Google is a monopoly – the fix isn't obvious
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Google is a big ass company and enjoys outsized market share because people choose to use it. Everyone who buys a MacBook or Surface computer or smartphone does one thing immediately and that's to download Chrome. It's literally the first thing people voluntarily choose to do after powering on the device for the first time.
I'm not sure why we need government interference here which in all likelihood would change no customer behaviour but probably just add a few extra clicks in front of the Chrome downloading process.
When Alphabet begins doing something like banning Google Fiber customers from accessing bing.com, that will be interesting. But there honestly very minimal anti-competitive behaviour like that happening at the moment.
If this were true, Google could make the immediate and easy decision to increase their annual profits by $26 billion, by simply stopping to pay browser vendors to make Google the default search engine. https://untested.sonnet.io/Defaults+Matter%2C+Don't+Assume+C...
The statement is true as written.
Incorrect.
Google spent ungodly amounts of money to make sure that their search engine was the default in as many places as possible. People didn't "choose" to use it, they use the defaults.
And in some cases, like my Android phone, google is the only option for integrated searches. I cannot use another search engine without opening a browser then opening up the search engine of choice.
Monopoly may not be the right term, but anticompetitive is. They outspent every other search provider to make sure their product was used. They paid off apple to not develop a search engine and instead use theirs as a default. These are things in the court documents which caused the ruling to go against them.
That should have been clear from my comment and if you look at other comments in this thread you'll see others interpreted the parent comment similarly.
I suggest you read others comments more charitably.
I tired Kagi, it's good too, but I didn't feel like the cost was justified when Google is free. I will probably try Kagi again someday though, I did like it and I think their mission is pretty cool.
And by no surprise, their browser is the only major one that has no privacy protection features and last month decided to abandon the plan to deprecate cookies and tracking.
That browser is competing with someone like Opera (used to be a paid for product) and Mozilla in an unfair way, because Google is killing others by making it free and taking the loss.
And yet browser development costs money. If browsers cost money, you could make a better product and compete by selling it, but when an incumbent is giving theirs away for free?
Safari has largely caught up now for web standards and mostly only lags behind in experimental features that are largely driven by Google anyway. But Safari has better battery use and privacy.
Chrome is good because Google see it as their play at a web OS. That’s why they shove everything and the kitchen sink into it.
So it’s just different priorities and the resulting differentiators. I don’t think any major browser is actually significantly better anymore today.
Removing manifest v2 might be the kick to try Firefox again but I’d still like to fix safari
Honestly if there was a set of plugins that would sync my bookmarks toolbar links I'd have less issue switching browsers and trying others more.
How do I explain groups that attempt to compete and don't overthrow an incumbent? How much explanation does that need? That's literally the default, most attempts to overthrow the king fail.
More often than not, when a product is replaced, the growth of the replacer is a steady way upwards from 0. Not a meandering stable placement that suddenly shuffles around. I dunno what's the reasoning for that phenomena, I just chalk it up to people refuse change without perceived innovation. But point is, experience states that none of the browsers should be doing too much more than what they already do - the only likely path to victory is waiting for others to fuck, and not even Twitter, a shithole, could do that to themselves.
Google justified a huge investment in Blink by making effectively making it the application platform of their netbooks. They also justified such an investment because they are afraid of other companies owning the method they get their ads in front of people - Such as dramatically changing and increasing their investment in Android when they saw the first versions of iPhoneOS.
The ChromeBook is why Google has so many non-standardized API in Chrome (that people often refer to under the umbrella of "PWA".) No other browsers saw an urgent need to be able to e.g. scan for and talk to bluetooth devices from a webpage, and in fact the other browsers were somewhat appalled by the security implications.
Edge: Gave up, and now repackages Chromium. They spent over a decade as an incumbent with supposedly only a half dozen developers on the IE team, and that was because they were doing their own monopoly game (protecting the Windows platform from cross-platform applications). They couldn't overcome their lack of momentum, and quite frankly had an inability to attract experienced talent.
Safari: Does fine, but Apple never directly cares about market share - they want profit share. There's no profit maximization for free browsers; WebKit and Safari investment is about owning the best default browser on Apple platforms, and it has better system performance. It is certainly arguable that Safari is better than Chrome on Mac. And let's not forget part of how Chrome got such a quick start is that they are a fork of WebKit.
Safari would be a better example.
Make no mistake, all that original plan was about was about applying pain to everybody else in the advertising world, while their replacement for cookies would have been satisfactory only at Google's scale. The whole thing was Google astroturfing, taking advantage of everyone's ignorance of how the Internet works to further entrench their advertising monopoly.
I don't know why they aborted the plan, but I suspect regulators had caught on that it wasn't altruism but Anti-competitiveness that motivated it.
The antitrust legislation protects consumers, not businesses. If Linux provides for free what a proprietary software offered for money, it's a net win, even if that company goes out of business.
The problem with Chrome is not that it's free. The problem is that it develops more and more anti-customer traits, like making it hard to block ads, and uses its market share and compatibility issues to force these on customers.
The problem with google search is that Google integrates it with Chrome and Android, and buys the default search engine slots in other browsers, so that many customers are not even aware of other options. Sadly, Bing and DDG are not clearly superior, and, say, Kagi is paid. (Kagi is a good example of a paid product that's significantly better than the common free alternative.) Ironically the default search engine deals is how Firefox acquires most of its funding.
I don't see an easy way to find Google guilty of hurting customers through monopoly power in search or browsers: free products, a few alternatives, trivial cost of switching, no price gouging possible. Same with dumping: products start and remain free, most of Chrome is open-source and competitors reuse that same code, and customers are free to use these derivates, or adequate independent browsers and search engines.
It's a bit like coca-cola: alternatives abound, downsides are known, but people just seem to weirdly prefer it.
Note that this also makes Chrome look like it dominates the market less which is presumably why they keep spending this money on FF.
It's not hard to see that the browser market has suffered from the actions of Google, while the operating system market has not suffered from the actions of Linux.
If anything antitrust action against Google might give Microsoft another kick at the mobile can and they can take on the Linux-based android OS that Google distributes.
