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>Google must not fall because it is a monopoly. If it was to fall it should be because someone built a better product.

One of the reasons for breaking up monopolies is that they make it harder for newcomers to build something better.

Even if you break up Google or Alphabet, the search division would probably remain a single company. It won't solve anything.

So You get Google Search Inc. Adsense Inc. AdWords Inc, Gmail Inc, I imagine.

This would be just restructuring, Googlers are too smart to get hold back by this and they probably already have an emergency plan if it remotely comes as a possibility.

If Google search is not funded by ads any more, they’ll suddenly have a serious problem.

It will, no worries. What would prevent Google AdWords Inc providing ads to Google Search Inc? It's like any other company signing up for an ad network.

My point is that if your company sells information rather physical products then breaking it up is pointless.

I don't think it would be possible to split off AdWords from Search. Search would either partner with AdWords or roll its own ads and then we'd be back to square one.

When Bell Telephone was split it was cut along geographic lines. That would also not work on a tech company for obvious reasons --- software knows no borders. I don't know of a sensible way to break up tech giants because the efficiencies of scale create a natural winner take all market.

So, as part of the deal, you prohibit the companies from engaging in the businesses that you broke up. So search, inc can't expand to ads, and adwords can't expand to internet search.

Search, inc is still going to want ads, presumably, so they'll contract with someone. Setup rules for the contract. Maybe require at least N ad providers with each getting a minimum of Y% of pageviews, and contract terms have to be FRAND.

Strongly restrict personal information passing between the companies.

Or, i guess you could go all Bell on them and divide the US into different territories and have Pacific Google and Southewestern Google and what not. Would be kind of weird to geofence search and ads though.

Google Search is aleady geofenced. Wven if you switch search language, it will still apply filters depending on the geolocation of the request IP. So splitting Google along geographic boundaries wouldn't change much on the technical side of things at all.

However Bell was broken up in a consent decree that didn't have to do with its monopoly over the networks, not explicitly at least.

Bell was broken up because they owned Western Electric and used it to vertically integrate the telco stack for the entire country.

A hypothetical breakup of Alphabet could mirror the breakup of the Bell system, as Alphabet controls the data collection -> advertisement stack. Spin off Search + AdWords as an independent business, while services targeting data collection services that feed it (Chrome/Chromium, Android, GSuite, Google Home, etc).

Personally I could see a lot of consumer benefits.

AdSense and AdWords are two parts of the same product.

I know, just an example to imagine breaking Google up in a really stupid way.

I don't think that if Google vanished tomorrow, a new crop of superior search engines would suddenly pop out of the ether to replace it.

Is Google somehow suppressing the creation of a good search engine? No, on the contrary it has created the best web search engine we've ever seen. I would personally be sad if you took it away from me, and I suspect that 99% or more of its users would be in the same boat (don't judge the zeitgeist by web forum echo chambers). You break up monopolies when they are harming users, not in order to cause harm to users.

Google's search engine is a unique portal into the WWW in that it heavily controls what parts of the web people get to see. Opinions can be shaped, facts can be suppressed, lifes can be ruined by the decisions that go into search result prioritizing.

With the world being what it is today, Google Search is in an extremely powerful position. We depend a lot on information that we find on the web. And these free form search queries are the best UI we have at the moment to retrieve it.

It is a good thing that Google Search is good and is getting better, but that doesn't take away from the fact that they wield a lot of power that needs to be checked somehow.

You are wrong. When a product makes the world a worse place—say fridges that deplete the ozone layer—the right thing to do is to ban the product.

In the case of petroleum fueled cars, they are significantly contributing to a massive climate emergency and should be banned regardless of the existence of a superior product. In the case of the Google search engine... Well in the case of the Google company, it should be forced to split up because it is a massive monopoly that hinders competitors from entering any of their dominated markets, and they use their domination of one market to increase their dominance of another.

And this is should be done regardless of the existence of superior products. Goggle as a single company is making the world a worse place, and the right thing to do in that scenario is to split it up.

