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> 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.