Unironically I think this would be a good thing for Google. Lots of smart people, and a lot of amazing technology.
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
I’m not as familiar with the Baby Bells, so this is a surprising comparison to me. Bell Labs was famously so productive while it had the monopoly money hose, and not as much came from it after Bell was broken up.
What are the most noteworthy accomplishments of the Baby Bells?
While I lament the decline of Bell Labs and unfettered research in general (unfettered research labs need protection from market forces that only a monopoly, government, academia, or the very wealthy can provide), I also believe that the breakup of the Bell System was overall a good thing for society. For example, there was a time when AT&T customers had to rent their phones; they couldn’t own them (https://memorial.bellsystem.com/bell_system_property.html). Customers were finally allowed to purchase their own phones once the divestiture was underway. In addition, I’m not sure if we’d have a competitive cell phone market in America today had the Bell System remained in place, not to mention how I haven’t heard anything about long-distance calling charges in about 15 years due to how many modern cell phone plans work.
Ironically, we're nearly back at the "renting" phone stage. Sure the companies selling the phones don't use that terminology, and it's a one-time payment for the life of the device, but full control of the device is never transferred to the user. The company holds the keys and will only allow you to do what they want you to do. This certainly describes iPhones and most Android phones to date, and it's getting worse on the Android side as root becomes harder and harder.
I just don't see any positives here though. Apple will be given 100% free-reign to take complete monopolistic control of the smartphone market without Google.
Calling people became cheap. Think about making a cross-country phone call in the pre-broken up AT&T era. It was like 25¢/min. Now I pay $35/month and can literally call most countries for up to 500min before I get metered (Visible+).
it's hard to compare without a control, but a few key points:
* none of the Baby Bells failed
* because they segmented regionally, integration was super important and you could argue paved the way for the modern internet
* consumer services under Bell was incredibly expensive and tightly controlled
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.
I think even with firehose monopoly money that Bell Labs would have eventually succumbed to cuts and general enshittification as the CEOs and shareholders wanted ever increasing pay and dividends. "Do more with less guys! You're smart you can figure it out! The Board really needs this 10,000% pay raise, they have families you know."
My opinion is that Bell Labs created great technology, but had no real incentive to make products and bring them to the public. The Baby Bells needed to compete however, and so they did.
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.
> Lots of smart people, and a lot of amazing technology....would find a way to make some incredible products
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.
About -25%. Current campus size is roughly what it was in early 2014.
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.
I think it's unclear what the results would be. For instance, and I honestly don't know, if gmail was split out would it still be able to be free? Or would they start charging for it?
Google workspace is expensive and a big money maker on any scale - except compared to the Google ad machine. This would be a very successful independent business and killing free gmail would not necessarily be a bad move.
Having to hire actual people for Customer Service and treat the whole thing like a business might be a novel concept for them, but they should be able to manage it. :)
> The US government is considering seeking the break-up of the world's biggest search engine, Google ...
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.
We need some serious trust busting in the USA. It's been a problem for decades and has culminated in the slow destruction of the middle class. The longer we wait, the harder it will be to fix the issue.
How can Amazon not be an obvious target? Many people say "it's just a website/store/marketplace". This is obviously wrong, but even if that was all they had I believe they use their monopoly position to crush any potential competition. Their model is essentially (the already monstrous) Walmart model at internet scale.
Frankly, it's really crazy how much of the modern web is controlled by google.
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.
It's the Biden administration pushing this so it's likely a Harris administration would keep on the same course. Trump and the tech industry hate each other so it's far from a given that he would be a typical Republican in favoring a large corporation like Google. Looks like Google is simply out of friends.
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.
There's been a lot of reporting on Harris having a much closer and positive relationship with Silicon Valley than Biden, pretty much from the point where Biden withdrawing became a possiblity. Here's an example, but you could find plenty more:
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.
If it comes down to an old guy who loves trains and a younger west coast lawyer I think I'll stick with the trains. They're all politicians first though, so does it really make a difference?
