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This is making the assumption that the Democratic party doesn't have a vested interest in these Silicon Valley giants. Democrats running for office might be slinging virtue, but I have my doubts that the party itself is particularly interested in breaking up institutions that are politically aligned with them. Having a Democrat president didn't stop the expansion of the surveillance apparatus or the monopolization of tech and communication.

I don't want to sound too blackpill, but anymore I really feel like political-party-based virtue claims - from both sides - are, by and large, expressions of virtue theatre that are designed to garner support.

Some people in politics really do care; but at least in the US, it's hard not to look at the state of things and come to the conclusion that the system lends itself to corruption that goes so deep that nobody with any real influence has a vested interest in "virtues" outside of using them to curry favor with the general public.

Again, I apologize for how jaded this sounds... but it's really hard to feel any other way.

It doesn’t sound too blackpill to me at all, in fact I’d take it a step further. I often wonder whether the domination of Google-Amazon-Facebook doesn’t really serve the interests of the “Deep State” making them essentially bulletproof. Why would you want to break apart a domestic company when they serve as an international parasurveillance apparatus? You hear more from the feds about Apple needing to backdoor their phones than the anti-competitive behavior or spying that the rest take part in. Like you said, it’s probably just lip service from (most) of the Democrats.

The fact that your comment here hasn't been downvoted to oblivion suggests to me the only beef most people have with what you've said is that you criticized the Democrats. I find this really surprising given typical HN'er political leanings.

Is this an indication of some sort of tipping point being reached? Have most people regardless of politics come to the same conclusion about the reality of the silicon valley surveillance-fueled power grab?

There's two things I see going on here. Firstly, there's the question of whether it's even possible for someone to be an effective politician without lying. There's also the possibility that America is so disinterested and morally bankrupt that politicians know they can get away with saying one thing and doing another. To make things even worse, the amount of scrutiny politicians are now under for even the most minor of things creates such a filter that only the politicians who are willing to spew PR bullcrap or are bulletproof to bad press will make it. It's a complicated issue because, let's say that political theater is far more effective at winning votes than telling the truth or actually helping the voters; an honest person is stuck in a sort of prisoner's dilemma where their most practical choice is to betray any sort of principles they have.

It's routine to make sure potential candidates who won't fall in line don't get their voice heard with equal footing. I would say the majority of the primary candidates in any election are cookie cutter. Trump and Bernie are rare exceptions I haven't really seen in my lifetime until recently.

"I don't care who does the electing, so long as I get to do the nominating."

-Boss Tweed

I don’t believe these companies are more or less aligned to one party vs another. The louder portions of their workforce may be liberal, but Mark, Satya, and others will wine and dine whoever they can to protect their companies. The only adversarial relationship I know of is Trump and Amazon.

There's a video of Google's first all-hands meeting after the election. It's like a funeral. Even the concept that someone could want Trump elected for a decent reason is utterly ignored. This includes and is led by the most senior of leadership - Sergey, Larry, and Sundar.

“Most people here are pretty upset and pretty sad,” Google cofounder Sergey Brin says as the meeting begins. “I find this election deeply offensive, and I know many of you do too. It’s a stressful time, and it conflicts with many of our values. I think it’s a good time to reflect on that. ... So many people apparently don’t share the values that we have.”

https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2018/09/12/leaked-video-googl...

That was in November 2016. It's highly likely that sentiment, at least with management, has changed over time- especially since this administration has proven itself to be as solicitous towards big business as prior Republican presidencies. Not to mention, the publicly-signaled sentiment of the visible figurehead leadership can be very different from the true opinions of the corporate board.

Re: support.

We let our Android app lapse because their automated tools incorrectly picked up a compliance error. I couldn't figure out a way to escalate that--their support was crazy bad.

That led me to look harder at our revenue. Android was 1/10 of the revenue that iOS brings in, with much lower retention, higher support costs, higher rates of credit card disputes.

So that pretty much sealed the deal for us--there's no reason to invest in the Google ecosystem.

Good call. I don’t know why people like apps so much when browser are just as good. I don’t download an application to order Chipotles, but somehow it’s necessary on a phone.

I wouldn't say Apple is in the safe position, in particular Spotify v. Apple in EU which has a much more aggressive definition of monopoly. And Apple have way less experiences with antitrust cases unlike Amazon and Google... Their only argument seems "we're not a dominant player!", but unlike America, EU has been actively developing new market definitions to regulate tech sectors. And even in America, Apple v. Pepper gets revived...

There's no reason to assume Democrats are more likely to support anti-trust suits vs Republicans. Tech companies and the wealthy individuals that created them tend to provide a great deal of donor support to the party. Whatever the rhetoric may be, Democrats have been fairly supportive of tech up to now.

> Google has its hands in too many pies...

