Google threatened with being broken up by US
bbc.com
bbc.com
If you took away the firehouse of money from search I'm sure a lot of those other parts of the business would find a way to make some incredible products. Think of everything that came out of the Baby Bells
What are the most noteworthy accomplishments of the Baby Bells?
In hindsight maybe they should have split up horizontally, nationalizing the natural monopoly components/infrastructure (ex: the physical lines)? It's interesting to see what looks like a reconsolidation of wireless now, I wonder what the future will look like.
It’s not just search. They make such vast amounts of money because they hold a monopoly across several layers of the stack: web browsers (65% market share on desktop, 67% market share on mobile), internet search (90% market share), and internet advertising (AdSense and Ads together hold 67%).
Interestingly, this dominance isn’t the result of fair competition, but rather acquisitions. Google was allowed to buy YouTube, Android, and numerous online advertising companies. You can see the list there https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
I believe most of these acquisitions should have been blocked by the FTC or DoJ, but they weren’t, which has allowed Google to become a vertically integrated monopoly.
One of the things I think a lot about with open source is that maybe not every amazing idea is profitable (or profitable in the current business climate).
It may be that some ideas have to be subsidized. Google subsidizes them with money from ads. But it also costs them a lot to maintain their monopoly, and the monopoly and the ads are IMO harmful to consumers.
So I think we need some more ways of funding digital public goods. I think governments can and should (and in fact do) play a role, but I think there need to be other sources as well.
Arguably the reputation Google has for killing its projects is a signal that they have more good ideas than they have funding capacity to sustain them. I realize it's also perf/promo driven. But it's also the pattern you see with smart people with ADHD where they start great projects but don't have the resources to continue them all. So we'll have more and cooler software if we find better ways of funding open source.
if this is true, it's very temporary and very fickle. It is well known that Google rewards (1) big, new initiatives over maintaining long-running projects, and (2) things that power the cash machine over anything else.
Neither of these are good for the OSS ecosystem.
*with the usual hijinks where a high-end device requires a bigger license fee than a budget phone.
I suppose it's possible that GAPPS would become licensed but the OS for free, though I could see the bean counters having a big problem with that.
The difference in the housing market is that instead of being 28-year-olds who live in apartments, all those MTV Googlers are 38-year-olds with families who are sitting on a couple million in stock compensation each.
All of the broken up companies created, the Googlettes if you will, would be flush with senior devs and researchers, many of them somewhat well to do and likely with savings.
Many of those people will spread like the wind, create new startups, and will require a house with garage to house said startup.
The MVRA and agents will be happy indeed.
And we may get a new barbershop band out of it too.
Maybe Google will even be forced to provide the dreaded "Customer Support" (of reasonable standard) for all of their products and services too. :D
Sorry, that BBC article reads like it was written by a nerd on HN or something. Google/Alphabet, first and foremost, is the largest online advertiser via its acquisitions of YouTube, DoubleClick, and others, in addition to selling ad placement on Google Search via AdWords, plus a growing number of consumer portals for price comparisons etc. integrated with Google Search (leaving out tracking your activity on Android devices, Google's cloud business, and Books/scholar). The immediate antitrust perspective starts by looking at Alphabet/Google subsidiaries both providing search results and ads on the pages listed in search results (and to a lesser degree even by pushing Google services via Google Search). This is what had ruined the web.
US antitrust is a lame duck anyway since it allowed the aquisitions of DoubleClick and YouTube in the first place, as well as the aquisition of WhatsApp by Facebook. The US stance of protecting business and turning a blind eye as long as US online hegemony and intelligence superiority is served isn't helping their case against TikTok today. With the antitrust enforcement's glacial pace, it's not clear if and when a breakup will take place to help the deranged market or if it's just political theater anyway, so other countries are well advised to take their own antitrust actions.
So the government wants "structural relief" here meaning to break up Google. But isn't the remedy simply tp make such payments illegal? That's certainly one argument I would make were I Google's lawyers. In addition to just appealing the finding outright of course.