The article continuously mentions Google, but how does that affect Alphabet, its parent company?
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.
It doesn't make sense, but it is what the US has traditionally done. The model breakup for antitrust people was the breakup of Standard Oil, and the owners (the Rockefellers) were richer after it was broken up, and still had control. Exxon (Standard Oil New Jersey) is still the largest oil company.
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 doesn't feel like a real solution to the problem. How would breaking Google into pieces solve a monopoly in search? The search part would still have that monopoly. Since it doesn't solve the problem, I doubt it will survive in court. Google's 1% drop in stock price is evidence of this being no real threat. IMO this isn't an honest attempt at anti-trust enforcement and is just more Democratic party vengeance against the tech industry.
I don’t think search monopoly is an important issue. The main issue Google is a monopoly for multiple levels of the stack.
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.
Less incentives for the world's most popular browser having a google search integration, less incentives for one of the leading mobile OSes to have a google search integration, etc.
For context, this relates to an earlier court ruling that Google search was an illegal because it pays others to make Google the default search engine. This isn't about Android or any other thing that might separately be investigated.
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.
> 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.
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.
> Google has pushed back hard against the proposals, describing them as "radical" and "sweeping" and claiming they "risk hurting consumers, businesses, and developers."
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.
The powers that be inside the Beltway will never let this happen in the current geo-political climate, it's like shooting themselves in their own foot. All that the Alphabet leaders/lawyers have to say is something on the lines of: "We can leverage AI better as a big integrated corporation and so we can better defeat the Chinese", and the game is theirs.
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 were most probably still at grunt-like level by the time you left, this is a very recent article co-written by Mark Milley and Eric Schmidt: America Isn’t Ready for the Wars of the Future [1]
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.
Ah, the old "you disagree with me, therefore you must have only been a stupid grunt" argument.
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.
I think it should happen for the health of the web, however, sadly too much capital is behind getting rid of Lina Khan so they probably will get rid of her as soon as elections happen. They will just backtrack on the one good thing Biden did which was turn back on the "allow companies to acquire every competitor without worrying about monopolies" that Clinton started.
> That isn't what Google is doing. They aren't using a monopoly in search to try to establish a monopoly in browsers or phone OSes. Google search will happily return results for Apple phones or for how to download Firefox.
Except that's not true. IIRC, before Chrome was ubiquitous and dominant, they used their search monopoly to incessantly nag people to install it. If Chrome had just popped up as a download on some Google website, and was never promoted by is other properties, I really doubt it would be so dominant today.
At the time Firefox had something like a ~25% market share and was growing fast, and IE had the rest). If Google hadn't used its monopoly, I bet we'd now have a 3-way browser split between Firefox, and Chrome, and a cleaned up IE.
>they used their search monopoly to incessantly nag people to install it
This is something I never understood. If I were already using Firefox or IE before installing Chrome, what would have prevented me from continuing to use Firefox or IE after installing Chrome? Did the Chrome installer disable or otherwise interfere with other applications?
The evidence is pretty heavy that they have a high price tag on keeping the default search position on browsers. The argument is somewhat more that their dominance in search is what affords them dominance in ads, which is what allows them to keep the dominance in search by purchasing the default spot.
This is even more relevant when a large portion of the first page of search results are essentially paid spots. Back when they were more algorithm focused and that was not directly influenced by revenue into the company, this was more defensible. Now, though, it is easy to say that they pay $X to keep the default search position to bring in $Y revenue.
> antitrust law says that you can't leverage a monopoly in one area in order to establish one in another area
Would Chrome have gained that much popularity if Google hadn't been the most used search engine, nay, website in the world?
> As far as I understand, developing a non-monopoly business to try to protect your monopoly business is not illegal.
IANAL either, but whatever Google is doing with Chrome should be illegal, i.e. making so many (open) web standards that it is basically impossible for a new browser engine entrant unless they invest billions.
