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.
Do it.
I so want this to happen, but at the same time I’m scared that Samsung or whoever will buy AOSP and enshittify it completely
Isn’t it already licensed under permissive Apache v2? Anyone can fork and carry on the project without the permission of Google, every manufacturer already does as a result of the license.
The OS is but the Google Play backend isn’t. Google has a monopoly over Android by keeping a monopoly on the appstore which dictates that you must allow google spyware to run on your OEM fork to be able to qualify as a “Secure Device”.
Several Chinese OEMs have China only variants that don’t use GPlay and also ship with some some other cool apps, but they can’t sell it globally because Google says “screw you” since no one publishes apps outside Gplay, and because several major apps refuse to run on Googless android which GrapheneOS has threatened to sue
This is still just the tip of the iceberg though. Google already got sued for GPlay monoply last year and reached a $700 settlement just for developers.
On top of that, several of Android’s underlying features are considered archaic and dated. They always have huge kernel patching issues because no OEM (especially Qualcomm) releases the source code for proprietary binaries, meaning no one easily upgrade kernels (practically impossible for FOSS android, expensive for OEMs). The android runtime is imo a piece of crap compared to some low power optimized linux distros. ADB is still needed to delete system apps. Settings lies about permissions, which themselves are poorly sorted. Oh and Google hired the dev behind Android rooting (magisk) so they could kill magisk hide which circumvents system app abilities to tell if you are rooted and therefore not worthy of running proprietary apps.
There’s so much more the deeper you go, it’s just really hard for any contender to step up because of the sheer might Google has over the market. They have so much power that they coerced Samsung into dropping RCS support which makes Google Messages the only app on android that supports RCS, even though RCS is an open OEM standard from 2008
Do it do it do it do it do it do it…
Smash them with a hammer. Google should not exist as it is. Not for decades.
Break up AdSense, chrome, search, android, shatter them all into separate companies that can stop selling out literally every waking aspect of life as their sole business model.
and then prosecute them for antitrust if those companies conspire together
Will this work out for consumers if other tech giants like Apple, Microsoft, or Amazon, etc. aren’t also broken up simultaneously? Won’t Google’s assets just get sucked up into another existing monopoly and we’ll be right back where we were but with one less choice than before?
I’m genuinely curious.
Capitalism finds a way.
It won’t. It simply benefits Apple and Amazon who should have been broken up a decade ago
Amazon literally has had a mostly worldwide monopoly
Don’t forget that the right wing has a hard-on for Google. People like them are Apple’s target market (I guarantee their families were the first to get iPads) and don’t forget their really warped questions during the congressional hearings which demonstrated that they had done absolutely no research and had a huge inherent bias. Stupid questions like “if I walk 3m to the right, can you guys see that”. Or, why does president Trump come up as the first hit on Google for loser
I support this, but only if it happens to all 3 companies simultaneously . Otherwise, we’re just transferring more power to Apple (who honestly have followed some Trump style tactics over the last 25 years)
I get the idea behind a duopoly, but from an economics and game theory point of view, but, if applied unequally, another monopoly will simply take advantage.
How does this affect or concern me?
No one really knows yet.
did somebody specifically ask you to look at this and comment? just wondering why are you asking such a weird question
Didn’t know there were stipulations to me commenting here. My, my. What an extremely hospitable user you are to this new, welcoming website. User since last year.
well howdy and welcome, stranger! i was just wondering why anyone would leave such a comment. i didn’t intend too imply that you couldn’t comment, of course.
I’m hazarding a guess that since you immediately went and looked up statistics about my user account and included them in your reply, you’ve come here with a lot of habits from… the other place.
i don’t run this place or anything, and this is just my observation, so don’t take it as gospel. i would say that the tone here is generally a bit friendlier, so (imho) there is no need to assume hostility on the part of other commenters. i was just curious!
