This has always been a weird case because the propose remedies have more to do with Apple than Google, and impact Apple negatively just as much (or more!) than Google.
This seems like a strange outcome.
Why not just prohibit payment for default search?
Doesn't Apple use Google's servers to pre-train it's AI models?
So that gets banned to?
Why?
How and why is any better for Apple to pay Amazon or MSFT for that than Google?
DoJ asserts that owning a browser gave Google an unfair advantage in building a search engine to the degree that it prevented meaningful competition.
I don't think Google losing Chrome is too harmful to Google. I would say it's probably equal to Apple losing billions from the default search deal.
Just think of all the new startups and money to be made by breaking up big tech.
I think the valuation of a broken-up Google and Apple would exceed the monolithic conglomerates that they have become. So many of their business units and products don't even monetize because they're going for an intangible "platform value" that is only achievable at obscene scale. In this hulking form, they can reach into new markets and charge nothing, killing off all the incumbents, just so that they can grow their empires larger and tighten their grips on your attentions and wallets.
Amazon gives away Hollywood movies for free because it keeps your eyeballs glued to them. And they're also a grocery store, for god's sake.
A big tech breakup would provide much needed oxygen to the ecosystem, lift a bunch of impossible to beat barriers, and result in far more competition and money making.
Imagine a web that isn't dominated by Google or a phone market that isn't controlled by a duopoly. Imagine if we could suddenly launch iPhone and Gmail and YouTube competitors. The energy barriers are too high today because the big players have consolidated every angle of attack.
No wonder Peter Thiel and Vance want it. This would turn the big tech money siphons over to venture capital, entrepreneurs, and engineering ICs again.
We should all be 100% for this.
They're also your primary care doctor! Amazon OneMedical!
https://health.amazon.com/onemedical
Scroll down the page a bit.
We can quibble over how valuable each of these things individually is, but it's not just toys. It's foundational tooling used all over the place that the larger community pretty just got for free. They've also been some of the biggest contributors to the Linux kernel.
To be fair, I don't know that we needed Google et al for this. We used to get this kind of thing from DARPA and university researchers, but Google and Facebook and friends made so much money from ads that they hired away all the best researchers so they no longer work at universities, at the same time government was hollowing out funding for basic research.
We could get this thing from real public sources if we made the public investments, but I don't know that the political will or taxpayer willingness exists to do that now. We need to get it from somewhere.
You can now travel anywhere in the world and communicate in the local language. Using offline models that translate between any two languages. That’s almost literally biblical magic levels of social good.
(Plus we got amazing image recognition tech, LLMs, voice and NLU stuff, AlphaFold for protein analysis, etc)
I'm a happy DuoLingo user, but educational software with an owl-with-a-BBL mascot is not going to be a trove of translation capabilities.
I don't think they have any significant data collected, nor do they do any handwritten anything.
> But wait – how could a beginner-level student translate advanced sentences? The solution that Duolingo employs uses the power of crowdsourcing, which involves many students offering their attempts at translating individual sentences. As each student submits a sentence, they can rate others’ translations, and the most highly rated translations “rise to the top.”
Over time, entire documents are translated and students gain many skill points for their language practice. It’s easy to see how the data collected from users could be useful to improve the algorithms that underly computer translation[…]
https://lile.duke.edu/blog/2012/11/duolingo-learning-a-new-l...
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SoTT-GGmiXA
FWIW, I like Duolingo and think it is a healthy and productive use of gamification, but that does come at the cost of pure efficiency and comprehensive treatment of grammar. It’s best when paired with other tools.
Most people’s problem with learning a language is not speed, it’s the quit rate.
It did refinement by using OpenAI to create synthetic data.
But it now exists, and OpenAI seems to have no way to control Deepseek, or any legitimate claim they can enforce to stop it.
Oops.
> I think the valuation of a broken-up Google and Apple would exceed the monolithic conglomerates that they have become. So many of their business units and products don't even monetize because they're going for an intangible "platform value".