In fact, I reckon that no major corporation should be sitting on the W3C board if they have vested interest in controlling the future of the internet. It's the equivalent of lobbying legislators, but worse, because the people writing the standards are openly on your payroll.
Right now the only thing that stands between Google and total domination of the world wide web is Apple and their stubborn dedication to Webkit. Another example that only a company with the revenue in the hundreds of billions can complete in this field that affects the entire world. I am sincerely thankful to them.
I'm not GP, but IMHO the alternative will be stagnation on web standards.
Normally I would think that a bad thing, but as the "progress" nowadays is becoming more and more user-hostile and developer-friendly (as both a user and a developer, I can see both side here), I would prefer stagnation to progress.
I don't want Web Integrity or manifest v3 or any of that crap. That's a blatant transfer of power from the user to the developer, and the latter is already substantially more powerful than the user. We need to go the other way.
> Would Chrome have gained that much popularity if Google hadn't been the most used search engine, nay, website in the world?
Yes, Chrome was absolutely superior to Firefox in every way at the beginning.
> impossible for new entrants unless they invest billions
All industries require that you invest billions, and it’s to compensate the civilization-long effort of R&D that the other company did. Reasoning-by-absurd: Should Boeing display all the plans of the band new Dreamliner so that it doesn’t take billions for new competitors to emerge? Should all companies make their blueprint public so they can have immediate competition? No, Google invested in browsers and set up new norms in WWW in exchange for their position on the market. The benefit to the general population has been excellent WWW norms, to be honest.
I’m thinking outside the law framework but to me, no corporation should be have 51% market share. But that’s wishful thinking, not the law (also, market share is something economists struggle to define).
> Yes, Chrome was absolutely superior to Firefox in every way at the beginning.
I can't speak to the technical capabilities early on, but I will say that I distinctly remember many of the computing people I knew explicitly not preferring Chrome early on. I distinctly remember a discussion in one of my college CS courses, shortly after the release of Chrome, where everyone was in agreement that Chrome was just "that awful browser that Google made".
> Yes, Chrome was absolutely superior to Firefox in every way at the beginning.
At the time of Chrome's introduction, Firefox still had XUL extensions and a somewhat different UI from Chrome, so Chrome wasn't strictly superior (though it is fair to say it had better performance than Firefox). Over time, Mozilla replaced XUL extensions with Chrome's extensions API (without providing meaningful additions, like reintroducing the ability to modify the UI) and reworked the UI to be a clone of Chrome, so thanks to Mozilla's efforts it might be fair to say that today Chrome is strictly superior (excluding privacy and MV3 etc.).
> That isn't what Google is doing. They aren't using a monopoly in search to try to establish a monopoly in browsers or phone OSes. Google search will happily return results for Apple phones or for how to download Firefox.
This is exactly what was Google doing when they started with Chrome. If you visited google search they had a very visible text in the center asking you to try out Chrome.
It was also on other google pages, but search is the most prominent one. They don't do it now, because they already have monopoly in web browsers also.
I don’t think monopolies are in-and-of-themselves entirely legal. Eg, if you have a monopoly on ads, you’re likely committing an offense.
But the enforcement of that has varied substantially over time: strongest at the end of the Gilded Age, lessened over time, and likely to be strengthened in our neo-Gilded Age.
The argument is that by paying Apple to be the default on its platform they are essentially paying Apple to not develop a competitor. Apple could easily develop its own search capability for less than the $20 billion a year that Google pays it. I think this is a reasonable argument.
The problem is how does this help me? Why do I care if Apple has a different search than Google? This benefits me in no way. Meanwhile pharma companies routinely do the same thing and pay off generic manufacturers to not produce generics after their patents expire. This makes medication massively more expensive for the public. But the FTC just sits back and lets it happen. I don't believe for a second that the FTC isn't just engaging in political warfare.
When the rich and powerful (including politicians) have their positions sold and will make money from the FAANG companies' stocks going down, we will see some real antitrust activity and society will get better and break away from the tech dystopia we are living in. So in a sense Gordon Gekko was right and greed is good. At some point you can't pump stocks anymore on vapors and you make money from them on the way down in shorts, buying lower, etc.
