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fny

I'm very curious to see what a breakup looks like. Past breakups involved "uniform" businesses:

- 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.

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Breaking up their individual businesses can cause each business to have incentives that line up better with their customers / users. Example: if Chrome was separated from Google, they won't have as much of an incentive to push back against adblockers with things like Manifest V3. Or include APIs that are only available to google websites (Which it has! https://x.com/lcasdev/status/1810696257137959018)

Users are not Chrome's customers. Even if Chrome is separated into a separate company that would still be true. Users are unlikely to pay for a browser when every OS comes with a free one.

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

Right now the main paying user of Chrome is Google as a tool to deliver product integrations and guarantee browser based ad delivery. It's just that all of that is seen as internal expense in developing Chrome instead of an external source of revenue from Chrome. If Chrome were split off the main paying user of Chrome would probably be large enterprises and educational institutions - that'd be a massive change.

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.

Can you explain what large enterprises and educational institutions would be paying Chrome for?

Chrome Enterprise Premium and ChromeOS/Chromebooks are existing paid offerings. They could probably squeeze a few more things out of the enterprise management toolset too though.

Every OS coming with a browser bundled for free is part of the problem.

It's an interesting hypothesis, but it's entirely possible that separated from Google, Chrome is either not a viable business model (browsers don't make money on their own) or is incentivized to get into bed with some other ad company to make money, to effectively the same result.

Aren't you pointing out the exact problem with Google? If Chrome wasn't a viable business without Google's ads subsidizing it, isn't its existence in its current form exactly the kind of anti-competitive outcome we would be better off without?

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?

The original value-proposal for Chrome was: The more people browse the web in general, the more Google profits. So the mere existence of a good free, fast, and safe browser would inherently benefit Google at large in general. And that rationale is why we get to have Chromium at all.

Obviously things have evolved quite a bit since then, but I think the general pitch that Chrome is primarily a value-multiplier for the org at large, rather than a direct value generator is still broadly the case, and it's really not clear to me that it can exist as anything else without a fundamental reassessment of what it's trying to accomplish.

That's likely not the real rationale. If people browse with Chrome, then google is the default. That is immensely valuable to google, as google's payments to apple, mozilla and android manufacturer's show.

In theory Chrome could exist as an independent business if it were allowed to take bids for search default from google. But if the US govt broke up google they would likely also ban the sort of deal that would let Chrome be a viable business on its own.

By the time Chrome came out Google already was in the position where everyone knew to set their default homepage to Google in IE in the same way they automatically go to install Chrome now.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned the pseudo-control Chrome gives them over web standards. They can implement experimental APIs in Chrome and immediately use them in their webapps.

Correct. Google's real concern was not that people wouldn't use them as their favorite search engine; it was that relying on Apple and Microsoft to be stewards of access to the web was a huge business risk because, hypothetically, if Apple or Microsoft decided to block google.com at the browser level (or pick your favorite equivalent scenario, like failing to implement a standard that Google absolutely was going to be relying upon to provide service), Google was screwed.

Chrome was a business risk mitigation move.

What possible browser competition can exist? The market price for a browser from a consumer perspective is $0. I will never pay for a browser. All that will happen is new ad placements from smaller companies, directly in the browser.

> The market price for a browser from a consumer perspective is $0.

The market price for search is $0. And yet we have Kagi because Google is now so ad infested. Ads are now bad enough that there is money in killing them.

The market price for email is $0. And yet we have Fastmail.

The problem with Google is dumping. The cross-subsidization means that YouTube, Gmail, Chrome, etc. can run at a loss indefinitely and soak up huge chunks of the consumer base. Forcing those services to stand on their own doesn't solve all the problems, but it sure makes competing with them a hell of a lot easier.

(YouTube, on the other hand, should be sued into oblivion for not implementing identity checks for upload. The fact that any published video will wind up monetized on YouTube 20 seconds later is genuine theft.)

