Justice Department, states likely to bring antitrust lawsuits against Google
wsj.com
wsj.com
In the European space, protection of smaller business' ability to compete is factored in. But the US space, in general, has not cared if smaller businesses can compete and tends to take a laissez-faire attitude towards business-on-business market pressures. It's the effect of the market on consumers that's paramount.
To be honest, I'm not sold on the European-style philosophy. Guilds traditionally empowered tradespeople, but they also had a reputation for holding back innovation and punishing new ideas that didn't fit the existing paradigms. Amazon, for example, has made book-buying so cheap nationally that individual bookstores have trouble competing. Amazon's other failings aside (which should be addressed by sweeping employee / labor protections, not by breaking up Amazon): should Grandma's books be more expensive in general so the local bookstore owner gets to enjoy the lifestyle of self-business-ownership to which he is accustom? Why / why not?
Bookstores are no longer viable, because Amazon has obviated the need for a brick and mortars store, and it passes the benefit on to both consumer and author alike, in reduced prices and thus increased sales.
Since Amazon is not in the authorship business itself, since it gets an equal profit on all books, its book business is a lovely example of markets working to further society.
Amazon's problem is in the use of data metrics on its giant store to create products that compete with its partners. The Amazon Essentials line is anticompetitive IMO, because as the operator of such a large platform, Amazon has a responsibility to the US economy.
Curious on your thoughts about Kroger/Great Value/Archer Farms (Target) brand items? At least Amazon marks them clearly as house-brand, Archer Farms is practically camouflaged at Target among the brand names, and it's placed pretty prominently too.
Personally I think it's hard to draw a distinction between the two cases - either they're both fine or they're both not. My line would be closer to: if Amazon noticed a certain thing was selling really well, created their own version of that thing, and then de-listed the original thing from their store, that seems like the point at which it becomes anti-competitive to me.
Store brands are an age-old practice so it's interesting to revisit them in the context of mega-corps like Amazon. Although WalMart+Great Value is probably a similar scale.
Walmart and Costco do it too, should that it be banned when customers get the product at a cheaper cost?
Which is why lower consumer prices aren't a valid defence against anti=trust. Nor is the argument that markets "naturally" lead to monopolies or (at best) oligopolies and cartels - even though empirically they do. So much so that setting out to create a monopoly is a bullet point on many unicorn-wannabe business plans.
The problem is abuse of power without oversight.
YouTube can screw over content creators with its insane system of copyright strikes. PayPal and Amazon can keep legitimately earned money on the pretext of non-existent ToC violations. Apple can decide to bar you from the App Store on a whim and clean-room your best green shoots ideas into its own products. Google can decide that you earned too much in ad revenue and shut you down just because it can.
People have lost businesses and livelihoods because of these practices. The monopoly position held by these companies makes them unassailable.
That's what antitrust protection is really about.
what's clear, however, is that they use their e-commerce position to also one-up competitors as a retailer. they have access to data about what's hot, what could benefit from a more economic option, etc. which they can use - perhaps anti-competitively (by e.g. intentionally selling at loss to defeat the new competitor).
additionally, their entire cloud computing arm affords them the opportunity to run other parts of their business at a massive loss, perhaps intentionally (again, to defeat competitors) as needed.
as an analogy, imagine if standard oil also had a financial operation that low-balled "normal" banks, intentionally losing money on every loan or instrument, just so those other banks blew up.
Now, French book-sellers, on the other hand, appreciate the law that keeps them in business for aesthetic reasons, whether or not it makes economic sense or they can stay financially competitive when the price of data transmission has crashed past too-small-to-meter-per-word.
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/20/opinion/paul-krugman-amaz...
Economists are quick to point out that the new money which is created of of thin air is not given outright, but rather, it is loaned out - Therefore, by virtue of having to pay it back, corporations do not have an unfair advantage.
I disagree with this conclusion because an entity's access to loans is based almost entirely on how much collateral they possess - This necessarily implies that those entities which have more capital are able to take out bigger loans and thus derive more profits from these loans.
For example, if you have $100K in a particular asset (e.g. stocks), you can use that as collateral to borrow an additional $100K and you end up controlling $200K worth of assets in total. So if the yield on those assets is 10% per year, you will end up getting 20% per year relative to your own capital. 20% of $100K is $20K.
So according to this principle, a company which has $100 million in assets can borrow an additional $100 million - This means that an asset class which can generate 10% yield can be bought on leverage to generate 20% yield on the initial capital. 20% of $100 million is $20 million. This means that $10 million of that profit was derived entirely from credit which was printed out of thin air by banks. That $10 million is free money and was given solely on the basis of existing capital.
This is why the rich get richer; it has nothing to do with value creation. Whenever banks print money out of thin air and inject it into the economy, everyone in the country who receives a salary in that currency ends up paying for that equally because of dilution in the value of their salaries. In effect, this means that, salary earners and small capital owners are subsidizing big capital owners. This is what is fundamentally unfair about our financial system and why big corporations have to be limited; they're not successful because they're efficient, they're successful because they own more capital than everyone else and can thus access most of the newly 'printed' fiat money.
Most of us just don't get to borrow 100 million, good credit ain't cheap...
For example would YouTube be successful as it is today if it wasn't Google's resources and knowledge to skyrocket it? I think not.
Want to use your own email server? Not going to be a piece of cake and good luck if gmail decides against you. Want to use firefox? Gmail and youtube really will move heaven and earth to make you use chrome. Want to preserve your privacy in any meaningful way? Good luck because rest of the society decided to hand over everything to Google and its free counterparts.
These companies gravity wells are so strong that they reduce meaningful choices to a consumer. In fact, give them enough time and they’ll coerce the market to behave in a particular way.
As of now, to operate as a business on the internet, you can ignore Apple, Amazon or even Facebook. You’ll have a tough time ignoring Google. Across the entire planet.
There’s no doubt that Google’s work has a lot of benefits to humanity. But that is not a license to ignore the dark side of the coin.
Look at the current pricing of medicine in US! Instead of going after those they decide to go after Amazon and Google. US is a place that many living outside of it could never quite comprehend.
If the consumer market wanted an alternative, wouldn't there be competing companies by now that would ingest all that data and give you matching mail, docs, video, etc, services?
On the advertising front, Google is no longer the only game in town, so by definition not a monopoly.
Who are their competitors (I've not heard of one that isn't directly tied to a platform (a'la facebook))? How is the market segmented between Google and their competitors? If google had, as an example, 80% of the market share, it could still legitimately be considered to be a monopoly, even if it had 1000 competitors fighting for the last 20%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
In a lot of sectors, sure. I'm all for someone building a better car.