Unironically I think this would be a good thing for Google. Lots of smart people, and a lot of amazing technology.
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
I’m not as familiar with the Baby Bells, so this is a surprising comparison to me. Bell Labs was famously so productive while it had the monopoly money hose, and not as much came from it after Bell was broken up.
What are the most noteworthy accomplishments of the Baby Bells?
While I lament the decline of Bell Labs and unfettered research in general (unfettered research labs need protection from market forces that only a monopoly, government, academia, or the very wealthy can provide), I also believe that the breakup of the Bell System was overall a good thing for society. For example, there was a time when AT&T customers had to rent their phones; they couldn’t own them (https://memorial.bellsystem.com/bell_system_property.html). Customers were finally allowed to purchase their own phones once the divestiture was underway. In addition, I’m not sure if we’d have a competitive cell phone market in America today had the Bell System remained in place, not to mention how I haven’t heard anything about long-distance calling charges in about 15 years due to how many modern cell phone plans work.
Ironically, we're nearly back at the "renting" phone stage. Sure the companies selling the phones don't use that terminology, and it's a one-time payment for the life of the device, but full control of the device is never transferred to the user. The company holds the keys and will only allow you to do what they want you to do. This certainly describes iPhones and most Android phones to date, and it's getting worse on the Android side as root becomes harder and harder.
I just don't see any positives here though. Apple will be given 100% free-reign to take complete monopolistic control of the smartphone market without Google.
Calling people became cheap. Think about making a cross-country phone call in the pre-broken up AT&T era. It was like 25¢/min. Now I pay $35/month and can literally call most countries for up to 500min before I get metered (Visible+).
Cross country? You mean a 15 minute drive away. Many places local was only that town and maybe another town under 5 miles away.
Really limited the range of those free BBS calls
I'll just say one thing: BlueBeep. If you know what that is, nothing else needs to be said. :)
it's hard to compare without a control, but a few key points: * none of the Baby Bells failed * because they segmented regionally, integration was super important and you could argue paved the way for the modern internet * consumer services under Bell was incredibly expensive and tightly controlled
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.
I think even with firehose monopoly money that Bell Labs would have eventually succumbed to cuts and general enshittification as the CEOs and shareholders wanted ever increasing pay and dividends. "Do more with less guys! You're smart you can figure it out! The Board really needs this 10,000% pay raise, they have families you know."
My opinion is that Bell Labs created great technology, but had no real incentive to make products and bring them to the public. The Baby Bells needed to compete however, and so they did.
> firehouse of money from search
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.
> Lots of smart people, and a lot of amazing technology....would find a way to make some incredible products
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.
>> Google subsidizes them with money from ads.
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.
Literally the only people this isn't good for is Google's senior management.
You think this would be good for Android users? What do you see happening to Android if Google were broken up?
Lots of possibilities. One is that Android charges a per-device* fee to the phone manufacturers to license the OS, similar to Windows.
*with the usual hijinks where a high-end device requires a bigger license fee than a budget phone.
Wouldn't that essentially mandate the discontinuation of AOSP? That seems like a massive loss to humanity, and certainly to the open source world.
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.
Won’t somebody think of the Mountain View Realtors Association?
Google's headcount in Mountain View has decreased by ~30% since 2022, with many of the jobs being shipped to Bangalore and Hyderabad.
how much did it change compared to 2019?
About -25%. Current campus size is roughly what it was in early 2014.
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.
Not sure it would hurt them.
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.
Being suddenly forced to increase revenues (to make up for lost subsidies) is unequivocally not the way to drive innovation.
Competitive markets have generally proven to foster innovation?
Hopefully it actually happens, in a way that's positive for people.
Maybe Google will even be forced to provide the dreaded "Customer Support" (of reasonable standard) for all of their products and services too. :D
If that's all that happens, it'll be a loss for consumers. A hefty cash fine will make shareholders pay attention.
