Google is a monopoly – the fix isn't obvious
theregister.com
theregister.com
Google is a big ass company and enjoys outsized market share because people choose to use it. Everyone who buys a MacBook or Surface computer or smartphone does one thing immediately and that's to download Chrome. It's literally the first thing people voluntarily choose to do after powering on the device for the first time.
I'm not sure why we need government interference here which in all likelihood would change no customer behaviour but probably just add a few extra clicks in front of the Chrome downloading process.
When Alphabet begins doing something like banning Google Fiber customers from accessing bing.com, that will be interesting. But there honestly very minimal anti-competitive behaviour like that happening at the moment.
From a consumer perspective it's not about being able to switch search engine. Google is potentially putting a drag on entire economies, both money wise, and innovation wise. If every service you use has to spend extra because Google has an advertising monopoly then every service is passing a cost to you. If every service needs to do it the one way then there's no advancement, no new models, just "give Google money" forever.
The judgment makes a lot of hay over google paying to be the default search engine and how google has all this data on how valuable default is and how much people don't tend to switch from them. That's all true but I'm not sure what the proposed solution is. Make it illegal to pay to be the default?
There has to be a default and I think the outcome there is that Google is still the default because people prefer it. Google only pays to be the default because, if they don't, someone else will. Google would love to not have to pay Apple to be the default.
I also notice the lack of acknowledgement that people actively do switch away from default browsers regularly, from their OS defaults, to Chrome, which defaults to Google Search. Bing's market share is basically entirely because Edge is the default browser in windows with Bing as the default search engine. "Solving" this default problem will probably crater Bing if it involves forcing a user to make a choice on install (or something similar).
The problem with talks of "splitting up Google" is that Google is an ad company, not a browser company, not a mobile phone company, not a search company, not an email company, etc. All of those other products exist to serve the ad company, they are loss leaders. Splitting up google is bad for consumers who use gmail, chrome, android and search.
The only real split that I think is possible is Google Ads from Google Cloud.
As far as the idea of Google's position being a drag on the economy, I'd like to see a competitor with a better model that Google used their market advantage to intentionally kill.
And by no surprise, their browser is the only major one that has no privacy protection features and last month decided to abandon the plan to deprecate cookies and tracking.
That browser is competing with someone like Opera (used to be a paid for product) and Mozilla in an unfair way, because Google is killing others by making it free and taking the loss.
The antitrust legislation protects consumers, not businesses. If Linux provides for free what a proprietary software offered for money, it's a net win, even if that company goes out of business.
The problem with Chrome is not that it's free. The problem is that it develops more and more anti-customer traits, like making it hard to block ads, and uses its market share and compatibility issues to force these on customers.
The problem with google search is that Google integrates it with Chrome and Android, and buys the default search engine slots in other browsers, so that many customers are not even aware of other options. Sadly, Bing and DDG are not clearly superior, and, say, Kagi is paid. (Kagi is a good example of a paid product that's significantly better than the common free alternative.) Ironically the default search engine deals is how Firefox acquires most of its funding.
I don't see an easy way to find Google guilty of hurting customers through monopoly power in search or browsers: free products, a few alternatives, trivial cost of switching, no price gouging possible. Same with dumping: products start and remain free, most of Chrome is open-source and competitors reuse that same code, and customers are free to use these derivates, or adequate independent browsers and search engines.
It's a bit like coca-cola: alternatives abound, downsides are known, but people just seem to weirdly prefer it.
Make no mistake, all that original plan was about was about applying pain to everybody else in the advertising world, while their replacement for cookies would have been satisfactory only at Google's scale. The whole thing was Google astroturfing, taking advantage of everyone's ignorance of how the Internet works to further entrench their advertising monopoly.
I don't know why they aborted the plan, but I suspect regulators had caught on that it wasn't altruism but Anti-competitiveness that motivated it.
Oh they didn't abandon the plans, they chose something worse. They are going to make it a user decision.
Advertising companies can still gain some value for people who have third party cookies enabled, applications which aren't well-maintained enough to remove a reliance on third-party cookies will fail (sometimes), and users will be pushed by things like work SaaS apps to re-enable third party cookies (as a global setting) to be able to use required services.
If this were true, Google could make the immediate and easy decision to increase their annual profits by $26 billion, by simply stopping to pay browser vendors to make Google the default search engine. https://untested.sonnet.io/Defaults+Matter%2C+Don't+Assume+C...
The statement is true as written.
Incorrect.
Google spent ungodly amounts of money to make sure that their search engine was the default in as many places as possible. People didn't "choose" to use it, they use the defaults.
And in some cases, like my Android phone, google is the only option for integrated searches. I cannot use another search engine without opening a browser then opening up the search engine of choice.
Monopoly may not be the right term, but anticompetitive is. They outspent every other search provider to make sure their product was used. They paid off apple to not develop a search engine and instead use theirs as a default. These are things in the court documents which caused the ruling to go against them.
I tired Kagi, it's good too, but I didn't feel like the cost was justified when Google is free. I will probably try Kagi again someday though, I did like it and I think their mission is pretty cool.
You probably can't stop Google from being the most popular search (or don't want to) but you should be able to stop Google from using the popularity of their product to crush alternative ad tech. Or crush some new tech we don't realize will be important.
but not really. the situation is similar to auto-voting the incumbent in every goverment election each november.
that is not ok.
So, the solution is relatively simple: break off their ad marketplace business. Break off their ad display business. Let the funnels fend for themselves.