What benefit does mass competition in the software service space give me? How many bespoke APIs am I expected to integrate against to build something useful?
Different for difference's sake is the curse of our industry.
And making this argument is exactly why they added search engine selection. They wanted to be able to point to this tiny insignificant detail that might cost them a negligible fraction of Chrome searches and hold it up as market competition when the inevitable antitrust suit came along.
Have you ever heard of a for profit company gifting traffic to their direct competitor? It would be irrational behavior in a competitive market. If anything this is evidence of Google’s search engine monopoly and Google built the selection feature into Chrome it in furtherance of that monopoly power.
The #3 browser (Firefox) is (was?) massively funded by a half-billion-per-year agreement from the #1 browser's maker (Google) to add Chrome as the default search engine.
Sure, they could pull that deal. Unless you think it's a perfectly balanced deal, though, that feels like one for-profit company gifting traffic to their competitor (either Google giving money to Firefox, or Firefox giving traffic to Google).
It's more niche, but a lot of companies in my market donate to or fund their competitors for the sake of innovation and growing the pie.
Contrary to popular belief, for-profit companies (even those with scary board members in a competitive market) don't inherently have to be cutthroat.
So? In the real world, antitrust isn't about how a company became dominant. The fact that a company is dominant is what matters. Legislatures know that having a market run by one entity is inevitably a bad thing. Google's success, its market dominance, is the very harm that antitrust is meant to address. How Google got there isn't relevant.
If the government deems an organization too big, there is always something on which to hang the prosecution hat. Price fixing, tying, vertical restraint, dumping... they will find something.
Isn't that what government is? One entity running the market?
Governments don't like competition.
Whether it is one entity or many, what matters is the welfare of the consumer, which includes allowing competition to arise that can do better.
And at the same time, they're taking steps to make it more difficult for Ad blocking software to be integrated into Chrome.
I'm glad they don't feel the need to bully other search engines out of existence, but that might have more to do with where their revenue comes from than any particular corporate morality.
> For example would YouTube be successful as it is today if it wasn't Google's resources and knowledge to skyrocket it?
You don't see the tight integration between Google's Advertising business and YouTube as a particularly unfair advantage? Are you sure they haven't operated at a loss on some or all of the product in order to bully smaller competitors out of the market?
Aside from the frontend code and the CDN, what is YouTube other than the advertising and other third-party integration anyways?
Googlebot was allowed to its thing pretty freely back in the day on the assumption that Google will remain a search company only and will not step on the toes of the companies whose websites it was parsing. That proved out not to be true.
What's more, if today I want to parse Google's web properties (let's say its GoogleMaps data) the same way that Googlebot used to parse the websites of the companies I used to work for I'll get banned almost immediately.
Android isn't iOS where you're not allowed to replace the browser at all.
Not sure about that considering how many startups they buy each year
Don’t you find it strange that a Republican administration is going after a company for anti-trust?
I am not saying that Google hasn’t unfairly competed against small business or they shouldn’t be sued, but this is purely political, not the Justice Department all the sudden caring about the little guy.
Nope. If anything, there is past precedence from the 2001 Antitrust case against Microsoft [1]. Note in that case, it wasn't about whether consumers were directly harmed, but whether Microsoft was abusing its market power to prevent other entrants into the browser space. Arguably this is very analogous to what Google and Facebook are currently being accused of.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
>Nope. If anything, there is past precedence from the 2001 Antitrust case against Microsoft [1]. Note in that case, it wasn't about whether consumers were directly harmed, but whether Microsoft was abusing its market power to prevent other entrants into the browser space. Arguably this is very analogous to what Google and Facebook are currently being accused of.
The President, March 16:
>The Radical Left is in total command & control of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Google. The Administration is working to remedy this illegal situation. Stay tuned, and send names & events. Thank you Michelle!
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/12616266746864476...
Well, no government wants any company to wield more power than them, right?
/tin-foil hat off
Can you share some instances of this being true in the 80s?
And google has arguably the best information in the world since identifying specific people is their core business.
Traditional monopolies "control supply of a good or service, and where the entry of new producers is prevented or highly restricted."
In this case, the supply of a good or service (social networking, webpage indexing and searching) are not controlled by Facebook and Google because they aren't finite resources. Anyone can index the web and anyone can build a social network and Google/Facebook aren't going to crush you with lawsuits or some other nefarious tactic to maintain their position (AFAIK).
Entry of new producers of these services is not prevented or highly restricted. New social networks and search engines pop up all the time.
What Facebook and Google have is massive, large scale user loyalty. Despite alternatives existing (Bing, Mastadon, DuckDuckGo, Myspace, etc.), users are voluntarily choosing to use Google and Facebook. This is not a monopoly.
I think we need a new term for this situation.
The antitrust laws prohibit conduct by a single firm that unreasonably restrains competition by creating or maintaining monopoly power. Most Section 2 claims involve the conduct of a firm with a leading market position, although Section 2 of the Sherman Act also bans attempts to monopolize and conspiracies to monopolize. As a first step, courts ask if the firm has "monopoly power" in any market. This requires in-depth study of the products sold by the leading firm, and any alternative products consumers may turn to if the firm attempted to raise prices. Then courts ask if that leading position was gained or maintained through improper conduct—that is, something other than merely having a better product, superior management or historic accident. Here courts evaluate the anticompetitive effects of the conduct and its procompetitive justifications.
"Market Power"
Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors. That is how that term is used here: a "monopolist" is a firm with significant and durable market power.
https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...
Your humble opinion has little relation to governing regulatory law.
The Herfinadahl-Hirschman Index is a widely used measure of market concentration. It's calculated completely independently of how the firms in the market go about getting and protecting their market share.
If the HHI is high enough, and depending on how important the market is, this can be a sign that the market should be investigated to ensure that there aren't monopolistic anti-competitive or anti-consumer practices taking place.
Google is by far the biggest player in the search market (outside China at least), so I don't think an investigation is unjustified. There have been more than enough posts on HN and elsewhere about decisions Google have made over the years that show disregard for both competitors (not so much in search, but in other areas where Google has a footprint) and consumers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herfindahl%E2%80%93Hirschman_I...
If all Google engineers left at the same time, Google would still probably end up dominant by hiring new folks to get things back up and running.
No amount of human labor will be able to close that data gap.
"Essential facility"?
This came up in the railroad era, the first big antitrust issue. Railroads were in a strong enough position to push up shipping rates. And push towns, and sometimes states, around. Pressure for antitrust action came from their customers, especially farmers, not from other railroads.
