Not sure how that would work…
I’m old enough to remember the breakup of Ma Bell and the way that worked was the creation of a bunch of regional telecom services, that’s not going to work on the Internet.
I guess they could mandate spinning off Android, but that’s not really the problem addressed in the antitrust case, is it?
Maybe split the AdWords side from the Search Engine side?
I’d guess it would be a vertical breakup rather than horizontal: separate android, cloud, youtube, search, chrome, ads…depending on how aggressive they want to be.
If you seperate Youtube from Google, I cannot see youtube surviving. It’s probably a loss leader for them.
Pretty sure youtube is revenue generating on its own now. Youtube doesn’t work as a loss leader because it’s so different from all other products.
So YouTube shall fail.
I really don’t understand why people have that believe. They’ve heard over a decade ago that Youtube wasn’t making a profit (which was mostly because they reinvested everything to grow and become the monopoly they are now), but by how much money it’s raking in every quarter and with how monumental Google’s infrastucture is, I find it extremely hard to believe Youtube isn’t a big money machine by now. They’re really squeezing everything out of it not because they have to, but because they have a monopoly as a user generated video platform that has more to offer than just shorts.
I think it’s a combination of the old news, how expensive hosting video is compared to anything else, and how Twitch is basically a boat - a hole in the water that you throw money into.
People lose the connection that burning money like it’s going out of fashion is only step one in the game. Step two is capitalizing on the market share that you acquired in step one. And, as every social media company has shown, ad revenue and data harvesting are very profitable. Otherwise, every tech giant wouldn’t have pivoted to that years ago.
I’m drooling at the thought.
I think the problem with Google is that none of their side projects actually make any money. I don’t have a solution here
I think each of these needs to be handled in separate ways. For example, search could continue to be a conglomeration that includes maps, mail and possibly cloud. Android can just be split very easily into a separate company and same for Youtube, since that would basically be another Netflix or whatever.
Ads, in my opinion, is the most important one though. That absolutely has to be shattered into thousands of tiny pieces, all of which need to be forced to compete with each other, for the benefit of all internet companies anywhere. It would be a massive boon to companies everywhere and would provide an opportunity for lots of innovation in the advertising space, ie. trying ads that are less intrusive or ones that are cheaper because they don’t rely on tracking information.
And another thing I think people need to understand about search is that building the search engine is not the hard part - the hard part is figuring out how to pay for it. Search is really expensive - crawling websites, indexing, fighting spam abuse. That’s what really makes Google successful - the fact that they coupled it with advertising so that they could cover all the expenses that come with managing a search engine. That’s much more important than the quality of the results, in my opinion.
And as for Chrome: well, personally I think that monopoly has been the most damaging to the internet as a whole. I would love to see it managed as part of a non-profit consortium. There should not be any profit motive whatsoever in building a web browser. If you want a profit motive, build a website - the browser should just be the tool to get to your profit model, not the profit model itself. And therefore it should be developed by multiple interest groups, not just one advertising company.
Anyway, I know this is all an impossible fantasy. Nothing in the world is done because it’s right or wrong, it’s done because it serves whoever holds the most power. But if there were a just world, this is what I think it would look like.
But if they’ve only been found to monopolize search, how does that remedy the search monopoly? Presumably the new separate Google Search company would still have a search monopoly.
Because that search monopoly allows them to boost their other products above all others. It’s not an impartial search result anymore. There is a financial incentive to favor their own products.
without search and their abuse of that monopoly, google wouldn’t have dominant positions or massive market shares that many of their other properties (products, services, software, etc) have.
I’m speculating, but perhaps the thought would be that separating Google Search from the rest of the company would deprive them of the alternative revenue streams they used to maintain their market position? If I remember the ruling against them correctly, one of the key pieces of evidence cited by the judge was that Google spent like 30 billion dollars a year to have 3rd parties use their engine by default.
But the ads on search are the big revenue driver for Google overall. Presumably those stay with the Google Search subunit, and they would have plenty of cash to do whatever?
Google search has some features that alternative search engines don’t. I use DuckDuckGo for 99% of everything, but I occasionally use Google to see local busy hours, or sometimes any hours, reviews, phone numbers without navigating a shitty website, etc.
I think there are ways to break up Google search on its own, and make some of those features separate and accessible on other search engines.
Then there’s the matter of advertising, data collection, SEO, exclusivity with corporations like Reddit, etc.