But do we have any reason to believe that in the absence of Google, the next dumper won't just come along and take their place? The government isn't exactly signaling a willingness to change the fundamentals of the market here.

> YouTube, on the other hand, should be sued into oblivion for not implementing identity checks for upload

YouTube is probably actually too big to fail at this point. Breaking YouTube video links would have a massive impact on video on the Internet as a whole. Hosting video (efficiently and performantly) is still actually expensive, and YouTube is eating the cost of subsidizing most of the Internet's archive of videos.

> But do we have any reason to believe that in the absence of Google, the next dumper won't just come along and take their place?

A new dumper would have to compete with the split out Google Ad Company for ad resources in order to have enough money to cross subsidize. The Baby Bells reformed, but they never again reached "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company." levels (other companies took on that mantle).

> Hosting video (efficiently and performantly) is still actually expensive, and YouTube is eating the cost of subsidizing most of the Internet's archive of videos.

That's even more reason to crack them up immediately. Did Google not just shut down the DejaNews Usenet archive--something that had negligible storage cost?

> All that will happen is new ad placements from smaller companies, directly in the browser.

I don't think this is going to be the case. This seems like an extreme conclusion with virtually no precedent.

Since an ad browser is such an important piece of software, I imagine it will receive many donations. The reason Chrome doesn't is because it doesn't need them. I think that will change.

Also, I think it's possible you will pay for a browser at some point. Ultimately software costs money to make and we've become desensitized to that because we've exchanged that cost for advertising. But advertising sucks. For example, I pay double for HBO Max just so I don't see ads, and I'm not alone in that.

The precedent is that every browser out there currently has one of:

- integration to ad infrastructure

- integration to the vendor's other service infrastructure

- a cost of more than $0

Given that the market is full of people who will only bear $0, the likely conclusion is that a Chrome separated from the ability to integrate to vendor infrastructure will turn to integrating to someone's ad infrastructure (more poorly and less securely than Chrome currently integrates to Google's infra).

No one pays $0. All that slurping of user data is used by other corps to maximize their profits.

They're paying for that data, and then believe they're making more from consumers as a result. But no matter what, the cost of collecting that data, the infra, and then corp x or y buying it, comes out of the bottom line.

It's like points credit cards. Where does that cash back come from, magical fairies? It comes from retailers' bottom lines, eg from you.

But there's an obvious difference between shelling out $60 up-front or $5 a month or whatever and shelling out $0 (and then being tracked, or having your data harvested).

Especially in the modern ecosystem where costs have become divorced from income, people would (behavior observation strongly suggests) much rather pay with their information footprint (a resource they can't capitalize alone) than the dollars in their wallets. Otherwise... Where's the successful paid-for browser right now? Which one? Can we point to it?

But they aren't capitalizing their data, because they're paying more in the end. That's my point.

Let's say widgets are $x. Now the widget manufacturer, as their competitors are advertising, decides to advertise too. They just hit magazines. Success!

But then comes targeted advertising. Now they must pay for profiled advertising, which means that someone colllected the data, archived it, continues to track, and provides uptime and an api you can poll.

Google had 300 billion in gross revenue, what of facebook and others? And there are more nuanced, more targeted providers too.

The entire tracking industry has got to be hundreds of trillions in revenue, and guess where that comes from?

The cost of everything you buy.

So you get a browser and gmail for supposedly free, but now steak costs 3% more. What a savings.

And yes, when people are tricked into thinking a browser is free, it will be hard for visibly paid competitors.

People complain about global warming, and "how did we get here?". Well, the same way we have no paid for browsers. No one cares past their own nose.

If your argument is "Browsers are subsidized by advertising driving up the cost of goods," I don't think I disagree but I don't think the consequence of stopping that model is the cost of good goes down.

Advertising is driven by competition; in the absence of a browser-subsidy flow for that money, the ads will still be there and prices won't go down. The ads will flow through other channels. Then we get higher cost of goods and no zero-cost browser, which seems strictly worse?