That led to the Interstate Commerce Commission and considerable price regulation.
Having the best product? Google and Facebook are just flat out better than Bing, Myspace, or duckduckgo for most applications. (Notice I said most, I get it, your super specific need does in fact fetch better results using ddg rather than google)
Platforms are defined as connecting two (or more) sides of a market.
There is a lot of economic literature in this space over the past several decades. Glen Weyl is pretty active in the area, as well as many known economists over the years.
It's not user loyalty that drives this, typically, but rather ease of ingress / difficulty of egress (adoption/switching costs) into the various platforms. Integration among common services helps too.
The economic definition of a natural monopoly is where firms have increasing returns to scale. That means where firms can produce more product per unit cost as the volume sold of that product gets large. https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs181/projects/1997-...
A good example is electricity -- it's super duper hard to put up electrical wires all around a country. But once the wires are up, it's not so hard to maintain them or extend them to cover more people over time.
Google and Facebook are perfect examples. The software engineer salaries ain't cheap to build their product, but once built the products can be scaled quickly at relatively low cost. Furthermore, their products' value itself has increasing returns to scale; the more people on a social network or using a search engine, the more valuable to advertise on them.
The Charybdis is trust. You can't monetize search directly, or it becomes a bunch of transparent lies that nobody wants. You can't be a rapacious predator that has already tried to eat the internet several times (sorry, Microsoft). It mattered that early Google said "don't be evil". You have to monetize something else, but weave it into your search so that you aren't bleeding money.
Only Google has threaded the needle. It may never happen a second time.
It would loosely defined as Monopsony. [1]
Both a monopoly and a monopsony refer to a single entity influencing and distorting a free market.
In a monopoly, a single seller controls or dominates the supply of goods and services.
In a monopsony, a single buyer controls or dominates the demand for goods and services.
The antitrust sense is about empirical control demonstrated by how markets respond in practice rather than the abstract theoretical potential you describe.
To fit your perspective, though, you could say that Google controls supply and service of user clicks, user attention, or even user interface.
It’s complete nonsense. Telecoms have been fucking people over for decades and yet we still see mergers resulting in 3 providers going to 2 despite it being downright impossible to start a new one (see: Google Fiber), that is if you’re even lucky enough to have more than one in your region.
Sure, some well meaning officials may enact useful policy to carve out a competitive space for smaller players. What everyone else, however, will learn is to stuff congress with more and more lobbyists.
The federal government decides the winners and losers.
Sadly, I imagine that big tech will catch on. It has the resources. It's just still in the process of developing the playbook.
This is just a shakedown.
The same way Microsoft was deemed a "monopoly" and what? Unbundled explorer? Is anyone seriously worried about their monopoly now? There's always a new kid on the block.
The DOJ is too slow to be effective at targeting tech monopolies. They should just quit before they look like a bunch of johnny-come-lately blowhards.
It's that "leveraging" bit that was the problem - trying to use a monopoly in one area to destroy competition in another area.
Absolutely correct. By the way, have you visited Google with a non-Chrome browser? They’ll encourage you to use Chrome for “the best experience.” Seems very much like leveraging, never understood why people don’t make a bigger deal about this.
The biggest needing breakups are:
- ISPs / telecoms
- Banks
- Food supply
ISPs / telecom should be first, the 2017 push to remove net neutrality even with clear violations [1], privacy protections and focus on ad networks [2], data caps, throttling, prioritization and more are unforgivable. The network is a utility, it needs strong liability behind that. I'd rather the lines be run by power companies and in many places like Phoenix SRP runs all the fiber anyways [3]. Cox only ran lines when Google Fiber was here. All Cox does is overload nodes and upload is severely limited as well as prioritization is going overboard and ending up with dropped packets and a horrible QoE. While these systems have a decent QoS, the QoE is going down immensely. There are lots more things they are doing like trying to get their modems in while having access to remotely install firmware on approved but not rented modems and limiting/throttling by device when you get their shared modem/router that they can see every device.
"too big to fail banks" next which are a national security issue almost at this point. Mind blowing after the Great Recession that we let the banks handle this stimulus as a gatekeeper. The GR bubble was caused by mortgage backed securities that went into cause a credit crunch. Now we got whistleblowers coming out about commercial mortgage backed securities [4]. It is going to get bad.
With the pandemic, now the food supply has been exposed as too consolidated. Even hedge funds are saying it, when hedge funds are worried you should be worried as these are the wealth extractors [5].
Harvard Business Review recently raised the alarm about too much consolidation called "The High Price of Efficiency" and how there should be a 'rethinking efficiency' to reduce concentration [6].
> "Superefficient businesses create the potential for social disorder."
You can have too much "efficiency", it leads to stagnation and monopolies/oligopolies which stop innovating and turn to rent-seeking. Ultimately it leads to less innovation, less products, less jobs, monoculture, higher prices and missed opportunities when there is efficient competition but not super efficient markets. We need companies doing the same things and finding new ways to do things otherwise product development and research and development stop. The sales/marketing/finance takes over then from the product/engineering/creative people and we all lose.
Here's a great quick point by Steve Jobs about product stagnation and the managers/business side [7] and how they can run amok if not controlled to allow value creation to continue, and how monopolies or problems that arise when only the business/managers are in charge.
> It turns out the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies, like IBM or Xerox. If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or computer. So what? When you have monopoly market share, the company's not any more successful.
> So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product.
> They have no conception of the craftsmanship that's required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts, usually, about wanting to really help the customers.
The market is like a garden. The seeds and smaller plants need help, the overgrown and large plants should be harvested and culled back so it doesn't take over the garden and then the midsize plants flourish. Our market garden is in a state of overgrowth and the rest of the crops can't survive.
What happens when the overgrowth is taken over and efficiently worked out competition and created stagnation? How will there be competition in an oligopoly that is no longer US owned? It is a national security issue as well as a fair market matter.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality_in_the_United_S...
[2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/05/congress-repealing-our...
[3] https://srptelecom.com/darkfiber/networkmap.aspx
[4] https://www.propublica.org/article/whistleblower-wall-street...
[5] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/hedge-fund-blames-us-meat-...
[6] https://hbr.org/2019/01/rethinking-efficiency
[7] https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-on-why-innovation...
Too much consolidation and waste due to super efficiency that is inflexible like code that is too coupled and specialized for a certain cpu over being flexible.
