US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

Absolutely not discounting all of that; there are some pretty strong parallels between the data you can infer on a person based on their gmail graph versus their fb messenger graph, for example.

Meta has a lot more "self-revealed-preference" data, though. Which of $thesePosts did you engage with? Does this pattern continue if we mix in $someOtherVariable? How long did you dwell on that one post before like/dis-like? Are you more likely to come back and spend time here if we tell you that $thisPerson has commented on your post instead of $thisOtherPerson? ... etc.

I think only YouTube serves as a plausible source of dwell time in the "at what part of $thisVideo did you click the like button" sense. If you don't use YouTube or use it signed out then it's (slightly) harder for google to attribute your actions to you. Facebook doesn't really have _anything_ that can be accessed without logging in.

https://www.npr.org/2024/04/01/1242019127/google-incognito-m...

But there have been businesses based on lead pipes for drinking water plumbing, asbestos for residential insulation, and so on. You could make an argument that these technologies enabled many businesses as well. That doesn’t mean we should allow lead pipes for drinking water or to use asbestos in residential homes.

I think a lot of these businesses could succeed using alternative promotional strategies. Some of them might suffer because the owners have more money than time and advertising is a good tradeoff in that case, but overall good products are still going to do well.

IME this is only true about drop shippers and similar business models. The vast majority of small businesses are, as a rule, awful at advertising. The few ads I see they are very poorly put together.

Even when they manage to get people to the business, small businesses are almost inevitably awful about maintaining their web presence, which makes it moot. Here's an example thread about such from the local reddit. Including some hostile responses from, charitably, overwhelmed small businesses about how you need to call to confirm a price https://old.reddit.com/r/Calgary/comments/1ewlsib/open_lette...)

Google ads was (and is) incredibly good for niche companies, since it makes it possible to advertise to people who are interested in your product instead of the general public.

So if you sell Warhammer paraphernalia, you can buy ads to be shown only to people who have searched for Warhammer related words, rather than "everyone in Wisconsin".

This lowers ad costs by many orders of magnitude, and makes a lot of businesses possible that simply couldn't exist before.

I'd want some damn good reasons to go back to the old ways!

With regard to modern advertising, you are absolutely correct!

That said, I fully understand and agree with the usefulness of advertising. What I'm against is the modern state of advertising. If all ads were simply contextual based on the content being shown and not the user, I don't think many of us would have problems with the ads industry.

What people don't like is the current advertising business, which is intrusive, a blackhole of privacy concerns, rarely useful, and full of abusive companies (clickbait sites, for instance) that exist on the back of scummy behavior that hurts the advertiser (costing them money) and annoys/infuriates the consumer.

They don't like having an ad-free 7usd Netflix/Amazon/etc account that is now 12usd with ads, or 22usd without ads and the same privileges.

I utterly despise how so much of the Internet has been gentrified and sanitized to appeal to advertisers at the expense of communities and culture.

No, they're an amazing benefit to your business. I'm sure your candles are great, but society doesn't need them (your candles, specifically) to survive. People would continue to find candles without your advertisements. Maybe candles that aren't as nice as yours, but people will get by just fine, and wouldn't know (or care) what they were missing.

> Advertisements can be good (when the business is good and genuinely wants you to know about good new product)

Advertising is emotional manipulation. Why do I need to know about good products, even genuinely good ones? If I have an actual, articulated need for something, I can go out and look for it. But if I'm not actually looking for something, but someone advertises to me and convinces me to buy their thing, likely I would have gotten along just fine without it.

> An optimist would say there are more good than bad. I suppose you wouldn't consider yourself an optimist.

False dichotomy. Whether there are more good companies that honestly try to hawk their wares, or more bad companies that try to trick people into buying their garbage, is irrelevant. Advertising is a blight on society.

The thing that really makes my stomach churn, though, is that if I ran a company, I'd absolutely advertise. It's the prisoner's dilemma. Because advertising exists and others will use it, I can't opt out of using it myself. I feel super gross about this fact.

You would rather ruin everyone else than have a functional economy? That says a lot about you.

The only thing the government will be interested in is the spying which they aren't allowed to do, but unaccountable corporations are allowed to do. As people become more aware of this it means google becomes less and less useful.

The break up occurred in the 80's. and since then through mergers/acquisitions, they have re-joined.

So we have monopolies again.