The other UNIX vendors that went out of business thanks to Linux's free beer, or Microsoft and Apple's issues trying to sell licenses for their OSes on the server room, both now supporting Linux VMs as "The Year of Desktop Linux", are good examples that when it is free, everyone takes it no matter how it goes.
Oh they didn't abandon the plans, they chose something worse. They are going to make it a user decision.
Advertising companies can still gain some value for people who have third party cookies enabled, applications which aren't well-maintained enough to remove a reliance on third-party cookies will fail (sometimes), and users will be pushed by things like work SaaS apps to re-enable third party cookies (as a global setting) to be able to use required services.
But then you're not the customer, you're the product, as they say. What is the cost to the actual customer to transition to an alternative?
The actual customer is the one buying ads. It's comically difficult to avoid Google if you're the one who wants to show ads.
That's the discussion start. Sounding clever about "the actual customer" isn't clever, it's irrelevant. Advertisers just go where the eyeballs are, they are constantly using several different channels. There is a word for it because it's so common - omnichannel. There are companies like TradeDesk which exist to help customers manage because there are so many channels.
The relevant switching cost is the search user. It's 0.
"0. The transition to bing from google costs 0."
It was in reply to the question that asked the switching costs to the customer. One would have to be completely out-to-lunch to think that the cost is 0.
> The relevant switching cost is the search user. It's 0.
The search user has no relevance. Did you miss the context of monopolies? Monopoly literally requires economic trade, by very definition. The search user is not engaging in economic trade. They are is what is being traded. You even said that yourself, so why play dumb now?
Read the case. One of the biggest complaints is the fees Google pay Apple. Made up definitions aren't relevant. Here is the ruling: https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/gdpzmaxjxvw/...
All the more reason for you to stick the topic that is already there. No need to double down on whatever out-to-lunch behaviour that came beforehand.
If you really want to talk about something else, why not start a new thread?
> One of the biggest complaints is the fees Google pay Apple.
Right, because that solidifies their position in the market. That spend provides a more compelling product (more eyeballs, as has been said), which is in no way realistically matched by would-be competition. Clearly monopolistic behaviour. But isn't about search users. Hell, the ruling you link to is literally about the impact on advertisers.
Actually read the case. Maybe start with the conclusion. Surely at some point you get tired of just making stuff up.
And as discussion continued, it was asked what the transition costs are for advertisers. He who answered that question clearly claimed it was also zero. This "someone said something about search users earlier", while technically true, is unrelated to anything being talked about here.
In danielmarkbruce speak: Actually read the comments. Whatever it is that you missed is leaving you horribly confused.
Read the comments. Read the case. Stop making things up.
You'd have known that if you read the comments.
You probably can't stop Google from being the most popular search (or don't want to) but you should be able to stop Google from using the popularity of their product to crush alternative ad tech. Or crush some new tech we don't realize will be important.
Another alternative could be that the government breaks up entities like Google and regulates the market in a way that segments it so that it is more beneficial to society by providing more safety and stability over the vital infrastructure that is the Internet as well as by creating healthier markets that provide consumers with access to cheaper, better goods from a variety of vendors aren't squeezed by the likes Google, Apple, and Amazon.
We have two generations now who have born thinking online services and software are supposed to be outrageously cheap or free, just because of companies who have used such services as loss leaders while operating off of their main business or bootstrapping off of VC funding.
We have small businesses who have chosen their revenue model based on what lets them work best within the simplistic financial model of mobile app stores. This is even more apparent now with the EU DMA, where Apple is pushing for a core technology fee that creates a huge financial risk for the freemium product tiering that customers now expect.
Google has the most popular search engine because creating such a thing defends their contextual advertising business. Being the most popular destination allows for higher rates than any incumbent could typically charge. Thus money doesn't exist to fund a competitive commercial search engine from scratch - it needs to being funded by another company as a loss leader (see: Bing) or as part of some other VC-backed product.
but not really. the situation is similar to auto-voting the incumbent in every goverment election each november.
that is not ok.
I wouldn't go so far as to say that literally nobody means that when they say 'monopoly' but I doubt it is common enough for that claim to be made in good faith.
Then there's all these other giga-sized "side projects" which seem small proportional to those mega-businesses - google home type stuff, google nest, waze, consumer electronics etc. Arguably the google nest and assistant is duopolistic with amazon alexa.
Which is the state of tech, there's like 5 big companies that share some portion of pies of 20 major duopolies and 100 minor duopolies. And they're all like "SEE! SEE! We're NOT a monopoly". And there's two of them saying that, pointing each at the other one as evidence of their non-monopoly status. To me that's monopoly by another name, and that other name is duopoly, and as such it has many of the same problems as the monopoly. And duopolies all every damn place, not just tech - NYSE and NASDAQ stock markets. Sony and xbox (sorry nintendo). Boeing and Airbus. Visa and Mastercard. Pepsi and Coke. Intel and AMD, AMD and NVIDIA. Windows and Mac. How many "gentleman's agreements" must exist in those duopolies, too many methinks
And so if you ask me it would be quite natural to shatter all these companies according to their duopolistic silos, with the hope being that the duopolies exist in part from the synergy and deep pockets of the whole organization, and so by breaking apart the duopolistic strings to the rest of the org, perhaps there can be a third and fourth phone operating system, home consumer electronic, web browser, youtube, and so on. Because the point of capitalism is an efficient market to serve the public, not to serve the megacorp coffers
Monopoly is when they use that market share to compete in _an entire different market_ without actually earning the "best" spot. Or using their dominance to prevent competition entirely from succeeding. For example: Blocking all ad-tracking on its own browser, except ads purchased through its own ad network. Remember, _you_ are not the customer of Google. You are the product. The ad companies are the customer. The market is not search: the market is ad sales.
From a consumer perspective it's not about being able to switch search engine. Google is potentially putting a drag on entire economies, both money wise, and innovation wise. If every service you use has to spend extra because Google has an advertising monopoly then every service is passing a cost to you. If every service needs to do it the one way then there's no advancement, no new models, just "give Google money" forever.