That's such a vague standard - every single big company has people claiming they make the world a worse place, are we going to break up nestle, every oil company, every agribusiness and pharmaceutical and car company along with google? That could make the world a much worse place

Would it? Big food producers like Nestle buy ingredients globally, ship them in masses between comtinents to produce highly engineered products. Would a company that is smaller do all of the same things? Would less energy be wasted on production in those factorie? Would the products have fewer additives, etc...?

Would smaller farms with smaller fields and a larger variety of crops be better for the environment? Would those farmers grow more organic food?

I don't think that this is black and white. But smaller companies would likely be a whiter shade of gray in some cases.

In some cases highly engineered products are not ideal for human health.

But highly engineered products are often ideal for:

1. Having a longer shelf life. (Ideal for countries without the same standards for food preservation) 2. Having yields large enough to feed populations. 3. Increased ability for transport.

I agree that there are gray areas, but it's these qualities that help feed a world.

The article says:

> One could rightfully counter that Google has a good product. They even offer it for free.

But Google Ads are not free. If Search is the product, then advertisers are the customers, not users.

Yes. Google has a superior product riding on top of a corrupting business model that cannot help but mis align Google's interests with those of the users they are claiming to serve. Google should unbundle the current business model from the technology and also offer clean, unbiased, private search service that is paid by the user on a subscription basis. I would jump on the chance to pay say $10 a month for Google quality search if I knew my search was private and the results were not influenced by outside parties.

Ballpark estimate, how much would you pay for the entirety of your digital life being private? All of it, bar none?

I would probably pay at least $50, in addition to whatever the services I use already cost me, for privacy and freedom from ads or any other manipulation I did not explicitly permit. Note I consider the latter at least as important as privacy.

> Note I consider the latter [manipulation] at least as important as privacy.

I second that. It's somewhat reassuring to know that others realize that as well. Most people just have no idea how marketing and now 'deep learned' algorithms (applied psychology) make puppets out of human beings.

I consider "user feed control" (that users choose what, how, where, when and why things are presented to them) of equal importance to e.g. democracy as far as human freedom is concerned. But the current manipulation is so insiduous that from now to mainstream awareness to generally implementing solutions is a long, long ways away.

> at least $50, in addition to whatever the services I use already cost me

I think this tends close to an upper bound — not many people willing to pay, and even fewer at that level — but certainly one more anecdotal proof that premium services are totally viable for a certain group. The question is 'how big' that group, what's the market for that, but I'd wager it's enough to sustain a few 'premium' businesses (or alternative plans) for most common services (some are harder; search notably).

The product is us.

Direct link for the lazy: https://cliqz.com/en/

The search results have gotten noticably worse in the last year.

When a Wikipedia/encyclopedia article is what I'm looking for, why is Google showing articles?

Wikipedia used to be the top result.

SEO is my first guess?

I've noticed things on the spectrum of articles <-> blogspam crowding out the top results in many queries, and that it's substantially more difficult to find forum content discussing related topics to the query. It's a shame, as I think there is often more interesting content on such forums.

Anti-SEO is my first guess, that and tweaking for fears of regulation or bad non-grown-up PR...

Google's algo changes since about panda have been burying good web sites and content while bringing quicker answers and 'sanitized' aka semi-censored results to the top.

Some of this is over reaction to SEO and trying to out do the spammers - but the collateral damage to the results and thus the end users who believe that google brings the truth is hard to calculate.

Combine that with regulation like dmca, right to be forgotten and others.. results are even more censored, and the general population does not know what they are not seeing, as they still trust google to be bringing the truth.

worry about bad PR from various factions - tweak the algorithms.. and you can say for sure that the results the more adolescent google brought a decade ago were often more of what people were looking for.. and the results today are often like cheap irradiated / sanitized snacks, not the full enchilada that was once a G search away.

Much of this started happening when whats his name became that adult in the room and started putting the finger on the scale to change what millions could find, it's gotten more and more censored every update since then, and less transparent about that.

in my biased opinion.. your searches and the results will vary. I still use other engines for different things, and I feel strongly that we need more search engines. Anyone who wants to create a better adult engine, let me know.

it’s useful for google to demote wikipedia in favor of showing more diverse results. wikipedia is very very very easy for you to just search directly before turning to google

Google does seem to have their 'recency bias' setting set to 11. If any of your search terms have been in the news in the last 2 weeks, those articles are all you are going to get.