Monopoly is when they use that market share to compete in _an entire different market_ without actually earning the "best" spot. Or using their dominance to prevent competition entirely from succeeding. For example: Blocking all ad-tracking on its own browser, except ads purchased through its own ad network. Remember, _you_ are not the customer of Google. You are the product. The ad companies are the customer. The market is not search: the market is ad sales.
- Hardware (Google Pixel, Chromecast, Chromebook)
- OS (Android, ChromeOS)
- Distribution (Google Play Store)
- Browser (Chrome)
- Search (Google)
- Products (YouTube, Drive, Gmail, ...)
- Business (GCP, Workspace)
The only other companies that are similar are Microsoft and Apple... both arguably less extensive.
The issue with this also isn't entirely clear until it's "exploited": Google (and the others) can force certain products on their customers due to controlling the "underlying" product. Ad targeting also becomes incredibly precise and valuable... everyone else has to go through the scraps while Google can "just" read your emails (Gmail), get your location (Hardware/OS), go through your files and photos (Drive) and use your search history (Google).
I think the problem is that people don't know what the word means. We don't need to redefine it, people will either respect the importance of definitions of we'll just lose the next term for a monopoly as well.
For anyone following along, Google is a monopoly because they are the market leader in multiple overlapping industries and product lines. They choose to leverage those products together to fain a competitive advantage that no one competing with a single product can reasonably compete with.
Then there's all these other giga-sized "side projects" which seem small proportional to those mega-businesses - google home type stuff, google nest, waze, consumer electronics etc. Arguably the google nest and assistant is duopolistic with amazon alexa.
Which is the state of tech, there's like 5 big companies that share some portion of pies of 20 major duopolies and 100 minor duopolies. And they're all like "SEE! SEE! We're NOT a monopoly". And there's two of them saying that, pointing each at the other one as evidence of their non-monopoly status. To me that's monopoly by another name, and that other name is duopoly, and as such it has many of the same problems as the monopoly. And duopolies all every damn place, not just tech - NYSE and NASDAQ stock markets. Sony and xbox (sorry nintendo). Boeing and Airbus. Visa and Mastercard. Pepsi and Coke. Intel and AMD, AMD and NVIDIA. Windows and Mac. How many "gentleman's agreements" must exist in those duopolies, too many methinks
And so if you ask me it would be quite natural to shatter all these companies according to their duopolistic silos, with the hope being that the duopolies exist in part from the synergy and deep pockets of the whole organization, and so by breaking apart the duopolistic strings to the rest of the org, perhaps there can be a third and fourth phone operating system, home consumer electronic, web browser, youtube, and so on. Because the point of capitalism is an efficient market to serve the public, not to serve the megacorp coffers
I think you're right. It hides a lot. We do need a better understanding of the problems. But be careful what you wish for. Google being a monopoly is not a cause, but a symptom. Do a little 5Y analysis. Even rolling it back one step;
Q. Why is Google/Microsoft etc a monopoly?
A. Because they bought up all the competitors.
So, a deeper problem is the very ability to buy and sell companies. Is it "the market"? Yet it is possible to create articles of a company as non LLC/Ltd so that it it can never be bought or sold. People don't do this because they don't intend to "build a great product/company", they intend to cash-out and sell a great company. These subtle incentive structures really matter.
Dig deeper and ask things like "why do people only build companies to sell?" There's more upsetting answers behind that one too.
In the end, if you want to say BigTech is not to blame and could not do anything else but agglomerate into problematically large blocs then we have to concede the environment and incentives of modern business are harmful to the public/national good. The place to intervene is then at the level of those values.
I wouldn't go so far as to say that literally nobody means that when they say 'monopoly' but I doubt it is common enough for that claim to be made in good faith.
But then you're not the customer, you're the product, as they say. What is the cost to the actual customer to transition to an alternative?
- American Tobacco: Commodity
- Standard Oil: Commodity
- AT&T: Utility
- Northern Securities: Railroads
- Swift & Co: Meatpacking
- Kodak: Film
- Paramount: Movie Theaters
Google is more of a synergistic conglomerate. How would spinning off an individual business like Chrome, Android, or AdWords reduce their respective dominance?
I support this ruling and more across all industries, but I'm trying to square how a breakup should work that actually drives competition.
Some companies that want to be the default search (unless the gov bans that) or, some companies that want to be the default new tab page, would likely be the actual customers
An exception might be Chromebook users. It's not clear how that would break out. Especially in light of ChromeOS being cancelled for Android
I'm not sure it'd really make sense to split Chrome off on its own or not though. Maybe Chrome/ChromeOS/Android as a base software platform for consumers, businesses, and schools.
Without Google subsidizing Chrome, a real competitive market for browsers might emerge, with more vendors investing more effort into competing for users, without having to compete against one of the richest companies in the world that sees its browser as a loss-leader for its ad business, has the ability to dump infinite money into its product, and can advertise it on the one website that 90% of people regularly visit?
No, that's not possible. Google pays $20 billion to Safari to be the default search engine. Imagine how much they would pay an independent Chrome, which has many multiples of Safari's market share. That alone guarantees it would be an incredibly viable business model.
It would be better to point out that Chrome is the only browser not getting rid of third party cookies. Chrome promised to, but then has reneged on that promise in favor of "user choice". I don't for a second think Chrome would have kept then around if they weren't tied to an advertising company.
That is certainly the excuse given, but that doesn't mean it's the reason.
> Adblockers can still block ads (as in not show them), but they can't throttle or block requests.
