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It's time to start lobbying hard for an antitrust breakup of Google. This DRM plan, as abuse of a monopoly position, provides more political coverage for a forced breakup.

It's pretty clear how to break up Alphabet, because it grew mostly by acquisition.

- Google - search, ads on search pages and nothing more.

- DoubleClick - third party ads on other sites.

- Analytics - services to web sites.

- Cloud - the money-losing data center service. Probably gets sold to AWS or Hurricane Electric.

- Android - phones and similar devices

- Chrome - browsers

- YouTube - streaming content. Probably gets sold to Netflix or AT&T or Comcast.

- Waymo - self-driving cars. Probably gets sold to a car company.

- Alphabet - all the other stuff.

Now, some of these have conflicting interests. That's a good thing. With Chrome separated from Google and Doubleclick, and forced to fight for market share, it's not in Chrome's interest to prevent blocking ads from DoubleClick or Google. Google wants people to see ads on search pages, while Doubleclick wants people to leave the search site and see ads elsewhere. Now there's competition.

Antitrust action against Google is already underway. The State of Texas and several state attorneys general have a case pending.[1] There are other cases.[2] All these cases benefit from Google's move to entrench their monopoly by technical means.

So make lots of noise politically about that. It's quite likely to make Google dump this proposal, on the advice of their antitrust lawyers.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-05/google-an...

[2] https://www.lanierlawfirm.com/google-antitrust-lawsuits-expl...

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This may seem like a good idea but so much of Google's power comes from the Search + Search Ads monopoly. That is where they are anticompetitive to the max, that is where a change needs to happen. Splitting everything else off doesn't solve the core problem.

Within Search + Search Ads you have a platform where Google are/have:

- the sole vendor of a digital asset - ads

- the sole marketplace for that asset

- a closed algorithmic trading system with no public auditing

- no public ledger or auditing showing who bid what

- currently one of the main customers for those ads (advertising their own products)

Along with that you as an advertiser have to install tracking on your site allowing Google to see every transaction, all revenue, every customer, of your business. The level of spying on the advertisers is insane, when seen in combination with the closed source algorithm and market for the ads the potential for manipulation is enormous.

The whole ads platform is built for extracting every last cent of margin from advertisers businesses. It's anticompetitive, monopolistic, and to some extent even a protection racket.

The most important "breakup" needs to be the ads business from everything else, including search. That's going to hurt, and I don't have the answers to how to make it work, but changes are needed.

I suspect a "breakup" isn't on the cards, maybe some strong regulation of online ad marketplaces, ring fencing them from the rest of the business and auditing of the platform?

> The most important "breakup" needs to be the ads business from everything else, including search. That's going to hurt, and I don't have the answers to how to make it work, but changes are needed.

You can be happy then.

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-googl...

The press release doesn't mention it, but the actual court document asks the court to:

"Order the divestiture of, at minimum, the Google Ad Manager suite, including both Google’s publisher ad server, DFP, and Google’s ad exchange, AdX, along with any additional structural relief as needed to cure any anticompetitive harm"

Note, too, that this is the DoJ. They, unlike the FTC, actually know what they are doing.

Sarcasm alert?

Let's not forget maps, where they arbitrarily decide to show you a shop/hotel/restaurant 5km away when there is one 200m away.

I am kind of surprised none of the navigation apps divert your course slightly to pass in front of a large store or something yet. It could even announce the place. "On your right is such and such store where using the code Maps will give you a 10 percent discount."

You could actually package this up in a way that people would find palatable.

What if maps only took you to places where you have a loyalty card - or the places that currently have discounts on things in your shopping list.

Give it the right marketing spin and people would love it.

I can imagine Margrethe Vestager will start flexing her regulation muscles the minute Google even thinks about it.

Google Maps (and even more so Waze which they own) already had partnerships with various brands - for example, type McDonalds into Google Maps (at least in the UK) and it has the M logo next to "see locations" as soon as you've typed Mc - so it's not such a huge stretch as you think it would be.

This isn't a "partnership", it's an option for anyone who has purchased a Local Campaign product on Google Ads.

Despite not being privy to the details, I am familiar enough with this sort of marketing to be extremely confident that Google and McDonalds (and other big brands) did indeed negotiate specific terms including promotion of McDonalds locations beyond what is available to typical Google customers, rather than a McDonalds marketing manager just logging in and setting up some local campaigns.

I'm sure you're right, but that doesn't change the fact that "logos on Google Maps" =! "partnership"

I'm grateful they started doing this sort of thing. It was what got me to finally stop using Google Maps.

What’s the alternative?

"And weren't you searching for something like this on your laptop yesterday?"

Waze does this, or at least it did a few years ago when I used it. I remember being stopped at a light, and it told me there was a Taco Bell or Jack in the Box, or something within X feet, a coupon for some kind of discount if I go there, and a button to navigate me to it.

One reason I prefer Apple Maps. shrug Let’s see if it stays ad-free.

The ideal breakup would be between search engine and index.

The index should be treated as a utility like water or electric that search engines purchase access to for a regulated fee.

You can then have a thousand competing search engines started in garages with their own ranking algorithms and ads but realistically there are only ever going to be a few indexes. Thats the part that requires enormous data centers and dedicated power stations to run.

I doubt this is feasible, there's a lot that goes into the index which determines which kinds of queries you can even run.

Why? As a supplier of an API to search engine "customers" their entire job would just be to service that demand and provide new query options.

The intra-engine competition, meanwhile, would drive up results quality. Search engines would rise and fall on their own merits rather than on the basis that theyve got access to the biggest index.

