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Comment by etempleton | Hacker News Reader

I just don’t see what the plan is here. I actually don’t think Google has such an iron grip monopoly that it unbreakable. In fact, I see Google as the most vulnerable of the big tech companies. They have one highly profitable product, search. Bing is making serious strides and their AI search is significantly better. Everything else Google does is small potatoes.

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> Bing is making serious strides

August 2022: 3.34%

August 2023: 3.03%

Meanwhile Google has 92%: https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share

> their AI search is significantly better

Whether the product is the best in class or not doesn't have any relevance when it comes to judging a monopoly. At least I really hope we don't end up in a situation where courts start ruling based on speculation on the future of AI because good lord would that be a mess.

I actually wish the media would stop calling these "monopoly" trials, even though I understand why they do it. They're antitrust trials. Google does not need to have an overarching monopoly in order to be tried for antitrust violations.

On the other hand, MS is pushing Bing hard via Edge/Windows.

Google should know from Chrome's start that a lot of market share is user laziness, if you show up with a functionally equivalent product. Eventually someone clicks "Try X!"

MS' privileging of ChatGPT in Bing-on-Edge is a pretty genius shot.

Sure but we're just discussing hypotheticals here. Courts shouldn't be ruling based on whether 2024 might finally be the Year of Bing.

If they had gone after Google 10 years ago, then sure, but I think you're right. The only place where I can really see a monopoly is in online advertising, it's not complete but pretty close.

Google is still the number one search engine, by a pretty large margin, but they are looking increasingly vulnerable and even smaller search engines with their own crawlers are starting to appear.

I think there is a valid meta question which is what would happen if Google Search stopped bringing in revenue tomorrow?

For example, would they attempt to exploit Android etc. even more?

On some level there is a case that their core vulnerability represents a major risk to them suddenly going full evil with everything in their strategic moat.

Youtube making $30B a year is small potatoes? Google Cloud $28B.

Relative to Search’s ~200 billion? Yes.

15% isn't small potatoes.

This is none sense. What about Android $40B small potatoes right ...

Is Google Ads and Youtube not profitable?

Technically, Google Ads is making all the money. Google search and YouTube are more or less just funnels for Google Ads. I'm not sure how Alphabet has everything setup and if Google Ads revenue that originates from search is booked to the search division, but in reality, everything is just ways for you to look at Google Ads.

I don't buy this argument. Google Search and YouTube are highly separable. There is some synergy between the two, but really no more than between any two ad-driven sites on the Internet.

Yeah, of course. At the scale of Google's main products, they could build unique ads platforms and keep everything completely seperate if they wanted to, needed to or were forced to.

Alphabet would like get separated into independent companies.

They might already be tracking their profitability that way to encourage search to include more ads "organically" (as in by tying search performance to ads in search revenue that team will be interested in improving ads in search revenue)

This doesn't even mean Google Search doesn't use Google Ads. It just means that Google Search has to buy usage of Google Ads thereby allowing competition between ad providers.

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