As expected, the comments here seem generally in support of such a move. But, it is really unclear to me how such a move would improve my life or the lives of most typical users. Genuinely open to having it explained to me.
Online store buys ads on Google to tell people about their products. People click the ads, and buy the products so the store can scale up and lower their per unit cost. Everyone are happy.
Now fast forward a decade. Google drop their "do no evil" motto and jack up ad prices. Online store now pays 10 times as much for their ads and have to raise prices to cover the costs. Google shareholders are happy, everyone else loses - it doesn't matter if they click ads or not, the prices are higher for everyone.
This is just not true and not how Google's ads work.
Google has a bidding system. You don't have to pay their prices if your ads aren't profitable. You can pull out. You can go somewhere else. You can try other forms of marketing. You can make a better product, better landing page, better messaging so you can convert more users per click.
Your company is essentially competing with other companies for the click. If the price 10x, it's because other companies are willing to pay 10x more. If other companies are willing to pay more for the ads, then your product/business/marketing isn't as good as theirs.
Or maybe you just don't have as much venture capital to burn.
Do we really want to live in a world that overwhelmingly rewards whoever is prepared to spend the most on publicity?
(How's Citizens United been working out?)
What does this have to do with the post you're replying to? I would suggest starting a new HN post if you want to talk about VC cash.
Yeah, right.
You can make a case that replacing Google with a bunch of bespoke ad vectors isn't a real alternative because they don't have Google's reach but Facebook does.
Raising prices is evil? Does this hypothetical online store never raise prices?
The sites you frequent are more likely to stick around if they have more revenue options, and we all benefit from competition in the search and browser markets lest we wind up with IE6 all over again.
This one makes sense to me and is pretty tangible.
How is your life better with having Standard Oil broke up in 1911? We didn't get to see the counterfactual of Rockefeller strangling the oil industry by 1920.
Big tech though has gone beyond the definition of a monopoly. We didn't breakup Standard Oil because we were worried about them taking over the garment industry too.
I imagine we already pay for big tech dearly as a society but we can't run reality a 1000 times over to see the alternatives. We basically run the Windows 11 version of society and since we can't actually have a different experience we conclude "hey this Windows 11 society isn't that bad, how would any of this improve my Windows 11 life?".
If we could actually see the alternate paths this would be the biggest political issue in democracies by a mile. Instead we have big tech controlling what people see and read almost entirely so of course this is no big deal. Big tech told me so!
And am not saying don't do it... because this liberate the potential from one big hand to multiple ones. I am just answering your question whether this is a positive or not.