But part of the competition is the index quality. For example, it's a lot easier to provide a keyword index than a phrase index. There's code search which is almost orthogonal to what ordinary search wants separators wise etc

I dont doubt that. The point of regulating it as a utility isnt that theres nothing to compete over but that the barrier to entry is so high that you can't simply rely on the market to provide competition.

Even if you split the search and ads divisions into two companies, what prevents them from entering into a partnership and keep doing whatever they do now?

That's what I fail to understand in these breakup threads. They would be free to business with whoever they want. It feels like if a breakup happens it's mostly paperwork and accounting changes in practice.

No, they would certainly not be free to do business with whomever they want. There's a reason the Baby Bells didn't all just enter into a partnership with each other the day after the breakup... they were not permitted to do so.

If/when business was unavoidable between two offspring companies, at minimum, I would expect them to have to inform the FTC, justify how it was unavoidable, and make the details of the transaction public. If someone complained that it wasn't unavoidable, quite possibly there would be additional penalties leveled on each of the participants.

It's not like some Monty Python character waves a wand and declares "you're not n different companies", only to wander off and never exercise oversight. Mind you, I don't think there's enough political capital in the world to manage to break Google up, but if it did happen then the judgement will have the teeth to make sure they're actually broken.

> They would be free to business with whoever they want.

The separate pieces would not be able to engage in business together that constituted a combination in restraint of trade, because that’s illegal whether or not they are breakuo siblings. Breakups turn what used to be sole company actions into combinations, which, in and of itself, adds legal complications.

(Also, as soon as the ownership diverges at all, which will happen almost immediately, between the siblings, a lot of things that are problematic for market effects would also be breaches of fiduciary duty on one side or the other.)

And all of this leaves out the explicit targeted constraints that would inevitably be part and parcel of any breakup order.

In the past, such forced breakups included restrictions on how the new entities could do for a period of time. As an example, AT&T was not allowed to use any of the Bell trademarks despite still owning them. In theory, the government could bar them from any contact whatsoever once the breakup is complete.

That said, AT&T/Bell was broken up in 1984. The "Baby Bells" had all merged back together into 3 different companies (AT&T, Verizon, Lumen) by 2000. So there would need to be better protections in any potential breakup of Google or any other company today

Enshittifying search to serve ads' end goals/margins will go against the search company's shareholder interest, and they can be sued for that.

Not if ads' pays them to do it!

Good chance the shareholders would be the same people for both.

The court order would embargo that for a period of time.

I feel like if you broke up the browser from search then the elimination of third party cookies will magically fall off the table because you break the browser's integration with the engine and the ad platform which made that elimination profitable for Alphabet (and a knife in the lungs for "open web" advertisers).

I hate web advertising but it's the model we've got so bear with me.

Once third party cookies are back on the table it helps level the playing field. Programmatic advertising becomes profitable again and all those small players can get back to competing. Only this time they're just competing with each other and doubleclick.

Maybe momentum carries forward and third party cookies are eliminated anyway (such faith in humanity). If that's the case then once again the playing field levels a bit more and everybody is working with the same blinders on.

Search will still be awful because of google.com's market share and its enablement of click bait and echo chambers, but search will always be awful and five years from now everybody will have their own LLM instead of search anyway (and five years after that LLMs will suck because there's no new data to train against but that's another rant).

Analytics will change a lot. Google not legally being able to integrate the data it scrapes from GA into its own products means that there's a lot less of a reason to stick just with their ecosystem. They'll still lag behind as far as privacy goes, so third party analytics providers will actually be able to get their toes in the door.

Anyway like you I agree that a breakup probably isn't going to happen. Most of the people who would legislate a break-up don't even understand the internet or what alphabet is, or what google does.

I worry the enshitification of a monopoly like Google, who now has it's hands deep in the workings of things like the web and email, means their supposed mission of "organizing the world's information" has devolved into "putting as many paid middlemen in front of the world's information as possible," or walling parts of that information off completely.

This goes without saying, but we shouldn't let one company be solely responsible for managing the "world's" information. "Organizing" sounds benign, but they've clearly extended past that.

I don't know that you're totally on point about how to break Alphabet up, but you're right that it should be. If information wants to be free, we should also re-examine how to ensure it stays that way in a world where Google isn't it's supposed shepherd.

Nit: Google Cloud has been profitable this year: https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/25/google-cloud-turns-profit-...

It's actually perfectly fine to lose money; you have to invest before you can start making a profit, and services like Google Cloud can be money printers once they're established.

But all the cloud providers are competing hard, pumping money into 3rd parties / partners that will then sell it and set it up at companies. I was at one company (a famous flower exchange in the Netherlands) that was in the process of moving all their workloads - hundreds of services, from people's office suites to high volume exchanges - to AWS, and I'm confident that the one guy, the new manager of the IT department, has Connections with Amazon to help sell AWS to companies like this. Because once they're in, it'll cost millions and years to move out again; I don't think many companies will do a sideways step often and move from e.g. AWS to GCP.

Also I don't think selling GCP to AWS really helps competition.

> But all the cloud providers are competing hard

They are not competing hard enough. (Or maybe they competing too well? I don’t know)

I used to work for AWS then Azure, and now just do consulting for both. The amount of companies I come across with the chief complaint of “We pay too much for AWS/Azure” is staggering.

In a healthy market with healthy competition, you’d think that would never be a statement to be made. No one says “I pay too much for Chevron, I’ll only buy gas from Total”

AWS, Azure, (and wth) GCP are in the tech support business, not infrastructure resell business. You’d think a cloud only need to sell VMs but there is literally no money in that. That’s the part that “competes hard” also the losing part. As a cloud provider, you want to be out of that shitty business. You want to be SaaS. SaaS is the magic work in Cloud. Selling Software is magic. It made Microsoft in the 80s/90s. It made Oracle in the 90s/2000s. It made Google in the 2000s. Selling software is an incredibly lucrative business. It is where you want to be.