I think a lot of these products aren’t monetized because they’re actually bad businesses or failed ventures and companies have the free cash to support them. A lot more of Google’s (for example) random side projects seem to be getting subscriptions or collapses into existing ones. I also think that vertical integration creates unique value sometimes. I think spinning off these random side businesses could destroy the side businesses, but that this may still raise stock prices as the companies get better margins. I think a lot of these products are bad businesses because big tech salaries are high and that makes labor costs hard to account for.
I think the breakups obviously rectify consolidated power. 100%. But I don’t see more mobile phone operating systems coming from a breakup of Apple, for example. Gmail isn’t going to be replaced by a new email provider. Nor would we see a new YouTube, or other dominant businesses. Disrupting these massive aggregators won’t come from direct competition, but rather new product and service experiences. TikTok has shown that tech is already not impenetrable.
Finally, I totally agree that this would be a feeding frenzy for VCs, but VCs learned in the last decade how to rip off ICs even more through delaying IPOs and more aggressive dilution. So I wouldn’t be holding my breath as an IC that breaking up Google (or others) will make jobs better.
Perhaps you're right. Perhaps breaking these products up would not create more competition.
But it would mean that these products must determine how to make money on their own merits. That might mean a better product overall. Or it might mean that the product really doesn't deserve to exist as a consumer product.
Why?
If a product or experience is used by people, and enjoyed, and could not be monetized directly, why should it not exist?
I think of Alexa/Google Assistant/Siri as representative examples. Some set of execs decided to fund these voice assistants - now used by millions - and they obviously don’t make money. Would customers be better off if they were jettisoned to drown on their own?
I just don’t see why it’s wrong that businesses have these silly side projects. We seem to have competition even amongst the subsidized vanity projects.
Again, I think a breakup wouldn’t be bad overall, but I don’t think this is the thing missing in the industry.
If you take a very narrow view of "make money"
They are immensely valuable to the owners and an important part of the systematic maintenance of people as "consumers" rather than "citizens".
We would be better off, over all, without the whole thing.
> They are immensely valuable to the owners
This is, of course, the entire point of this entire thread.
Its not a particularly "narrow" view, FWIW, because most businesses have a P&L sheet that will list expenses and revenues, and entire business units have big "costs" and not so big "revenue". Which is what "don't make money" means.
[1] https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2020/12/21/google-bu...
So exactly who want Chrome? How would they monetize it and you can already get Chromium for free. Could Android not come with a browser? Chromebooks?
Who would fund Chromium development?
Gmail, for example, would be a fabulous standalone business with a normal (subscription) business model like other premium email services. I would love to run that spinoff.
YouTube: fabulous standalone company. Would love to be working there when they IPO. I’m sure there are more.
The business units that can’t survive except for “platform charity” should shutdown, go open source, sell their assets, etc. and the developers should move on to found new startups.
These big mega-platforms have sucked most of the oxygen out of the tech industry and it’s in the best interest of everyone except their major shareholders to break them up.
Look at Google Assistant or Alexa and their speakers. Losing Billions a year.
Look at smaller products like Google Fi or Fiber. Google Podcasts. Google Translate. Google Voice. WhatsApp. Quest/Oculus. Amazon Go stores. Apple HomeKit.
It’s the long-tail of small-use products that would be hurt. No one doubts that an ad-supported product with multiple billions of users would be a great standalone business.
And you speak of “platform charity”. But not thinking about VC charity?
This is easy to solve though, just change the laws. Why are we putzing around with courts when we can just change the law? I'll never understand that?
Maybe the politicians see court cases as being able to be seen to be doing something, while at the same time having the comfort of knowing nothing will actually be done? Because they could easily just change the laws. The strategy they're pursuing doesn't make sense right now.
When a large subset of people only care about culture war, this isn’t easy.
Changing the law for highly politicized situations is damn near impossible today.