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Comment by mozball | Hacker News Reader

If this isn't the straw that breaks the camel's back, there is never going to be one.

Google needs to be broken up.

They own the browser market. They own the web (through Adwords). They own Search. They own mobile. They own most of the video sharing market with 2.5 billion monthly annual users. They own a good chunk of email with 1.2 billion monthly annual users.

They have amassed an incomprehensible amount of power and influence over humanity and they have proven repeatedly that they are willing to use that power to the detriment of humanity and to entrench themselves further.

Google needs to be broken up.

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> Google needs to be broken up.

To make it explicit: the only way this happens is by Americans voting for it. The FTC has been more active on anti-trust issues in the past two years than at any time in the past 30. That's a direct result of the 2020 election. Elections matter.

Citation? FTC against Google doesn't produce much results on Google (kind of an irony :))

Have seen FTC going against Amazon because the FTC chair had published prior work against Amazon's practices. Not defending Amazon but FB/Google are a much bigger threat than Amazon.

Citation for what, increased anti-trust activity from the FTC over the last two years? Sure, here's one article:

> Private equity deals and transactions in the healthcare and technology sectors continue to attract heightened antitrust scrutiny...

> The US agencies have also demonstrated an increased interest in challenging vertical transactions.

> In January 2022, for example, the FTC sued to block Lockheed Martin's US$4.4 billion proposed acquisition of Aerojet, which the parties subsequently abandoned.

> Increased enforcement, combined with the agencies' reluctance to approve remedies, has created an uncertain environment where commercial parties should be increasingly prepared to litigate mergers.

> The ramping up of antitrust enforcement in 2022...

https://www.whitecase.com/insight-our-thinking/us-ma-fy-2022...

Here's another:

> Since 2020, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) have filed multiple lawsuits against major tech companies...

> "The agencies have started laying the foundations for a more interventionist stance over the last two years, and this year is when we'll start to see some of those efforts come to fruition -- or be stopped in their tracks by the courts," Kass said.

https://www.techtarget.com/searchcio/news/252528606/FTC-push...

I'm sure you can find more.

Except they keep losing cases. ex:

https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-appeals-court-opens-docket-...

Or Judges fast-tracking lawsuits to allow those being prosecuted by the FTC to get things over quicker, ex: https://www.reuters.com/legal/illumina-wins-fast-track-appea...

And I think the biggest blow may actually come about because of the SEC lawsuit that will be heard this upcoming term at SCOTUS: https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-supreme-court-decide-legali..., which will likely heavily reign in the power of administrator judges and the ability for an agency to keep initial fights in-house (blocking litigants from taking fights to the normal courts).

Yeah. You can't expect every swing to be a home run, but you also miss every swing you don't take. My point is at least they're trying to do something now, unlike previous decades. It will take some time and effort to bring the agency back around to being effective after decades of inactivity. That's not going to happen if future administrations put the FTC back on the bench.

Citation for this statement.

>The FTC has been more active on anti-trust issues in the past two years than at any time in the past 30

FTC being more active in past two years over previous 30 is a strong statement.

The FTC isn't going to do anything as Google/Alphabet is a big donor to the Democrats.

https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/alphabet-inc/recipients?id=...

Here is them lobbying specifically around antitrust reform legislation: https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/bills/specific_...

So are Amazon:

https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/amazon-com/recipients?id=D0...

and Microsoft:

https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/microsoft-inc/recipients?id...

And yet we see high profile activity against them from the current FTC.

And Meta: https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/meta/recipients?id=D0000335..., https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/cases-proceedings/0...

And Intuit: https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/intuit-inc/recipients?id=D0..., https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/cases-proceedings/1...

And Epic: https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/epic-systems/recipients?id=..., https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/cases-proceedings/1...

etc. etc.

? This is provably false. FTC filed 6 months ago.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/24/technology/google-ads-law...

n.b. I've found a lot of comfort by conciously rolling away from any subject that leads me to do "They"-ing, i.e. name an enormously large group, then talk about them as a unit. The more I avoid it, the more I realize how prevalent it became and drives how a lot of us feel society shifted.

It's called saving appearances.

So your position is, they'll never do it, and if they did, it's fake. Sounds like self-peasantization.

The people working at the FTC have been involved in revolving doors in the very industries they're trying to break up.

It's a simple observation. They don't have the interest to make it pass but they still have to do it to save face.