Surely you can’t be serious.
I think it's unclear what the results would be. For instance, and I honestly don't know, if gmail was split out would it still be able to be free? Or would they start charging for it?
Google workspace is expensive and a big money maker on any scale - except compared to the Google ad machine. This would be a very successful independent business and killing free gmail would not necessarily be a bad move.
Having to hire actual people for Customer Service and treat the whole thing like a business might be a novel concept for them, but they should be able to manage it. :)
> The US government is considering seeking the break-up of the world's biggest search engine, Google ...
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.
We need some serious trust busting in the USA. It's been a problem for decades and has culminated in the slow destruction of the middle class. The longer we wait, the harder it will be to fix the issue.
How can Amazon not be an obvious target? Many people say "it's just a website/store/marketplace". This is obviously wrong, but even if that was all they had I believe they use their monopoly position to crush any potential competition. Their model is essentially (the already monstrous) Walmart model at internet scale.
There is a recent suit that is already proceeding.
https://apnews.com/article/amazon-antitrust-lawsuit-ftc-case...
Frankly, it's really crazy how much of the modern web is controlled by google.
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.
Microsoft faced the same threat in 2000 but the outcome of elections that year prevented that. Will it be the same?
It's the Biden administration pushing this so it's likely a Harris administration would keep on the same course. Trump and the tech industry hate each other so it's far from a given that he would be a typical Republican in favoring a large corporation like Google. Looks like Google is simply out of friends.
Everybody seems to love Crypto these days - when they're willing to spend 10's or 100's of Millions of $$$ against your election campaign.
> Trump and the tech industry hate each other
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.
There's been a lot of reporting on Harris having a much closer and positive relationship with Silicon Valley than Biden, pretty much from the point where Biden withdrawing became a possiblity. Here's an example, but you could find plenty more:
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.
If it comes down to an old guy who loves trains and a younger west coast lawyer I think I'll stick with the trains. They're all politicians first though, so does it really make a difference?
If this happened it would be great, but I hold out little hope it'll ever actually happen.
The article continuously mentions Google, but how does that affect Alphabet, its parent company?
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.
Presumably they would be forced to formally divest.
> 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.
It doesn't make sense, but it is what the US has traditionally done. The model breakup for antitrust people was the breakup of Standard Oil, and the owners (the Rockefellers) were richer after it was broken up, and still had control. Exxon (Standard Oil New Jersey) is still the largest oil company.
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 doesn't feel like a real solution to the problem. How would breaking Google into pieces solve a monopoly in search? The search part would still have that monopoly. Since it doesn't solve the problem, I doubt it will survive in court. Google's 1% drop in stock price is evidence of this being no real threat. IMO this isn't an honest attempt at anti-trust enforcement and is just more Democratic party vengeance against the tech industry.
It would prevent Google from using its other companies to engage in anti-competitive practices.
I don’t think search monopoly is an important issue. The main issue Google is a monopoly for multiple levels of the stack.
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.
Less incentives for the world's most popular browser having a google search integration, less incentives for one of the leading mobile OSes to have a google search integration, etc.
For context, this relates to an earlier court ruling that Google search was an illegal because it pays others to make Google the default search engine. This isn't about Android or any other thing that might separately be investigated.
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.
> when that's what most users want anyway
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.
> 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.
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.
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> Google has pushed back hard against the proposals, describing them as "radical" and "sweeping" and claiming they "risk hurting consumers, businesses, and developers."
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.
The powers that be inside the Beltway will never let this happen in the current geo-political climate, it's like shooting themselves in their own foot. All that the Alphabet leaders/lawyers have to say is something on the lines of: "We can leverage AI better as a big integrated corporation and so we can better defeat the Chinese", and the game is theirs.
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).
As someone who spent 20 years in uniform active and reserve . . . this is unadulterated tinfoil-hattery.