Somehow we have lost the will-power in government to impose the needed actions to ensure a free market. Like also denying mergers that would create monopolies.

Like how was Ticketmaster even allowed to happen. We let it buy its competitors and now it is a monopoly.

https://www.businessofapps.com/data/google-play-statistics/

https://www.statista.com/statistics/444476/google-play-annua...

The fact is that with the Spectre mitigations added to Chrome, the performance of networking with manifest v2 was bad. Having to keep sending every network request through 3 different processes just in case there is a plugin (uses by the minority of users) that wants to filter the requests before they are made.

Of course, blocking resource fetches like that could have easily been detected by any server that cares about it, and the interaction with service workers was...weird.

With manifest v3 you can still block ads. You can remove them from the DOM, you can make them invisible, you can replace them. You just can't programmatically decide which resources to filter - only a declarative model for resource filtering is supported.

But I agree that default search with being Google must have heavily blocked competition.

Comparing how much they pay Mozilla and Apple to maintain search, it would be reasonable to estimate Chrome’s implementation to save them $1b a year

But I highly doubt they make any back given > 1k people work on it

Not in the US they don't; it's a minority share, split across many different manufacturers who all have their own flavor of Android, their own (crappy) app stores and pre-loaded crapware apps, etc. Apple has a clear majority of the US smartphone market (and it's a vertical monopoly, with Apple controlling the phone hardware and the app store and not allowing any alternatives), but no one's looking at breaking them up.

>I think these two being open source is a major reason why they have been so successfully adopted.

iOS isn't open-source, and it has a commanding majority of the US smartphone market.

Chrome synergizes with the rest of Google's portfolio.

People eventually recognise a good idea, you don't need a well funded research group to have one. You need an environment where it's plausible for the new thing to work and be profitable.

Breaking up a giant like google seems that it would make it easier to promote an new idea, as it has less risk of being crushed by the interests of a tangentially related company.

Nationalizing anything is an absolute disaster for innovation. What innovations did Aeroflot develop?

The free market and a thriving entrepreneur ecosystem creates innovation. The profit motive is a powerful one. Taking risks to invent the next big thing is what drives entrepreneurship in the first place. Governments are corrupt, inefficient, and don’t get punished by the markets when they fail.

This idea that governments are democratic is a myth. I didn’t vote for tethered bottle caps in the EU. I didn’t vote to send money to fund wars. In the U.S., one can vote, but the policies that actually happen are the result of what lobbyists spent the most money buying the relevant congressmen.

The answer to this is smaller government. The most democratic thing there is is the free market. Everyone can vote or not vote with their money. And the results are seen nearly immediately and companies have to respond.

If we could choose to pay taxes on a line-item basis, that would be the most democratic thing ever. Because a rep that you voted for on one issue and is wrong on another issue gets his “wrong” initiative defunded and his “right” initiative funded. We should bring free market principles to government not government principles to the free market.

>Innovation requires reliable funding, such as monopoly profits or government funding.

we have more than enough angel vestors, normal investing, bank loans, etc. to get any innovation off the ground. And I think people forget that the original innovation hubs for big adacement came from Acedemia. Now retrofitted to be a recruiting wing for private businesses who pay to capture that knowledge.

The only downside here is that they then cannot proceed to offer that product for free for a decade to capture a market before squeezing said market they captured. Is that a downside for people who don't/can't pay? Yes. But that is historically how every business has operated. Figure out how to optimize costs so they can profit, and balance it against the market you are targeting. Big tech has forgotten about that and simply throws money around like it's monopoly money (and it kind of is).

We need a huge overhaul of how all this works. Ironically enough by going "backwards" in a few areas.

The way I see this argument is "Innovation requires an institution devoted to innovation, which requires reliable funding such as monopolistic or taxpayer"

As you say, on the 1-5 year horizon that's not true. Most successful startups are innovative, we need to look no further than Google itself with its pagerank innovation dominating search. Most universities have innovative researchers, and indeed explicitly set up innovative centers called "incubators" - but of course this is an example of government funding.

One of the first questions is what innovation requires 1-5 years. What about aha moment! innovation? Pagerank is an "aha moment" idea that takes a few months to demonstrate. There are more aha moment innovations than "grind for more than 5 years" I feel. Most of the "grind for 5+ years" innovations have yet to pay off e.g. fusion, super batteries, room temperature semiconductors.