You're right, but not because of politics.

FTC is on a losing streak, with the latest fiasco being the Microsoft Activision acquisition fiasco.

Republicans control the house. That's who would have to pass any legislation. FTC is non-partisan.

>The FTC has been more active on anti-trust issues in the past two years than at any time in the past 30.... That's a direct result of the 2020 election.

Active against Google though? Remember, Google can help a certain political party in tough times (e.g. rollout of healthcare.gov).

So can Microsoft and Amazon, surely? Yet they're getting a lot of scrutiny from the FTC right now.

Wake me up with they actually do something instead of making announcements of looking into the possibility of perhaps one day sending a strongly worded letter asking their tech buddies to calm down a little bit, if they're so inclined. Until then, this is campaign fodder and nothing else.

Okay, here's your alarm clock going off:

"FTC rewrites rules on Big Tech mergers with aim to ease monopoly-busting"

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/07/ftc-rewrites-rul...

"FTC prepares “the big one,” a major lawsuit targeting Amazon’s core business"

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/06/ftc-prepares-the...

"The Federal Trade Commission sued Amazon today, claiming the online giant violated US law by tricking consumers into signing up for the $14.99-per-month Amazon Prime subscription service and making it annoyingly difficult to cancel."

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/06/ftc-sues-amazon-...

"FTC files to block Microsoft’s $69B Activision Blizzard acquisition"

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/06/report-ftc-will-file-...

"A Federal Trade Commission lawsuit filed yesterday accused Ring, the home security camera company owned by Amazon, of invading users' privacy"

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/06/ftc-amazon-ring-...

"Microsoft will pay $20 million to settle an FTC complaint that its Xbox platform illegally collected and retained information about children without their parents' consent"

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/06/xbox-coppa-violations...

And that's all just from one news source, in the last three months.

Yes, but Google has a strong existing relationship, the D party owes them for that one and some other favours. Can you find a link for any recent FTC action against Google (not against Google's competitors or some tiny subsidiary of Google)? I hope I'm wrong here.

I don't see anything significant from the FTC specifically regarding Google, but there is an ongoing DOJ lawsuit. Possibly they don't want to step on that? I admit I don't really understand the roles of the DOJ versus the FTC regarding anti-trust enforcement. https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-googl...

How much of that involves the tech industry? Are you seriously claiming that Silicon Valley and Donald Trump were besties while the Democrats and tech hate each other?

> How much of that involves the tech industry?

A lot. Here's a link where you can read about some recent activity in the tech industry (change it to sort by Date, I couldn't figure out how to do that in the URL): https://arstechnica.com/search/?ie=UTF-8&q=ftc You can probably find more on Google (or perhaps Duck Duck Go? :) ).

Why should the US break up an asset like Google? Would be completely self defeating. This isn't like standard oil or at&t, that mostly had influence and market share inside the US. It would basically be handing power to foreign competitors who would pounce at the opportunity

And I'm not American so it's not even some sort of patriotic comment. If Europe , or anywhere else, had a Google sized Behemoth, they wouldn't mess with it no matter how "anti tech" they might seem now. If anything they are anti tech because they don't want foreign big tech to have massive influence over them. You'd bet they wouldn't cripple big tech if they were European. On the other hand, as long as they are American that massive power is a feature, not a bug for the US government.

The reaction to Tiktok is a good example of how nationalism/geopolitics shape the reaction to big tech, which is why google is probably safe.

One thing comes to mind: antitrust! It happened to Microsoft as well!!

...and Microsoft has more power than Google at the moment

But anti-trust stalled Microsoft's efforts at a critical time and allowed Firefox and Safari (like Gecko) to restore a standards-based web from an IE-based web. It's not a cure all but it worked. IE had 95% marketshare in 2002 and Firefox took a third of that from them in a few years thanks to anti-trust and the consent decree it forced on MS.

Chrome has nowhere near 95% market share so it would be hard to make the same case against them.

Given that it's open-source and anyone can roll and distribute a tweaked version of Chromium (and many have, notably Microsoft), it's really hard to see an argument here that Google is acting anti-competitively. If anything it's very pro-competitive to give away your secret sauce to your competitors.

Just because their browser is more popular than you would like, and you don't like a feature they're adding, doesn't mean a judge is going to stop them from adding it.

> Why should the US break up an asset like Google?