This could affect you in several ways:
Search Experience: If Google is broken up or forced to share data, you might notice changes in how search engines operate. Competitors like DuckDuckGo or Bing could become more competitive, offering better privacy, search results, or features, potentially giving you more choices. Privacy and Data: If Google is required to share data, there might be concerns about how your data is handled across different platforms. On the flip side, increased competition could lead to better privacy practices as companies vie for users. Technology and Services: Google’s services are deeply integrated into many products and platforms. A breakup could impact the availability, integration, or performance of these services, which might affect how you use technology in your daily life. Economic Impact: Google’s size and influence mean that any major changes could have broader economic impacts, potentially affecting industries related to technology, advertising, and beyond. This could indirectly influence job markets, investment trends, or even consumer prices.Overall, these changes could alter how you interact with the internet, your privacy, and the services you rely on daily.
invest in Sherman Antitrust Act memes now
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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
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Ha, another good point. I didn’t recognize the person so I just lazily assumed it was supposed to be “generic Union Soldier”
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Good luck, I’m all for it, but good luck
“Kagi Search” looks cool. The examples of searches look far superior to even that of google.
But it’s $5 per month. (No adds) Or $8 for couples. Even so I think I will try it. The search results look really good.
Has anyone here used Kagi Search?
I use it now, and like it. Do you have any questions about it?
I’ve been paying for it for a few months now, I like it. You do have to be a more deliberate in search results, especially if you’re looking for location specific info, but that’s how old Google was too anyway. The summerize site and fastGPT features can be pretty useful too.
Just a silly example, I was playing skyrim and wanted a duplicate item so I could display it, put in “skyrim console command to spawn item” and it spit out the console command perfectly
I wanted to like Kagi, but their Brave fiasco turned me off of them for good
Brendan Eich should be blacklisted in the tech world. It’s really too bad that they partnered with a bigot and his shitty company.
When I was younger, I thought Brendan Eich was a god for creating JavaScript and his contributions to web development. Then he started to speak about his personal views, and he instantly went from a god to an evil villain to me.
How can somebody so smart be so dumb and evil at the same time?
Brendan Eich worked really hard to turn himself into just another tech bro incel but Brave is a really good browser and the engineers deserve to not have their accomplishments overshadowed by a weird adult obsessed with other people’s genitals.
They created a novel and interesting approach to ads with their BAT token and Brave is probably the most private browser you can get if you’re stuck with Chromium browsers.
As often as I’ve tried to switch to Firefox I always end up encountering issues and going back to Brave. I wish he’d step down so Brave can shine without his bullshit whining hanging over them.
That’s fair and I can agree. I don’t use Brave, but for everything I’ve heard about it, it sounds pretty competent. The team behind Brave doesn’t deserve to suffer, and the hatred should be to Eich, himself, not Brave as a whole.
But it’s $5 per month. (No adds)
The price seems reasonable IMO. Search engines are expensive to run, and I’m not sure they’d even be breaking even at the moment.
They have a “small web” search that searches through small sites like blogs, which I really like. Sometimes there’s small sites that have great info but aren’t ranked very high in Google due to all the SEO spam and Google’s preference for major sites.
I’ve been using it for the last few months, and while it doesn’t offer as many “nice to have” features as Google (like automatically finding mask results need in where you are), the core functionality works great, and the lack of ads is refreshing.
I tried kagi for a month and the results were probably as good or slightly better than Google for 90% of searches but it completely falls apart any time you want something local or hyper-specific. It made me realize that the personalization that people hate with Google’s results actually saves a ton of time because I had to retry a lot of kagi searches with additional context.
Blocking ads and trackers in your browser and then using Google without an account will get you most of the way to what kagi is doing.
May I recommended watching “The YouTube Effect” if you don’t see the problem with big tech companies.
I’m guessing it can be found on YouTube?
lol, no :) I tried
the place is there, but it looks blocked to me, maybe it’s a region thing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2Lle0vMBoM
if that don work, there are places to stream from e.g. https://pw1.unblockit.download/movie/1467291-the-youtube-effect
Its on YouTube in the US, but you have to buy or rent it to watch there.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
There’s no reason Gmail should be included in search of it’s broken up. Otherwise agree though.
I’m drooling at the thought.