Note that this makes them less effective at blocking ads. And speaking as a former uMatrix user, filtering/blocking the network traffic is a lot of the point.
https://x.com/jason_kint/status/1821558368659456399
And thats what they dared put into writing.
I think your example is completely wrong. Chrome has no source of funding. If separated from Google, they will have a massively magnified incentive to cater to the whims of advertisers because they would be completely subservient to them for funding.
My understanding is that Chrome provides value to Google through intangible means like brand association and thus Chrome does not have to 100% justify its existence by enabling ads for Google, meaning that it has some funding to just be a good browser for consumers.
Boeing used to own an oil company, engine manufacturer, airline, and airplane manufacturing. The US government broke them up because nobody can compete with that vertical integration.
This is a common issue addressed by strong anti-trust regulations.
If Google (or any online business) is prevented from owning a web browser then the browsers compete on merit. Consumers choose what is actually good for them.
Google has no incentive to make a good browser for consumers. They only have incentive to make one that is good enough for consumers to behave in Google’s interest. And if nobody can compete then that bar is low. Consumers don’t know what they are missing. Nobody does because we haven’t had a competitive browser market in close to three decades.
How is Chrome going to make money as a standalone company? I have no idea, but it probably aligns with your guess
That would be a paid service that the majority of people would not be okay with, and even if google search did an enshittification pass trying to create a crowd that would. Users would still jump ship to the next search that is still provided for free.
If the search business worked with other ad networks to maximize their revenue, while the ad business worked with other search engines, we’d likely see higher quality search results, less confusion about what’s an ad versus a result, and better as rates for buyers.
That said I don’t support that remedy at all. Maybe ten or fifteen years ago, but now it’s too late and the market is evolving around Google. IMO a consent decree that they won’t pay anyone for exclusive search placement is sufficient.
I'm skeptical that search is viable as an independent business at scale. I know DDG is making a go of it, but the business only has to pay a single salary.
My point being...of course it isn't viable right now given ... Google exists and has a stranglehold over that market...
The whole point of breaking Google up though is to make what isn't currently viable, viable.
I suspect the AT&T example may be more similar to the current situation than you're thinking. AT&T wasn't just the network, they also manufactured the phones themselves through subsidiary Western Electric. They leveraged their monopoly in phone service to drive customers toward leasing their phones, similarly (if more aggressively) to how Google drives customers from one product to another. Whether this remedy will be so far-reaching beyond search I don't know, but in the abstract there would be benefits to splitting up the conglomerate.
An easier example would be Microsoft and Office; you could spin off an application like that quite successfully, the same might apply to their ERP. But those examples only stem from the fact that they used to be isolated 'offline' products, and Microsoft is working hard to undo that.
Trying to draw parallels between that and Google Workspace, that is a technical nightmare considering the entire distributed nature means that half of workspace can't exist outside of Google. You'd have to copy Google to host it outside of it, and I'm not talking about GCP or Borg or anything like that, it's everything, from the GSLB to Zanzibar, from monorail to the custom hardware everything runs on. Perhaps a double-digit years long refactor could change that, but nobody wants to pay for that.
Given that monopoly-breakups are supposed to be in the public interest, it is a complicated argument to make in court that the public is advantaged by all those ancillary services getting killed. Now, I'm happy to declare that; I think the "culture of free" is corrosive, to probably an even greater degree than most other HN users. I'm outright willing to call it morally corrosive, for both the companies and the consumers. You, dear $READER, may not be inclined to go that far, especially perhaps on the consumer side. I'm just putting down my cards so that you can see that when I point out that in court that's going to be a difficult argument, it's an admission against my interests and biases.
Google is similar. They make money on ads and everything else is a distant second. Even search might have trouble standing on its own because it is funded on ad revenue; split them up that way and how is search getting funded? Google Cloud could certainly survive on its own for a time, but if it had to reduce investment it could go into an uncompetitive death spiral of having to match investment resources to profits over the years. Gmail could in principle make radically more money if they charged $5/month or something, but how many customers will do that?
And how on Earth would you even break up Android? You can't just hack it out as its own thing; it integrates with a lot of Google things and there's no way they'd all end up in the same entity.
I'm willing to just hack them to pieces and let the market figure it out. I think in the long term we'd come out stronger. But I'm arguing here in a relatively friendly forum for that and probably a lot of you still disagree with me. I'd hate to be arguing this in court.
Browsers need to be a utility.
Email needs to at least have an option that is a utility.
Arguably operating systems need to be a utility.
Adtech needs to either go back to what it was when Google started out (simple contextual ads, no targeting, no data collection, no flashing or popups or video or or or or...), or just die.[0]
The reason these things have all been operated entirely by for-profit entities up to this point is because they're too new for government to have caught up. All the parts of Google that I've named above as needing to be utilities are fundamental, necessary parts of the modern internet, and are basic requirements for the average person to operate in Western society.
> How would spinning off an individual business like Chrome, Android, or AdWords reduce their respective dominance?
As for this question, Google uses the profit from its dominance in adtech to fund its dominance in other businesses. That's the textbook definition of an abusive monopoly. Take away the ad money from the other parts of Google, and they'll no longer have an unfair advantage over potential competitors.
[0] Yes, this would mean that large parts of the internet that have been free-at-the-point-of-service will have to find new business models or dry up and blow away. No, I don't have a silver bullet solution to this. No, I'm not advocating for nuking adtech from orbit overnight with no replacement.