I'm also European and I think almost pretty much 100% as you think on this, but to play devil's advocate, and how I think this should have worked in theory in a free-market economy, is that the US, by allowing companies like Google to do their nefarious and frankly evil things right now and in the near future is also, at the same time, not allowing future potential companies, more innovative than Google is now, to take Google's place.

But what happens is that the US is focusing on having a strong and national security-enhancing company (Google) on its side now and in the near future, versus having an even stronger and, potentially, even more national-security enhancing company (the one that would have taken Google's place had the free market been allowed to do its thing) in the medium to long future.

On the face of it this compromise of security now and in the near future vs security in the medium to long future looks like a decent bet, the problem is that evil colossuses like Google are actively getting rotten from the inside, and at some point in the medium to long future they'll fall almost in an instant, with no company to take their place. That will leave the US highly vulnerable at that point in the future.

> Why should the US break up an asset like Google? Would be completely self defeating.

Because in the short term it would disrupt a major company (ala Standard Oil), but in the long term it would allow the US to remain competitive in the global market.

If we allow Google to continue abusing its monopoly power in the US, that guarantees that the US will not be the home of the future technologies of the world. Innovations will be sucked up and killed as acquisitions. Enormous energy will be focused on blatant moat-building like WEI instead of developments that benefit the world. etc.

Tech competitiveness relies on network effects. Breaking up tech would just cede marketshare to companies like ByteDance and Baidu.

Any successful US-based tech post-breakup would be acquired by larger international players, like Tiktok was.

In which case foreign governments, the EU and the like who collectively represent the interests of the other 7+ billion people, should start levying taxes, penalties and fines on Google and haul it and the US in front of international agencies like the WTO for unfair trade practices.

That would be a desirable action but look what happen in the end of 90s to Microsoft. It was about to be broken up and in the very end it didn't. They become dormant and polite only to strike back some 10 years ago with Windows 10, its telemetry, ads and cloud services which are being pushed onto users whether they like or not. And somehow, no regulators decided to step in to clean up this company's behavior - everyone seems to be ok with what MS is doing. Whether it's the US or EU. I take that the business and lobbing goes extremely well in both markets.

And because of this, I don't believe that the US is able to break Google or the other flagship companies despite of reasons existing for such action.

What would it mean for Chrome to be spun-off into a separate business? How would it survive?

Google Ads and Search would have to pay Chrome for search placement. Just like they do to Mozilla right now.

ideally, it wouldnt survive.

the ideal scenario is that 65% of users' favorite browser is no longer available? why is that ideal?

It's ideal that monolithic spyware dies.

> Google needs to be broken up.

Not going to happen. Rationally there should be broad political consensus about cutting Google back to size: from rabid libertarians worshiping the miraculous abundance generated by "competition and free markets" to bleeding-heart socialists keen on pushing back corporate power as the root of all evil.

Alas, these political categories no longer have any meaning. The US political system has mutated into something else (the messenger being a horned man) which will probably require some time to properly characterize and name using terminology that is appropriate to use in good company.

So the fate of Google will be more shaped by actions of external entities than as part of US regulatory efforts. Powerful countries that antagonize the US are simply degoogling and creating their own copycat panopticons.

The question is what will be the course of action of powerful countries that are alies of the US (i.e. Europe and a few others). Will they accept that their digital society will be feudal in nature because the broken US political system cannot deliver on even basic responsibilities?

> Will they accept that their digital society will be feudal in nature because the broken US political system cannot deliver on even basic responsibilities?

The Germans, British, Australians and French are also attempting to build their own panopticons.

Don't forget, increasingly transport, you won't be able to get a taxi in SF soon without being monitored / tracked by Google.

How so? Are they requiring request of taxis via a site with Google analytics?

I think they're alluding to Waymo. I feel much better about Google tracking my taxi rides than I do with Uber, Lyft, random taxi company, my cell phone company, etc.

Google broke itself up in 2015. What are you even asking for here?

Chrome and Android are open source, and there are several forks of both thriving in the ecosystem. Yeah it would be cool if there was a decent open source alternative to GMail and Drive, but no one else seems to have figured out how to get the incentives right for something like that.

That "incentive" for Google is "80% of our revenue comes from ads".

Google's open source projects are open in name only.

> Google's open source projects are open in name only.

The link at the top of the page is pointing to the GitHub repo, where you can see literally over a million contributions from thousands of people working at hundreds of companies: https://github.com/chromium/chromium/commits/main

I've worked on both Chrome and Android (Chromium and AOSP) professionally, and never worked at Google.

