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Comment by MrTonyD | Hacker News Reader

It isn't barbaric to break up a company - at all.

Companies operate in our society, and they impact the citizens of our society. It is reasonable to directly stop a company when it is working against the shared values of our society.

Really, I would argue that it is barbaric to force a society to live with a company which ignores the wider interests of society.

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Silly use of persuasive words on the part of the OP. Barbarians don't have corporations nor anti-trust regulation. All of the "market forces" remedies that the OP suggest are just the sort of thing that monopoly power makes ineffective. If Google is a utility like the phone system circa 1970, then the solutions suggested are analogous to addressing AT&T's monopoly by forcing government employees to use ham radios one week and carrier pigeons the next. Monopoly power means that consumer choice has been reduced to the choice to take it or leave it and all the suggestions are simply that; take it or leave it.

Maybe if you owned one you'd feel differently.

Can I reach into your backpack and crush your bag of potato chips?

What's the matter; all the baked potato material is still there!

If my bag of potato chips is demonstrably and deliberately harming the lives of many real live people, you are welcome to crush it.

(Not that all corporations harm people. But some combination of "the way we tend to structure them" and "human behavior in large groups" seems to make them a lot more cavalier about collateral harm and negative externalities, particularly as they get big.)

I'm pretty sure you can understand how much of a false equivalency it is to compare a bag of chips with a powerful entity like Google.

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