Both are open source projects with "ungoogled" options available, but those options are nowhere near as successful as the Google flavors. Would they just forbid Google from offering their own flavor of Chromium?
Even though Android itself is open source, Google Play services really are what allow Google to have so much influence on the Android platform. So what happens to Google Play? Would they be forced to split that off with Android? Would they be forced to continue offering their services for free, but with no strings attached? Would Android have to offer a middleware that lets you choose which services to use a la carte? Would Android device manufacturers have to ship their devices with an open source alternative to Google Play like microG?
How do you separate Google from Android without driving everyone to the other side of the smartphone duopoly, iOS?
If a breakup does happen, it's going to be wild. I wish I had more faith in our government to come up with the best solution. But something has to be done.
Then if you add that Chrome enforces how browser experiences are designed and how tracking is done, you see the problem emerging.
The hard part is turning that staggering amount of unstructured data into a useful search engine, and in particular fighting off black-hat SEO.
Vimeo has tried a different approach, but it's hardly in the same league as YouTube.
One point to mention is that there are two different "Google Ads". Search ads are very different from page ads (DoubleClick). You could certainly take away the DoubleClick part, but separating Search Ads from Search is much harder.
For instances if Android phones were allowed to not make Google the default search engine, for Apple to ask each user which engine they want instead of there being a default, for query and click through data needing to be shared at cost with other search engine companies, Chrome not being allowed to default to Google but require user input, and so on. Lots of options and more than one remedy can be applied simultaneously.
Maybe we do want to make everything a little worse for the average customer so that more businesses can compete in the marketplace. But I, for one, will miss being able to attach Drive content smoothly to my emails, or being able to use my voice to trigger map navigation on my phone.
Because we think interfering with the free market is necessary when a company misuses market power, not solely when it is a behemoth.
The Gilded Age Trusts were brought down regardless as to whether they misused their power. It wasn’t just oil.
Monopolies are like a positive feedback loop which causes the market to diverge into a barely functional state
It doesn’t matter if they abused their market position, monopolies are to be corrected, mens rea present or not
See the point here? All of Google pieces are a giant machine to collude in the same direction: their ad engine.
It's not particularly bundled to the ad engine.
ATT WAS phone service in the U.S. 90% of the U.S used ATT when it was broken up, and much of that 90% had no alternative.
With Google if another better search engine did appear you could switch in minutes.
And if you consider Android a monopoly then you'd have to consider iOS one too, and that's one much more obvious in it's user impact with a 30% cut being taken on the only app store you can install apps from.
If you don't like default X being purchased, pass a law. Otherwise we'll just be back here in a few years later if some other company becomes unpopular.
Billions (probably trillions) of dollars are spent every year on advertising through other channels than Google, including online. Let's stick to reality.
A breakup would separate the major services: Google search, YouTube, the ad business (DoubleClick et al), etc.. However, even then, the ad business probably needs to be broken up further.
This should all have been done much earlier, at least 5 and maybe even 10 years ago. Now Google is so entrenched that it will be difficult. One assumes that the government is more powerful than a corporation, but once you look into just how members of Congress so quicly become millionaires, well...
So we are in a world today where things like Android, Chrome, and the default search experience on an iPhone are all what they are because of Google's need to build moats around the GooDubClick cash cow. More importantly it's really hard to compete with these things unless you have a GooDubClick cash cow of your own, which guess what basically nobody does. Decouple them and that will start to change, there will be many businesses that will take all sorts of novel approaches, and that is what we refer to as "innovation" when we are being pragmatic and un-cynical about what innovation is, it's a dozen or a thousand companies throwing new stuff out there and sooner or later some of it sticks and the world changes.
NOTHING is natural about what Google is today unless you consider the FTC not doing its job for 15-20 years "natural."
Middleman platforms often become natural monopolies due to network effects, but how does this expand to tech products in general?
I don't see any structural incentives that lead to natural monopolies in search, email, or a wide variety of other products that Google is dominant in.
Maybe even demanded that certain too effective components were separated like adds. Or with Amazon retail from AWS.
Based on what evidence? Isn't the simpler explanation "VC wants big return; VC funds tech; therefore VC encourages monopolies"?
YouTube, Search, Email, advertising, are all controlled by the same people and that is a problem for freedom and the economy.
There are giant incentives to keep the ecosystem as it is.
Isn't it time to think about either (a) just accepting that you give them a much wider birth or (b) be much faster and tactical in your enforcement. Not every monopoly case needs to result in a break up. If you could point at one bad thing Google did - maybe the Apple deal for example, get that in court quickly with fast penalties that don't require massive corporate interference maybe we would be better off.
Google was incorporated 26 years ago, in 1998. Microsoft was founded in 1975, 26 years before US v. Microsoft was decided. Google is exactly as old as Microsoft was at the time, and while it's harder to measure my sense is that their stranglehold on search is at least as long and at least as unassailable as Microsoft's was in OSes.
You can't have it be both too early to go after Google and yet too late to have gone after Microsoft.
I kind of am asking to have it both ways - they should be able to move against these companies earlier by levying smaller sanctions. That way they don't need 1 big killer case to get a judge to order the entire company broken up or spun off.
This is like requiring overwhelming evidence that a radiation source caused a particular case of cancer—not other problems, like birth defects, just cancer, and we’re gonna assume the cancer wasn’t caused by the radiation source until you can convince us otherwise—before being able to move against an actor exposing the public to radiation.
> If you could point at one bad thing Google did...