LLMs are not going to meaningfully upset the balance any time soon. They are a service / product in search of a problem for most people. And if they do something useful for you, that’s great but HN users are not most people so the statement stands.
The judgment makes a lot of hay over google paying to be the default search engine and how google has all this data on how valuable default is and how much people don't tend to switch from them. That's all true but I'm not sure what the proposed solution is. Make it illegal to pay to be the default?
There has to be a default and I think the outcome there is that Google is still the default because people prefer it. Google only pays to be the default because, if they don't, someone else will. Google would love to not have to pay Apple to be the default.
I also notice the lack of acknowledgement that people actively do switch away from default browsers regularly, from their OS defaults, to Chrome, which defaults to Google Search. Bing's market share is basically entirely because Edge is the default browser in windows with Bing as the default search engine. "Solving" this default problem will probably crater Bing if it involves forcing a user to make a choice on install (or something similar).
The problem with talks of "splitting up Google" is that Google is an ad company, not a browser company, not a mobile phone company, not a search company, not an email company, etc. All of those other products exist to serve the ad company, they are loss leaders. Splitting up google is bad for consumers who use gmail, chrome, android and search.
The only real split that I think is possible is Google Ads from Google Cloud.
As far as the idea of Google's position being a drag on the economy, I'd like to see a competitor with a better model that Google used their market advantage to intentionally kill.
Just barely, 95% of their ads are scams.
This is a little unimaginative. Google's ad business could be split horizontally or vertically to make space for competition. It's simplistic to say they are an ad business, they are performing several functions in the online ad business space.
> I'd like to see a competitor
Me too!
are you sure? what if they had other options?
> Make it illegal to pay to be the default
Yes
> I'd like to see a competitor with a better model that Google used their market advantage to intentionally kill.
I hope the government will show this is exactly what happened. The competitor doesn't even have to have a "better model"
So, the solution is relatively simple: break off their ad marketplace business. Break off their ad display business. Let the funnels fend for themselves.
I think you're right. It hides a lot. We do need a better understanding of the problems. But be careful what you wish for. Google being a monopoly is not a cause, but a symptom. Do a little 5Y analysis. Even rolling it back one step;
Q. Why is Google/Microsoft etc a monopoly?
A. Because they bought up all the competitors.
So, a deeper problem is the very ability to buy and sell companies. Is it "the market"? Yet it is possible to create articles of a company as non LLC/Ltd so that it it can never be bought or sold. People don't do this because they don't intend to "build a great product/company", they intend to cash-out and sell a great company. These subtle incentive structures really matter.
Dig deeper and ask things like "why do people only build companies to sell?" There's more upsetting answers behind that one too.
In the end, if you want to say BigTech is not to blame and could not do anything else but agglomerate into problematically large blocs then we have to concede the environment and incentives of modern business are harmful to the public/national good. The place to intervene is then at the level of those values.
I think the problem is that people don't know what the word means. We don't need to redefine it, people will either respect the importance of definitions of we'll just lose the next term for a monopoly as well.
For anyone following along, Google is a monopoly because they are the market leader in multiple overlapping industries and product lines. They choose to leverage those products together to fain a competitive advantage that no one competing with a single product can reasonably compete with.
- Hardware (Google Pixel, Chromecast, Chromebook)
- OS (Android, ChromeOS)
- Distribution (Google Play Store)
- Browser (Chrome)
- Search (Google)
- Products (YouTube, Drive, Gmail, ...)
- Business (GCP, Workspace)
The only other companies that are similar are Microsoft and Apple... both arguably less extensive.
The issue with this also isn't entirely clear until it's "exploited": Google (and the others) can force certain products on their customers due to controlling the "underlying" product. Ad targeting also becomes incredibly precise and valuable... everyone else has to go through the scraps while Google can "just" read your emails (Gmail), get your location (Hardware/OS), go through your files and photos (Drive) and use your search history (Google).
- American Tobacco: Commodity
- Standard Oil: Commodity
- AT&T: Utility
- Northern Securities: Railroads
- Swift & Co: Meatpacking
- Kodak: Film
- Paramount: Movie Theaters
Google is more of a synergistic conglomerate. How would spinning off an individual business like Chrome, Android, or AdWords reduce their respective dominance?
I support this ruling and more across all industries, but I'm trying to square how a breakup should work that actually drives competition.
The hard part is turning that staggering amount of unstructured data into a useful search engine, and in particular fighting off black-hat SEO.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/14/technology/how-google-dom...
The AI goldrush also has sites scrambling to block any crawlers other than a short list of approved search engines. Even before this mess Googlebot running on Google IPs often received special treatment.
Search itself is still a hard problem but one that can be solved independently. Crawling on the other hand requires websites to cooperate and due to Google's size enough won't care to bother with anyone else.
Vimeo has tried a different approach, but it's hardly in the same league as YouTube.
One point to mention is that there are two different "Google Ads". Search ads are very different from page ads (DoubleClick). You could certainly take away the DoubleClick part, but separating Search Ads from Search is much harder.
Without Google subsidizing Chrome, a real competitive market for browsers might emerge, with more vendors investing more effort into competing for users, without having to compete against one of the richest companies in the world that sees its browser as a loss-leader for its ad business, has the ability to dump infinite money into its product, and can advertise it on the one website that 90% of people regularly visit?
I don't think this is going to be the case. This seems like an extreme conclusion with virtually no precedent.
Since an ad browser is such an important piece of software, I imagine it will receive many donations. The reason Chrome doesn't is because it doesn't need them. I think that will change.
Also, I think it's possible you will pay for a browser at some point. Ultimately software costs money to make and we've become desensitized to that because we've exchanged that cost for advertising. But advertising sucks. For example, I pay double for HBO Max just so I don't see ads, and I'm not alone in that.
- integration to ad infrastructure
- integration to the vendor's other service infrastructure
- a cost of more than $0
Given that the market is full of people who will only bear $0, the likely conclusion is that a Chrome separated from the ability to integrate to vendor infrastructure will turn to integrating to someone's ad infrastructure (more poorly and less securely than Chrome currently integrates to Google's infra).