You were most probably still at grunt-like level by the time you left, this is a very recent article co-written by Mark Milley and Eric Schmidt: America Isn’t Ready for the Wars of the Future [1]
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...
Ah, the old "you disagree with me, therefore you must have only been a stupid grunt" argument.
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.
I think it should happen for the health of the web, however, sadly too much capital is behind getting rid of Lina Khan so they probably will get rid of her as soon as elections happen. They will just backtrack on the one good thing Biden did which was turn back on the "allow companies to acquire every competitor without worrying about monopolies" that Clinton started.
it's like cutting the head off a hydra
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> That isn't what Google is doing. They aren't using a monopoly in search to try to establish a monopoly in browsers or phone OSes. Google search will happily return results for Apple phones or for how to download Firefox.
Except that's not true. IIRC, before Chrome was ubiquitous and dominant, they used their search monopoly to incessantly nag people to install it. If Chrome had just popped up as a download on some Google website, and was never promoted by is other properties, I really doubt it would be so dominant today.
At the time Firefox had something like a ~25% market share and was growing fast, and IE had the rest). If Google hadn't used its monopoly, I bet we'd now have a 3-way browser split between Firefox, and Chrome, and a cleaned up IE.
They still nag.
>they used their search monopoly to incessantly nag people to install it
This is something I never understood. If I were already using Firefox or IE before installing Chrome, what would have prevented me from continuing to use Firefox or IE after installing Chrome? Did the Chrome installer disable or otherwise interfere with other applications?
It is similar to promoting music in radios - if one hears given music enough times they will start liking it more.
The evidence is pretty heavy that they have a high price tag on keeping the default search position on browsers. The argument is somewhat more that their dominance in search is what affords them dominance in ads, which is what allows them to keep the dominance in search by purchasing the default spot.
This is even more relevant when a large portion of the first page of search results are essentially paid spots. Back when they were more algorithm focused and that was not directly influenced by revenue into the company, this was more defensible. Now, though, it is easy to say that they pay $X to keep the default search position to bring in $Y revenue.
> antitrust law says that you can't leverage a monopoly in one area in order to establish one in another area
Would Chrome have gained that much popularity if Google hadn't been the most used search engine, nay, website in the world?
> As far as I understand, developing a non-monopoly business to try to protect your monopoly business is not illegal.
IANAL either, but whatever Google is doing with Chrome should be illegal, i.e. making so many (open) web standards that it is basically impossible for a new browser engine entrant unless they invest billions.
In fact, I reckon that no major corporation should be sitting on the W3C board if they have vested interest in controlling the future of the internet. It's the equivalent of lobbying legislators, but worse, because the people writing the standards are openly on your payroll.
Right now the only thing that stands between Google and total domination of the world wide web is Apple and their stubborn dedication to Webkit. Another example that only a company with the revenue in the hundreds of billions can complete in this field that affects the entire world. I am sincerely thankful to them.
This is a classic ‘be careful what you wish for’. Because what do you think the alternative is going to look like?
I'm not GP, but IMHO the alternative will be stagnation on web standards.
Normally I would think that a bad thing, but as the "progress" nowadays is becoming more and more user-hostile and developer-friendly (as both a user and a developer, I can see both side here), I would prefer stagnation to progress.
I don't want Web Integrity or manifest v3 or any of that crap. That's a blatant transfer of power from the user to the developer, and the latter is already substantially more powerful than the user. We need to go the other way.
Or bug for bug lockin of existing players in an increasingly more static space.
> Would Chrome have gained that much popularity if Google hadn't been the most used search engine, nay, website in the world?
Yes, Chrome was absolutely superior to Firefox in every way at the beginning.
> impossible for new entrants unless they invest billions
All industries require that you invest billions, and it’s to compensate the civilization-long effort of R&D that the other company did. Reasoning-by-absurd: Should Boeing display all the plans of the band new Dreamliner so that it doesn’t take billions for new competitors to emerge? Should all companies make their blueprint public so they can have immediate competition? No, Google invested in browsers and set up new norms in WWW in exchange for their position on the market. The benefit to the general population has been excellent WWW norms, to be honest.
