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Comment by grandmczeb | Hacker News Reader

I think it's pretty clear what the motivation is if you look at who's pushing for this.

  - Large publishers and news agencies who have seen declining revenues due to increased competition for ads.
  - Left-leaning people who believe large companies are inherently bad for society.
  - Right-leaning people who believe "big tech" is biased against them.

Its also worth noting who's not pushing for this.

  - Advertisers.
  - General consumers.

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I have noticed a decline in quality of google products in recent years. I attribute this primarily to their increasing monopoly power. Not to mention all the products google has killed: https://killedbygoogle.com/, many of which were quite popular.

It's not like Google has some noble duty to launch or maintain their products if they don't want to.

The second and third groups contain many general consumers, so I who you intend include in that. Is your point that only ideologues believe that Google deserves anti-trust scrutiny?

The point is that the groups pushing anti-trust action seem to be motivated by things that have nothing to do with helping Google's customers.

> Left-leaning people who believe large companies are inherently bad for society.

Curious to read more about this. It could just be me, but I have not seen much criticism of Google coming from this perspective. The closest I can think of is criticism of their skill at avoiding taxes.

Advertisers just apply a markup and pass it along to their customers.

This is the weakest part of your argument.

>General consumers

But are they pushing against it? Would they, if asked?

If the verdict involved something like "your Google account will no longer work with X service" there would definitely be a lot of consumer pushback

Or if you now have to pay for X what you used to get for free

Google already does this, bolstered by their monopoly. You used to be able to listen to Youtube videos with the screen off without paying them.

YouTube vanced ftw

That's an assumption. Severing the financial tie might not necessarily fully sever the operational relationship. Obviously Google would be pushing that narrative hard, but it would be relatively easy to push back and say, "Separate companies with a non-exclusive relationship would still be lucrative and so the two companies that result from this action aren't going to give that up just to spite consumers/regulators."

Why should anyone care about general consumers? They're just fine being sheep as long as they're comfortable.

Protecting consumers is the entire basis of anti-trust law.

this is sort of an admission that the motivation is purely notional, and most people would not see any actual tangible benefit to it

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