Google is doing things with its search that seem to intentionally reduce the ability of other search engines to compete with them, and that’s really all that the antitrust laws are meant to prevent.
They removed something that I used to use: using “-word” to exclude a keyword. Apparently it is because advertisers don’t want you doing that, so they turned it into a weighting. So there are features and antifeatures too. I’ve seen ddg do that too before, but right now it works :)
I think you go about it the other way: break data analytics and advertising off from everything else. If every unit has to be self-sufficient without reliance on data collection and first-party advertising I think you fix most of the major issues.
Not breaking up Google because the effects would be inconvenient would literally be letting a monopoly regin because they’re a monopoly.
Shut down services if needed. We can adapt.
Making YouTube its own thing again wouldn’t be that hard.
Neither you nor almost anyone who upvoted you or replied to you read the article, huh
FTA:
“DOJ attorneys could ask Judge Amit Mehta to order Google to sell portions of its business”
That’s the author of the article speculating, they don’t know what it would actually look like any more than you or I do.
Bonus, as I noted, it doesn’t address the primary issue of a search monopoly. Even if they sell off those business unit, the search monopoly remains.
There was more discussion of potential remedies in the article than that.
Never forget that the baby bells slowly reassembled themselves. They’re not a single company but they’re down to 3 or 4 now
Which is exactly where it should be… having regional phone companies sucked. Having 1 phone company sucked. Having 3-4 is the least sucky, but we have real competition.
Before tearing apart Google and Amazon, I’df much prefer we have 3-4 choices for internet providers (unless we can turn them into utilities, then we should do that).
Fuck that. Any Canadian will tell you, you don’t want an oligarchy
What about Microsoft and Facebook?
How do the people who make this comment every single time something like this happens, expect change when no one’s allowed to be first?
“They said smugly without an ounce of depth in their argument.”
Microsoft already lost an anti-trust suit in 2001. It’s in the article if you care to read it.
No one reads the articles man. I won’t lie, I’m guilty of it, but it’s mainly cuz Im lazy and go to the comments hoping someone will give a synopsis.
Thanks
We already had first Microsoft anti-trust suit, but what about second Microsoft anti-trust suit?
Great, now do the rest of them.
PBMs/healthcare conglomerating needs to be looked at as a top priority
And this Kroger Albertsons thing needs to be stopped for good
Do it! Then, do every single major conglomerate they’ve allowed to form over the last 30 years
Keep going I’m almost there
😂
Antitrust comes in waves in the US. First, it’s a free for all to let the tech develop freely…then you see the horrors and a time of antitrust kicks in. This would be the 4th wave since the Sherman Act. Let’s hope it’s a good one.
Interesting! Go ooooonnnn 😍
You can also read about Lina Khan, the current chair on the FTC side of antitrust.
That’s all I had, I’m not an expert, but I hope they go after FB and microsoft too (in case that makes you feel randy like that other guy in the comments) :P
Do you think they’d do Apple?
My biggest fear about a Google breakup would be what that does to the mobile market, specifically in the US, given the iPhone’s popularity here.
A human can live their whole life without ever interacting with an Apple product by mistake. I’m not sure about that for android/google/adsense/maps/youtube. It takes a deliberate effort to avoid these guys and I’m still not completely free from it. Slightly easier but still a minefield with Microsoft and FB, especially in niche areas.
It would probably do Google a world of good, depending on what gets split or spun off. A lot of Google products have unrealized potential that’s hamstrung by poor leadership and privacy issues. Maybe at least some of their products will be able to thrive on their own.
Will the old method of breaking up a company work enough on modern tech companies? Will the 2nd best map software ever catch up in market share?
Just spinning off Android would shake up map software. It’s how they get traffic and other data.
Many apps for Android rely on Google Play Services which I don’t know exactly what it’s doing but collecting data is a good bet.
Do we end up with worse maps then?
By my understanding google play services is basically just shared libraries and APIs for doing stuff and not as tied into Google specifically as its name might suggest
If you swapped most people from google into DDG without telling, most would hardly notice, I venture. Mapping is different.
Perhaps, though I am dubious (when it comes to things like searching for business open hours or street view).
However it’s not like choosing which restaurant to go to. They just type their search in the Google browser textbox and use the same search engine they’ve always used, the default. They’d need to encounter a failed search and think to try another, only to find that probably doesn’t work either.
Just apple maps and bing under the hood though.
What we really need is some non-super monopoly competition like osm
Yea! OSM is the Wikipedia of maps.
I think Apple could catch up.