Agree. But then there are the more nebulous ones — like Google's ad/search entanglement.
What UI are you imagining? Perhaps no search engine at all in the browser but the first time a user goes to "search" you present them with a list of random-sorted search engines?
Maybe the problem was that Apple has "that default option for sale."
The lawsuit started under Trump DOJ as a political stunt because Google resembled wokeness and the party of freedom and family values (Republicans) wanted to show how tough they are to their constituents.
A few republican states also filed similar lawsuits in tandem which all got lumped together into this lawsuit.
Then the Biden came to power and kept at it because, well, he did keep a lot of Trump initiatives and now the DOJ people think they're some kind of a hero for working on this case.
Should suing Google really the highest priority for the administration? I don't think so but here we are.
Okay ... that is some serious wishcasting.
Chromium especially is so core to being a building block for applications and the modern Internet nowadays, it does seem like this core infrastructure piece should be more collectively owned.
Then you spin off the rest of Google as separate companies. Android/Pixel, Google Ads/Analytics, Youtube, Chrome, Gmail/Docs/Drive and Maps/Cloud would all be separate businesses. Chrome would likely be best spunoff as a non-profit as well, operating an open source web browser project.
Of course, if you're going to break up Google you also have to break up the rest of FAANG too or they're just going to step right into the space vacated by Google and probably buy up the Baby Googles[0]. Apple would probably need to be broken up into a hardware company, a software company and a services company. Amazon would need to be broken up into AWS, Amazon Shopping and Prime Video. You could arguably even break Amazon Shopping up into the online store and the logistics company. Microsoft would need to be broken up into Windows, Office, Xbox, Bing and Azure. Xbox would then itself need to be broken up to unwind all of its purchases of independent video game companies. If you're breaking up Xbox, you also have to do the same with Playstation (spinning them loose from Sony and unwinding their own acquisitions). It might also be a great idea to then do the same with major 3rd party video game companies like EA, basically unwinding all of their acquisitions. Meta would need to be broken up into Facebook, Oculus, Instagram, WhatsApp and Meta Ads.
Once you start breaking up Google, you open up Pandora's box and basically have to keep going until you break up the entire tech sector. That's why it is so tricky to do it. Once you're done with tech, it'd be a good idea to look at other sectors such as health care, Hollywood and the news media where consolidation has been rampant over the past few decades.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_Bell_Operating_Compan...
I would argue that because of this, the index itself should be something operated by the public rather than privately. This is especially true because it's within the best interests of the public to have an archive of the internet. The wayback machine currently supports that and it's on its last legs.
Index the internet with a public search API, then let future search engines hit that an optimize based on internal algorithms to get better results.
I love this but the act of indexing the web is both complex and ever-evolving (not to mention expensive), so the market needs to have natural incentives for the public crawler to continue being good at its job. Google is incentivized to have a great index because it feeds into its competitive advantage. If the index is a shared resource, what incentive does the indexing company have to keep improving it? And what guarantees that the indexing company's strategy doesn't end up being unfair to those affected by their websites getting indexed?
All search companies would have to maintain secondary indices to augment the public one. There's probably some artificial structure needed to make open indexing viable.
That is clearly not true. Marginalia has a different index than Kagi, which has a different index than Google. You are somewhat making the assumption that there is some perfect index that works for everyone, when the market shows there is a need for different indices for different users.
I think splitting up Maps from Google/Apple would make OpenStreetMaps see a lot more usage and improvements.
Amazon Shopping should absolutely be split into an online store and a logistics company.
I'd like to see something even more radical when splitting up Infrastructure (AWS / GCP / Azure), such as the Government offering Infrastructure similar to the Postal Service, effectively turning AWS / GCP / Azure into Fedex / UPS.
At least it used to - I haven't kept up much recently.
If you know better then please tell - but I'm not clear at this point whether you have an informed opinion - or whether you have no idea what The Register is.
That team will from that day forward be able to create a forked version of the product. Every gripe they had about it will be able to be fixed. They'll also be given half of Google's cash to hire the best people.
If search & ads are the main money makers, then force the existing company to compete with itself in those fields.
Also, instead, they could just unmerge doubleclick from Google. Let them make money by having ads on search and other places without BEING the advertising company.
At a minimum, not having Google paying Firefox/Apple to promote them as the default is a good thing. It’s super annoying that Safari doesn’t allow me to switch to Kagi easily.
I understand a reason they do this is to protect users like my father from adware/spyware companies putting in fake search engines, but I’m sure not getting money from Google to force a default has something to do with it as well.
What does Apple not allowing you to set a custom search engine on iOS have to do with Google?
Google funds Apple for search dominance and Firefox for reasons I don’t know of. Neither Safari (on mobile nor desktop) nor Firefox allow custom user supplied search engines. The presets they supply appear to be controlled opposition.
I want to be able to use Marginalia, Kagi, Yandex, MWMBl and SearXNG by default after a few settings changes.
Wikipedia, archive.org are two examples of non-Google projects that come to mind when I think of internet "public-good". They seem to be doing fine without advertising dollars (although perhaps they are only hobbling along, I don't know — but I would rather they get "public institution" treatment before Google franchises).
Imagine chopping Search and Ads out to be their own things.
GoogAds turns into just another advertising company. Perhaps viable but uninteresting. GoogSearch, well, almost nobody wants to pay for search, so they seek some kind of way to get money, and the start up with the integrated ads, soon to result in what we have now. I used to run various Google Search Appliances, but they bailed out of that market.