They're paying for that data, and then believe they're making more from consumers as a result. But no matter what, the cost of collecting that data, the infra, and then corp x or y buying it, comes out of the bottom line.
It's like points credit cards. Where does that cash back come from, magical fairies? It comes from retailers' bottom lines, eg from you.
Looking at your current user's post history, you've posted gibberish as comments (just random text). You then progressed to posting a personal history multiple times, where you lambasted the users of this forum, essentially calling everyone "mean" and implying foul intent. Attacks like this are against the guidelines, and really, I cannot imagine they'd go over well anywhere.
Most of your posts seem to be non-thoughtful posts (see the guidelines), which contribute little such as this one. We all go off the rails a bit from time to time, we all colour outside the lines occasionally, but it seems like most of your posts are outside of the lines.
If you really want to engage in thoughtful debate, at least on HN, I suggest you read the guidelines again, and at least attempt to post in the spirit much of the time. Again, no one is going to be perfect in this, but from what I see it doesn't seem like you really want to engage thoughtfully.
Good luck.
Especially in the modern ecosystem where costs have become divorced from income, people would (behavior observation strongly suggests) much rather pay with their information footprint (a resource they can't capitalize alone) than the dollars in their wallets. Otherwise... Where's the successful paid-for browser right now? Which one? Can we point to it?
Let's say widgets are $x. Now the widget manufacturer, as their competitors are advertising, decides to advertise too. They just hit magazines. Success!
But then comes targeted advertising. Now they must pay for profiled advertising, which means that someone colllected the data, archived it, continues to track, and provides uptime and an api you can poll.
Google had 300 billion in gross revenue, what of facebook and others? And there are more nuanced, more targeted providers too.
The entire tracking industry has got to be hundreds of trillions in revenue, and guess where that comes from?
The cost of everything you buy.
So you get a browser and gmail for supposedly free, but now steak costs 3% more. What a savings.
And yes, when people are tricked into thinking a browser is free, it will be hard for visibly paid competitors.
People complain about global warming, and "how did we get here?". Well, the same way we have no paid for browsers. No one cares past their own nose.
Advertising is driven by competition; in the absence of a browser-subsidy flow for that money, the ads will still be there and prices won't go down. The ads will flow through other channels. Then we get higher cost of goods and no zero-cost browser, which seems strictly worse?
However if everyone paid cash for browsers, browsers would also be quite cheap. If you sell 50M copies a year, even $1 goes a very long way.
Firefox seems to spend around $200M/year1 on 'software development', but they also have lots of side projects (pocket, proxies, other software like thunderbird, etc) so I bet $50M could easily fit the bill. And Firefox doesn't even use a shared render engine, or HTML/etc parsers, it's not a chromium based browser.
1. https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-invest...
...in the current market, which was created by companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Google, who subsidized their browsers through other income.
The people have already spoken with their wallets on this topic.
This could, hypothetically, lead to a collapse of that ecosystem into an also-ran, in which case all Apple has to do is invest more in supporting their browser on OSs they don't own and we could end up with full browser hegemony... "If it doesn't work on Safari, it doesn't work on the Internet."
The market price for search is $0. And yet we have Kagi because Google is now so ad infested. Ads are now bad enough that there is money in killing them.
The market price for email is $0. And yet we have Fastmail.
The problem with Google is dumping. The cross-subsidization means that YouTube, Gmail, Chrome, etc. can run at a loss indefinitely and soak up huge chunks of the consumer base. Forcing those services to stand on their own doesn't solve all the problems, but it sure makes competing with them a hell of a lot easier.
(YouTube, on the other hand, should be sued into oblivion for not implementing identity checks for upload. The fact that any published video will wind up monetized on YouTube 20 seconds later is genuine theft.)
> YouTube, on the other hand, should be sued into oblivion for not implementing identity checks for upload
YouTube is probably actually too big to fail at this point. Breaking YouTube video links would have a massive impact on video on the Internet as a whole. Hosting video (efficiently and performantly) is still actually expensive, and YouTube is eating the cost of subsidizing most of the Internet's archive of videos.
A new dumper would have to compete with the split out Google Ad Company for ad resources in order to have enough money to cross subsidize. The Baby Bells reformed, but they never again reached "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company." levels (other companies took on that mantle).
> Hosting video (efficiently and performantly) is still actually expensive, and YouTube is eating the cost of subsidizing most of the Internet's archive of videos.
That's even more reason to crack them up immediately. Did Google not just shut down the DejaNews Usenet archive--something that had negligible storage cost?
Browsers offer incredible value. If there is need people will pony up the money. Many corporations have an business interest in keeping the web free and easily accessible so could serve as potential sponsors. Just like some newer programming language get baking from different companies and manage to stay independent. You just don't want to have one company having total influence.
Obviously things have evolved quite a bit since then, but I think the general pitch that Chrome is primarily a value-multiplier for the org at large, rather than a direct value generator is still broadly the case, and it's really not clear to me that it can exist as anything else without a fundamental reassessment of what it's trying to accomplish.
In theory Chrome could exist as an independent business if it were allowed to take bids for search default from google. But if the US govt broke up google they would likely also ban the sort of deal that would let Chrome be a viable business on its own.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned the pseudo-control Chrome gives them over web standards. They can implement experimental APIs in Chrome and immediately use them in their webapps.
Chrome was a business risk mitigation move.
Without Chrome there will be only be Safari and Edge
So I think we can cross that off the list as well and conclude that in the short to medium term, if Chrome went away it would mean simple web hegemony for Apple.
Speaking from personal experience, I write my best code when I'm frustrated by the absence of something I need. I'm sure many others here are the same way. If a sufficient fire is lit under the community to make the web continue to work in the absence of the old guard, I'm pretty sure it'll happen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
But Edge will not be the only alternative; Firefox does still exist, and the Chromium project has forked into several other browsers besides Edge.
No, that's not possible. Google pays $20 billion to Safari to be the default search engine. Imagine how much they would pay an independent Chrome, which has many multiples of Safari's market share. That alone guarantees it would be an incredibly viable business model.
It would be better to point out that Chrome is the only browser not getting rid of third party cookies. Chrome promised to, but then has reneged on that promise in favor of "user choice". I don't for a second think Chrome would have kept then around if they weren't tied to an advertising company.