That's one of the reasons anti-trust is such a difficult case to make. Besides search, Google doesn't really have a dominate market share within any of their other offerings (not even Android counts since it's open source and comes in many flavors from phone companies). Their search service is free, so the only party that is effected by their market dominance (in how we've typically defined trusts) are advertisers. Before they can have a strong anti-trust strong case, the government needs to define data as an asset and the disclosure of that data as a cost to the data owner (the Google user).

I think it’s safe to say consumers would benefit from lower prices because companies wouldn’t have to bid so high on ads. We’d also possibly benefit from fewer ads on the main page, diluted ad tracking, more competition in other areas Google competes in (video, maps etc.) Ads subsidises the rest.

More ad competition doesn't mean lower ad fees, since the success of another search platform would depend more on the number of users, not the price of the ad. Suggesting lower ad fees somehow benefits users is a huge stretch.

The success of the other Google offerings is due more to the benefits of network effects, you'd need more than a decrease in Google ad subsidies to be competitive.

It might have one in online advertising? Are there any players aside from Amazon that aren’t Google in the online, automated advertising world?

Also a difficult case to make. They're dominant because users have chosen to be a part of their network, and advertisers want to reach those users. It's difficult to argue they engaged in anti-competitive behavior by making a highly useful/effective product people choose to use. Up to this point, network effects can't be cited as anti-competitive. Looking at the times when Google did use their platform to bully other companies, it still wasn't in a business they dominate (Yelp comes to mind). It's difficult to argue an algorithm producing search results is inherently anti-competitive.

I'm not very involved in the browser/web standards space, so I just started to realize the stranglehold Google has there. It's terrifying! I was quite involved in the 90's and reminds me of Microsoft with IE, but no one seems to care this time.

I've been wondering the last couple days how people can best support Mozilla, aside from simply switching to Firefox. And how to best share the message with others who aren't technical or normally wouldn't care, like my friends and family. I'm willing to put up with some conveniences from not using Chrome, but that might be enough for them to not care.

IIRC the Microsoft antitrust issues came from the fact that IE was the default browser and people didn't know they could switch. Chrome needs to be actively installed first before it can be used, so that whole issue is gone.

IE had way more market share than Google-controlled browsers; MS let the web stagnate and trapped users in their worst of breed browser. I don't really see that many similarities. Google is currently in a leading position because they're most dependent on the web to succeed (MS and Apple never cared much about it), and thus have poured the most resources into it. But I don't see a lot of cases of that dominant position harming the end user.

The DOJ has already begun anti trust investigations into the tech cos. If you think this is something one political party is for and the other against you may be in a filter bubble.

Honest question here -- if a monopoly is broken up legally, what prevents the two new organizations from collaborating in a way such that the combination is still monopolizing the market?

It seems to me that a purely organizational split would be nothing more than something on a piece of paper. The two corporations could still rent buildings next to each other, have lunch meetings together, gift each other money, and continue as before.

In the past, the companies formed from a broken up monopoly are competitors. The company isn't broken up just along business lines.

Interesting, but couldn't they choose to collaborate? It would seem to me that collaboration would be the path of least resistance, in which case they could largely maintain all their existing infrastructure and just effectively swap half their employee badges for ones with new logos.

Even if they were forced to use a different physical building, they could form a corporate alliance and share customer loyalty.

What makes them choose to compete, when given the choice?

Yeah, I don't think people have thought that far.

Seems easy enough for the broken up Instagram and whatsapp to instantly declare insolvency and close up shop while conveniently getting jobs for the newly formed Facebook photos app that would also be conveniently released at the same time.

I'd be more concerned about Amazon. For awhile I would literally search for "Google Home" on Amazon and I'd get Alexa devices.

Microsoft seems safest of all, almost as if they see the coming investigations and regulations.

Ironic, since their monopoly on the enterprise desktop is the oldest and most deeply entrenched. 20 years on and it's still commonplace for documents to be distributed as Word or PowerPoint files that will only display properly in MS Office. And there's the enormous ecology of Windows-only programs. I guess if your monopoly is around long enough people take it for granted.

Every time I search for a product lately I have to work to find a non-Amazon result.

At some point soon I will (re-)learn the search bar syntax just so I can cull the damn Amazon results.

And today is that day.

cats -site:example.com works on both DuckDuckGo and Google, except... Google Shopping doesn't give a shit about -site when there are sponsored links to be shown.

Search for, say, Anker, on google and -site:amazon.com removes amazon, -site:bestbuy.com removes Best Buy (nothing against Best Buy, it's just the first result I saw not including Amazon, so the easiest to check).

Flip over to Shopping and it's wall-to-wall Amazon.

So I have a new skill, but at the cost of knowing I'm screwed instead of not knowing. Fuck.

> Microsoft seems safest of all, almost as if they see the coming investigations and regulations.

Heh - it's almost as if hindsight is 20/20.

