Hacker News Reader

Comment by CobrastanJorji | Hacker News Reader

I know that there's a quota of at least one "Google bad" article at the top of Hacker News each day, and that's fine and all, but I feel like the bar for them is getting lower.

There's a pretty good case for breaking up Google, but this article doesn't make it. The word "monopoly" doesn't appear once in the whole article, which is pretty weird in an article about how to break up Google and the justifications for doing so. It lists six reasons, and not one of them is about how anybody would be better off if Google were broken up, nor are there any about the legal burdens that must be satisfied to do so.

Instead, we get reasons like "YouTube has become the visual voice of several generations and is too important to leave hidden inside an opaque conglomerate." That's not even an argument. "The world needs Google Cloud to be viable?" That's an argument AGAINST breaking up Google.

View on HN

"The word 'monopoly' doesn't appear once in the whole article"

You're correct on that! It appears three times.

Ahh shoot, I must've misspelled it when I did a search. You are quite correct! One of the six reasons was in fact that the "maps business has a built-in monopolization risk," which is still a crummy argument, but it IS about monopolies.

Ha.... yeah and I did count that as one of them, because three is funnier than two. :)

> "The world needs Google Cloud to be viable?" That's an argument AGAINST breaking up Google.

The "argument" appears to be that if GCP were a separate company, instead of just a bunch of products inside Google, it's not going to get randomly axed like Google Reader was.

The article also goes on to undermine its own argument by noting that a) GCP is now important enough to be broken out in the financials and b) GCP serves a very different class of enterprise customers.

>"The world needs Google Cloud to be viable?" That's an argument AGAINST breaking up Google

I’m not strongly opinionated either way, but google cloud being connected to the main advertising company is the one of the two major reasons the European public sector isn’t using it. Terrible support is the other major reason.

Maybe google doesn’t want the public sector billions, but something like firebase is actually a better fit for us in a lot of cases than what AWS or Azure has to offer, but we’ll never use it because google won’t guarantee our data stays in Europe or that only European citizens access it like AWS currently does. Likewise, we would never chose to use g-suite over office365, but there you can add a 3rd major reason in that it hasn’t really been updated for 10 years and is now horribly behind office365.

This is my opinion, but I don’t think the services google actually sell for money rather than privacy benefit a whole lot from being a minor part of a major advertising company.

> I’m not strongly opinionated either way, but google cloud being connected to the main advertising company is the one of the two major reasons the European public sector isn’t using it.

Please cite. And is M$ not also advertising[1]? If this ridiculous argument can get people to stop using M$ azure crapfest it might be just the boon I needed.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Advertising

> M$

Really?

>we would never chose to use g-suite over office365

Do these products meaningfully compete? G Suite seems to be the simple version and Office365 seems to be the complex behemoth.

I see them as a shovel vs a backhoe.

And with Firebase you can expect a fast increase in cost within 2-5years (the Google Maps model)

> “For many years, the astonishing torrent of money thrown off by Google’s Web-search monopoly has fueled invasions of multiple other segments, enabling Google to bat aside rivals who might have brought better experiences to billions of lives.”

This was described as the ultimate reason to break up Google. Then he goes on to explain 6 more reasons.

I am all for breaking google, but then you also have apple (app store monopoly), amazon (delivery monopoly), facebook (personal data collection), microsoft (total grip on public contracts)... Not to mention non virtual companies. Are American ready to break Walmart? Cause given their lobbying capability, they are more dangerous than google for democracy.

The sudden focus on google is a bit weird, given how non internet companies have been doing their thing in total impunity for decades. Not saying we should not do it, but it would be sane to also ponder if we are being influenced in doing so, and why.

> The word "monopoly" doesn't appear once in the whole article

„For many years, the astonishing torrent of money thrown off by Google’s Web-search monopoly [...]“

> I know that there's a quota of at least one "Google bad" article at the top of Hacker News each day, and that's fine and all, but I feel like the bar for them is getting lower.

Feel free to make a better one, I'll upvote that as well ;-)

People reflexively upvote any articles that contain Big Tech and something negative. I'm sure most people who upvoted this didn't even read it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com