That is certainly the excuse given, but that doesn't mean it's the reason.
> Adblockers can still block ads (as in not show them), but they can't throttle or block requests.
Note that this makes them less effective at blocking ads. And speaking as a former uMatrix user, filtering/blocking the network traffic is a lot of the point.
They didn't, but other malicious extensions did.
So Google has maneuvered into this position skillfully and then blamed the regulars for not continuing on a pro-privacy path, while conveniently that also makes them the most ad money...
https://x.com/jason_kint/status/1821558368659456399
And thats what they dared put into writing.
Some companies that want to be the default search (unless the gov bans that) or, some companies that want to be the default new tab page, would likely be the actual customers
An exception might be Chromebook users. It's not clear how that would break out. Especially in light of ChromeOS being cancelled for Android
I'm not sure it'd really make sense to split Chrome off on its own or not though. Maybe Chrome/ChromeOS/Android as a base software platform for consumers, businesses, and schools.
I think your example is completely wrong. Chrome has no source of funding. If separated from Google, they will have a massively magnified incentive to cater to the whims of advertisers because they would be completely subservient to them for funding.
My understanding is that Chrome provides value to Google through intangible means like brand association and thus Chrome does not have to 100% justify its existence by enabling ads for Google, meaning that it has some funding to just be a good browser for consumers.
That would be a paid service that the majority of people would not be okay with, and even if google search did an enshittification pass trying to create a crowd that would. Users would still jump ship to the next search that is still provided for free.
How is Chrome going to make money as a standalone company? I have no idea, but it probably aligns with your guess
Boeing used to own an oil company, engine manufacturer, airline, and airplane manufacturing. The US government broke them up because nobody can compete with that vertical integration.
This is a common issue addressed by strong anti-trust regulations.
If Google (or any online business) is prevented from owning a web browser then the browsers compete on merit. Consumers choose what is actually good for them.
Google has no incentive to make a good browser for consumers. They only have incentive to make one that is good enough for consumers to behave in Google’s interest. And if nobody can compete then that bar is low. Consumers don’t know what they are missing. Nobody does because we haven’t had a competitive browser market in close to three decades.
An easier example would be Microsoft and Office; you could spin off an application like that quite successfully, the same might apply to their ERP. But those examples only stem from the fact that they used to be isolated 'offline' products, and Microsoft is working hard to undo that.
Trying to draw parallels between that and Google Workspace, that is a technical nightmare considering the entire distributed nature means that half of workspace can't exist outside of Google. You'd have to copy Google to host it outside of it, and I'm not talking about GCP or Borg or anything like that, it's everything, from the GSLB to Zanzibar, from monorail to the custom hardware everything runs on. Perhaps a double-digit years long refactor could change that, but nobody wants to pay for that.
Given that monopoly-breakups are supposed to be in the public interest, it is a complicated argument to make in court that the public is advantaged by all those ancillary services getting killed. Now, I'm happy to declare that; I think the "culture of free" is corrosive, to probably an even greater degree than most other HN users. I'm outright willing to call it morally corrosive, for both the companies and the consumers. You, dear $READER, may not be inclined to go that far, especially perhaps on the consumer side. I'm just putting down my cards so that you can see that when I point out that in court that's going to be a difficult argument, it's an admission against my interests and biases.
Google is similar. They make money on ads and everything else is a distant second. Even search might have trouble standing on its own because it is funded on ad revenue; split them up that way and how is search getting funded? Google Cloud could certainly survive on its own for a time, but if it had to reduce investment it could go into an uncompetitive death spiral of having to match investment resources to profits over the years. Gmail could in principle make radically more money if they charged $5/month or something, but how many customers will do that?
And how on Earth would you even break up Android? You can't just hack it out as its own thing; it integrates with a lot of Google things and there's no way they'd all end up in the same entity.
I'm willing to just hack them to pieces and let the market figure it out. I think in the long term we'd come out stronger. But I'm arguing here in a relatively friendly forum for that and probably a lot of you still disagree with me. I'd hate to be arguing this in court.
With ads, by making deals with ad brokers. Its just that they will be able to shop around rather than using their own in house one
Whatever revenue is attributed to Search today is just the result of internal horse-trading, perhaps augmented with some accountant’s estimation of “fair market value” for ad space in search results. After the breakup anything is fair game. Maybe the ad broker keeps 95% of ad revenue.
And, if you believe that Google has been using its monopoly to raise ad prices, why shouldn’t prices fall?
Maybe we do want to make everything a little worse for the average customer so that more businesses can compete in the marketplace. But I, for one, will miss being able to attach Drive content smoothly to my emails, or being able to use my voice to trigger map navigation on my phone.
If the search business worked with other ad networks to maximize their revenue, while the ad business worked with other search engines, we’d likely see higher quality search results, less confusion about what’s an ad versus a result, and better as rates for buyers.
That said I don’t support that remedy at all. Maybe ten or fifteen years ago, but now it’s too late and the market is evolving around Google. IMO a consent decree that they won’t pay anyone for exclusive search placement is sufficient.
I'm skeptical that search is viable as an independent business at scale. I know DDG is making a go of it, but the business only has to pay a single salary.
I don't know about you, but I remember the time before Google where search engines openly offered paid search listings.
Google's search quality has declines over the years, but I don't think we're at the point you're talking about yet.
2. Why is everyone here so convinced that ad rates will go up with this structure? Isn’t part of the reason for Google’s conviction that they are charging too much for ads?
I just think it's a complete non-starter for any government to allow foreign governments to decide everything your citizens see. If they don't bow to your brand of censorship, you're going to pull out.
My point being...of course it isn't viable right now given ... Google exists and has a stranglehold over that market...
The whole point of breaking Google up though is to make what isn't currently viable, viable.
Browsers need to be a utility.
Email needs to at least have an option that is a utility.
Arguably operating systems need to be a utility.