Now I've previously said (and I stand by this) that making such payments illegal would help Google maintain its search dominance. Why? Because Firefox, Apple, etc could no longer extort Apple to make Google the default when that's what most users want anyway.
Mozilla already tried making Bing the default. They went back to Google eventually, probably because Google paid them, but I would guess the user response was probably negative too. That's just a guess however.
Those of us who are old enough will remember the Microsoft antitrust trial and how that really went nowhere in the end. And that was for something that was profoundly much more harmful. There is such a larger barrier to entry to installing a new browser.
And that's the thing: this will take a decade or longer to actually play out. Any administration in the meantime could not have the same resolve or otherwise choose to settle with Google in some form of consent decree that limits their behaviour for a period of time.
So I don't see this going anywhere realistically.
I doubt that people who would never think to change their default search engine would complain about the choice of search engines. Google vastly overpays for the privilege of being the default search engine because the existence of firefox protects their browser monopoly. Microsoft gets no such benefit, so I assume they wanted to reduce their payment to a more rational value 4 or 5 orders of magnitude smaller than the half-billion from Google.
Not sure about that. A lot of people really couldn't care less if their search results came from Google, Bing, Duck Duck Go.
If you ask them, most of them would probably say Google since that's the only search engine they know.
But if you just replaced Google with Duck Duck Go, I'm sure most people wouldn't bother to switch it back.
Defaults are very powerful, otherwise Google wouldn't pay billions to keep them the default.
https://apnews.com/article/amazon-antitrust-lawsuit-ftc-case...
A good internet search engine would deprioritize low quality stuff like ad-infested clones of Wikipedia, stackoverflow, and similar SEO generated or AI generated web sites. Google won’t do that because it would affect their income from online ads. Ever wondered why google’s search quality is declining over the years? https://mashable.com/article/google-search-low-quality-resea...
They have a similar conflict of interest for web browsers. I use Samsung web browser on my phone which asked me “would you like to enable the ad blocker?” on the first launch. Google won’t do that in Chrome despite end users would love the feature.
That doesn't seem particularly impactful. Chromium is open source, you can literally go and swap out the search engine right now in a couple of minutes (well, minus the compile time).
The most common kind of consumer-facing computer is a mobile device, and the most common mobile OS worldwide is owned by Google.
The most common way that people interact with the web is either mobile apps or a web browser, and Google-owned Chrome/Chromium has basically eaten the world.
The most common way that people find new information on the web is a search engine. Once again, Google's namesake search engine is the unambiguous leader in terms of market share by a landslide.
Obviously there's more: YouTube, Google Maps and Waze, GSuite/Drive/Docs. But it's these first three verticals that smell the most monopolistic to me.
Citation needed. Almost 100% of Web is dominated by the likes of Reddit, Twitter/X, Facebook, Instagram, etc. All of which are curiously not controlled by Google.
Do they? I can never tell. I feel like lots of the people working in tech don't like him, but it feels like the VP/Director/C-Suite types secretly do like his policies even if they don't like his attitudes.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-vice-president-harris-vi...
It makes some sense. Biden was an ancient guy from the east cost, for whom the basis of wealth was manufacturing things and technology was confusing. Harris on the other hand built a political career in San Francisco during Silicon Valley's ascendancy. She would naturally view that industry in a more positive light, and would have had a lot of contacts with and backing from that set during her early career.
Breaking up Google would undoubtedly be good for consumers, businesses and developers. Having a monolithic, anti-competitive, closed source, advertising driven behemoth with the bad habit of killing off their own mediocre projects on the regular, would be a huge win for all of us.
When I read about breaking up google, I had assumed that the division would simply force all alphabet companies to operate fully independently. But this is specific to the Google search engine part.
> I had assumed that the division would simply force all alphabet companies to operate fully independently.
I'm not sure this makes sense if the same party has a controlling interest before and after.
