Google has the closest thing we have to the Bell Labs of the past that invented the transistor. If the DOJ breaks them up, we will lose another valuable industry research facility.
I believe that fostering long-term, unfettered research is an important element for revolutionary work, though I don’t believe it’s the only way for revolutionary work to happen. However, it’s difficult for most companies to consistently fund this work for an extended period of time. Bell Labs and Xerox PARC in their heydays were special, and I struggle to think of any modern-day equivalents in industry.
While antitrust actions might temporarily disrupt a company's innovation, they ultimately foster a healthier market by encouraging competition, which drives more diverse and widespread innovation across the industry. Breaking monopolies often unleashes creativity and technological advancement by empowering smaller players and preventing market stagnation.
If the government steps in they would have to break them all up and expect to make entering those sections possible. At the moment it’s nearly impossible.
Maybe we will all be fine without those.
That mostly ended when they became a VC financing & monetization endpoint rather than a novel research platform, and renamed themselves 'Alphabet', cut R&D spending to about 1/12th of revenue, hired a bunch of middle managers and marketing execs, and killed 20% time, because the idea of a thousand engineers making white-paper reports about how they chose to spend their time to one CTO was no longer a favored organizational strategy for executing further growth by shareholders.
They still do a great deal of research, but it's less blue-sky and more focused. Google's got 182,000 employees now, with official R&D spending at about four times the National Science Foundation, but still in the 10-15% of revenue band. This is more a condemnation of the NSF and Congress than praise of Google.
They’re definitely not at the forefront of AI anymore, which honestly is super surprising given the reputation that had.
These tools have been used to create amazing things that normal people have come to depend on every day.
I’m not disagreeing that Google is adding value, but it just seems more like incremental improvements rather than innovation. Yes they make free things, but so do Facebook, Netflix, Apple, etc.
Meh, we give Nobel prizes to anyone these days - they're more symbolic of certain politics than anything else sadly.
Turing Awards? Yes, many things Google has contributed to the world are probably worthy of such an award. Http/2/quic/3 were driven by Google if I'm not mistaken, and there is no other browser core like Chromium today that facilitates so much of the world's internet access (a significant amount of which does not use Chrome itself). Tensorflow and early "AI Revolution" tech came largely out of Google as well.
The problem we have today is tech is very complicated and requires many organizations working together to really advance groundbreaking technology. When the day finally comes that FSD Vehicles are possible, would we say the first company to market "invented" the technology or would it be the compound experiences of dozens of companies? Gone are the days 5 people can get into a room and 3 months later turn out world-changing technology...