Right now pork is being wasted as slaughterhouses and meat packing has been reduced dramatically in the US since the 90s, larger facilities, less of them. Too efficient that it created a security issue and potential national security attack vector. Everything is not as localized, so there are choke points in our food supply that become massive backlogs.
>In 1977, the four largest meat processing firms constituted just 25% of the market, claims Bond. Today, they control 85% of the slaughter market, as well as some 35% of cattle ranches and around 65% of the entire chicken industry, he said.
> Since 1990, the number of slaughter houses, excluding poultry, has declined by 46%, from 2,709 establishments to just 1,461 establishments.
[1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/hedge-fund-blames-us-meat-...
or Disney?
The big tech co's have made their bed, now they get to sleep in it.
With net neutrality gone, an ISP absolutely could do that.
Even if you could, does that make it right that big tech companies are censoring people and organizations for their views?
If I bring up federal contracting, which is an industry of comparable size, and which is dominated by companies founded well over 50 years ago [1], and which is way more politically opaque, and whose funding they cannot as tax-paying US citizens opt out of, the response is never anything more than "meh".
I understand that one is more relevant to daily in-their-face life. These aren't dumb people. They read, argue, write, vote. But the choice of what to agitate for is so odd to me.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_100_Contractors_of_the_U.S...
As some variant of mid 20th century man, I'm continually bemused by how many of my peers are on board with breaking up AT&T when we make phone calls practically every day!
etc.
(Also, point about federal contractors is pure Whataboutism)
Perhaps it's because the internet (and surrounding technologies) are so much more foundational to society. Without information moving freely and fairly, we'll mostly never learn about any of the other big problems that need addressing (of which, the one you pointed out seems perfectly valid).
Also, I think the average person feels more empowered with regards to shaping the future of the internet, than they do with something so entrenched, opaque, political and corrupt (IMHO) as federal contracting.
The first point makes sense, but it's hard for me to square with breaking up companies. I don't think any of FAANG has played a real censorious role on the internet. I'm just as free to spin up a random webpage to espouse whatever as I was in 1999. People move around the web differently, but I can still send it to whomever I want. I could also see an argument that AMP and similar technologies hurt journalism, but I hardly ever see that claimed.
If it's a question of agency, to me it feels much better to "vote with my feet" and not patronize companies I dislike than to write my congressperson and receive a form response from some intern. You may be right that people just expect better from the internet than federal contracting.
Good is not the enemy of perfect. Google and Facebook should be shattered into a thousand little pieces. And we can also look into other monopolies.
Not every suggestion that we've misidentified a big problem is whataboutism. Especially when elected officials (in theory) look to their constituents to determine which problems to address/industries to threaten.
Unlike other monopolies (telecom, defense contracting) etc. where the monopoly is used to stagnate innovation (see Comcast being terrible), here the monopoly leads to more innovation. Smaller companies can't embark on Google-sized projects.
Sidenote: I'm pretty sure this lawsuit is just a political attack. It seems reasonable that other monopolies in healthcare/defense/etc. are much much worse, yet they aren't "liberal"/"blue" companies, so there are no lawsuits.
Disclosure: I'm interning at Google. I don't think this matters at all, but someone called me out on this in the comments.
There were better social networks than Facebook, but they didn't make money the way Facebook does, so Facebook bought them and killed them. There were better online stores than Amazon, but they didn't abuse humans and play the same games Amazon does to succeed, so they died and it won. Tech monopolies are monopolies, and they're particularly aggressive ones.
I also don't think you grasp the scope of tech monopolies. You cannot operate a business today without doing business with Google. You can hate Google, but you still have to do business with Google. Because if you aren't putting out Google Ads or at least optimizing your SEO for Google's bots, if you aren't launching your app in the Play Store, you're cutting off the majority of your customer base, and you're dying.
Healthcare has to do business with Google. Defense has to do business with Google. Effing Comcast has to do business with Google. There has never been a monopoly on this planet that had more power and that was so unavoidable. And it doesn't take a lot of research to find places people are being hurt or having their livelihoods taken by the unholy beast that it's become.
Can you elaborate on this? Neither industry seems to rely on ads or SEO or app stores.
Obviously healthcare providers market to consumers, medicines are marketed to consumers even when they're supposed to be prescribed by doctors, and of course, marketing healthcare wares to doctors is a pretty big deal.
But ask yourself how healthcare companies and defense contractors market themselves, find new talent, even lobby. (Targeting advertising can literally shove ads just in the face of people in federal government buildings.)
Google has the eyes of well over 80% of the global population. Which means if you want to talk to... pretty much any group of people, you likely have to do it through Google.
The effects of tech monopolies are particularly obvious to those who work in open source.
For example, it's extremely common to find that some very expensive third-party services have free open source alternatives available - These open source communities are often struggling to stay alive. Big tech corporations hire thousands of engineers in-house and so it would cost them nothing extra to use the open source solution (they already have the engineering capacity to implement and manage it). But they won't! They will happily pay millions of dollars of fees annually to get something that they could have gotten for free and maybe paid an optional $20K per year 'tech support' fee to the open source community. Not only that, but their system would be way more flexible because the corporation would have full control over the open source code and their own data. For example, the $400 million that Facebook spent on acquiring Giphy could have been saved if they had used an open source solution instead. Heck, they could have built Giphy themselves from the ground up in a couple of months using open source solutions for very little additional engineering cost.
Corporations have no incentives to be efficient; instead they will use some expensive provider because the CEOs of both companies are friends. They have a monopoly so they can afford to be very wasteful.
More innovation in what? And as compared to what?
The innovations you mention are all addressing issues that only huge tech giants like Google have anyway. And they are all funded by the ad-supported business model, which IMO is a negative that outweighs those positive contributions.
Plus, the ad supported business model means users only get the benefit of any innovations Google makes when it increases Google's ad income. That incentive is not well aligned with the needs of users. How many times has Google discontinued a popular application because it wasn't making them enough money? A company in Google's position is exactly the company that could figure out how to get a billion users to pay them directly for services those users want, instead of using their eyeballs as commodities, but Google has put zero effort towards that highly desirable innovation.
We also don't see all the innovations that are not happening because the people that would have made them are being paid by Google and other tech giants to look for new ways to capture more eyeballs instead.
> I'm pretty sure this lawsuit is just a political attack. It seems reasonable that other monopolies in healthcare/defense/etc. are much much worse, yet they aren't "liberal"/"blue" companies, so there are no lawsuits.
If this hypothesis were correct, we would have expected to see lawsuits against those other monopolies during, say, the Obama administration. But we didn't.