Being political, antitrust enforcement is often largely a ritual to display for the public when corruption has become too obvious for anyone sane to deny. It has no explicit goal (except benefit to the consumer, defined arbitrarily), so it can't actually do anything, because officially nothing is wrong other than "market manipulation" that "harms the consumer."
It's like forcing a rich guy to keep his money in two different wallets. With people making a living arguing about whether two wallets are enough, or should it be three, or even (as argued by dangerous radicals far outside of the mainstream) ten wallets?
The main reason antitrust should be pursued far more aggressively is because there is no harm to the owners other than that their ability to manipulate the market through anti-competitive means (something that they claim not to have anyway) is weakened. It's really just paperwork. Real positive change to markets comes from forcing individuals to divest from competing companies, or by holding companies and their owners responsible for crimes that they commit.
This happened over 100 years ago and does not reflect contemporary judgement. Furthermore the court has firmly indicated its desire to break from all but the aesthetics of jurisprudence—I see no reason why the court might be bound from by judgements when it's rejected the concept of any binding language outside of literal statute.
> Being political, antitrust enforcement is often largely a ritual to display for the public when corruption has become too obvious for anyone sane to deny.
Most political actions are rituals designed to fend off the public from interference with the state.
>It has no explicit goal (except benefit to the consumer, defined arbitrarily), so it can't actually do anything, because officially nothing is wrong other than "market manipulation" that "harms the consumer."
Yes, we have pathetically weak anti-trust laws, particularly when statute does not bind the court to determine what constitutes anti-consumer behavior. Perhaps we should begin with abandoning the concept of the "consumer", who is a ridiculously stupid entity only designed to buy from a market with no other attributes. Perhaps we should embrace the concept of the "citizen" again.
Presumably the public will either demand stronger protections or suffer further.
> It's like forcing a rich guy to keep his money in two different wallets. With people making a living arguing about whether two wallets are enough, or should it be three, or even (as argued by dangerous radicals far outside of the mainstream) ten wallets?
Yes, partial satisfaction of public demands do not make rational sense. These make political sense, though, in the fact that states tend to comply with demands only insofar as the public is satisfied enough to stop bothering the politicians.
> The main reason antitrust should be pursued far more aggressively is because there is no harm to the owners other than that their ability to manipulate the market through anti-competitive means (something that they claim not to have anyway) is weakened. It's really just paperwork.
Anti-trust should be pursued more aggressively because this tactic seem to produce better environments for humans to live in. "anti-trust" is certainly already narrowly defined to only pursue narrow private behaviors, but it just as certainly has no rational basis to be confined to such terms. We could easily define it in terms of harms to humans in betrayal of the idea of an actually competitive market. It certainly produces a higher cost for the government to only portray anti-competitive semantics in terms of purely monopolistic terms.
> Real positive change to markets comes from forcing individuals to divest from competing companies, or by holding companies and their owners responsible for crimes that they commit.
Absolutely—this is the ideal goal of anti-trust legislation. The statute and your conception of what is right or just are not contrary concepts—except in the statute's extremely limited vocabulary of what constitutes behavior that is anti-competitive.
This is irrespective of what some minor judge or even a Federal agency not directly connected to the "war-adjacent" institutions in DC might say (i.e. something like the FTC will never have the upper hand against the White House, the CIA, the State Department or the Pentagon, again, not in this geo-political climate).
You must of have also missed the tens of billions of dollars (and more) that the people in DC are now more than happy to throw at the US IT industry, all in the name of national security. And you think they’re going to kill one of their golden geese for competition-related reasons? That’s just delusional.
[1] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/ai-america-read...
If they broke up Google, DOD could contract with the remnants as easily as they contract with Alphabet today. If anything, deficiencies in the defense sector are because of forced consolidations and mergers stifling innovation and competition post-Cold War, not the opposite. DOD suffers when it can only contract with a few dated apathetic behemoths. Look at Boeing vs. SpaceX.
But feel free to make believe that I wasn't a senior officer when I hung it up.
https://www.currentmarketvaluation.com/models/s&p500-mean-re...