If the cost goes up, then the cost will come down. It doesn't happen overnight, and yes a browser is a minimal part of the market.

However if everyone paid cash for browsers, browsers would also be quite cheap. If you sell 50M copies a year, even $1 goes a very long way.

Firefox seems to spend around $200M/year1 on 'software development', but they also have lots of side projects (pocket, proxies, other software like thunderbird, etc) so I bet $50M could easily fit the bill. And Firefox doesn't even use a shared render engine, or HTML/etc parsers, it's not a chromium based browser.

1. https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-invest...

well, I know that the free cash I get IS from fairies. Yours doesn't?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Looking at your current user's post history, you've posted gibberish as comments (just random text). You then progressed to posting a personal history multiple times, where you lambasted the users of this forum, essentially calling everyone "mean" and implying foul intent. Attacks like this are against the guidelines, and really, I cannot imagine they'd go over well anywhere.

Most of your posts seem to be non-thoughtful posts (see the guidelines), which contribute little such as this one. We all go off the rails a bit from time to time, we all colour outside the lines occasionally, but it seems like most of your posts are outside of the lines.

If you really want to engage in thoughtful debate, at least on HN, I suggest you read the guidelines again, and at least attempt to post in the spirit much of the time. Again, no one is going to be perfect in this, but from what I see it doesn't seem like you really want to engage thoughtfully.

Good luck.

I absolutely would have donated large sums of money to Firefox development if they had allowed me to do so. Sadly you can only donate to the Mozilla Foundation which does a lot of other stuff. Wikipedia shows that projects can get very stable funding through donations.

Browsers offer incredible value. If there is need people will pony up the money. Many corporations have an business interest in keeping the web free and easily accessible so could serve as potential sponsors. Just like some newer programming language get baking from different companies and manage to stay independent. You just don't want to have one company having total influence.

AFAIK, the foundation only does "other stuff", and the development is fully funded by the corporation (i.e. Google), so you can't really sponsor Firefox development at all, except by buying unrelated services like Pocket and the VPN (and who knows where your money goes then).

"I will never pay for a browser"

...in the current market, which was created by companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Google, who subsidized their browsers through other income.

If Google is broken up, Apple will still have Safari and Microsoft will still have Edge. There is no reason to believe the market for non-$0 browsers will suddenly manifest absent a Google-integrated Chrome.

The people have already spoken with their wallets on this topic.

Microsoft gave up on maintaining their own browser engine (Trident) almost a decade ago, and therefore are now dependent on Chrome's engine (Blink). Since then there have only been three independent browser engines: WebKit (Safari), Gecko (Firefox), and Blink (Chrome, Chromium, Opera, Brave, Edge, ...). Maintaining a performant + featureful + safe browser engine is a massive task, requiring many expensive engineers -- and Blink/V8 in particular has a lot of complexity (sea-of-nodes repr, their weird DSL, ...) that other engines don't. So if Google dropped Chrome, Microsoft would have a hard time picking it up, but would need to if they wanted to keep providing Edge.

Good point. That suggests a significant nonzero possibility that unless MS decides it's strategically meaningful enough to them to maintain a foot in the door on the browser space (much like Google chose to do), they might abandon the project, which would severely crimp the money-faucet for maintenance of the core engine.

This could, hypothetically, lead to a collapse of that ecosystem into an also-ran, in which case all Apple has to do is invest more in supporting their browser on OSs they don't own and we could end up with full browser hegemony... "If it doesn't work on Safari, it doesn't work on the Internet."

> Without Google subsidizing Chrome, a real competitive market for browsers might emerge

Without Chrome there will be only be Safari and Edge

I don't that Edge would survive without Chrome. I think it would be more fair to say that without Chrome, there will only be Safari, Firefox, Ladybird, and Verso. Yes, the latter two aren't ready yet, but I get they would gain fast traction in Chrome's absence.

