Hacker News Reader

Comment by bambax | Hacker News Reader

But removing Chrome from Google makes zero sense and won't stop it from being a monopoly. The monopoly part comes from buying DoubleClick (in 2007!) -- that should never have been allowed.

Not sure how to extract that part from Google now. It would be difficult, but probably quite effective.

View on HN

Quite effective at destroying anything good left of Google I would say.

Google has a bunch of nice things (search, gmail, maps, ...) that cost money, and an advertising business that makes money, the former helping the latter. Split the two and the nice stuff will be without funding and die out, and only the "evil" part will survive. Or so I think. Splitting out Chrome will not change the face of the world, but Firefox has shown that an (somewhat) independent browser can work.

Those 'nice' parts of the google are feeding the 'evil' advertisement business. Now more than anything, the reason google's ad business is so rich specifically because they (and only they) know everything about most of the denizens to farm them efficiently and thus demand a premium. Take their feed away and the ad business livestock will suddenly be lot more docile.

It would be interesting to hear how much a subscription to docs, gmail, maps, etc. would have to be to keep them operating at current levels.

Google could have had solid competition if Garmin and TomTom made their offline map subscriptions available on phones instead of pushing their dedicated devices so hard. TomTom just started publishing their own apps during Covid, and Garmin is still nowhere to be found. There's also other apps like Magic Earth that use other data, but they're also super recent.

I feel like the whole tech industry, especially the American part, really dropped the ball on this.

> But removing Chrome from Google makes zero sense and won't stop it from being a monopoly. The monopoly part comes from buying DoubleClick

Not only. Google controls a lot of user attention. See how many services they link together to serve you ads .... erm .... recommendations to make browsing better or something: https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1908951546869498085 And one of those services is Chrome

They could just split DV360 from Google Ad Manager and Google Ad Exchange.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com