A monopoly offers stable funding for some institution, but at what cost? No capitalistic incentive to improve product? Excess pricing because the consumer has no choice? Surely there are more fair ways to structure this.

Government control would destroy tech, government is not made for it. Look at Amtrak. A nationalized google would wither and get eaten alive by.. ... innovative search startups (themselves without research institutes funded by monopolies), or startups in one of the dozens of fields where Google has spread its tendrils.

Microsoft in its prime is a great example of monopolistic problems. They were a OS monopoly and kept leveraging that to smack down competition wherever they wanted to expand into. Google almost didn't make chrome - the CEO at the time was frightened that Microsoft would annihilate google if google should make a new browser. The monopoly engine allows for ease of dominating more and more industries through lateral growth. This all-encompassing destruction of captalistic price minimization, alone, is why we need to break down big tech monopolies such as google. An example of a "good citizen" non monopolistic company in this setting is Netflix - there's huge competition in entertainment field, they have innovated streaming tech, their profits are meritorious, and they haven't suffocated other fields like other big tech i.e. there's no Netflix phone, no Netflix video game console, no Netflix social media.

The other health of the Netflix / media ecosystem is it's not a duopoly. There's Netflix, there's Apple TV (hello, suffocating new industries!), there's Disney, there's paramount, there's hulu, and so on. This is what competition should look like. This is classic innovation in the capitalist sector, through brutal competition. We not only need to bust up monopolies but to consider duopolies or more generally - busting up groups of companies that collude to price or feature fix as holders of the majority of the market, which is what many duopolies are.

1. Google is fined/broken up due (in part) to paying for the default search engine position.

2. In the newly broken off chrome company, they auction the default search engine position.

3. Google cannot bid on it. So I guess Microsoft is going to win that position? Who else is going to pay for it?

I can't imagine this is what happens. This would just make the DoJ look absolutely foolish and would basically put the DoJ in the position of being Microsoft's personal attack dog. But on the other hand, what else could happen? It's still ridiculous even if it's anyone other than Microsoft that is the winning bidder.

My biggest question is how long they can stay at a handful if they become popular. The increased burden of security patches alone would likely turn that handful into a small army.

Security through obscurity is often mocked (for good reason), but it actually does work in cases like this as long as you don't reach Android's scale.

Most browsers have consolidated over time because we are constantly updating web standards and bar for security is so high. On top of that everything has to be insanely backward compatible

WebGPU is a good example. Implementing that securely in a nightmare

No? It used to be IE and Mozilla, and now it's Edge, Chrome, and Mozilla. Opera existed then and now, and probably more people use it now, but it's still small enough that no one cares. I suppose you could make a point about Edge using Chrome's engine, but that's because the IE one sucked and the new one Microsoft made for Edge sucked so they eventually switched to using Chrome's. But the idea that the browser market was somehow better back in the day is hilarious and wrong.

>There used to be a lot more mobile operating systems out there, too.

Not really. I suppose early on during the smartphone era, blackberry was still around, but they mostly lost out due to Apple finally getting decent MDM, and not bothering to improve their product after a while, than the fact that Android was growing in popularity. Microsoft entered kinda late and never really developed their phone OS enough and eventually gave up, but that's because their product wasn't good enough, not because of anything the others were doing to stop them.

My subjective experiences tell me that, just like the early days of the microcomputer revolution, anything is possible with talented nerds who don't have to worry about grinding at their day jobs to survive. Early markets are often defined by those with the privilege to innovate absent the need to work to survive, and sharing the fruits of their labors with the masses because that's their entire intent - and that being able to live off of that income instead of a corporate gig was a nice bonus.

If you want more innovation, focus on eliminating societal precarity instead of slashing regulations or growing monopolies.

It'd be ridiculous if Epic sued Pepsi and Coca Cola for something about their Soda and the same court ruled against Pepsi but for Coca Cola.

The issue is that these are near monopolies, so the market isn't efficient.

In other words, if those companies didn't have monopoly power, other businesses (or non-commercial entities) might be able to afford to hire some of these people as well, which might be beneficial overall for innovation.

That's the economic argument and it's pretty clean imo.

But as far as I'm concerned personally, I would really prefer to live in a world in which smart people work on human flourishing... rather than whatever that is.

What is the possible societal-positive outcome of another social media filter? Or improved ad targeting algorithm? Or more attention-grabbing social media feed?

