U.S. Said to Consider a Breakup of Google | Hacker News Reader

U.S. Said to Consider a Breakup of Google

nytimes.com

24 pointstechnics25611 comments

Way overdue but also required for the rest of the big tech companies. Look at how Google and others can lose billions on one failed product after the next - any smaller company would go bankrupt. Competition isn’t fair when one player can just afford to take risks and failures of that scale. And then there’s all the anti competitive aspects like network effects or bundling or whatever. We need all new laws around anti trust because a monopoly today looks different from a monopoly a hundred years back.

Please, could someone elaborate how a forced split would solve the problem? Behind the scenes still the same people isn't it?

Each product could stand on its own and act in the best interest of its users (could not would, not a given). E.g. Android and Chrome would act less like lead generation for ads. Why do certain browsers come with adblocking built in but Chrome does not? Because Google says ads.

Why would Google support Chrome if it wasn’t made to make them money?

If Chrome was a split off product, I expect Google to charge users to use it. Why wouldn’t they?

How many browsers do you know that charge their users?

Splitting of Youtube as a separate entity would be a great start. Maps needs to stay with search.

Why?

Maps to me seem like search like product. With Images, Scholar, Patents. You could reasonably keep them under same umbrella. As long as advertising network is separated from it.

It's funny, since the "monopoly" decision, not sure exactly when, they seem to have pulled their finger off the scale of political candidate search results.

Can you elaborate?

As recently as a few days ago, if you searched for "Donald Trump" without quotes, over 2/3 of the top results would be for Kamala Harris. Where if you searched for the inverse, it would be all Kamala Harris results. Similarly, for autocomplete, if you start keying in "Donald " then "Trump" isn't in the autocomplete results, similarly, searching for the assassination attempt.

Google did a lot of similar things in the 2020 election cycle, such as suppressing natural results for Tulsi Gabbard after she roasted Harris in the debates.

That doesn't even begin to cover results bias on video content on YouTube and expressly burying content results when specifically searching for "$ChannelName $VideoName"

The results have clearly been manipulated and I find it disturbing and contemptible.

edit: loosely related - https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/

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