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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

We haven't had antitrust enforcement for 25 years. It's high time we did.

Google needs to be broken up.

Its still crazy to me that a judge effectively said "yes you're a monopoly, but it's too hard to break you up so we won't bother"... I'm being glib, but only slightly.

Start with Apple which actually has a monopoly on mobile devices in USA and let's go from there then.

You do care about the market and aren't just angry because a corp doesn't listen to your orders, right? RIGHT?

You would have a heck of a job convincing a court that 60% domestic market share in a two competitor market constitutes a monopoly.

Then how is Google a monopoly at 40%?

That’s not the metric under which Google is seen as a monopoly, and you know it.

It’s search. And ads.

No I don't know it. Is that what echelon meant when saying Google needs to be broken up?

It isn’t, and nobody said it is. The ruling in question did not find that Google had a mobile OS monopoly. It found that they had monopolies in both the ad server and ad exchange markets, and was using them to reinforce each other in an anticompetitive way.

So why would they breakup Android away from Google (essentially killing the product as a whole due to lack of funding from Play) instead of separating the Ad business?

Wow, Apple really made the right business choice only catering to people who don't care about any of this. Google set different expectations, and it already bit them with Epic.

MS was never broken up.

So do M$ as well ?

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