Apple's iPhone and App Store are far more of a walled garden. The whole Tile debacle the article opens with as well as the Spotify one and many other instances of them crippling competitors are ripe for antithrust too.

Similarly, I think what Amazon does with their Basic brand as well as them blocking Google products and other competitors off their stores could very well be a target. Them using financial tricks to pay some of the lowest taxes also won't help them with democrats.

Google and Facebook are some of the biggest lobbyists in Washington. I think you'll find that very little will change with respect to this.

> If the Democrats win the election this year, I think Google and Facebook both stand serious chances of looking at antitrust cases.

I think there is a serious chance, no matter who wins the election. The tech companies have pulled off the difficult feat of allying both parties against them. Democrats, in addition to their historical opposition to big business, blame them for the spread of misinformation that allowed Trump to get elected, and Republicans blame them for censoring Republican opinion. The fact that these companies have very outspoken employees who publicly oppose conservatives (see Kay James) does not help.

In the past, big business could rely on Republicans to shield them. However, for the most part, big tech entered the culture wars opposing Republicans, and I think a lot of Republicans will happily support their breakup.

When have the Democrats been anti-big business? Genuinely curious, was the last time Microsoft in the 90s? They've been pretty closely aligned with corporate America as far back as I can remember.

https://www.politico.com/news/2019/10/14/facebook-zuckerberg...

There's no allying against them, they've been sweet talking lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.

They’re playing the corruption game with politicians, but the rank and file of both sides hate them. That’s a much riskier situation than a big company wants to be in.

The amazing part is that both sides hate them for their own political reasons, not because of any common ground.

I wasn't aware anti-trust extended to cover "creepy" behavior and "not offering support [for free services]".

Literally every Google product has a competitor and the cost of switching is very low unless you're talking about their hardware, which is hardly successful much less dominant.

> Literally every Google product has a competitor and the cost of switching is very low unless you're talking about their hardware, which is hardly successful much less dominant.

Windows and Internet Explorer always had competition. The cost of switching to Netscape and later Firefox was extremely low. That did not stop people from referring to Windows and IE as monopolies in the past. With Windows, some still call it a monopoly today.

I would also add buying companies and creating services only to shut them down. With the exception of search and gmail I gave up using services owned by google but their monopoly position ruled out alternatives. They not just expanded into a monopoly, they are also working to keep it in place by means other than competing in the product space.

Apple and amazon and facebook are all vulnerable. I'm not sure about microsoft, they are working harder to be independent. Apple controls the installation of apps on their platform, you can't easily go around it. They arbitrarily prevent competition as in browsers. Many many companies get no benefit from being in the app store and don't want to pay apple 30% of their revenues (think disney, amazon, netflix). Apple doesn't have a way to unlock their phones and go around these limitations. If they did then you could argue they aren't blocking competition. Apple (and all these companies) all do some things I see as positives too.

D0D and friends will protect M until the end.

Can you clarify please?

https://fcw.com/articles/2019/10/25/dod-jedi-microsoft.aspx

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-seeks-halt-microsoft-d...

>Google has its hands in too many pies, actively hurts other industries, and they're creepy af.

The most disgusting part is they are unfairly using their search and ads (i.e. data) to set up subsidiaries to compete with their own ad customers and bid up the price of ads to their own customers.

Say you are an airline or airfare aggregator. Google knows the market size (search), they have a good idea of your marketing budget and online ROI. Once they see you have a thriving business/product/industry they create their own competitor. Organically Google's competitor will float to the top of Search, if they don't outright make a "native" interactive tool that appears above ads and organic search results. As if thats not shady enough, they start buying their own ads (money is just going from their left hand to their right hand) which now the cost of ads for you has increased because you are competing with a Google company that is getting them for free. Now your options are spend more on ads for a smaller slice of the market or just packup an go home leaving Google as the industry leader (which based on history they really didn't even want in the first place as they are likely to deprecate their product, leaving the market with no product/service provider).

And yet that is exactly what you want in a lot of cases. Companies like DeepMind and Open AI do not run on thoughts and prayers; without subsidy from other areas, industry-upending research and development would have a hard time showing up and gaining traction. Google Search, regardless how bad it may have been for consumer welfare in the search space, has been a net boon. Do you think any other private company could have afforded something like Street View?

Perhaps a company that's already involved in logistics, that could augment their transport fleet to have scanning vehicles? So Amazon, FedEx/UPS/DHL, the U.S. Postal Service?

Amazon did not have a proper door-to-door delivery service until very, very recently. And even now it is limited to a few locations. The rest are hardly tech companies, Google Maps and Street View are as much about UI and implementation as the actual photography. Most of the other companies named would probably only sell raw data to law enforcement and finance, your average consumer would not be able to have access.

The same exact thing is happening with businesses on Amazon.