The lawsuit is specifically stated in the article to be targeted at the ad-supported business model, so the obvious inference is that all the issues with that business model that have come up over the years have finally built up enough political pressure that the government feels it has to do something about it.
This presupposes that the DoJ has always been a political weapon.
Of course it has. Look at the war on drugs and lack of prosecution when democrats enter power. Both parties use the DoJ to push their own agenda and perception. Frankly the expectation that the DoJ be non-partisan (much like the supreme court!) is naive and the democrats cripple themselves by even articulating this expectation.
No, it only presupposes that if the DoJ is going to be used as a political weapon, any administration, of either party, is about equally as likely to use it as any other. Given the general track record of the Federal government, this seems like a much more plausible assumption than your implicit assumption that it only started being a political weapon just now.
Fwiw Google has tried this more than once. It's just that the value that advertisers get is way higher than the value that consumers get.
There are specific search terms that can go for more than $50 ad bids. Individuals can't really pay for that much. Like how much would you be willing to pay for Google search each year?
> If this hypothesis were correct, we would have expected to see lawsuits against those other monopolies during, say, the Obama administration. But we didn't.
This only follows if you believe the Obama and Trump admins are equally corrupt.
What do you mean by "Google-sized projects"? Google is made up of many differently sized services. And a lot of the services that Google provides have smaller companies that provide competing services. One of Google's advantages is that it can subsidize the cost of smaller services with it's cash cow.
Google forces you to work solely with google, E.g (from the antitrust investigation of the EC:
Google required direct partners to exclusively use Google's AdSense and could not engage with Google's competitors;
It is actively disadvantaging the competition:
>Google does not apply its system of penalties, a predefined set of parameters to lower the placement of shopping results, to its own Google Shopping results as it did to other competitors.
>yet they aren't "liberal"/"blue" companies, so there are no lawsuits
And this is off the track in my opinion. In Europe Google also has problems with the European Union, do you think they are liberal or conservative on your scale? Google deserves some punishment for how it behaves. It is doing actively damage to society. Do not evil has long be gone.
This is going to give bad points again, but may I say that I find the amount of polarization in your country distasteful? And that is an understatement. I think you shouldn't divide your country into two compartments, you are all in the ride together.
It will weaken you in the long term and your country is actively exporting these ideas. So in Europe polarization is also growing. It is a dangerous matter thinking into sides like this.
It sounds like red is evil to you and blue is good. Watch out for that. Watch out for that.
You mean they have enough money to buy other companies to stifle competition and innovation.
> yet they aren't "liberal"/"blue" companies, so there are no lawsuits.
The distrust of google is bipartisan. Both the democrats and republicans have called for this. Actually, the democrats have been far more vocal.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/8/18256032/elizabeth-warren-...
> Disclosure: I'm interning at Google. I don't think this matters at all, but someone called me out on this in the comments.
It matters because it shows you have financial interests which may bias your opinion. Not to mention if you are interning at google, you have very little experience in and knowledge of the tech industry.
Amazon should have won in very few of the markets it entered. Instead, its competitors just decided to lie down and die, with a couple of yelps on their way to their death.
If we want real competition in the search engine space, Google's crawl should be opened up as a "common crawl", accessible to any company that wants to pay a nominal sum to access it for building an index.
Once AWS started really making money, there's not many companies that could realistically beat Amazon. How do you beat them when they can use tactics like what happened with diapers.com? How many companies can afford to run what is likely their main revenue source at a $100,000,000+ loss every three months just to keep Amazon out of a market that wouldn't even be a top 5 revenue stream for Amazon?
'The Justice Department is moving toward bringing a case as soon as this summer, some of the people said. At least some state attorneys general—led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican—are likely to file a case, probably in the fall, people familiar with the matter said.
'Much of the states’ investigation has focused on Google’s online advertising business. The company owns the dominant tool at every link in the complex chain between online publishers and advertisers. The Justice Department likewise is making Google’s ad technology one of its points of emphasis. But it is also focusing more broadly on concerns that Google uses its dominant search business to stifle competition, people familiar with the matter said.
'Details about the Justice Department’s legal theories for a case against Google couldn’t be learned.'
That's what it seems like to me too.
I understand a popular opinion is that Google is too big, should be broken up, etc. But I really don't think there's a prevailing justification. Or examples of competition that they've supposedly stifled? This stinks of politics.
> The company owns the dominant tool at every link in the complex chain between online publishers and advertisers.
The same could be said about Apple - they have the dominant (actually, the only tool) at every link between iOS developers and iPhone users.
I think the case is weak. Google's a big company, sure. They're the most popular in many areas. But what about that requires anti-trust, compared to hundreds of other companies that check that same "most popular and big" box?
Whether you think Google is a monopoly or not, and whether you think they've done harm with that monopoly or not, I think this case is going to do net harm to Internet security.
Is Google really a monopoly? Many people use Outlook, iPhones, Apple Maps, AWS, Bing, HERE maps etc...
I'm not particularly familiar with the infrastructure of the ad business, but my layman's view is that alternatives are slim outside of Google for search engine and the more general web and Facebook for specifically social media.
These numbers are really scary, if you care about fair competition and a just, balanced society.
[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/544400/market-share-of-i... [3] https://beta.trimread.com/articles/16433 [4] https://www.geekwire.com/2019/amazon-gaining-google-search-a...
Exactly. The Federal government speaks out of both sides of it's mouth. If monopolies fail to spur innovation as is suggested by many, then regulatory burdens such as the Jones Act do even more explicitly.
Increasingly? When wasn't that true? You have to go back to pre Civil War, where the economy was heavily geographically split due to movement/transport limitations, which mostly voids the discussion (it was very much a local and regional, agriculture-heavy economy, with limited manufacturing and a very limited consumer goods market as we know it today; not very comparable to anything that exists now). Once you get near to or beyond the Civil War and firmly into the industrial era, the combinations begin essentially immediately and they dominate their segments rapidly. Vanderbilt got so rich by aggressively creating monopolies in his day, in transport. It was far more brutal than anything you can imagine today, in all respects including the options/alternatives that consumers had. From US Steel in 1901 to the few giant railroads to Standard Oil to American Tobacco to the couple remaining giant auto companies (eg GM, Ford, Chrysler) that survived that industry's shakeout in the following decades. Further, you had a small group of industrialists and financiers that cross-controlled everything regardless (and they had few laws limiting their behavior), as with eg Rockefeller heavily dictating terms with the railroads to crush his competition.
Leap forward in time: Sears, PAN-AM, IBM, General Electric, General Motors, Ford, AT&T, US Steel, US Rubber, Bethlehem Steel, Armour & Co., Kodak, Polaroid, a very small number of giant media companies like CBS, and so on.