Adtech needs to either go back to what it was when Google started out (simple contextual ads, no targeting, no data collection, no flashing or popups or video or or or or...), or just die.[0]
The reason these things have all been operated entirely by for-profit entities up to this point is because they're too new for government to have caught up. All the parts of Google that I've named above as needing to be utilities are fundamental, necessary parts of the modern internet, and are basic requirements for the average person to operate in Western society.
> How would spinning off an individual business like Chrome, Android, or AdWords reduce their respective dominance?
As for this question, Google uses the profit from its dominance in adtech to fund its dominance in other businesses. That's the textbook definition of an abusive monopoly. Take away the ad money from the other parts of Google, and they'll no longer have an unfair advantage over potential competitors.
[0] Yes, this would mean that large parts of the internet that have been free-at-the-point-of-service will have to find new business models or dry up and blow away. No, I don't have a silver bullet solution to this. No, I'm not advocating for nuking adtech from orbit overnight with no replacement.
I suspect the AT&T example may be more similar to the current situation than you're thinking. AT&T wasn't just the network, they also manufactured the phones themselves through subsidiary Western Electric. They leveraged their monopoly in phone service to drive customers toward leasing their phones, similarly (if more aggressively) to how Google drives customers from one product to another. Whether this remedy will be so far-reaching beyond search I don't know, but in the abstract there would be benefits to splitting up the conglomerate.
Both are open source projects with "ungoogled" options available, but those options are nowhere near as successful as the Google flavors. Would they just forbid Google from offering their own flavor of Chromium?
Even though Android itself is open source, Google Play services really are what allow Google to have so much influence on the Android platform. So what happens to Google Play? Would they be forced to split that off with Android? Would they be forced to continue offering their services for free, but with no strings attached? Would Android have to offer a middleware that lets you choose which services to use a la carte? Would Android device manufacturers have to ship their devices with an open source alternative to Google Play like microG?
How do you separate Google from Android without driving everyone to the other side of the smartphone duopoly, iOS?
If a breakup does happen, it's going to be wild. I wish I had more faith in our government to come up with the best solution. But something has to be done.
For instances if Android phones were allowed to not make Google the default search engine, for Apple to ask each user which engine they want instead of there being a default, for query and click through data needing to be shared at cost with other search engine companies, Chrome not being allowed to default to Google but require user input, and so on. Lots of options and more than one remedy can be applied simultaneously.
Then if you add that Chrome enforces how browser experiences are designed and how tracking is done, you see the problem emerging.
Because we think interfering with the free market is necessary when a company misuses market power, not solely when it is a behemoth.
The only thing that matters is competitive markets.
“Free markets” is typically associated with regulatory capture, buying out your competitors, and abusing your monopoly status to thwart others.
Governments should care about competition, not that abusive corporations stay at the top.
The Gilded Age Trusts were brought down regardless as to whether they misused their power. It wasn’t just oil.
Monopolies are like a positive feedback loop which causes the market to diverge into a barely functional state
It doesn’t matter if they abused their market position, monopolies are to be corrected, mens rea present or not
Globally, it's even more lopsided with Windows at about 75% and Mac at about 15%.
Hard to say Windows isn't a monopoly.
Regularly I get an OS update that walks me through "setting up" my "new" PC I've had for 3 years, and it involves dodging dark pattern UIs to not sign up for Office or Xbox Game Pass or set Edge as my default browser. And even if I succeed, they'll probably have taught my computer a new way to try to sell me something.
One update they added their horrible Copilot chatbot as an app to my taskbar, which I promptly unpinned. Then the next update they removed my "show desktop" button - which has been a consistent part of Windows for 15 years - and replaced it with ANOTHER COPILOT BUTTON. I had to look up online how to restore a basic navigation button that was replaced with an ad for their terrible new AI product.
Uhh not really, I use it by choice, because it provides functionality that other brands don't.
That operating system provides functionality, compatibility and services that other manufacturers don't.
"Compatibility" is exactly what I'm referring to as being the issue. I use Windows because it has compatibility with my Steam library. But if I could play those games hassle-free on another platform then I'd love to never boot up that dark-pattern-riddled adware dumpster fire excuse for an OS again.
Aside from any adware…
See the point here? All of Google pieces are a giant machine to collude in the same direction: their ad engine.
It's not particularly bundled to the ad engine.
ATT WAS phone service in the U.S. 90% of the U.S used ATT when it was broken up, and much of that 90% had no alternative.
With Google if another better search engine did appear you could switch in minutes.
And if you consider Android a monopoly then you'd have to consider iOS one too, and that's one much more obvious in it's user impact with a 30% cut being taken on the only app store you can install apps from.
If you don't like default X being purchased, pass a law. Otherwise we'll just be back here in a few years later if some other company becomes unpopular.
A breakup would separate the major services: Google search, YouTube, the ad business (DoubleClick et al), etc.. However, even then, the ad business probably needs to be broken up further.
This should all have been done much earlier, at least 5 and maybe even 10 years ago. Now Google is so entrenched that it will be difficult. One assumes that the government is more powerful than a corporation, but once you look into just how members of Congress so quicly become millionaires, well...
Billions (probably trillions) of dollars are spent every year on advertising through other channels than Google, including online. Let's stick to reality.
YouTube, Search, Email, advertising, are all controlled by the same people and that is a problem for freedom and the economy.
Middleman platforms often become natural monopolies due to network effects, but how does this expand to tech products in general?
I don't see any structural incentives that lead to natural monopolies in search, email, or a wide variety of other products that Google is dominant in.
So we are in a world today where things like Android, Chrome, and the default search experience on an iPhone are all what they are because of Google's need to build moats around the GooDubClick cash cow. More importantly it's really hard to compete with these things unless you have a GooDubClick cash cow of your own, which guess what basically nobody does. Decouple them and that will start to change, there will be many businesses that will take all sorts of novel approaches, and that is what we refer to as "innovation" when we are being pragmatic and un-cynical about what innovation is, it's a dozen or a thousand companies throwing new stuff out there and sooner or later some of it sticks and the world changes.
NOTHING is natural about what Google is today unless you consider the FTC not doing its job for 15-20 years "natural."
Maybe even demanded that certain too effective components were separated like adds. Or with Amazon retail from AWS.