100% of companies I consult for don’t spend money on VMs in the cloud. They always spend it on “log analytics” or “data warehouse” or “serverless”

Why hire a Postgres admin when you can pay AWS/Azure 200k a month for postgresql “managed” offering where you can email them whenever things are not working and have _them_ hire the Postgres experts who would look at your usage/queries/tables and suggest an index here, or a stored proc there.

> It's actually perfectly fine to lose money; you have to invest before you can start making a profit, and services like Google Cloud can be money printers once they're established.

It's not fine if you use a monopoly in one area to buy your way into another. That's one of the core tenets in antitrust (back when it was being enforced, at least).

Google Cloud is quite far from a monopoly...

No, it’s using their de facto advertising monopoly to get into a new market (cloud hosting).

So, like Amazon used their de facto book sales monopoly to get into cloud hosting? How Microsoft used their huge desktop & office software market share to get into cloud hosting? How IBM used their huge typewriter market share to get into computers? It's normal for large companies to use their revenue to expand into new market segments.

Those are excellent examples! This kind of thing was prosecuted firmly until antitrust was “reformed” under Reagan (the law didn’t change but the FTC reinterpreted it, largely led by Bork), the new approach (consumer price doctrine) followed by every successive president until Biden. And those years of doctrine, and judges influenced by them have made it tough going. But I think the tide is slowly turning.

The consumer price doctrine (all that matters is what consumers pay, whether by a large monopolist or deep competition doesn’t matter; pick the best for each situation) is seductive: after all the whole point of government, at the end of the day, is what’s better for the people, right?

But lazy analysis meant just imagining the immediate price change for consumers; long term factors like supplier resilience, innovation, supply chain fragility et almare ignored. Also ignored is the reality from empirical data: permitting or even endorsing monopolies ends up with higher prices not lower.

"Chrome - browsers"

And the money is coming from where? Chrome exists mostly, so the ad buisness gets more data and they can influence the direction of the web.

Seperate that and there will be no more chrome as there is no other source of income. (Except maybe a little bit from ChromeOS).

Otherwise I get it, it is mostly politics to threaten google to reach this.:

"It's quite likely to make Google dump this proposal, on the advice of their antitrust lawyers."

But a breakup of google(alphabet) is something very unrealistic and actually not something I want to see, unless we also break up Microsoft at the same time. Otherwise we end up with Microsoft dominating the web again. No thank you, I still remember those times.

Well maybe from search engines, who'd pay to be the default search option? So far, it mostly worked for Mozilla.

"So far, it mostly worked for Mozilla."

Yeah, with tracking and ads from the browser enabled by default and by now allmost non existent marketshare. The money from ad companies does not come with no strings attached.

(But I still use Firefox btw.)

Money for developing chrome is not an issue. Google search could pay chrome to be the primary search engine just like they pay mozilla. Microsoft could fund chromium based on their use in Edge. Etc…

> Google search could pay chrome to be the primary search engine

This doesn't sound like a good idea if your goal is to prevent these two companies (or divisions of the company) for co-conspiring.

"Microsoft could fund chromium based on their use in Edge. Etc…"

Microsoft surely will continue to develope edge. That is my main issue with this thing, because they surely would like to be the one with the dominating browser again and if google has to drop chromium, Microsoft will just overtake it.

Antitrust and breakup is not a simple thing to do right.

Then lets break up Microsoft too.

There's plenty of questionable business practices that Microsoft could probably be slapped on the wrist for of anyone cares, but I'm not actually sure there's a good antitrust claim that could lead to a breakup there.

There's always bundling a web browser with their OS and giving it an unfair advantage over all other browsers, aka the exact thing they were sued for last time.

ChromeOS bundles its own browser and goes even further in preventing people from installing their own than Windows. Imagine if on the first boot of ChromeOS it asks if you want to use Chrome, Edge, Safari, or Firefox.

In related news, ChromeOS is separating the GUI shell from the browser: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36977107

There's a small difference in that Windows clims to be a general purpose operating system and Chrome OS is exactly what it says on the tin, but also a Chromebook running Firefox would be pretty great.

That lawsuit SAS honestly complete bullshit. Going after Microsoft for having plentiful stolen their browser would have been one thing, but saying an OS couldn't ship software applications out of the box is crazy. What do you find when booting up an OS for the first time? Am empty desktop and no way to install anything?

What apple has done with browsers at least seems more egregious. Windows didn't stop you from installing a different browser, ios does. There was even a long running joke that the only good use for IE was to install a real browser.

It wouldn't be hard to find a reason to sure Microsoft though. Take a look someone at where the legal text states their software builds were made and ask what tax benefits one might get from running production builds on servers in the Caribbean.

The problem I see with this idea is that MS doesn't really have much leverage to push Edge on people any more. People aren't just using Windows PCs for their web browsing these days; lots of people are using mobile devices, and many don't even have PCs any more. Google and Apple control the mobile device market (roughly half and half, though it depends on which country you're in too).

If a bunch of websites suddenly required Edge on Windows to view, they'd lose a majority of their visitors.

"The problem I see with this idea is that MS doesn't really have much leverage to push Edge on people any more"

But they do it any way they can. I never intented to open edge even once, but through various sketchy things, I had it open way too many times.

(when you click on the "learn more about this awesome landscape" - you land in edge, open a pdf, edge, saved a mhtml in chrome and open it, edge again. Search for chrome on edge? It almost tries to block you from downloading it.)

What do you expect if you're using an MS platform?