If they forced them to split Waze off and make it independent again it probably could, it’s probably the only non default app I see people use regularly
Oh, did they actually keep Waze? I assumed they bought it to kill it.
Still using it, so still going right now.
How about we start restricting how many businesses a company is allowed to buy out in a year. Maybe allow like 1-2 mergers a year. There no reason we should allow one company to buy everyone and then kill their products and services leaving the consumers holding the bag that will no longer function because the server is gone.
I’d go further, restrict the market cap for businesses so they have to spin off if they get too big. Add to that a value limit for the number of boards you can sit on so 30 companies can’t be controlled by the same people.
Buying out companies takes longer than a year usually.
Ah yes, but you see, the US government only cares about faceless corporations, business owners and other rich people, and not about the average citizen, sorry. In fact, I would argue most governments are like this.
Can I vote for YOU for president?
One thing that I’ve always found interesting is that silicon valley has a common start up strategy that is basically: do well enough to get bought buy your bigger competition. Basically, be a threat so your VCs can cash in when a Google, Facebook, etc buys you.
I’m other words, Silicon Valley has a start up culture that feeds an anticompetitive/anti-trust ecosystem. No one complains because they are all making money. It’s the users who slowly suffer and we end up were we are not with 5 companies running the modern web and Internet infrastructure.
I would say even one a year would be too much.
That unless the business has failed and is no longer operating, for a merger and acquisition to occur they would have to petition the courts for permission first.
Imagine the shit that Microsoft and Google and Adobe and Amazon would be doing if they had to start their companies from scratch and compete against the already extant players in the field?
It would create so many jobs, and create an excess of consumer choice opportunity, lowering prices and fighting against inflation far more than a couple of percentage points on the interest rate index ever would.
I’m tired of only being offered incredibly overpriced very shitty low quality options in every single category.
We don’t need $100,000 cars. We need $5,000 cars.
We don’t need $1,000,000 homes, we need $25,000 homes that anyone in America who works a full-time job regardless of if they’re slinging fries at McDonald’s or digging ditches can afford.
We don’t need $100 a week grocery bills. We need $5 a week grocery bills.
And ponies!
Your arguments are all invalid because capitalism
(I fully agree with your post, I sorry the world is shit)
Buyouts shouldn’t be allowed by default. The only cases where it should be allowed are when the business being bought out is struggling to the point where a buyout is really the only way to prevent bankruptcy. It should never be a good deal for the selling company and only a last resort to stop closing doors completely.
That’s what I like to hear!
So they’re breaking up Google but giving Intel more free money after it cut 15k jobs?
How is this related?
Google also cut 12000 jobs in Jan 2023, but it does not have an AMD or Nvidia to kick its ass in search when it fucks up.
Kagi is kicking their ass.
Who?
really? Is it growing that fast? I expected it would remain more niche than Linux, particularly if you need a subscription.
Oh I just mean in terms of product quality. It’s gonna take forever to even teach people they can change search engines.
Almost as hard as picking a lemmy server :D
Intel is a near monopoly and it controls the physical hardware that runs the entire universe with the exception of mobile devices and embedded.
If you’re going to break anyone up that’s who I would go for first but because of the pipe dream of making computer chips in 'Murica these idiot politicians keep propping up Intel’s Wall Street investors while its employees get fucked over.
At the very least the x86 duopoly has to end. It’s not only legal but kept the way it is because of legal contracts. The courts need to declare them void because their enforcement leads to to the violation of antitrust laws.
IFS is struggling to compete against TSMC, Datacenter is bleeding and loosing Customers to AMD, Ampere. Microsoft, NVIDIA and Google are also working on ARM server CPUs. Client Computing Group is loosing marketshare to Apple and AMD, with Qualcomm also recently entering the ring. They had to kill Optane, sell their NAND business, they’re not really relevant in GPU, have to IPO Altera again to get some cash and Mobileye already had to be IPOd again.
Clearly the CPU market didn’t need intervention to get competitive again, Intel didn’t have the power to prevent others from competing in the market and as soon as they got complacent others got ready.
Relying on TSMC as the exclusive manufacturer for bleeding edge semiconductors would be insane. We need Intel and Samsung to remain competitive.
At the very least the x86 duopoly has to end.
AMD, Intel and Centaur/VIA have x86 licensees. ARM exists, RISC-V is gaining traction - No need to implement all the legacy baggage of x86 when you can start with something a little bit more current.