Based on what evidence? Isn't the simpler explanation "VC wants big return; VC funds tech; therefore VC encourages monopolies"?
There are giant incentives to keep the ecosystem as it is.
Isn't it time to think about either (a) just accepting that you give them a much wider birth or (b) be much faster and tactical in your enforcement. Not every monopoly case needs to result in a break up. If you could point at one bad thing Google did - maybe the Apple deal for example, get that in court quickly with fast penalties that don't require massive corporate interference maybe we would be better off.
What UI are you imagining? Perhaps no search engine at all in the browser but the first time a user goes to "search" you present them with a list of random-sorted search engines?
Maybe the problem was that Apple has "that default option for sale."
On that page should be a list of the current well known / trusted providers (this can be a cached copy for offline config), maybe a refresh button (check for an updated version of that list), and a method of providing an end user installed search option.
In short: Empower the End User.
Google was incorporated 26 years ago, in 1998. Microsoft was founded in 1975, 26 years before US v. Microsoft was decided. Google is exactly as old as Microsoft was at the time, and while it's harder to measure my sense is that their stranglehold on search is at least as long and at least as unassailable as Microsoft's was in OSes.
You can't have it be both too early to go after Google and yet too late to have gone after Microsoft.
I kind of am asking to have it both ways - they should be able to move against these companies earlier by levying smaller sanctions. That way they don't need 1 big killer case to get a judge to order the entire company broken up or spun off.
It'll likely be the same for Google -they'll continue to be the dominant search engine, but search engines will be significantly less structurally important going forward.
> If you could point at one bad thing Google did...
Agree. But then there are the more nebulous ones — like Google's ad/search entanglement.
This is like requiring overwhelming evidence that a radiation source caused a particular case of cancer—not other problems, like birth defects, just cancer, and we’re gonna assume the cancer wasn’t caused by the radiation source until you can convince us otherwise—before being able to move against an actor exposing the public to radiation.
The lawsuit started under Trump DOJ as a political stunt because Google resembled wokeness and the party of freedom and family values (Republicans) wanted to show how tough they are to their constituents.
A few republican states also filed similar lawsuits in tandem which all got lumped together into this lawsuit.
Then the Biden came to power and kept at it because, well, he did keep a lot of Trump initiatives and now the DOJ people think they're some kind of a hero for working on this case.
Should suing Google really the highest priority for the administration? I don't think so but here we are.
Okay ... that is some serious wishcasting.
Chromium especially is so core to being a building block for applications and the modern Internet nowadays, it does seem like this core infrastructure piece should be more collectively owned.
Then you spin off the rest of Google as separate companies. Android/Pixel, Google Ads/Analytics, Youtube, Chrome, Gmail/Docs/Drive and Maps/Cloud would all be separate businesses. Chrome would likely be best spunoff as a non-profit as well, operating an open source web browser project.
Of course, if you're going to break up Google you also have to break up the rest of FAANG too or they're just going to step right into the space vacated by Google and probably buy up the Baby Googles[0]. Apple would probably need to be broken up into a hardware company, a software company and a services company. Amazon would need to be broken up into AWS, Amazon Shopping and Prime Video. You could arguably even break Amazon Shopping up into the online store and the logistics company. Microsoft would need to be broken up into Windows, Office, Xbox, Bing and Azure. Xbox would then itself need to be broken up to unwind all of its purchases of independent video game companies. If you're breaking up Xbox, you also have to do the same with Playstation (spinning them loose from Sony and unwinding their own acquisitions). It might also be a great idea to then do the same with major 3rd party video game companies like EA, basically unwinding all of their acquisitions. Meta would need to be broken up into Facebook, Oculus, Instagram, WhatsApp and Meta Ads.
Once you start breaking up Google, you open up Pandora's box and basically have to keep going until you break up the entire tech sector. That's why it is so tricky to do it. Once you're done with tech, it'd be a good idea to look at other sectors such as health care, Hollywood and the news media where consolidation has been rampant over the past few decades.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_Bell_Operating_Compan...
I would argue that because of this, the index itself should be something operated by the public rather than privately. This is especially true because it's within the best interests of the public to have an archive of the internet. The wayback machine currently supports that and it's on its last legs.
Index the internet with a public search API, then let future search engines hit that an optimize based on internal algorithms to get better results.
I love this but the act of indexing the web is both complex and ever-evolving (not to mention expensive), so the market needs to have natural incentives for the public crawler to continue being good at its job. Google is incentivized to have a great index because it feeds into its competitive advantage. If the index is a shared resource, what incentive does the indexing company have to keep improving it? And what guarantees that the indexing company's strategy doesn't end up being unfair to those affected by their websites getting indexed?
All search companies would have to maintain secondary indices to augment the public one. There's probably some artificial structure needed to make open indexing viable.
A publicly owned asset doesn't need to be managed by a private entity. The incentive can be exactly the same incentive that the NHS and NASA operate on. It's a fun problem that you can make a career on making better that is ultimately a public good. Not everything needs to be operated with pure profits in mind.
> And what guarantees that the indexing company's strategy doesn't end up being unfair to those affected by their websites getting indexed?
Voting/lobbying/etc. Though I'd assume everyone that makes a website will want to be indexed.
I’m not saying privatisation is better (US healthcare is the textbook counter-example), but just wanted to make the point that socialising something has demonstrably not been a good way to drive innovation and improvement in some cases.
Sure like there's open street maps for maps, there could be something like that for search indices.
But I thought we were discussing the viability of making search indexing an independent, maybe even regulated natural monopoly as a way to democratize search and keep competition improving search itself.
And I think the answer is no because search companies will find alpha from maintaining their own secondary indices and use it as a competitive advantage, and the 3rd party index will be (and if not immediately, then over time become) inferior to what the search companies use to differentiate themselves due to natural pressures.
It's not as if the gov doesn't already employ in several sectors skilled software developers. It only goes haywire when Reagan/Clinton style "Send it to the private businesses" policies get in the way.
When you start talking about a constrained resource like this, it only makes sense to move it to the only entity without profit as its primary motivation.
Constrained resource doesn't mean what you appear to think it means.