An unfortunate additional consequence of this antitrust lawsuit is that it is likely it will end The Google payments to Mozilla every year. That's 80% of the revenue, so the odds of them being a viable business afterwards are low.

So I think we can cross that off the list as well and conclude that in the short to medium term, if Chrome went away it would mean simple web hegemony for Apple.

I'm a bit more hopeful about Mozilla. I think there would be a collapse of the business without the Google cash flow, but expect the browser itself would be continued by the community for its importance.

I have about as much faith in the open source community maintaining a machine as complicated as a full browser without significant corporate backing as I have in OpenOffice displacing Microsoft Office in my lifetime, but hope springs eternal.

Consider that KHTML, the grandfather of just about every modern engine that isn't Gecko, was a fairly small open source project. Ladybird is open source and surprisingly usable for its youth and single developer.

Speaking from personal experience, I write my best code when I'm frustrated by the absence of something I need. I'm sure many others here are the same way. If a sufficient fire is lit under the community to make the web continue to work in the absence of the old guard, I'm pretty sure it'll happen.

You're forgetting Dillo, lynx, elinks and NetSurf.

Dillo and elinks don't count due to not supporting modern HTML, but yes to lynx and NetSurf.

Safari may also be facing the same issues; even before this, the rules about browsers in iOS were (to my non-lawyer eyes) suspiciously similar in market impact to Microsoft's Internet Explorer in Windows 95, for which they got in trouble.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

But Edge will not be the only alternative; Firefox does still exist, and the Chromium project has forked into several other browsers besides Edge.

I dunno, man - a competitive market for browsers likely involves the browser itself inserting a bunch of ads all over the place. It becomes another axis for enshittification, rather than a mostly-neutral window into the web. It's not enough to hope that a business model appears... Ask any journalist.

> It's an interesting hypothesis, but it's entirely possible that separated from Google, Chrome is either not a viable business model (browsers don't make money on their own)

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.

But Google isn’t allowed to pay to be the default search engine anymore. So that revenue stream is gone.

You're imagining things. Google hasn't been prevented from that at all, yet, and may not be. We are discussing remedies here that have not happened yet. You cannot discount one possible remedy because of the existence of another possible remedy.

It still shows the market value of browsers, even if unrealized or illegal this value could be exploited differently

Would they be allowed, or would that be more anti-competitive behavior?

The more I think about your example the more it is a viable business model as you have the incentive to make people bid for the data, rather than defaulting it to Google, which is the point of the monopoly issue.

I agree with your premise, but you're example is unfortunate. The manifest v3 thing was due to an API change to improve performance by pulling the renderer out of the critical path for network requests. Adblockers can still block ads (as in not show them), but they can't throttle or block requests.

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.

> The manifest v3 thing was due to an API change to improve performance by pulling the renderer out of the critical path for network requests.

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.

If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck it’s a duck. They used the “improved security” as an excuse while leaving other just as big holes in their security. Show me how AdGuard or ublock origin abused the current system in v2

> Show me how AdGuard or ublock origin abused the current system in v2

They didn't, but other malicious extensions did.

In that case, it should be a permission thing that a user can switch on for certain extensions.

It currently is, and it's easy to trick users into switching it on.

I think the third party cookie thing is due to their other antitrust lawsuite in advertising.

They've used the UK regulators as a very convenient excuse. But realistically the problem is that Google's DoubleClick has a monopoly on both sides of the ad marketplace. If that wasn't the case, the regulators would not have a problem with Chrome deprecating cookies.

So Google has maneuvered into this position skillfully and then blamed the regulars for not continuing on a pro-privacy path, while conveniently that also makes them the most ad money...

If you believe that I got a bridge to sell you. Look at the things they were up to even back in 2017:

https://x.com/jason_kint/status/1821558368659456399

And thats what they dared put into writing.

