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Comment by halflings | Hacker News Reader

> Why isn't US govt doing this?

Why isn't the UK, Sweden, Switzerland, Italy, ... doing this? Because it's a pretty strong form of controlled economy that distorts the market.

How would this work for search engines? Would you force people to use a different search engine than the one they want? (e.g. they type Google.com and end up redirected to Bing.com) ; or somehow just funnel revenue to other companies... then who gets to decide which companies this gets funneled to?

Anti-trust is about preventing anti-competitive tactics, but the scheme you is ironically anti-competitive: it artificially inflates usage of other services even if they don't provide an equal/superior service, with consumers paying the price.

[disclaimer: I work at Google, so likely biased]

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> How would this work for search engines?

There is a way. If we start treating Internet search as commodity/public utility, we can use shared municipal fiber analogy. One public website can route requests to multiple participating search providers, ensuring that the searches are evenly distributed.

Of course, it's not a good idea for a lot of reasons. Starting as extending government surveillance, through leaving consumers with limited choices (if different providers' result quality is significantly different, which it probably is), and all the way down to having to decide what qualifies as a search engine.

It's best to look at the root of the issue. I don't think most people are upset that Google is the most popular search engine out there. It's the other practices that make people wary or outright unhappy. Google is very multi-faceted, so government forcing company split (e.g. make Google Search, Gmail, Chrome, Android etc. entirely separate entities), or disallowing of some business practices (such as making Chrome cater to Google Analytics needs) might be beneficial.

> Because it's a pretty strong form of controlled economy that distorts the market.

Would be trivial compared to how Google and Microsoft have distorted the markets over the years.

What would you propose instead?

Banning anti-competitive behavior (which is what antitrust laws are for in the first place). For instance: a company actively blocking competition (e.g. coffee machine manufacturers that make it impossible for people to buy pods from another brand).

Again, I am probably biased here, but I don't see much anti-competitive behaviour in the search engine space. If people have a clear superior alternative to Google, then by all means please share it here.

Even during the brief period where I used duckduckgo, I was constantly finding myself typing "!g" to get results from Google as they were just consistently more relevant.

What about buying the default search from Apple? Maybe I'm remembering it wrong but I seem to recall they pay a lot of money for that.

What outcome are you hoping for here? Google can't pay to be the default search engine on a browser, no one can pay to be the default search engine on a browser, no one can be the default search engine on a browser, or just Google can't be the default search engine on a browser?

1 and 2. Google as the overwhelmingly dominant player should not be allowed to pay to further monopolize the space, and since Microsoft is the alternative, I would support banning paid defaults in general.

Legally enforced ballot with random default if users click through without reading. Same for browsers themselves.

People can use google all they want, the restriction would be on how much ad can be sold by Google.

So the remaining traffic would be all expenses, no profit? Doesn't sound like capitalism anymore then, more of a public service.

Imagine a government creating a search engine as a public service.

... Oh wait, that's actually a great idea and I want to see that happen.

Sure, then advocate for your government to build a public search engine.

Why do you need to penalize private institutions if users prefer to use them over a government service?

I, personally, am very, _very_ glad my country doesn't oblige me to use a state-sponsored search engine.

Baidu "六四事件"[0] to find out more!

[0] "June Fourth incident", the Chinese name for the Tiananmen square massacre. Other banned search terms include "candle", "never forget", and the numbers 25 and 64.

I wasn't imagining one would be obliged. Merely that as a demonstrated vital good in modern society, it's something a government could, perhaps, guarantee a minimum standard on.

Ad-free tax-funded search would be kind of neat.

You know, even with Google amd Bing, search terms are extremely (even politically) censored depending on where you search from. It's not like Chinese users can search the same thing fine on Google.

It would be expenses and profit, the remaining traffic keeps users coming.

They would just have to divest portions of their product.

It’s painfully simple and we’ve done it a million times. Breaking up AT&T is probably the most obvious example.

They could split up the search and ads business and maps and Google local search and so on.

It would be fine. We’d be fine.

Also if you work at Google can you tell us if anyone has noticed that the supposedly “equal/superior service” has degraded so badly that it’s barely fucking usable a lot of the time?

Which is, of course, relevant.

Except previously the big breakups (AT&T, Standard Oil) were location-based, which doesn't really make sense for Google. Why do you think splitting of maps and display ads would matter for Google's market share in search?

Done it a million times? How often does this happen? AT&T was decades ago, though I suppose you are referring to less well known actions since then?

Alphabet in the US would just spin off 3 "competitors" and be done. All 4 would then be subsidiaries of the holding company and they still collect the money. Of course this can't happen in India, because there would be political repercussions unless it was was an Indian firm connected to the government.

To change this takes real political will and a recognition of who the beneficiaries of the current systems are. It's not simple in any remotely democratic system with rule of law.

We do have the FTC which can enforce antitrust (when the executive branch doesn't interfere) and force various requirements (like the auctioning of ad terms be separated from the business of marketing ads, and the collection of search data) on different parts of the company.

(edit: Oops, I must remember to only discuss US politics with any realism. Reference to any other country's corruption/politics must only be with the highest reverence, deference, and awe.)

> Alphabet in the US would just spin off 3 "competitors" and be done. All 4 would then be subsidiaries of the holding company and they still collect the money.

Right, because a judge would look at a company holding the same market through subsidiaries and not throw the book at them. IANAL, but AFAICT the wording in the law doesn't even distinguish one company vs a group acting together; why would that make a difference?

The law in India that this was a direct response to... or the FTC's case in the US?

I'd answer those two questions differently, but I think you're referring to something I wasn't.

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