If you seperate Youtube from Google, I cannot see youtube surviving. It’s probably a loss leader for them.
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.
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 think the problem with Google is that none of their side projects actually make any money. I don’t have a solution here
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
A tiny bandaid on the capitalism that’s literally destroying the planet.
Yeah! Let’s get some real disaster in here! Let’s hit those 100+ million dead marxist numbers! You sad ugly tankie.
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.
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.
I think they might be using it as a beta testing ground for their back end features, the brand is also pretty valuable in and of itself. The traffic avoidance is much more aggressive than Google maps
I think Apple could catch up.
So they’re breaking up Google but giving Intel more free money after it cut 15k jobs?
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.
How is this related?
Separate the search engine from anything that stinks of advertising so it can return to what it’s supposed to do: return the most relevant results.
Because even appending
udm=14only gets rid of promoted links and in-page advertising, it does f**k-all to correct manipulated search results.And chrome from everything else too
Chrome doesn’t make any money. How is it supposed to support itself as a separate company?
It doesn’t have to be free. People used to pay for licensed software with money instead of their private data. We can do that again, or there’s still open source options like Firefox and it’s derivatives.
It does have to be free. It’s open source software. If they tried to charge money for Chrome, people would just use Chromium or one of the other browsers based on it.
Chromium is open source. Chrome is not. Open source also doesn’t mean that you can’t charge for the compiled binaries. But that isn’t my point. My point is that the reason it’s free is that you’re actually paying for it through the value of Google tracking and storing everything you do, but as a society have don’t have to structure services this way.
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A decentralized search engine, running on something like what Locutus (neo-Freenet) is intended to be, can work without a business.
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even appending
udm=14FYI all this is doing is going to the “Web” tab of the results. You can just click it instead of modifying the URL.
I guess where it’d be useful is modifying the search URL in your browser so that searches always add
udm=14by default.Can you elaborate on the business model of a search engine that has no ads?
Let’s not make them a business. Search Engines are fundamental core services for the modern globalized and connected world. It’s just like your post-office service. Make it an internationally owned and funded non-profit organization with open-source and the goal of enabling the unrestricted sharing of knowledge over the internet.
What does the creation of a multi-national state owned search engine have to do with Google? I presume nations have the resources to do that all on their own.
What would you suggest the Google search engine be allowed to do to profit as a business?
The only business model that really works is charging people to use it, like Kagi is doing.
like Kagi is doing
I haven’t seen much to suggest Kagi’s results are better than Google’s. But that’s as much a function of time and horsepower as anything.
I would argue that the private model is what’s fundamentally wrong with modern search. Nationalize Google and make it a public utility, like any public library or publicly financed research institution. Open up the front end source code and let people apply their own filters and modifications, rather than locking everything down to force feed you sponsored content.
That’s the only real way to fix search.
Yeah, let’s see how much worse corrupt bureaucrats can make this already rotten turd of a product!
Not trusting the EPA because Exxon has done such an awful job.
Nationalize Google and make it a public utility, like any public library or publicly financed research institution.
This would be great. Running a search engine is very expensive though.
The Internet Archive is probably the closest thing we’ve got to something like this. It’s a non-profit but AFAIK they don’t get any government funding. They’ve got the scrapers and could probably work on a search engine project, but I doubt they could afford it in their current state. They’re spending a lot of money at the moment due to companies filing lawsuits about Internet Archive archiving their content (and a bunch of content is gone from the archive forever as a result
Running a search engine is very expensive though.
The federal government spends about $1.3B a year on advertising and another $37.5B on data collection, with Google being a major recipient of both budgets. Nationalization would save a small fortune.
And for the economic tailwinds that efficient Internet research provides, I’m willing to bet we’d see significant economic benefits that eclipse the base cost, not unlike with Amtrak or the USPS.
The Internet Archive is probably the closest thing we’ve got to something like this.
Them and Wikipedia, definitely. Both make for excellent models of non-profit free-at-point-of-use information services.
I get the feeling a lot of people would complain about Google search doing that too.