Meanwhile, all of us not using MS platforms (Linux, Android, MacOS, iOS) don't see any of this.

MS only has power over you because you choose to give them that power. They have no power at all over anyone not using an MS OS.

I sometimes have to use Microsoft Teams at work. Microsoft Teams requires Microsoft Edge to run. I was forced to install Microsoft Edge on my Ubuntu machine. Microsoft is pushing its Microsoft Edge product even on GNU/Linux.

There are indeed the end times. I just saw cats lie down with dogs.

> Microsoft Teams requires Microsoft Edge to run.

Where exactly did you get this idea?

It runs fine on both Chrome and Firefox on desktop, including voice, camera, screen sharing. They also have desktop apps, including a .deb for Linux (since it's ultimately just an Electron app).

Well, perhaps "runs fine" is not exactly the right word for what Teams does, but it's as awful on every platform at least.

>I sometimes have to use Microsoft Teams at work. Microsoft Teams requires Microsoft Edge to run.

Plainly wrong. I use MS Teams at work too. My machine is running Debian. No, I sure as hell don't have Edge installed on Debian; I use it in Chrome.

At that point nothing would stop AdCorp from cutting a deal with the new ChromeCorp that says "you get incentive payments for each page load that presents a remote attestation that no ad blockers are present". It wouldn't be seen as anti-competitive then because there are multiple ad serving companies and multiple browser companies, and anyway, legislators would expect and find it reasonable that browsers only get paid referral fees for page loads that do actually display ads. In fact if it goes to court you might not get what you expect - judges (who likely don't use ad blockers much themselves due to age) might perceive browsers who take ad incentive payments but allow ad blocking to be engaged in fraud.

> At that point nothing would stop AdCorp from cutting a deal with the new ChromeCorp that says...

I suspect judges that just ordered an antitrust would not be kind to people to people who essentially ignore the order by recreating an informal structure.

Why? Company breakups are about increasing competition. It's not about killing the Baby Bells by cutting them off overnight from what they need to survive. ChromeCorp would be both free to cut similar deals with other ad networks, and incentivized to do so, that would be sufficient for governments concerned about monopolies and anti-trust.

It's important to keep things mentally separate here. There is nothing anti-competitive about remote attestation, no more than there is about TLS. It's just far too general a tool for that. Even much more restricted versions as used by the smartphones, games consoles, Windows managed network security etc have never been claimed to be anti-competitive. That would be a very novel legal theory that's unlikely to work on its own (you can use the tech in ways that are anti-competitive, but it needs someone to actually do so).

So if Google were to be broken up, it'd have to be for wider competition and market health concerns, it wouldn't be to do with any specific API getting added to Chrome. And then if they were split up, they'd need to formalize arrangements in contracts that are today informal, like how Chrome is funded exactly. At that point, do you think the newly born AdCorp will just accept paying lots of money for ad impressions to Chrome when the users aren't going to see them? Google tolerates it today for a mixture of reasons e.g. a lot of their own staff use ad blockers, they want to be able to recruit very widely for many different projects, etc. A company specialized only in advertising would have fewer such concerns and could easily demand more aggressive measures, indeed, their new shareholders might insist upon it. Whereas today Google isn't really susceptible to stockholder pressure and is willing to let a lot slide.

1. Judges don't order an "antitrust" case, a prosecutor must do that start a case. A judge can then rule on it OR a jury (the DOJ in fact requested an anti-trust jury trial this year)

2. Your theory was basically proven broke by the fact that ATT which was broken up in anti-trust, became ATT, again.

> A judge can then rule on it

And the result of a ruling is a court order to do something. Sure, "ordering an antitrust" is a bit less precise than "ordering a series of actions that result from a successful antitrust prosecution", but I was hoping it to be clear enough.

My point was that judge do issue orders, and they really don't like people finessing around the wording.

I guess you have no idea how much money it costs to develop something like Chrome, especially at Google's salary.

Google currently plays Apple billions ($15B supposedly) to be the default search engine on Safari, and another half a billion a year for Firefox. For Chrome, with their gigantic market share, they'd pay billions (just like they pay Apple).

Browsers are complicated, but let's not pretend that that kind of money wouldn't be enough.

I’m not sure what you mean. Google would continue to pay chrome to advertise?

They’re saying: Google (the search company) would pay ChromeCorp (company behind Chrome/Chromium) big money to be the default search engine in the browser. Google already pays both Mozilla and Apple in this way.

Theoretically this money should be enough to finance the continued investment in Chrome.

It might be nice to have less web browser development, fewer engineers who need to add a new feature to get a bullet point for their review.

Rendering a website should not be a huge project. Websites are a medium for transmitting ideas; communication. A communication scheme that requires a massive engineering effort to interpret it is bad. A web browser should be something that a small community team can throw together in a couple months.

It shouldn’t be necessary to pay so much to develop Chrome in the first place. Web standards have gotten so unimaginably complex that only two of the richest companies in history can produce a web browser (and then somehow, inexplicably, Mozilla manages to almost keep up; wildly impressive on their part).

That figuring out the funding required to draw a website is seen as a big issue is a symptom of the problem.

Mozilla makes money with Firefox. Brave does with brave. It is not impossible that Chrome could. ChromeOS, default search engine, integrated VPN offering, ... The browser has a monopoly market share, income would be huge fast.

Mozilla makes money from whom? Isn't it like mostly Google?

https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-202... <-- yes, the biggest part are royalties for search engine placement. Part of that is from Google, likely the biggest part. It's still something that Chrome could do as well.

Mozilla feeds from Googles hands to ensure an awesome pay for their execs

Call me old skool, but how about charging for it?

