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Comment by b112 | Hacker News Reader

It's sad that Google has absolutely no foresight.

The speed of government is slow, incredibly slow. It's measured in election cycles. It takes government eight, twelve years to simply turn around and notice. But once it does, it's a juggernaut.

Nothing can stop it. Nothing can avert it. Nothing can prevent it. And as everybody from Facebook to Microsoft knows, once it starts moving, you're screwed.

In the US, the oil companies thought they were too big. Then the telco companies thought they were too big. What really happens is eventually people just get pissed off, and then it's too late.

Google is fast approaching that. They almost had chrome and other things ripped away from them, and now they've got requirements to have alternate play stores. If they don't turn course, and turn course blazingly fast, they're going to have their entire empire wrenched away from them.

Oh well.

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I think it's best that government has a lot of inertia in general, but maybe that doesn't preclude government having sub components that can act fast within defined domains.

Like you don't want to have fundamentals and pronciples change hardly ever. So you might take a long time to create or destroy say the FDA, but the FDA could be responsible for being on top of time-sensitive FDA things.

Maybe there could even be a body whos job is only to decide if something is time -sensitive or not, allowing other bodies to move as they need to, yet not just have no limits or accountability at all even within their own domains. So a rapid action can be done, then shortly after determined it was a bad idea and undone, or partly wrong and needs adjustment, and have that all be justified by a seperate independant process that judged or agreed "this is something that needed rapid action".

I don't think we have anything so organized yet. We do have some things where a body is responsible for a domain and can act more quickly within their scope, but we also have a lot of things where we get both forms of bad, making big changes on immediate whims, and being unable to make clearly needed even small changes simply because "government is slow".

We do have some examples of a reasonable organization and heirarchy and layers, and a whole lot of not, all together at the same time.

> If they don't turn course, and turn course blazingly fast, they're going to have their entire empire wrenched away from them.

Unfortunately, that's no longer the case with the app store monopolies. While Apple is under some partial enforcement on parts of their app store policies, Google managed to play the game of regulatory brinksmanship better and largely avoided that for their app store. So the regulatory powers (such as they are) have already taken their best shot and this is where we are.

Once this starts it never ends. Regulatory action has been steadily increasing around the world, and it will continue to do so.

Juggernauts do not have to be fast. And the judge has seen Google being intractable and sneaky with alternate app stores too:

https://www.theverge.com/policy/979852/that-is-not-acceptabl...

There is now a record of this. The next action against Google, will see people pointing out each step they took to avoid compliance.

A case a year down the road about AI, will see stubborn attempts to comply like the above cited.

Google, with the gold plated shovel, digging a hole for itself. Put another way, breaking up a company typically comes after other methods don't work. Such as being sneaky and making them not work.

Or even because the required competition didn't occur, regardless of fault.

It's not over. It's a step taken, with a positive outcome, and a judge who is making sure there's follow through. Next step will be more stark.

You can already stand up an alternate store.

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