It was, but not any more. The crazy capital investments often come from private companies as well. And that's not a problem. They're spending their money rather than your money.

Your citizens/consumers/users are utterly dependent on your services and your goodwill, and you have an absolute, unquestionable, non-negotiable lifetime monopoly on the means necessary to exist in a modern, always-connected society. You can provide as little, terrible service as you want, because if anyone complains, you shadowban them from being able to exist in society, and they die, which is much easier than actually making good changes. And you don't even have to go to the effort of legal kabuki theater now, because you are the law.

If this sounds absurd, remember that power increases sociopathy and that bunker bros contemplate bomb-collars to ensure the compliance of their security forces after the apocalyptic "event" they're engineering, even if it truly is inadvertent, and in the meantime we have Epstein and child miners in the Congo and social media companies running world-scale psychological experiments and sometimes they pay a little fine for it to show how sorry they are for enabling one genocide or another.

The two most likely outcomes are a 1984-like state of the world, with a contrived stalemate because no one bloc can gain an edge, or, more worryingly, a 1984-like world state, because one of these blocs managed to either destroy or devour the others.

They started doing public long distance on their own (railroad) network in the 1970s. They were restrained (and frequently sued by) AT&T. The breakup opened the floodgates. They were sold like a half dozen times in the 80s.

But, MCI was AFAIK the largest early fiber pioneer.

I did a search for books about building the internet infrastructure and it turned up some other recommendations but I haven't read them so can't vouch for quality or content:

Network Geeks: How They Built the Internet by Brian E Carpenter

The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim Wu

Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet by Andrew Blum

How the Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone by Brian McCullough

Maybe someone else here has read them and can comment.

I honestly would love it we would ditch surveillance capitalism and went back to a simpler option of paying for products and services. I think that essentially all of the complaints you here about Google (their lack of any responsiveness/customer support, their constant spying on users, the constant "Google graveyard" of discontinued products, their current corporate ossification, etc.) can be directly linked to the fact that users don't pay for their products.

You’re repeating someones posthoc thesis as obvious fact.

It’s probably a good point to share. Let’s just have a little more skepticism and openness to other analysis.

When you search for "vacuum cleaner", you either want online stores or you may want a local store. In either case it's a business query rather than looking for reviews or specs.

What's really polluting search, including Google, is the on-demand content generation based on your query. It's a sea of flotsam.

Look at any two sided market: Amazon/Etsy's third party sellers also want to be at the top, and there are bad actors trying to scam the intermediary and the customer. The same low friction onboarding that allows the company to succeed as an intermediary is also facilitating the fraud. Merchants can be fraudsters, advertisers can be fraudsters, users can be fraudsters producing fake clicks. There's economic incentives everywhere. See the relatively recent news of spotify getting generated songs, which are then played by fake listeners.

The companies are entering this situations with their eyes wide open. It's a necessary problem when you want to be an intermediary at a large enough scale. And if you don't have the scale, the per-interaction costs are really high, and your company gets beaten by someone with an easier onboarding funnel.

But the funding model is also extremely blessed: you have a stream of people telling you every page load what they're interested in at that exact moment, and it's not hard to match them up with advertisers for those keywords.

And arguably the SEO parasitism problem is worsened by their monopoly -- to the extent that optimizing a site for one engine deoptimizes it on on others, the stronger the lead engine #1 has the more incentive there is to game it.

I switched to DuckDuckGO about 1.5/2 years back, and it was awesome at the time. But it has gradually gotten worse to the point where I @google search pretty much 70% of the time. Now that could be me being in a bit in the honeymoon phase with DDG at the time and it wore off, or maybe it's actually been getting worse.

My pet, unproven, theory. Is that DDG has been "improving" but that's been making the search worse somehow. Perhaps the context and "fanciness" of a search is not something we all value and that's what we're experiencing.

Edit: Per Wiki, Google has also bought and killed the following search engines/services that nobody has heard of: Outride, Kaltix, Plink, Like.com, Orion, Metaweb, Awkan Technologies.

Arguably this is not their fault - I really wish iOS/MacOS Safari let you set a custom search engine instead of picking from a fixed list.

"Are they actually planting these trees?" and "How would I possibly verify?"

"Does Microsoft actually pay them? All I'm doing is clicking? Is that worth enough?"