When every other browser is free, that sounds like a death sentence

Maybe, but I know that I'd happily pay for a browser that was better than the ones that currently exist, as long as it wasn't a subscription/SaaS thing. So I know there's some sort of market. How large it is, I have no idea. Has anyone actually done this market research?

> But a breakup of google(alphabet) is something very unrealistic and actually not something I want to see, unless we also break up Microsoft at the same time. Otherwise we end up with Microsoft dominating the web again. No thank you, I still remember those times.

This isn't the 90s anymore. Smartphones exist, where Microsoft is irrelevant.

> And the money is coming from where? Chrome exists mostly, so the ad buisness gets more data and they can influence the direction of the web.

This is their business problem, not ours.

Since Chrome, the browser, is in some way a new OS paradigm we can think that the open source community would take it seriously to build a new one and/or improve/fork Firefox in the same way we have Linux, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, etc, etc. I think the main issue is UX/UI where the open source community doesn't excel, yet.

I totally agree. IMHO regulators should have been looking at safety net attestation already because it effectively destroys the claim of Google that OEM have a choice and it is not Google's monopoly. The problem is that Google is really good at just keeping below the radar (only the few people will notice that are not using Apple, Google or Microsoft products, which probably does not include any politicians, the broad public or other influential individuals)

With this thing it is the same. The problem is: nobody will care. And I think everyone who should care will look away again, because it is just too complicated to explain.

The core problem is that a minority raises this concern and this minority is not loud enough. We really need to nag out banks etc if they do not allow to use de-google Android. There should be public visible lists of the few 'good' guys left. Not even tech magazines seem to pick up this topic.

I think the only thing to do for now is really actually using free browsers and free operating systems and on the other hand raise the issues (literally on GitHub?) as loud as possible. The world is just lacking enough web activism. The only loud thing about freedom of the web is web3 and crypto, but obviously to me this is just backed by some people who like keep the buzz up to make some more money with speculation.

>IMHO regulators should have been looking at safety net attestation already because it effectively destroys the claim of Google that OEM have a choice and it is not Google's monopoly.

Apps that require play services are just as much exclusive as apps that require attestation. Phones that don't use play services can create their own attestation API and partener with apps to support it.

I fully agree with a breakup but arguably other than Search, DoubleClick, and Youtube, none of the others are solvent without ad money.

On thing I feel we are still missing is for FSF, Wiki, Archive.org, etc. to effectively gather enough cash to start lobbying in politics and in industry much in the same way Meta and Alphabet do. Politicians/legislators are ridiculously cheap to lobby in the grand scheme of things.

> none of the others are solvent without ad money.

This is a consequence of Google's structuring. If the pricing is unrealistic after a split, it's also currently an example of price dumping preventing competitors from emerging.

That’s not “price dumping”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)

If you don’t charge a normal price for something anywhere, then it’s just a loss leader (costco hot dogs).

Just because the marketing dept calls it a "loss leader" doesn't mean it's not predatory pricing.

Whether a company crosses the line is defined by the impact it has on the market: if a company with enough market power uses that power to damage competitors, then this is deemed predatory. And, when it comes to Google, their history of leveraging their dominant lines of business to force an advantage in new markets, including via pricing, makes a good case for this.

If some spin-offs of a Google antitrust can't swim, let them drown.

> if a company with enough market power uses that power to damage competitors, then this is deemed predatory

I think the trick there is that you legally have to show intent. One could argue that anything a market leader does to grow or even just retain it's market share hurts the smaller competitors.

Chrome is probably the best example. I don't really know how people would expect that to be a company or even a division under Alphabet. It's rather unfortunate, because I don't think Google can be trusted to build a browser anymore.

Android is also a weird case. All funding is coming from Google, but the revenue isn't coming from licensing of the OS. Separating out Android and require manufacturers to pay a license wouldn't kill it at this point, but it could fragment the Android market. Like with Chrome, Google isn't the best steward, because their interests are primarily data mining and advertising, but building the best mobile operating system.

DoubleClick, analytics, Youtube and search are the divisions I'd go for if I where a regulator, but there where would Chrome and Android go?

> require manufacturers to pay a license wouldn't kill it at this point

They'd only have to pay for Google services like the Play Store. However half of them would now belong to a different company and I don't know if the Play Store would be self sustainable on it's own?

Samsung already has their own store, smaller ones will probably still stock to the Play Store for the time but increased fragmentation would be unavoidable.. That might not be a bad thing on its own, however I don't see how/why anyone would continue funding the development of the open-source bits of Android to a degree Google is capable now.

They forked the browser to grab data for the advertising engine.

If all they wanted was high quality browser imagine what Apple and Google could have done if google hadn't forked webkit.

How exactly does taking one of the 3 major cloud providers and selling it to the largest of them help with monopoly/antitrust?

Besides IIRC Google cloud is actually profitable these days. No need to find a buyer.

Google's ad business (and the need to track ad conversions) affects every business sector it's involved in. From Maps (where you loc. is tracked for 'in-store' conversions' to your Google ID which tracks which ads you click, to Chrome pushing for mechanisms to track conversions after cookie-blocking has become standardized.

You kind of understand their needs (since ads fund search and everything), but I also don't trust them not to 'over-optimize' (esp. given the unchecked powers, both political and technocratic, they have).

Cloud - the money-losing data center service. Probably gets sold to AWS

Your solution to breaking up a large monopoly is to boost another (quasi-)monopoly? I'd suggest that both Amazon and Microsoft should be prevented from taking over those assets.

Yes, we will need to evaluate and approve each acquisition but I am not sure if it is even possible to break up Google.