Peel off GMail? More than zero people want to pay for email, so you might see something like a clunky Fastmail with a free tier and a pay tier. The free tier means ads again and you're evolving to a Yahoo model. Ummm, nobody really wanted that.
How about hardware? I dunno, are Pixels a loss leader for Google? I'll bow to someone else's insight on this, and I'm not really hip to the phone scene: are there a lot of "smartphones, we only make smartphones" companies?
Google Docs and various officeware might stand on its own as a distant second to Microsoft. I know some people pay for that.
Google Books, maaaaaaaaaaybe. It might stand on its own but here we just see people having to pay for what was once free.
I just don't see anything interesting or stimulating coming out of carving up Google. Almost everything they did (it has been a while since I was "into" them) seemed focused on making things that were almost byproducts, wherein their real utility was feeding the search <-> advertising cycle.
Google Sets? Ain't nobody gonna pay for that! Chromecast? Google Domains? I am scrolling through the list and not seeing much that would stand on its own two feet. Stadia? Google+?
I'm just not seeing much that can stand on its own, that people will pay for without it resorting to an ad model to support it.
Even worse is when these "public forums" are hosted entirely within walled gardens, e.g. Facebook; then you need an account (and not just DNS whitelisting) to participate in this public forum.
All government entities should be required to post public documents on their own servers/equipment/hostname.
It feels like one of those situations where we “get exactly what we asked for”. Like those movies with an Evil Genie who delivers on their wishes in the sneakiest way possible. “You wished for $1M, so I burned your house down - but look at all the insurance money you got!”
Or maybe a bit like how everyone wanted their cable bills to be cheaper (“just let me pay for the few channels I watch!”) and what we got was 15 different streaming services at $12/month.
This is how you sound.
Another example of this was Apple’s response to being forced to allow alternate app stores, where they added enough fees and restrictions that it was effectively unusable. The spirit of the law (allow anyone to make apps without a gatekeeper and fees) was not what happened.
We should have at least prevented them from growing so fast via acquisitions but it’s too late for that now.
Is "Chocolate Factory" a typo?
2. Give Google search competitors access to Google’s search data so these new AI search engine companies can compete. Without these huge amounts of data, they have no chance.
Done!
The infra for a decent crawl is prohibitive. There's a bit of black magic in crawl scheduling, and a bit in de-duplication, but most of the challenge is in scale.
I used to work on Google's indexing system, and sat with the guys who wrote the Percolator system that basically used BigTable triggers to drive indexing and make it less batch-oriented.
I know France has made at least a couple of attempts at a government-funded "Google killer" search engine. I think it would be a better use of government money to make something like a government-run event-driven first-level indexing system where search engine companies could pay basically cloud computing costs to have their proprietary triggers populate their proprietary databases based on the government-run crawling and first-level analysis. When one page updates, you'd want all of the search engine startups running their triggers on the same copy of the data, rather than having to stream the data out to each of the search engine startups.
Basically, you want to take some importance metric, some estimate of the probability some content has changed since the last time you crawled it, combine the product of the two plus some additional constraints (crawl every known page at least some maximum period, don't hit any domain too hard, etc.) as a crawl priority. You then crawl the content, convert HTML, PDF, etc. to some marked-up text format (UTF-8 HTML isn't bad, but I think UTF-8 plain text plus some separate annotations in a binary format would be better). You strip out text that's too small or too close to the background color. You calculate one or more locality-sensitive hash functions over the plain text, cluster similar texts, pick a canonical URL for each cluster. You calculate the directed link graph across clusters. The PageRank patent has expired, so you could calculate PageRank and several other link-graph ranking signals across canonical clusters. You'd presumably compute some uniqueness scores, age scores, etc. for each canonical URL, and then in parallel run each of the search engine startup's analysis over this package of analysis data each time you find a change for a particular canonical URL.
You might have some startups providing spam scoring or other analysis and providing that (for fees, of course) to search engine startups, etc. Basically, you want to modularize the indexing and analysis to provide competition and nearly seamless transition between competing providers within your ecosystem.
I think that's the way to drive innovation in the search engine startup space and properly leverage economies of scale across search engine startups.
This is kind of going the other way. Google had a monopoly on search (arguably - Bing would like a word). All these other actions are to keep that from being eroded. They didn't do Chrome because they wanted to own the browser market, they did Chrome because they wanted browsers to not be owned by somebody else who could make the default search engine be not-Google. That's entering other businesses to protect your main one. IANAL, but that may not be against antitrust law. It's at least not the main thrust of antitrust law.
I don't think there would be much benefit to society by breaking up google. Whereas I do think there would be great benefit to breaking up Apple or MS.
Hum... I'm sure you've heard about that famous one called AT&T.
Or Microsoft a decade later.
Particularly given how more "friendlier" has turned for corporations in the last 30 years.
I consider Apple by far the most insidious, since they leverage your friends and family against you to put heavy social penalties on not submitting. They then use this dominance to bend devs to their will, and take an egregious cut of their profits while doing it.
That being said, the trial is the basis for the action taken against Google:
> However, the Circuit Court did not overturn Jackson's findings of fact, and held that traditional antitrust analysis was not equipped to consider software-related practices like browser tie-ins.
Another interesting outcome of the trail was that it established a playbook that others, namely Google, could follow to avoid antitrust litigation. I would argue that Google's ability to operate as a monopoly for so long was largely a result of the outcomes of the Microsoft trial.