You and GP both can be right depending on definition used for “open source”.

There is the OSS vs FOSS distinction which may have been unwittingly invoked. Certainly there is nothing “free” about Chromium except its price. Google is not about to switch to a fork for Chrome and any changes to Chromium which are not approved by Google are unlikely to be in any release builds.

Well, true :)

What I should've written is that: yes, they are open source, but there's no way to influence the direction they are going. These projects are 100% Google-run, and very few (if any) decisions are public.

For most projects there's also a significant proprietary part in the actual final product

It's not the lack of open source, it's ease of use. Alternatives exist, but no company is going to run a charity case for you to store tons of data for free. Mail in particular is commonly known to be a hassle which has nothing to do with Gmail the software, as much as Gmail the provider.

Google broke itself up in 2015. What are you even asking for here?

No, it didn't, it restructured itself into Alphabet, with many subsidiaries. But, all the core businesses are still under that umbrella organization, with most web-related businesses remaining inside the current Google entity.

A forced divestment of the browser business might help. Same for the productivity products.

What browser “business”? Chrome makes no money. Don’t you think they are going to fund themselves the same way that Firefox does - via Google ads?

No one has paid for a browser in almost 3 decades and even then few did.

> No one has paid for a browser in almost 3 decades and even then few did.

Considering NCSA Mosaic’s initial release was just 30 years ago this year and it’s considered the first browser, think you might be using a bit of hyperbole there? Twenty years would’ve been more accurate.

MSIE was free, 28 years ago in late 1995, and while Netscape did take 5 years to follow suit, by 1998 Netscape was not in a healthy position because of the free competition.

And to a first approximation. No one paid for Netscape then. I first downloaded it free in 1996 from their ftp server.

As someone who worked in this space at the time (Webmaster at Spry, Inc. in 1994), and we sold a web browser in the 1994-ish timeframe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBox, no, saying "almost 3 decades" isn't hyperbolic at all. 29 years is close enough.

I don't think you understand what a business is. Google pays Firefox a lot of money to be the default search which means there is a lot of money in browsers. Google Search conceptually pays Google Chrome to be the default Search engine on Chrome. Except since they're both under the same company they will never take an outside offer which is why it's a monopoly. No different from any other vertically integrated company.

I understand that perfectly, how do you think the theoretical Chrome business would make money?

The same way the non-theoretical Firefox business makes money.

edit: Safari as well.

By showing ads from the “AdSense Company” and sending your personal information to them?

Meet the new boss…

Sure, but on the positive side, the Chrome Company has its own incentives.

Today, Google can provide Chrome as a loss-leader, making up for the "free" browser with ad revenue.

The new Chrome Company can't operate that way. It needs to make money on its own. Perhaps MS Bing offers more money. Or they build their own ad system. Or pivot into some other business area.

Anyway, I don't think anybody is arguing Google/Alphabet must be broken up, only that it's a tool that's available in the US, should we (society) decide other regulation is insufficient.

> Perhaps MS Bing offers more money.

> Or they build their own ad system.

And we still are being tracked by BigTech with the same business model that people object when Google does it.

> Or pivot into some other business area.

And what other method do you suggest for funding besides ads or people paying for the browser? The second option has never been a long term successful business for browsers?

Chromebooks are literally a browser that you pay for, and they are heavily embedded in the US education system.

Just because they don't sell floppies in a box like it's 1994 doesn't mean these aren't businesses.

Yes, you just pay for the browser and not the hardware. Are ChromeBooks also a “keyboard you pay for”?

But what does breaking up even mean? Separate companies, each publicly traded with their own C level staff, shareholders, etc?

Because to me it just feels like it might be legally separated, but still owned and directed by the same handful of people. And it being separated makes it safer, in that they can't forward e.g. large fines to the parent company.

Disclaimer: I don't know anything about large corporations. or economy. or governments.

Yes, breaking up a company means divesting some business units. The new businesses would have their own BoD, leadership, shareholders, etc.

The US did this with Standard Oil in 1911, Bell/AT&T in 1983. And the same laws were used against Microsoft in 2001, though the company was able to avoid a break-up.

Breaking up Google might not be the best option. Perhaps more rigorous regulation by the government would be better, similar to Microsoft. But a break up should be an option.

Say that to Huawei.

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