I don't have a solution to the problem but I know this — we can't do the stupidity of breaking alphabet into a bunch of small baby alphabets like what we did with at&t.I think that was complete incompetence, if not corruption.

We can't have a bunch of regional companies. However, we can't do what OP said either, even with your safeguards. Amazon and Microsoft don't care if they get Google cloud for themselves to buy. Either they get to buy it or it dies, they still get its customers.

I think someone else said elsewhere if Microsoft abuses MsEdge, break up Microsoft as well but that's the kicker. That will take time. Microsoft can and will abuse it's position during this time. I don't think it is possible to do a "safe landing" here. An alphabet Google will either be a nothing burger like the AT&T break-up or will be very painful to ordinary people, at least for some time.

> we can't do the stupidity of breaking alphabet into a bunch of small baby alphabets like what we did with at&t.I think that was complete incompetence, if not corruption.

After the breakup, it became trivial for me to buy my own phone and hook what I wanted up to my phone connection (including dial-up modems later).

What do you think would have granted+preserved those options, that wasn't an exercise in incompetence and corruption?

But if it's indeed "money-losing" wouldn't it be just worth as much as their equipment is?

Also if we are talking about MS/Amazon/Google's cloud businesses we shouldn't ignore that these companies themselves are generally their own biggest clients which is something they could leverage to a significant degree to outcompete their rivals (initially at least)

I know it's just a hypothetical but YouTube being sold to Netflix or god forbid a century-old telecom company sounds awful to me, unless they let it continue to run as basically a completely separate entity - possible under something like Netflix or another tech-forward streaming company, nigh impossible under something like Comcast.

I would hope YouTube could just operate as its own company. Certainly there's enough traffic, and it makes Google billions so presumably there's enough for it to survive on its own.

It's ultimately all about ads, though. Ads on the search page, ads in Android aps, ads on web pages, ads in or around YouTube videos, and several big data sets that help them figure out which ads you are most likely to respond to.

Although the Chrome team would prefer not to block ads, I'm pretty sure there's some pressure on them to reduce the number of users using ad blockers.

Cloud would be a huge profit maker as YouTube, search, ads would all then pay cloud for hosting. And they’d have no where else to go.

Further, selling GCP to AWS is not how we "break down monopolies".

as long you can rent rack full of servers and use it easily there is not that kind monopoly.

The logistics at scale can't just be waved away like that; current providers would have at least a 10 year moat at scale to a new competitor even if they did nothing. And you can bet if a new company came along that was a serious threat the current players wouldn't sit idly by.

You're comparing huts to skyscrapers

The FTC would never allow that anyway.

I don't see why people think that antitrust is a magical silver bullet that will solve everything. Breaking up Google will be great for Google's paying customers, mostly advertisers. That doesn't mean it would it would help the users. If anything, each broken up piece of Google would have less scrutiny that the whole.

That's wishful thinking. Politicians will never break up Google since they benefit from it.

Fundamentally, Big Tech is an outsized part of what sets America's economy apart. Breaking up any of them would potentially be a footgun.

Yep - weakening Big Tech in the US will strengthen China's Big Tech, which no one wants.

So we have to accept control through Google or Apple or otherwise we will be controlled by Alibaba or Huawei? I don't want my devices to be controlled by neither company.

One wants profits; another wants to influence you. Take your pick.

I agree that big tech is huge part of the American economy.

In the 1900s, Teddy Roosevelt busted up the biggest monopolies and did it boldy. He was a strong believer in capitalism and market forces, and he believed that government had a responsibility to keep market forces working well.

I know we are not in the early 1900s anymore, but I think it is interesting to ponder how the only politicians who dare to say something similar today are the furthest left we can imagine (Bernie Sanders and AOC and the like).

> I know we are not in the early 1900s anymore...

We still have the antitrust laws of Teddy Roosevelt's era, the Clayton Act and the 1890 Sherman Act.

Sherman Act, Section 2:

"Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, shall be deemed guilty of a felony."

The US Justice Department hasn't often applied that standard rigorously, but it can if it wants to.

Google is not quite Standard Oil though and generally modern tech function in an environment is different from the cartels/trusts/monopolies of the day that it's hardly comparable.

Also thankfully general regulatory situation (and arguable level corruption) isn't as quite yet as bad as it was back in the 1900s.

It's like banks, it depends on your logic. We have systemically important banks, banks that will always be bailed out. You have two ways of dealing with that scenario, either prepare to save these companies when they fail or make them non-systemic so we can afford to let them fail.

What I fail to understand is why it's better for society to support these "to big to fail" companies. Why not break them up. Why not plan break them up if they become to "important" for a lack of a better term? How can you not see it as a political failing that taxpayers have to be ready to save a company, just because you failed to bring it under control?

It's mind boggling.

There’s reasoning if you can actually see what’s happening. Does it outway the costs? It’s a political question, but there’s some benefits.

For example, JPMorganChase is “the” big bank lately. It was able to handle the acute financial crisis this year by providing liquidity and a buyer as needed to keep the system from ever losing a deposit. That was likely bad for them as a business, short term, but it happened because the regulators can call up a single organization and get what they want.

Big tech has similar (unrealized) opportunities to keep strategically important things going. One possible example is the ease of releasing the Covid contact tracing system. If there were 20 fragmented parties they may never have aligned.

> There’s reasoning if you can actually see what’s happening.

You can't see what's happening though, because JP Morgan "mistakenly" deleted 47 million emails. [0] Their fine for that came to about 12 minutes worth of revenue.

They "failed" to keep records, firm-wide, right to the top. [1] Again, their punishment was at the "cost of doing business" level.

We're talking about the bank that financed and enabled Epstein here [2].

There are other ways to provide liquidity without relying on these ghoulish overlords who manipulate global markets [3] and finance blackmail operations.