Yesterday was dominated entirely by massive corporations. It doesn't matter what decade you select. Whether it's 1910, 1950, 1980, or 2020. It wasn't better in the past.
Markets always do this consolidating naturally. Your only option to prevent that is to use the government to prevent or interrupt it.
Most people I've seen equate monopoly with "95% of people use", which really isn't a monopoly. As far as I'm aware, dominating a market is not the sole criteria of a monopoly (although I am aware it is a sign of successful one, correlation/causation).
For someone who doesn't follow this kind of thing, can anyone point to concrete examples of "no other company does this" monopoly or "actively stifling competition" anti-trust practices taken by google without just scoffing and saying its obvious?
For example, Google doesn't have a monopoly on search; I can use DuckDuckGo just fine (although patent trolling complicates this a bit). Google does, however, have a monopoly on search traffic; if Google delists your site, it has effectively disappeared from 90+% of peoples' (mis-)conception of the internet[1]. A government the purports to support a free market must[0] regulate the latter case.
0: in the sense that not doing so directly communicates that they do not in fact support a free market
1: and this could be true to a lesser degree even if it had only, say, 45% market share
Edit: there might also be regulations that should apply to de-facto infrastructure like search engines regardless of monopoly status, but those are, by specification, not based on monopoly status.
"Majority blue" is in a majority of their employees vote Democrat? That's just what happens when you're headquartered in California, in a metro area, with a workforce that skews younger.
I don't think that Google is somehow pushing liberal objectives in a meaningful way.
if they were, i'm sure a careful examination of topics highlighted in google doodles i'm sure would illustrate this one way or another
But true or not, it is perceived that way by those who are aggrieved (social conservatives in the USA)... which is what your comment's parent was discussing.
I'm not disagreeing with your comment, but you aren't disagreeing with your parent comment either.
It doesn't matter if they're biasing search results or not, that's complicated anyways, highly visible culture war stuff is what his audience is primed for.
A study showed that Google News returned links to CNN vastly more often than links to Fox News, even though Fox News has triple the market share of CNN.
See also censoring of YouTube videos: https://www.wsj.com/articles/dont-let-google-get-away-with-c...
> How else to explain why Google has restricted more than half of our 15 videos that are pro-Israel—even one by former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper?
Google may or may not be doing this intentionally; it may be some byproduct of the algorithm plus unconscious bias from left-leaning Googlers. But the result definitely pushes liberal objectives. Your typical Googler reviewing YouTube videos living somewhere like San Francisco simply isn’t equipped to figure out what is and isn’t within the mainstream of acceptability.
> Barr is a longtime proponent of the unitary executive theory of nearly unfettered presidential authority over the executive branch of the U.S. government.
> Barr as attorney general in 1992 authored the report The Case for More Incarceration, where he argued for an increase in the United States incarceration rate
> Having criticized the Mueller investigation before taking office, Barr did not recuse himself from overseeing the investigation as attorney general. After receiving Mueller's report he issued a four-page letter to Congress, describing what he said were its principal conclusions, and adding his opinion that the evidence presented did not establish obstruction of justice by Trump. Special counsel Mueller privately responded that Barr's letter had misrepresented the report.
> Barr intervened in the criminal case against convicted Trump associate Roger Stone, recommending a lighter sentence for Stone than the career prosecutors who had worked on the case. In May 2020, the Justice Department under Barr announced the dropping of charges against ex-Trump adviser Michael Flynn despite an earlier guilty plea by Flynn, which he later filed to withdraw.
So yeah, he's a hatchet man for the president, through and through. This is just revenge for tech's left leaning donations and stance, at the bidding of Trump of course. Big tech has long been in the sights of conservatives and this is just another shot in what's been a growing conflict.
[1]https://www.justice.gov/opa/speech/attorney-general-william-...
If Google wasn’t a majority “blue” company they would have been trust busted under Obama.
Certainly can't help them. However, I think that's a moot point if everyone can agree they are the most troublesome company in the "land of large companies". It seems like every few months I see outrage on HN over "Google increased pricing for $X service, but there aren't really any other options" situations.
Cable companies have taken billion in federal subsidies, lied about universal deployment and speeds, and unless there is local competition have taken customers to the cleaners, forced the purchase of bundled channel packages, charged rentals for modems they were not renting (I should know - I called in every month to have charge removed) etc.
I can think of a long list of other large / monopoly type companies that regular abuse consumers at far higher levels than google does.
Consumer spend on google is actually pretty small.
Breaking up a regional monopoly into smaller regional monopolies doesn't work (see baby Bells).
What would be better is requiring the owners of any last mile infrastructure to lease said infrastructure to any other interested operator at cost. This worked with DSL, but the mandate ended when we moved on to other technologies like cable and fiber that had no such requirements.
Instead, we now do the opposite. We give ISPs tax breaks and incentives and piles of cash to "build out the infrastructure" (read: we pay them to invest in their own business), because they threaten to not build it otherwise (read: they're threatening to deliberately decline to grow their business), and for the privilege of paying them to increase their customer and revenue base, we (get this) give them the exclusive right to be the only operator of any similar last mile infrastructure in that area.
How fucking stupid can we get?
We should not allow these agreements to happen, and we should retroactively void any that are currently in place.
Boeing has a serious lack of competition. Their only meaningful competitor is Airbus and that's a foreign company. They have no domestic competition at all, which is inherently problematic, especially for a critical industry like that.
I don't understand why United Airlines is on that list either. Airlines are a weird market because it's extremely capital intensive but also aggressively competitive, so they sort of alternate between all going bankrupt from relentless price competition and all colluding to raise prices enough that they don't all go bankrupt and then getting in trouble over it.
This isn't due to monopolistic behavior; the McDonnell Douglas company, the last big American competitor to Boeing, would probably have ceased to be a going concern had the merger not happened. Modern aircraft cost billions and billions of dollars to develop; Bombardier just threw in the towel and sold to Airbus, and Embraer almost did the same with Boeing were it not for COVID. There are only so many aircraft manufacturers with the resources to invest in development of brand new commerical aircraft.
Apple already lost a preliminary suit that will allow them to be sued for their monopolistic practices - https://www.zdnet.com/article/goodbye-walled-garden-apple-ge...
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/united-sta...
And 66% of the tablet market share in the USA
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/tablet/united-sta...
So yes, Apple can easily be considered a monopoly in the USA. Monopolies are regulated by countries.
In reality, I agree that Apple doesn't really qualify as a monopoly. Same with United.