That's a bit of an oversimplification. Key parts of the original ruling were overturned because the legal analysis performed by the original judge was done incorrectly. Or more specifically, for the case of bundling IE with Windows, analyzed using the wrong legal framework (per se analysis vs rule of reason).
The case was remanded back to the district level for re-analysis under the rule of reason, and that would have been necessary regardless of the judge's behavior.
- Microsoft's biggest monopoly candidate is Windows, and outside of business the PC space is too small for this to be as problematic as it once was
- Apple's devices have competitors, although they are really bad about sucking people into their ecosystem and mistreating the outsiders
- No one is forced to use Amazon, although they do have scummy tactics for their sellers I believe (you're not allowed to sell it cheaper elsewhere or something like that?).
I'm sure similar arguments could be made for Google though.
I don’t see how apple beat epic but google lost. Lawyers
Depending on how this goes, companies will need to change how they act in fear of the hammer coming down on them next.
Google commands a higher market share % of search than Microsoft does of personal computing OS.
I can choose iOS over Android. Bing over Google. Yahoo over Gmail. Dailymotion over YouTube.
Why is it a problem that google makes a superior product and people choose it ?
In all studies, when consumers get faced the decision to choose freely any search engine, most of them keep going back to google. Why is that a problem at all?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Antitrust_Act_of_1890
https://www.economicshelp.org/microessays/markets/monopoly/
This article states that 25% of market share may be sufficient. That is not how I learned it in my economics classes: there we said it's 60% and values below that could be oligopoly (a small number of companies holding ~90% market share).
As for why it's bad: a single provider may choose to degrade their service, or increase charges, or create an unacceptable TOS. They would likely not be able to do that if there is an acceptable alternative.
We either start ripping this band-aids off or we will just continually have a worse and worse internet.
Zooming back out, whatever pain comes from breaking Google up today will be less than the pain of doing so in a decade. Even more broadly, the pain of breaking up any monopoly (a matter how small) today will be less than when their breakup is as or more pressing than any of the historical antitrust cases.
As Senator John Sherman put it, "If we will not endure a king as a political power we should not endure a king over the production, transportation, and sale of any of the necessaries of life."
Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, ATT/Verizon/Tmobile, and hoards of smaller but similarly situated companies behave as kings shaping markets, acting without accountability or culpability, and shaking down the public at their whims. The gospel of the stock market has paralyzed our legislators from taking action to put these corrupt, wasteful, polluting and abusive businesses in their place or out of operation.
I don't follow your point. All rates are set arbitrarily according to the monetary policy followed on any specific moment.
What leads you to believe that arbitrarily setting a rate one way is natural, but arbitrarily setting it another way is more natural?
> Zooming back out, whatever pain comes from breaking Google up today will be less than the pain of doing so in a decade.
Will it, though? Think about the problem for a second. Do you think it would be more painful to break up Yahoo now than it would have been a decade ago? What about Intel? What about IBM? I mean,do you think Google of all companies is doing great?
Why does Google search use Google adwords? Is it because adwords has given them the better terms than their competition or because they have no choice by virtue of being the same company?
I don't follow your logic, because it does not have any logic.
Can you clarify your line of reasoning? I mean, if breaking up a company creates more problems than the ones it solves, what leads you to believe that anticipating the breakup would have any impact whatsoever in the fact that breaking up the company creates more problems than the ones it solves?
This world would be much poorer a place without this open source work & protocols.
I struggle to think of how else we would have got this, what action we would have taken to keep this outcom, while not "waiting too long".
You do not follow it because you do not wish to.
Think of Google as a cancer.
You can ignore it for the rest of your life, and your quality of life may get shittier and shittier until you die.
Think of anti-trust like surgery, you may be permanently harmed, lose a limb, skin, organ, etc... but you will be better in the long run. Sometimes surgery has no side effects, sometimes it harms you, we won't know until we are out the other end.
In this case, we may have waited so long the cancer might kill the host by removing it. I don't believe that to be the case however.
My perception is that there are too many politicians trying to pick winners for their own benefit.
The way to break up companies is to win antitrust lawsuits against them. Except in cases where the companies are actually tied together in some meaningful way (ie, they're not fully separate companies in practice), there's no way to link such suits to each other; each one has to stand or fall on its own merits, and on its own timetable.
I think it would be hard to argue that Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc are actually arms of the same company. Thus, each of these Big Tech antitrust suits needs to happen separately, and some of the remedies might end up combining in counterproductive ways, because they are generally not able to consider each other's situations (the remedies have to be based on the facts of the individual case, AIUI).
It sucks, but it's the only antitrust system we've got right now.
The solution is simple (the word simple here is doing a lot of work, I know); Meta, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Apple and any other similarly sized behemoth should be nuked, and not just in the tech world. Microsoft should've been properly nuked 30 years ago with the original anti-trust, yet alone now, same goes for the others.
It's probably no coincidence that Google's first external CEO Eric Schmidt was the CEO of Novell.
Break them up to? Break everyone up.
Ask me any company over 5k employees. It should probably be broken up.
Or do I misunderstand your point?
The whole point of breaking up monopolies is not moral principle. It's so that things get better for customers. If they don't, then what's the justification for breaking them up?
Say the Search product is split off, it would instantly collapse as without the crutches of the Ad business it has no way to support itself. Maybe if we normalise paying for web products, and have some sort of "10 searches for free per day" starting point. That could open the door for a sustainable product that actually does what it needs to do. Perhaps the classic (and not in-line) ad sidebar with clear markings (and different markup) could provide some coverage there as well. But others have tried that (from scratch, with no brand recognition) and haven't really become a household name so far...