> Example: if Chrome was separated from Google, they won't have as much of an incentive to push back against adblockers

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.

The “intangibles” you reference have a name. It’s called vertical integration.

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.

This is insane you're getting downvoted. Someone needs to pay for the development of Chrome. That's just the reality.

How is Chrome going to make money as a standalone company? I have no idea, but it probably aligns with your guess

Also, websearch would equally not be able to survive on its own. We know it from the fact that the competitors in the search field that put quality over ads, are doing it as a paid service.

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.

Manifest v3 exists to increase security and privacy, not to break ad blockers. I suspect that an independent Chrome would implement it even faster because they don't have to worry about the perception that they're doing it for ads.

Ads and search are the two businesses that most directly collude and which could both survive and thrive independently.

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.

> Ads and search are the two businesses that most directly collude and which could both survive and thrive independently.

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.

I’m skeptical that Google search contains any search results. So maybe that part of their business is already dead and they just need an honest rebranding to ad search.

> I’m skeptical that Google search contains any search results. So maybe that part of their business is already dead and they just need an honest rebranding to ad search.

I don't know about you, but I remember the time before Google where search engines openly offered paid search listings.

Google's search quality has declines over the years, but I don't think we're at the point you're talking about yet.

I'm skeptical of us ever being able to run the required real world experiment to prove your point of view without Google being broken up and search split out as it's own thing.

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.

Why wouldn’t Google search be viable if it could negotiate rates with multiple ad networks? IMO there would be more net revenue generated from competition in the ad space.

1. Doesn’t that bring us back to a monopoly? One dominant seller of ad space with many buyers? Do we just recursively split out the ad sales and then ask search to sell ads?

2. Why is everyone here so convinced that ad rates will go up with this structure? Isn’t part of the reason for Google’s conviction that they are charging too much for ads?

Personally, I think Search should be a public, not private, effort. Indexing the internet should be a global endeavor beneficial to world governments in unison. The issue is that the potential for censorship is rife, but I think including many govs on a board might solve this.

Google has already specifically deranked Russian government media and media promoting the lab leak theory during COVID. Obviously China would require the index to exclude any mention of Tiananmen Square. If it's anything like the UN, Jerusalem Post will be deranked in favor of Al Jazeera on every search relating to the Middle East.

I just think it's a complete non-starter for any government to allow foreign governments to decide everything your citizens see. If they don't bow to your brand of censorship, you're going to pull out.

You could contribute to the solution by spinning up an indexer for Yacy.

I really don't see how is it too late, the incentives are so huge that competition will bid for the ads.

Splitting ads and search is a nonstarter. Ads on the search page are very different from ads on other pages since search ads can leverage information retrieved during the search. Ads on other pages have to use contextual or remarketing signals, with much poorer results.

I don’t think I follow. Whatever the technical integration between Google search and Google ads, why could it not be done with multiple, competing ad networks?

At the very least, spinning off individual businesses prevents self-preferencing. Google can right now leverage its dominance in one area to increase market share in another. For example, if I load my GMail account in a browser other than Chrome, Google will "helpfully" suggest that I change my default browser to the "recommended" Chrome. This behavior makes it harder for upstarts to get a foot in the door across a wide range of products — by removing these synergies we reduce the grip Google has across all its lines of business.

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.

People don't realize, you couldn't just buy a phone - you had to use the one provided by your monopoly phone company. It was only after breakup that there could exist an ecosystem of phone peripherals like answerphones, direct-attach modems (this is why acoustic couplers were a thing), cordless phones, etc.

I’m frankly shocked that Google continues to think the juice on that annoying, constant Chrome-in-Gmail popup is worth even a marginal additional anti-trust attention squeeze.

It's worth a lot. People regularly fall out of Google's funnel and they must get them back. You think every user that switches to Firefox is a user Google's willing to walk away from?

There are probably only a small number of services that could successfully spin off on their own, but a lot of the value is in integration, which as others point out is also how some things seem 'free'.