I don't know if the good necessarily outweighs the bad, but maybe it does.
This is a continuation of politics trying to skim money off of tech and funnel it to thier favored constituents - it's straight up corruption.
This doesn't mean its corruption. You need more qualification to call it that.
(Not saying that the Trump admin isn't corrupt. I'm rather saying that your statement is too broad, and it fits almost all generally accepted democratic governance.)
Precedent is tricky. Democrats removing the filibuster for judges came back to haunt them.
There was a recent (last few weeks) SCOTUS decision that came out with numerous opinions by different coalitions. You could tell that they were all maneuvering around this idea of precedent.
Liberal justices who ended up on either side (majority or minority) were couching their votes as upholding a prior precedent, even when they definitely weren't.
Conservative justices ended up on either side of the case while subtly arguing that overturning precedent, or at least modifying it, was okay and normal.
Both are presumed to be setting up for the next challenge to Roe vs. Wade.
EDIT: mistakenly put that the democrats removed filibuster for SCOTUS judges, that was for other nominations
Did it though? Legal precedent is different (for now) from political precedent, and I think the Republicans have proven they’re happy to steamroll through almost anything they can to seat a Justice. They would have instantly dropped the filibuster if it hadn’t already been done.
Just why? What’s the history here?
I don’t know if there is a political angle to this or not. But Google is objectively differently situated than the other companies you mention.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/09/25/inside-...
Your choices for searching something on the internet, hosting a video, doing email, etc. are innumerable.
So you'll have to qualify what you mean by "negative impact" before I can answer that.
The definition of a monopoly isn't "really big". It's not even "the biggest of four major companies".
How many ways are there to publish a mobile app, for example?
I generally describe myself as libertarian but I'm struggling to have a laissez-faire attitude about some aspects of big tech. I think the most frustrating thing is the lack of "due process" in the way that big tech deals with customers. Look at the recent story about the ridiculous review process for Chrome extensions. I could tell similar stories about the app stores.
Both delta and united are operating very high capital cost businesses on thin margins.
What can we gain by trust busting them?
> What about for internet service - just a single ISP in most areas.
ISPs can be dealt with effectively at the local level - and they are not as invasive or as politically powerful as the tech giants.
I’ve never had my searches for coronavirus related content restricted in any way by my ISP for example.
> Your choices for searching something on the internet, hosting a video, doing email, etc. are innumerable.
You are ignoring network effects and the advertising monopoly.
But maybe that’s a good way to trust bust them?
Perhaps YouTube should be made to start showing my dlive streams in the search results?
The Pinto fuel system alone killed over 900 people
No, it's not; it's just tedious and requires math and statistical/actuarial concepts like quality-adjusted-life-years. (The TL;DR would be that google inflicts significantly less harm per person to vastly larger numbers of persons.)
Unpleasant and time consuming is not the same as difficult.
In August 2018, a study[86] estimated that more than 24,000+ Rohingya people were killed by the Myanmar military and the local Buddhists since the "clearance operations" started on 25 August 2017. The study[86] also estimated that more than 18,000 Rohingya Muslim women and girls were raped, 116,000 Rohingya were beaten, 36,000 Rohingya were thrown into fire,[86][87][88][89][90][91] burned down and destroyed 354 Rohingya villages in Rakhine state,[92] looted many Rohingya houses,[93] committed widespread gang rapes and other forms of sexual violence against the Rohingya Muslim women and girls.[94][95][96] The military drive also displaced a large number of Rohingya people and made them refugees. According to the United Nations reports, as of January 2018, nearly 690,000 Rohingya people had fled or had been driven out of Rakhine state who then took shelter in the neighboring Bangladesh as refugees.[97] In December, two Reuters journalists who had been covering the Inn Din massacre event were arrested and imprisoned.[97]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Muslims_in_Myan...
The company involved, Facebook:
is Facebook really doing all it can to try to halt the spread of violence? Not according to the United Nations’ Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, which released its own report on Tuesday looking into the causes of the genocide that has taken place against the Rohingya in that country. Among other recommendations, the UN report says any commercial entity doing business in Myanmar should not “enter into an economic or financial relationship with the security forces,” including the military police, known as the Tatmadaw.
https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/facebook-un-myanmar-geno...
With no absolution at all to Beoing for its impressive death count, 24,000 souls, and tens of thousands of rapes and beatings,, in which Facebook's negligence played sufficient role for the UN to specifically call it out, is more than a couple of planes-full, and is why what happens online is in fact as serious and consequential as can be.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/inside-the-u-s-antitrust-probe-...
[2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323689604578221...
This is whole reason for the criminal trial. If they can prove Google stifled competition in the advertising business, it is going to be a cut and dry case.
We're going to do this and open technology back up to innovation and progress, or just watch the tech giants continue to grow in power and abusiveness year after year while new startups continue to decline.
Let's be real here. None of these megacorps are getting broken up any time soon. We haven't had a trustbuster in office for a very long time. The megacorp/lobbyist/politico triopoly has ruthlessly, slickly snuffed out any perceived opposition for quite a long time.
Economic incentives for innovation and disruption are greater when a monopolistic entity is over charging for it's good or service. If they are not over charging then there is not as great an incentive to innovate or disrupt. If the latter is the case, why bust a monopoly that is providing a fair service?
Care to back that up, or are we supposed to take your, frankly, very unorthodox views at face value? Every industry I can think of with entrenched monopolies sees almost no innovation until things get so bad that they are finally disrupted: aerospace, energy, advertisement, telecommunications, and the list goes on and on.
Intel's virtual monopoly of microprocessors has led to AMD's recent advancements: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4247790-intel-vs-amd-battle... https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-vs-intel-cpu-market-sh...
Check out the historical market shares in the links. Markets have changed in time with respect to computing. People are opting for mobile devices which use arm processors(even breaking into server space). Unless the behemoths in the industry adapt, their industry may not exist in the future. That is innovation and disruption happening right now.
Intel had in 2018 90.4% of the desktop/notebook/server market with 96.8% of the server market share. Maybe this is only Intel vs. AMD stats. Are servers run with other processors?
Standard oil(Arguably the most notorious monopolistic company in the history of the United States) by comparison: "At one point, it was believe that they controlled somewhere between 88% to 91% of all the oil in the United States"
Railroads still are. If you mean transport in general, it's because the government build a huge number of roads, waterways, and airports.
You're not a Google customer. Advertisers are the customers. Your attention is the product.
Again, anyone who does not get an invoice from Google every month is not a customer.
https://www.cnet.com/news/momentum-grows-to-break-up-big-tec...