0 - https://www.reuters.com/legal/jpmorgan-chase-is-fined-by-sec...

1 - https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2021-262

3 - https://www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/PressReleases/8260-20

Politicians would never break up Standard Oil or Bell Telephone either.

Why? It's pretty straightforward to show how Standard Oil or Bell Telephone were harmful to consumer interests. With Google.. well they are giving away half+ of their products for free which they wouldn't able to if broken up. Antitrust laws from the 1900s were just not designed with that in mind, they were trying to solve quite different issues.

This is such a naive and for lack of a better word stupid take

> YouTube - streaming content. Probably gets sold to Netflix or AT&T or Comcast.

Make Netflix more powerful? In what world is that good for competition

>> YouTube - streaming content. Probably gets sold to Netflix or AT&T or Comcast.

>This is such a naive and for lack of a better word stupid take

What is the not naive, not stupid, clearly-more-beneficial-than-what-we-have action that should be taken with youtube?

Doing nothing? I mean Youtube is at least competing/trying to compete with Netflix, Spotify and others to some degree at least.

I don't understand the downvotes. You asked a legitimate question. How do we fix this anticompetitive monopolistic behavior?

> - Google - search, ads on search pages and nothing more.

> - DoubleClick - third party ads on other sites.

No, hard disagree. One of the things that gives google its position of power is that its both an ad exchange and a publisher (as participant in said exchange).

The correct way of breaking is NOT search+ads vs third party ads. It's search vs ads.

Make google a publisher that DOESN'T own an ad exchange and make it compete for search ad revenue on equal footing with everyone else. Lets see how well it does (I'm guessing not well).

Same goes for facebook.

Rather than sharding the company, and getting stuck in endless discussions of where exactly to draw lines and what business units are unsustainable, why not nationalize it?

The "projecty" things like Chrome and Android and Waymo are arguably money sinks that will produce things of significant public value over time-- what if we funded them like other research probjects, with the understanding that the commercial applications will either generate public revenue or directly enhance domestic competitiveness. Imagine if in 5 years, the American carmakers had highly discounted access to Waymo's self-driving technology, but Mercedes and BMW still have to roll their own or license it at an intentionally hostile price?

The revenue-generating stuff could be "commoditized" -- turn it into white-label products they'll resell to all comers. You no longer go to Google, you go to a Google Reseller who provides their own ad or subscription monetization model to pay for the underlying infrastructure cost. Since they all have the same core index, they start from strong competitive parity, and then they can focus on their differentating features-- extended custom indexes, more tools, etc.

Government should force google to give competitors access to its search index so that they have a real opportunity to build a competing service on top of it, AI or search. The same way monopoly telcos were forced to open infrastructure to competing service provides.

Google products are getting increasingly crappy. Would be great to see what others could build with their information monopoly.

This will immediately kill some of the parts (Chrome, Analytics, Alphabet) and increase the antitrust issues in others (Cloud, YouTube)

> - Cloud - the money-losing data center service. Probably gets sold to AWS or Hurricane Electric.

I don't think any of this would happen, but I'd rather see it go to Cloudflare so there's still 3 "big player" choices. They seem to be trying to head down the cloud provider path anyway.

> Cloud [...] sold to [...] Hurricane Electric

I'm a customer of both GCP and HE and this would be a really, really weird merger. Not saying I don't want to see it. :)

It is highly unlikely that Android, Chrome, and Analytics can be viable businesses on their own. I can perhaps see a viable path for analytics if a lot of things go their way but those three are almost entirely successful because they are subsidized by the other businesses. Youtube, and the other ads business can probably survive okay on their own but Chrome and Android I suspect can't.

All can be fully viable, very profitable, very large independent businesses.

Android Based on information obtained by Oracle in a lawsuit, Android had, as of 2010-ish, generated $31bn for google

https://www.androidauthority.com/android-generated-google-31...

Chrome: Browsers make money by

- sharing revenue from ( product and service ) ad searches

- prioritization in search engine results in the browser ( eg being set up as the default search engine)

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/041315/how-m...

It is estimated, for instance, that as of 2021, Google was paying Apple $15bn for default browser placement

https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/17/google_apple_chrome_i...

Google Analytics:

This is much harder to research - since looking for 'revenue' with 'Google Analytics' simply shows how to use the tool to track revenue for 'your' site if you are a Google Analytics user and my Google-fu fails at a quick remedy for that.

Best quick result would be a proxy i.e. competitor revenue. MixPanel is a standalone Google Analytics competitor and it makes $96MM from that business

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/mixpanel

The problem with Chrome is it would have no funding unless we suddenly end up with subscription browsers.

It also means the fall of Firefox because they are still dependent on the Google moneytit.

The future I see in this direction is Chrome ends up getting a free easy takeover/hijack by Microsoft since they are have no problem throwing money at Edge.

How would Chrome make money? Right now they get a blank check from Google because dominance on the web is their business model. But if they're not supposed to sell out users interests to the ad-company, how are they supposed to earn any revenue? Sell Chrome licenses?

Just like how Firefox earns money, sell default search engine rights to highest bidder (google, bing) etc , Chrome itself can become billions of dollar business.

So in other words, sell user interests to the highest bidder.

Firefox is not comparable because it's not a stock company. They don't have the obligation to maximize profit for shareholders.

Wholeheartedly agree. And we shouldn't stop at Google : a large part of western capitalism in 2023 looks pretty much like a dystopian landscape out of a cyberpunk novel. It's a democratic nightmare in the making.

> a large part of western capitalism in 2023 looks pretty much like a dystopian landscape out of a cyberpunk novel. It's a democratic nightmare in the making.

