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Comment by jcfrei | Hacker News Reader

The US doesn't have a great history when it comes to the effectiveness of breaking up monopolies. The breakup of the Bell system just resulted in regional monopolies for example. How would you break up Google? Into search, sites, youtube, android (devices) and cloud hosting? Search and youtube would just stay monopolies on their own but they couldn't cross-finance android development and google sites anymore. And I don't think Android would be a worthy competitor to iOS without Google's ad billions. Stricter regulation with regards to privacy laws and online advertising would probably work out much better for the consumer.

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> The breakup of the Bell system just resulted in regional monopolies for example.

The breakup resulted in a massive consumer bonanza, as long-distance communications became too cheap to meter. The regional monopolies it failed to address, on the other hand, held back the deployment regional broadband for decades -- and have since used the outsize profits from their lousy monopoly business to eat up many players in competitive markets.

But the imperfection of the breakup isn't an argument for leaving monopolies alone. It's hard to believe that companies like Google would even exist today if AT&T had held their monopoly. What new "Googles" are we missing -- and don't even know we're missing -- because Google subsidized things like Android and YouTube?

Or break up search into a utility that provides crawling/indexing service, that provides an API to third party search result providers. Similar to how many power companies are split up.

Then DuckDuckGo would have access to rebrand googles search but keep its privacy benefits, while other providers could compete on other search value add.

Considering they already provide the !g command how is that significantly different for DDG? They obviously have access to Google search results if they want them.

>Then DuckDuckGo would have access to rebrand googles search but keep its privacy benefits

Have you heard of startpage.com? It's literally that. Essentially it's to Google what DDG is to Bing.

If a company in tech has to give their technology to competitors, what motivation do they have to invest the resources to keep iterating and improving? When I hear the "utility" idea I realize that a lot of people, even in tech, don't understand how big a challenge search is.

The technical complexity difference between power distribution and internet search is so large that you can't compare the two.

Motivation to keep improving is vital in search. It's a decades old arms race between quality results and black hat algo gaming. And it plays out on a dataset that's always growing, and that growth is always accelerating. If iteration slows down even a little, black hat wins and everyone else loses.

Your suggestion would effectively kill Google, which is maybe the goal, but unless it applied only to Google it would kill the searchability of the internet along with them.

Remember Altavista? It would look like that.

Which is not to say there aren't regulatory answers to Google's dominance. Forcing a firewall between their interests (i.e. search and advertising) would be a start.

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