AWS is a $400 to $600 billion market cap company right now if it were trading on its own, based on its operating income and the insatiatable market demand for anything cloud. The ticker is even available conveniently. They'll get to $150+ billion in sales and $25+ billion in operating profit in the next six to seven years (average of 21% annual growth over seven years; very much within reach). It might approach being a trillion dollar company a decade from now (at MSFT type multiples).
You'd split Facebook and Instagram as the most obvious separation line (and then do something with WhatsApp, it can be spun off or go with either or; FB already has messenger, so it probably shouldn't go with that entity).
Instagram is a $100+ billion publicly traded company on its own plausibly. There is some question on erosion in both FB and Instagram once you detach them from eachother. They both lose a huge protective moat and cross promotion (Instagram has become a lot more mature at this point, it'll be more at risk to userbase erosion going forward, versus say five years ago; and FB is definitely at high risk for userbase erosion with fewer moats).
I know virtually nothing about antitrust law, and I'm not a lawyer, so I'm speaking largely out of my behind, but those seem like logical-enough divisions.
Google is infinitely worse than Amazon and Facebook put together.
They just so happen to be an advertising company so they internet doesn't know about it yet.
> They just so happen to be an advertising company so they internet doesn't know about it yet.
Could you share your reasoning for coming to that conclusion?
Could DOJ also do this to overseas-based companies that operates in the U.S.?
Say you break up Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc., and people begin to adopt the platforms like say, Baidu, TikTok, Alibaba, etc. which grow to 90%+ market dominance. Can DOJ bring antitrust lawsuits against Alibaba?
Having a competitive advantage is not illegal. Someone correct me, but isn't the law's intent to protect people from abuse of monopolistic power? Which wouldn't be the case here.
The motives here are entirely political. Notice that the ISPs, telecom industry in general, defense industries are left out of this discussion.
Tech companies lean left, largely donate to the Democrats, and have been the focus of conservative groups for years as they are considered "biased" towards those on the Left. Like many things about Trump's administration, it's about revenge against those who oppose him, be they companies, state or individuals.
I'm reminded of how I was so enamored by the internet during the age of the directory. Humans assembled information to share with each other, and there were different search engines you could use as well. It was just so much more interesting at the time.
There are still wonderful examples of information being assembled by humans like Wikipedia. But these types of sites struggle to have enough money to operate, while other companies just dominate everything, especially anything that involves money. That's how the market works.
But there are certain things the way having libraries, police, firefighters, maybe you can health insurance, where if profit is the only thing that's going to be considered, it just creates a society that is less worthwhile. Perhaps the search engine needs to be considered a public service.
(You see, the arguments go on and on...)
Private sector companies done right (aka incentives align correctly) are inherently more trustworthy than public sector.
Disclosure: I do work for Google, but I've held these opinions for a long time.
The US government’s increasing hostility towards peaceful trade is alarming. Google is one of America’s greatest business successes of this century.
This will not be an easy case for the states.
Content discovery: Google Reader -> (Twitter, Facebook, Apple Podcasts) Chat: Google Talk/Hangouts -> (Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, Imessage, Facetime, Zoom) Product Search: Google -> Amazon Video: Youtube -> (Youtube, Prime Video, Apple TV, Netflix, Tiktok)
A lot of these examples are big tech -> big tech but still if anything it seems like the rest of the FANG that have grown their businesses.
Obviously any lawsuit doesnt need to win over consumers, but personally I could care less who owns what in adtech.
And take Apple to task as well - their app store policies and new app signing requirements for OSX are absurd.
Amazon has just started abusing it's monopoly so they'll be in the next antitrust wave I imagine and get away here.
Don't even get me started on Whatsapp.
Consistently anti-user and competition crushing behaviour in tech should be dealt with forcefully. Not some 5 billion $ chickenshit fine please.
I don't understand. Apples has more than 50% of the phone marketplace AND locks everything down. They also have twice the revenue of Google.
Google needs to sell eyeballs, so it creates products for free (subsidized by ads) and along the way destroys competition.
Globally, how does breaking up Google benefit the US?
Maybe part of the reason for the publics perception of Google‘s teams and divisions seemingly operating in an independent and chaotic manner is a way of minimizing the attack surface for antitrust accusations.
Making big acquisitions much more difficult and reviewing the big acquistitions of the last decade would be the right place to start in my opinion.
If we believe for a moment, this is a play against Google's liberal position, or at the very least Google's employees liberal outlook.. (I will try to pull up references).
Lets say it's true: These actions are by all accounts the same as the old communist states.. Only this time they're under the guise of legal proceedings which have some precedent. Americans would usually be so alergic to the idea of such a thought that there would be uproar.. But nationalism and faith in a leader/idea has prevailed.
I would argue that it's super rich for the Justice Dept to be worried about antitrust all of a sudden, as a European, I've been fortunate to be protected far better than the US over the years by why of data protection laws. Also knowing Google and other major tech companies penchant for moving their headquarters abroad (Ireland for example), its super interesting to see a swift interest in antitrust..
The US has had, and still does I believe, a huge fight to get chip & pin on debit and credit cards because of insurance liability.. But hey.. Those tech companies.. Gotta get them first.
I'm no tinfoil hat wearer, but if it walks like a duck .
The rational thing is to have a "monopoly" that isn't evil. But that means that democratic control shouldn't be after-the-fact, external regulation (shown time and time again to be insufficient and generally bought off) but fundamental to the operating of these companies. In essence, Google makes the case for democratic management of production - socialism - very clear.
But the other important part of this theory is it's not just about "what would be nice to have" in some utopian sense. Larger companies have competitive advantages that cause them to grow even faster - some real economies of scale, more political heft, greater bargaining power. This leads to the system being inherently unstable and tending towards concentration, which is apparent in pretty much every sector of tech. Trying to permanently reverse this trend through anti-trust is as nonsensical as suggesting people go back to living in the woods; it is in opposition to the fundamental trends inherent in market economies. The only way we can move is forward, to the resolution of these contradictions by working class ownership of all by all.
If you want real change then you got to be more radical than just separating Google search from Gmail or Instagram from Facebook.
I have no idea how, but the goal should be to change their incentives.
Why? Are they inefficient? Have their resources been mis-allocated?
> jobs
For the sake of jobs? That pay more or less?
> create much needed competition
Are they charging too much?
Prior to I'm guessing 2013 to 2015, Google to many was viewed as the company who actually did no evil & a dream company to work.
Maybe them absorbing other company's and their cultures affected them?