My take is that this process is inevitable while the following is in play: DoJ rubberstamps monopoly creating mergers, merger desiring companies fund campaigns & otherwise gift politicians, voters keep reelecting those politicians while not overly objecting to their corruption, news orgs fail to cover mergers in a historical context while generally preferring fluff and stenography.

Those wishing to expose flaws in my analysis can use the space below.

Your solution to Alphabet abusing their position in the market is to consolidate some parts of its business in to its present competition.

I don’t see how that increases competition.

> So make lots of noise politically about that.

How? I've seen similar ideas but the best they do is resonate really nicely in this echo chamber.

Send letters and call your Senators and House representatives. Donate to them the maximum you’re legally allowed to and when you get the staffer call asking for more money, give them an (respectful) earful.

All it takes most of the time is a dozen people pushing the issue for a rep to make up their mind on a bill. On contentious issues, a few hundred persistent constituents will convince even Senators in large states.

Seriously it’s not that hard when it’s not a culture war issue. The vast majority of the time our politicians get bought out for a pittance like $10k in contributions. It doesn’t take much to bend them the other way when coming from voters.

Speaking from experience.

So what kind of money are we talking about here? Order of magnitude?

$3,300 is the federal maximum per election per candidate but even a $1-2,000 donation will get a House rep’s attention (better donate the max for a senator though).

None of what you suggest has any impact, and your model of how many people it takes to influence a Senator is frankly delusional. A max donation to a campaign will get you a signed thank-you card if you're lucky.

Policy on stuff like tech is set by staffers, most of whom work from material helpfully pre-drafted for them by lobbyists. There are some legislators (like Wyden of Oregon) who have very good in-house people on tech policy, while others have no expertise and have to rely on outside parties. But the idea that anyone can be bought for a donation is heartbreakingly naive (and fortunately false). Large donations at best get your calls answered by the junior staffer whose job it is to protect the Senator/Congressman from ever having to talk to people like you directly.

Major legislation on tech is rare, and it's generally much easier to kill something you don't like than to get a provision put into it. The latter course requires being deeply plugged in to the people drafting policy (again, mid-level staff on the Hill, who have zero awareness or interest in which private individuals are making campaign contributions) and enough clout and political ability to shepherd your desired policy through the full sausage-making apparatus of Congress.

Look at the current dueling bills on crypto for an example of how the process actually works. None of it is driven by strongly-worded letters from constituents.

I never said you could buy a Senator's vote for the max donation, just that you can get their ear. You should try harder if all you get is a thank you card because a decent sized donation is the easiest way to quickly establish a relationship with their office.

YMMV but I've helped several nonprofits in SoCal navigate Congress and I'm constantly surprised by how little coordinated effort it takes to effect legislation, especially the budget (and I have no previous experience in politics, I was just an interested volunteer). We've only just begun collecting sponsors for the first bill drafted by one of the nonprofits so I can't speak to the whole process for a greenfield bill just yet but already we've had help from the Office of the Legislative Counsel to fix up the bill through our House rep so the ball is rolling.

So far we've spent far more on travel expenses than any of the orgs have spent on lobbyists or the members have spent on donations.

> Large donations at best get your calls answered by the junior staffer whose job it is to protect the Senator/Congressman from ever having to talk to people like you directly.

They're there to protect the politician from raving abortion/guns/bullshit-of-the-day lunatics. Offer to send them a short fact sheet in the format that they expect and the doors start to open quickly.

Like I said though, I'm in SoCal and YMMV. I have no idea what it's like with the GOP or in states where both Senators are like Feinstein (her office is a black hole). I do agree with the rest of your point about tech bills, my experience is with environmental and social services nonprofits who don't deal with very controversial issues.

You will not be getting in a senator's ear for the maximum campaign donation. Senate races are nosebleed expensive, and the federal maximum doesn't scale with the kind of race. It has not been my experience that large donations to congressional candidates get you any real airtime either (which is a good thing), and House races cost 1/20th what Senate races cost.

Now, if you max out any Democratic race anywhere in the country, Raja Krishnamoorthi will ring you up from Illinois CD8, and you can talk his ear off. But it's a grift. He's not going to do anything for you. With my John Williamson voice activated: he - just - likes - talking - to - donors.

As regards affecting legislation, I'd be interested in hearing some specifics about your experience here. What legislation did you see get altered, and what were the tactics that accomplished it?

> On contentious issues, a few hundred persistent constituents will convince even Senators in large states.

If there aren't already that on each side of an issue, its not actually that contentious. In reality, it takes large numbers of people coordinating action or a small number of people who each are financially involved orders of magnitude beyond the maximum legal direct donation (either as fundraisers marshalling donations for others, or as well-known contributors to party committees and SuperPACs as well as candidate committees, or whatever) to sway most members of either House of Congress from where they would otherwise be. (Being an existing org that is known to either bring a lot of voters or act as a proxy for a lot of big donors, or better both, also helps.)

Google and it's employees are, combined, one of the largest DNC donors. This will never, ever happen.

Sure, but then you have to militate also for half of the fortune 500, most of them having bigger impacts.

No one pays for web browsers, I doubt Chrome would be a viable separate company.

>it's not in Chrome's interest to prevent blocking ads from DoubleClick or Google

But it would still be in their interest in preventing ad fraud on the web.

Why? Users don't care about ad fraud and neither should the user agent.

Because sites, advertising networks, and advertisers do care about it and they are part of the web too.

Browsers aren't a business for Google (or any of the other big browser suppliers), they are an adjunct to other businesses, in Google’s case a way to shape the web—initially through client performance—to support the kind of online app environment that Google’s actual profit making ventures rely on.

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