I’m thinking outside the law framework but to me, no corporation should be have 51% market share. But that’s wishful thinking, not the law (also, market share is something economists struggle to define).
> Yes, Chrome was absolutely superior to Firefox in every way at the beginning.
I can't speak to the technical capabilities early on, but I will say that I distinctly remember many of the computing people I knew explicitly not preferring Chrome early on. I distinctly remember a discussion in one of my college CS courses, shortly after the release of Chrome, where everyone was in agreement that Chrome was just "that awful browser that Google made".
> Yes, Chrome was absolutely superior to Firefox in every way at the beginning.
At the time of Chrome's introduction, Firefox still had XUL extensions and a somewhat different UI from Chrome, so Chrome wasn't strictly superior (though it is fair to say it had better performance than Firefox). Over time, Mozilla replaced XUL extensions with Chrome's extensions API (without providing meaningful additions, like reintroducing the ability to modify the UI) and reworked the UI to be a clone of Chrome, so thanks to Mozilla's efforts it might be fair to say that today Chrome is strictly superior (excluding privacy and MV3 etc.).
(I still begrudgingly use Firefox BTW :))
> That isn't what Google is doing. They aren't using a monopoly in search to try to establish a monopoly in browsers or phone OSes. Google search will happily return results for Apple phones or for how to download Firefox.
This is exactly what was Google doing when they started with Chrome. If you visited google search they had a very visible text in the center asking you to try out Chrome.
It was also on other google pages, but search is the most prominent one. They don't do it now, because they already have monopoly in web browsers also.
Antitrust law says more than that. In particular, it’s illegal for a monopoly to take anticompetitive action to maintain their monopoly — e.g,
> what Google is doing is making sure that nobody else gets a monopoly
Depending on what “making sure” is, that could very well be illegal.
other way around. using a near monopoly on android to suggest chrome. or the default in chrome being google.
just because you provide a way to do so, it's a lot of effort to swap. defaults matter. remember msft getting sued over IE?
Don't forgot Google (at least used to) routinely break Gmail and other Google provided things for people using non-Chrome browsers.
I’ve been using Firefox for over a decade and haven’t experienced that ever.
Google, YouTube, Gmail and other sites have nagged me to install Chrome, though.
It definitely happens. Non-Chrome gets non-performant polyfills that break. Maps in particular is nerfed on Firefox.
I live in an area with 3D on Google Maps, and I ONLY get it on… Firefox!
Same for Lisbon. I switched from Chrome to Firefox and bahm! 3D was available!
If this is the standard, it seems clear that Android and Chrome buttress Search via defaults. Compare to bundling IE with Windows.
I don’t think monopolies are in-and-of-themselves entirely legal. Eg, if you have a monopoly on ads, you’re likely committing an offense.
But the enforcement of that has varied substantially over time: strongest at the end of the Gilded Age, lessened over time, and likely to be strengthened in our neo-Gilded Age.
The argument is that by paying Apple to be the default on its platform they are essentially paying Apple to not develop a competitor. Apple could easily develop its own search capability for less than the $20 billion a year that Google pays it. I think this is a reasonable argument.
The problem is how does this help me? Why do I care if Apple has a different search than Google? This benefits me in no way. Meanwhile pharma companies routinely do the same thing and pay off generic manufacturers to not produce generics after their patents expire. This makes medication massively more expensive for the public. But the FTC just sits back and lets it happen. I don't believe for a second that the FTC isn't just engaging in political warfare.
When the rich and powerful (including politicians) have their positions sold and will make money from the FAANG companies' stocks going down, we will see some real antitrust activity and society will get better and break away from the tech dystopia we are living in. So in a sense Gordon Gekko was right and greed is good. At some point you can't pump stocks anymore on vapors and you make money from them on the way down in shorts, buying lower, etc.
https://www.currentmarketvaluation.com/models/s&p500-mean-re...