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Comment by cisanti | Hacker News Reader

If U.S or E.U would want to break up Google, how would it realistically work?

I hope we see that happening, the company has become a monster and can literally tell the world what to think and how to feel.

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OT: I agree Google has become monster-ish. But when this talk comes up, I can't help but think Amazon is just as if not more of a monster.

Especially the employee horror stories and now slashing Whole Food prices. While its awesome for it's customers, I'm worried about long term effects.

But Google has much more global power. Amazon is in Europe and other places too, but nowhere strong as in the United States. Google, on the other hand, has most of the world under its arm, besides China and maybe Russia.

I can easily choose to avoid Amazon - they aren't seeding the entire internet with sly tracking technologies. They are a logistics business that makes money by moving stuff from warehouses to customers.

Similarly Apple wants to sell you an iPhone and a laptop and Microsoft wants to sell you an office suite and a database. Real companies with real products and services. But Google's ONLY business is stealing and selling personal data.

Really? Go ahead and avoid anything hosted on or using AWS.

Might be a bit difficult, and you may reconsider Amazon's scale relative to Google.

A fair point but I've not seen even a hint that Amazon themselves are tracking me across AWS hosted services. Do you have any evidence or links?

I'm pretty sure companies would not be happy if they found out Amazon was tracking those companies' customers. If it got out, it would probably be huge. Not worth it for Amazon to do this.

The only practical way to do such tracking reliably would be to inject html into every page loaded from one of their CDN's. That would be visible to everyone, and they don't do this.

Hence, either they have fairly ineffective IP address based tracking, or no tracking at all.

They wont need to add cookies or anything like that. They can track you just by parsing the connection logs on their routers and switches. Also every thing that is billable is logged. So technically they are already tracking and recording every access across their network. It is impossible to verify if they actually do this without anyone leaking information that worked on the system.

Immediate seizure with lethal force to any who resist. Same way they treat the average citizen who they think is involved in profiting off of illegal activity. I really with this happened more (there is at least one major bank that knowingly laundered drug money who should be fully seized). This should include any and all legal and PR assets, they'll be given a single public defender who will take on the case for them.

Well, bear in mind, the US and the EU effectively can only mandate how Google operates as long as it does business there. So both the US and the EU have the ability to demand Google be broken up, but it will be up to Google, as an international entity, whether they want to leave the territory that orders it or comply to the extent that the regulator in a sovereign territory is appeased.

See also, the recent Canadian decision: Canada can order that Google do something worldwide. But the extent of enforcement ends at "Canada decides what happens with businesses that operate in Canada. Google's free to leave."

You have to remember, though, that these aren’t small national governments.

If Google really pissed off the EU, or US, they could simply force all banks to freeze Google’s assets, and seize them. This has worked in the past, and can be used again.

They aren't being a genuine, credible anti-corporate voice either.

These are nation states. They can start arresting Google's employees too. "Officer of the company" is not just an empty phrase.

What happened here? My original comment about Trump is gone and replaced with the body of another comment I made.

If the EU and US really pissed off Google, imagine the things that would start appearing in news centers all over the world that Google has stashed away on storage drives in some backroom server.

This might cause issues in many countries, but there’s equally many stories about Google that can quickly be on the front page of all German newspapers, and would cause a rioting mob to lynch Google’s developers.

That is not really a valid option. No source, but I'm sure a very very large proportion of Google revenue comes from the US and EU. They would comply if required to. There is no way they would leave those markets.

It depends. Being forced to split into multiple companies which can't collude would also crater their revenue. Presumably, the amount of revenue loss from being split into different companies would be weighed against the amount of revenue loss from losing a continent. Either one would be devastating.

While I knew Google would never sacrifice the EU market to avoid this fine and some changes in search behavior, Google might sacrifice their EU business if it meant the end of Google as we know it. (Aka, they were ordered to break up.)

Of course, the main reason they functionally can't leave the US over a policy decision is that their headquarters and the vast majority of their senior talent all live there, and they would have very little left if they tried to move out of the US.

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