"How does anybody verify, and how is it not just an optimization for Ecosia to farm clicks for money? Chinese/Indian/Bangladeshi/Nigerian/MechTurk click farms don't cost that much. Seen the prices on MechTurk?"

[1] https://www.ecosia.org/

It uses google search behind the scenes. Among other search providers.

The links points however are a bit ridiculous, they're entitled to their opinion but may be surprised to find people, at the businesses they use, have opinions that differ to theirs, and these businesses aren't always well-oiled machines.

After reading the founders thoughts, if they were any sort of sizable company they would immediately have a GDPR violation. "emails and any info you give to use voluntarily (search prefs) is not PII and as such you can't have your data back." :0

MapReduce would be invented anyway (I implemented it from scratch before learning of it’s existence).

Chrome is just a slightly upgraded Firefox (and novadays Safari is just as good if not better with ai)

PageRank was what gave Google monopoly, it’s not a result of monopoly.

Go - I can give you that. ProtoBuf - not my field, but isn’t it just a format that someone else would develop to fill a niche? (unlike say mp3 that had new compression algorithms baked in)

Maps - I can give you that. Some people might argue that it was an acquisition, but without Google’s muscle, Street View would not be feasible.

- Providing a free alternative to Microsoft’s monopolized office suite and desktop OS

- Provide a free alternative to Apple’s mobile OS, spurring a revolution in access to the internet for the world’s poor

- Provide free global maps with streetview sights

- Provide a free to access video platform with invaluable educational resources that allows millions of creators to make a living and that likely wouldn’t exist save for Google’s monumental investments and ability to sustain years of losses

- Research given away for free that ignited the current AI revolution

- Research given away for free that is revolutionizing medicine and drug development

In sum, truly a horrible thing they’ve done

Google is an advertising company, search is a by-product and has been for a long time.

OpenAI has raised almost $18bn to date [1]. That puts it in the top 10 corporate R&D spenders globally, ahead of Intel and the entirety of big pharma [2]. (And OpenAI's gross margins for its API business are estimated around 40% [3]. Standard fare for tech. If anything, OpenAI subsidising its business with Apple and ChatGPT is behaving more like a tech giant than a start-up.)

The top of that list are the big 5 American tech companies, spending about $200bn annually on R&D. By coincidence, that's roughly the pace of U.S. VC spend [4]. The depth of American private capital markets make a solid case against favouring housing these long-shot bets inside tech giants. (Particularly absent non-compete and IP reform.)

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/02/openai-raises-6-6b-and-is-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_by_research_...

[3] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/a-peek-behind-openai...

[4] https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/ai-deals-lift-us-ve...

It's not about building and owning the next best thing, it's about preventing someone else building and owning the next best thing.

TCP/IP?

Of course, consumers cannot possibly estimate the cost of ads. They can't tell how much of the stuff they buy is because they're influenced, or how many years of life they throw away by watching ads in the long run. Ads could be costing them 1 dollar a year, or maybe 1,000. But they don't know, and they sure as hell won't be paying 5 bucks for a product if there's a "free" ad version.

Hey! You just bought a filter for your air purifier! Want to buy a new one! For a different purifier you don't own!

No, talk to me in six months.

If gmail disappears, people could move to another provider. Etc.

Fine-grained permissions are a good thing, even though they do unfortunately make things more challenging for developers.

Because it's a bad faith argument meant to dismiss all context surrounding the situation to be a reductive 'gotcha' point. Anti consumer practices are still harmful even if people willingly opt into them, and there's no cute soliloquy for you to publicly muse onto us here that would be able to suggest otherwise to dissipate the sentiment.

Your parent poster commented on the nature of learned helplessness to an obvious problem by framing it as leading a horse to water. They were talking about people like you.

You can’t get turn-by-turn directions because they don’t (consistently) have things like lane permeability, turn restrictions, directionality, etc. You can’t get accurate ETAs because they don’t have speed limits or free flow speeds. And traffic data of course. Unless things have changed, routing class and surface type are also unreliable, so a shortest-path graph algo will take you down neighborhood streets or unmaintained roads.

There is a ton of under-the-hood map data, invisible to the end user, that you need to have to be able to deliver a modern phone navigation experience.

MapQuest doesn't have any of this stuff either. Apple Maps is probably the closest, but it falls very far short of what Google Maps can do.