Fully support the action, don’t know how the timing works…
Best case, you only start to basically outline what this looks like before the election. Worst case, you enliven the complacent, left-centrist billionaires to vigorously join in with the perpetually batshit right wing billionaires to get trump in to “live to fight another day” with the reasoning of, “we need to save ourselves first, then we’ll deal with trump when he goes full fascist” and then they either won’t be able to or won’t care to because they won’t want to upset their share price.
Well, something, but that action is only temporary because those companies that were the result of the division are reunited to form or are acquired by other large companies.
Obviously they will no longer be what they were in the original company. But something is something.
Yea, I’m afraid of that, tbh, if more corpos go full elon.
Good luck, I’m all for it, but good luck
I don’t hold my breath until they really do it.
invest in Sherman Antitrust Act memes now
Unless Savannah is some girl he knows, not sure this lands. Savannah, GA wasn’t really ever ravaged in the Civil War or anything.
Atlanta’s the one that got leveled.
Like that is what you point out, and not the fact they got the wrong Sherman pictured lol. John Sherman ≠ William Tecumseh Sherman
Ha, another good point. I didn’t recognize the person so I just lazily assumed it was supposed to be “generic Union Soldier”
I knew it was the wrong Sherman, but in the case of Google, I’d want the Total War Scorched Earth type.
Here you go. Right guy.
Yeah. I just remembered from history class that he had given them a message saying basically “Surrender or I lay unholy seige apon the city and you either die by being blown up or starve to death.” and the name sounded good, lol. He did end up with the key to the city! Good old Sherman. Liked to laugh, sing, set fire to homes, sometimes with people in them, good old total war guy.
Don’t stop with them
Crush corporations, swiftly and without fanfare rebuild capitalism with worker co-ops, seize the means of production without all that stagnation and failure that usually follows.
rebuild capitalism
Replace, yes?
Let’s just choose our words carefully for now or the people with the money will get spooked and pay the people with the missiles to start blowing things up.
I’m already on a list.
I’m trying to make things easier for my own FBI agent, we’ve been through a lot together.
Will cooperatives really be able to offer good services or will they become corrupt sooner or later?
Can’t predict the future but a system like this could be better than our current state of affairs where we already suffer user-hostile services and corrupt action all concentrated in a few private companies to which we have no alternatives.
If cooperatives were a more prevalent structure, there would likely be more of them since the power incentives to consolidate are lessened, but not eliminated. Because there would be more competition in the marketplace, there would be more incentives to provide good products and services. We can assume that underperforming cooperatives would generally be less successful.
Also, with more participants in the marketplace and greater decision-making by members, less power would be concentrated in the hands of the owners and managers. While that’s not a guarantee against corruption, limiting power concentration lessens the impact of any individual’s corrupt actions and provides opportunity for others not to have to do business with them. Compare to the current state of Google’s leadership directing so much of the company’s efforts not toward providing service but toward manipulating people and markets to squeeze more money out of them.
There are, however, things we likely would lose out on with a more cooperative-based economy. For one, while there would be more incentive for co-ops to produce higher quality products and services, they would probably spend less effort on the “high polish” (for lack of a better way to say it) that attracts marginal customer/user growth. In other words, things would work better but probably be less pretty.
Another potential drawback is in economies of scale. Theoretically, market-dominant and tightly integrated companies can produce more for less while every piece of the puzzle just fits together. I don’t see this as a very compelling argument since the efficiency gains don’t usually benefit anyone but the owners, with excess profit directed not to increased quality but to marketing and manipulation. Since cooperatives would be less able to build up their own “walled gardens,” interoperability may be more incentivized and this drawback may be mitigated.
Really, though, anything has got to be better than having so many smart people working toward finding new ways to squeeze money out of us rather than doing something actually productive.
Another potential drawback is in economies of scale. Theoretically, market-dominant and tightly integrated companies can produce more for less while every piece of the puzzle just fits together.
Personally, I have a pet theory that economies of scale fall start working backwards once a company reaches a certain size because so many employees become so disconnected from the actual activity that makes the company money that 1. Various management types try to do good but instead accidentally impede the money making process, 2. Various inefficies emerge just due to the sheer number of people involved and miscommunications are amplified 3. You reach a scale where lots of B2B products (especially SAAS products) start making sense, but B2B generally charges you a premium for the convenience compared to doing it in house, so the cost benefit can quickly get out of whack while lock-in and corporate intertia makes it harder and harder to change
History says corrupt…