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.

Microsoft for a good long while made money on two things: Office and Windows. You could break them up into "Office", "Windows", and any combination of "everything else", and for the most part what would happen is that the Office and Windows parts would make more money proportionally, and most if not all of the "everything else" would die. Even products that could nominally have survived on their own if they had grown up on their own would die because by the time the corporate culture adapted to the new realities they'd mostly already be dead.

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.

> how is search getting funded?

With ads, by making deals with ad brokers. Its just that they will be able to shop around rather than using their own in house one

Sure, but why should we think that those deals will be better than what “Search Google” has with “Ads Google” today?

Whatever revenue is attributed to Search today is just the result of internal horse-trading, perhaps augmented with some accountant’s estimation of “fair market value” for ad space in search results. After the breakup anything is fair game. Maybe the ad broker keeps 95% of ad revenue.

And, if you believe that Google has been using its monopoly to raise ad prices, why shouldn’t prices fall?

If things are broken up, we will get open standards for integration. The value of open standard would be much higher than today. Think how XMPP might have evolved if everyone had an interest in keeping it open.

Search needs to be a utility.

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.

Chrome and Android are particularly interesting to me. What would splitting those projects off from Google possibly look like?

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.

An interesting read on the matter comes from Cory Doctorow (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-shat...). The uniform business here is ads. Google controls the supply, the demand and the marketplace, effectively setting whatever price they want and whatever quality of service they want. Smaller business cannot enter the market as competitors, while customers (here the people wanting to put ads on the internet) are chocked out.

Then if you add that Chrome enforces how browser experiences are designed and how tracking is done, you see the problem emerging.

One of the potential remedies is to require Google to open source their crawling data. This should make it easier for others who want to build a competing search engine.

Surely the crawling is the easiest part? The AI goldrush has seen dozens of new players gobbling up the entire internet.

The hard part is turning that staggering amount of unstructured data into a useful search engine, and in particular fighting off black-hat SEO.

Websites these days are often pretty hostile to crawling aside from the Googlebot. Other crawlers are asked not to by the robots.txt, fully blocked, or put through captchas.

https://knuckleheads.club/

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/14/technology/how-google-dom...

Good point. Now I think about it Google is actively contributing to that with their Reddit deal which has them blocking all scrapers besides Googlebot, even known legit search engine crawlers like Bingbot.

> Surely the crawling is the easiest part? The AI goldrush has seen dozens of new players gobbling up the entire internet.

The AI goldrush also has sites scrambling to block any crawlers other than a short list of approved search engines. Even before this mess Googlebot running on Google IPs often received special treatment.

Search itself is still a hard problem but one that can be solved independently. Crawling on the other hand requires websites to cooperate and due to Google's size enough won't care to bother with anyone else.

That's a pipe dream and really achieves nothing other than hurting Google.

If they break up the ad business it could be helpful. Otherwise search and youtube are like you say synergistic and there is no obvious way to break them up.

Keep in mind that without the Ad business, most of Google's products cannot exist. Search gets paid by Ads, same with YouTube. Most of the free product are just Ad delivery platforms, and they are all pretty much on the verge of losing money as-is. The Ad business itself has margin enough to cover that, and without a set of outlets like those services, it wouldn't be able to exist.

Vimeo has tried a different approach, but it's hardly in the same league as YouTube.

YouTube has been profitable in recent years -- thanks to an investment in hardware transcoding reducing costs. So that is potentially separable.

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.

The larger point is youTube should sell its own ads. As should search. Double click as an agency that sells ads for other websites shouldn't be allowed to sell to the previous google properties, and vice versa.

Remedies don’t always necessitate a breakup.

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.

I don't know... Would you call the Kodak "moment" a breakup? Or a failure to move quickly into digital photography...

And, indeed, there's a case to be made that there's net consumer harm to breaking up the synergy.

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.

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