Google has essentially built a software Ouroboros, and if you try to take any of the critical (the most well-known) parts out, it fails and everyone is left with nothing.
I could see Android and Chrome as a combined company.
The cut should be in the vertical integration stacks. Like in Apple's case between the hardware and OS, between the OS and the App Store.
In Google's case, their hardware is already open, they mostly keep apps in their walled garden (and take their 30% troll tax) with things like GooglePlay and other Google "services", not sure how that would be something to break apart.
Realistically, the best outcome we can hope for is breaking Ads away from Search.
There are some head scratching serious leaps of logic here. Why would Meta start running android if it became an independent business?
It's never explained.
This article is rather clumsy FUD.
If we mandate that our electronics and software must be repairable then these companies will automatically no longer be able to hold monopolies on their platforms.
The idea that the government has to force people to buy things they don’t want never ends well.
Search is about to get disrupted by LLMs. Heck, aren't teens searching on Tiktok more than Google nowadays?
Other feasible way to avoid this would be keeping Google ads to subsidize them, but then what's the point of change? This is why the remedy should touch very specific illegal practices. Structural changes need proper legislation which targets the entire market. Otherwise, you'll just see balloon effects in action.
There has been nothing in my life so disillusioning as working on a Web app for a company that is more or less required to play Google's game.
Have you built any iOS apps?
We need to regulate search and app stores like it is a public utility. Pricing should be dutch auction or something provably fair. 20-30% for in-app purchases is obviously insane when credit cards do 1.5-3.5%.
I worry that the government will not do sensible regulations and instead play investment banker and try to create spin off companies.
I don't think the vast majority of the internet understands how the business model of the internet works.
Defining a market as a specific search engine's search results is wild. Wouldn't every search engine have a monopoly over it's results? A grocery store monopoly over its shelves?
Etc.
And I would say that Google can fairly be called a unique product in the market. They are the default search engine on almost all browsers and operating systems, their mobile phone operating system owns 70% of the global market share, and most of these devices give Google's search engine preferential treatment, their name is synonymous with searching on the web, their market share is over 90%, they have more data on their users than probably any other company and can provide more personalized search results than anyone else, their web index is clearly more complete than e.g. Bing's (if you do a domain-restricted search, Google often finds twice as many results as Bing).
It's true that alternatives to Google exist, but Google's overwhelming market dominance makes it imo difficult to argue that they aren't a monopoly in practice.
The product is not search, it’s ad placements.
If you were in a position where you could just put things online and they may or may not be useful to people, you wouldn't be having this problem. But you're not; you're working for a taskmaster that demands attention or they can't justify their existence.
If Google evaporates tomorrow, there's no guarantee that your product gets customers. Indeed, in the absence of Google, most content on the internet is harder to find, not easier. The knob your overseer wants you to turn happens to be attached to Google, but when Google goes away there's going to be a different knob.
Yes, capitalism is a problem, but it's also true that Google is a problem because Google's scale makes a poor combination with capitalism. Which is worse, the match or the gasoline? Both, if they are used to cause a devastating fire.
So, no different than every company on any given day under capitalism?
Darn these regulators for trying to allow competitors to enter the market. Everybody knows, competition only makes things worse!
/s
Azure, VS code, Github, CoPilot... the emergence of teams...
> I wish Microsoft owned
A large chunk of the engineering stack?
Google leadership (according to public info) was in a panic about ChatGPT and rightly so. It was eerily similar to what Google once was at its inception: a no bs way to get better answers to your questions.
Luckily for Google, hallucination is a significant issue. Just “GPT it” is already in the modern vernacular. Google is in serious danger of becoming Facebook: only used by boomers (now millennials) while the new gen gets their adds on Insta, TikTok and could soon be served Llm generated product reviews and comparisons with link to buy from ChatGPT.
Search and web are dead media. in 10 years no one will care.
They just need to say that they are gonna start charging for all their services because without the level of integration they have it doesn't make sense to keep running businesses that otherwise would lose money.
Oh boy is this incorrect.
Outside the Silicon Valley / well-educated upper middle class / tech worker bubble, tech companies are more trusted than most political parties and government and religious institutions, and this is true across the world as polls show. People who are not into tech have no idea about Google's business deals or App Store anti-steering provisions. They use Google as long as it delivers great results, and switch to searching on Tiktok or asking Chat GPT if it doesn't. HN is probably one of the most anti-tech places on the internet, maybe outside of Mastodon.
But otherwise I don't think an average non-tech person would be likely to notice a difference between Bing and Google. And ms, ddg, Kagi and perplexity would love to see lots of people actually looking for alternatives.
Docs/sheets/pages/whatever wouldn't change since they're supported by the paying users. The rest, Google is going to kill at some point anyway like they did with hundred other projects.
They only one I really don't know how it would be affected is Android.
Apple levels of arrogance.
Apple tried the same approach when the EU was slapping them down with DMA and few were having it, calling Apple out for their immature responses delusionally thinking that because people were glued to their phones they would some how value that above their representative government.
If standard oil had control of the information space history would be very different. Not even Ma Bell had the power that google has
In a world where the competition's price for most of those services is "free", charging for used-to-be-free stuff sounds like a sure-fire suicidal business strategy.
If you are specifically referring to Apple becoming an even bigger monopoly, that would be a bad thing but I think in the US they've already effectively won.