You have to take more than econ 101 to understand the real world.
Supply and demand -- gov't doesn't pay as well, so top SWEs do not work for gov't. Stronger reward signals attract stronger performers. If you can get paid 2x-10x more to do the same work, who will you go work for?
> When you start talking about a constrained resource like this, it only makes sense to move it to the only entity without profit as its primary motivation.
If the goal is to give competitors a starting point to mitigate the negative effects of a monopoly, then sure it'd be nice to have an open index that anyone can get. However I'd argue this is an ineffectual strategy because it's likely to be too little to be helpful, and just have low overall quality.
Profit is a reward signal that typically signals a customer's demand / need. When organizations like gov't lose that signal, they typically end up optimizing for some far less effective target (someone's whim, political clout) and missing what the underlying need is in reality.
Additionally, gov't lacks of a lot of software infrastructure and tend to use outdated tech / must adhere to procurement procedures that don't always yield the right set of tools.
So in addition to being unable to understand constituent needs well, and being unable to hire good people, they also have the nasty privilege of working with worse infra when they do get funding.
> The government directly running something like this can be every bit as efficient as what any private entity could do.
I hope I've illustrated that the answer is no. Also, anecdotally I've worked with gov't on behalf of a big tech company and it was very enlightening to see the structural issues keeping them from succeeding at tasks of even moderate complexity. The US Digital Corps can only do so much :(
I'm not anti-gov't though -- gov't _can_ make private entities more efficient though by busting monopolies and enabling maximum competition in the markets. Big tech is certainly due for a shakeup.
That is clearly not true. Marginalia has a different index than Kagi, which has a different index than Google. You are somewhat making the assumption that there is some perfect index that works for everyone, when the market shows there is a need for different indices for different users.
I think splitting up Maps from Google/Apple would make OpenStreetMaps see a lot more usage and improvements.
Amazon Shopping should absolutely be split into an online store and a logistics company.
I'd like to see something even more radical when splitting up Infrastructure (AWS / GCP / Azure), such as the Government offering Infrastructure similar to the Postal Service, effectively turning AWS / GCP / Azure into Fedex / UPS.
At least it used to - I haven't kept up much recently.
If you know better then please tell - but I'm not clear at this point whether you have an informed opinion - or whether you have no idea what The Register is.
That team will from that day forward be able to create a forked version of the product. Every gripe they had about it will be able to be fixed. They'll also be given half of Google's cash to hire the best people.
If search & ads are the main money makers, then force the existing company to compete with itself in those fields.
Also, instead, they could just unmerge doubleclick from Google. Let them make money by having ads on search and other places without BEING the advertising company.
At a minimum, not having Google paying Firefox/Apple to promote them as the default is a good thing. It’s super annoying that Safari doesn’t allow me to switch to Kagi easily.
I understand a reason they do this is to protect users like my father from adware/spyware companies putting in fake search engines, but I’m sure not getting money from Google to force a default has something to do with it as well.
What does Apple not allowing you to set a custom search engine on iOS have to do with Google?
I guess I am weird. I want the rules enforced for all players.
Microsoft has been a too big company since the 1990s.
Google funds Apple for search dominance and Firefox for reasons I don’t know of. Neither Safari (on mobile nor desktop) nor Firefox allow custom user supplied search engines. The presets they supply appear to be controlled opposition.
I want to be able to use Marginalia, Kagi, Yandex, MWMBl and SearXNG by default after a few settings changes.
Wikipedia, archive.org are two examples of non-Google projects that come to mind when I think of internet "public-good". They seem to be doing fine without advertising dollars (although perhaps they are only hobbling along, I don't know — but I would rather they get "public institution" treatment before Google franchises).
The bigger practical problem is that we want it to remain a global service and not become a national one.
Imagine chopping Search and Ads out to be their own things.
GoogAds turns into just another advertising company. Perhaps viable but uninteresting. GoogSearch, well, almost nobody wants to pay for search, so they seek some kind of way to get money, and the start up with the integrated ads, soon to result in what we have now. I used to run various Google Search Appliances, but they bailed out of that market.
Peel off GMail? More than zero people want to pay for email, so you might see something like a clunky Fastmail with a free tier and a pay tier. The free tier means ads again and you're evolving to a Yahoo model. Ummm, nobody really wanted that.
How about hardware? I dunno, are Pixels a loss leader for Google? I'll bow to someone else's insight on this, and I'm not really hip to the phone scene: are there a lot of "smartphones, we only make smartphones" companies?
Google Docs and various officeware might stand on its own as a distant second to Microsoft. I know some people pay for that.
Google Books, maaaaaaaaaaybe. It might stand on its own but here we just see people having to pay for what was once free.
I just don't see anything interesting or stimulating coming out of carving up Google. Almost everything they did (it has been a while since I was "into" them) seemed focused on making things that were almost byproducts, wherein their real utility was feeding the search <-> advertising cycle.
Google Sets? Ain't nobody gonna pay for that! Chromecast? Google Domains? I am scrolling through the list and not seeing much that would stand on its own two feet. Stadia? Google+?
I'm just not seeing much that can stand on its own, that people will pay for without it resorting to an ad model to support it.
The problem with a lot of Google services is that they have to generate enough ad revenue to offset the high cost of development and maintenance that Google's operating style leads to. Ostensibly, you could have some of these stand on cheaper practices?
Even worse is when these "public forums" are hosted entirely within walled gardens, e.g. Facebook; then you need an account (and not just DNS whitelisting) to participate in this public forum.
All government entities should be required to post public documents on their own servers/equipment/hostname.
It feels like one of those situations where we “get exactly what we asked for”. Like those movies with an Evil Genie who delivers on their wishes in the sneakiest way possible. “You wished for $1M, so I burned your house down - but look at all the insurance money you got!”
Or maybe a bit like how everyone wanted their cable bills to be cheaper (“just let me pay for the few channels I watch!”) and what we got was 15 different streaming services at $12/month.
We should have at least prevented them from growing so fast via acquisitions but it’s too late for that now.
This is how you sound.
Another example of this was Apple’s response to being forced to allow alternate app stores, where they added enough fees and restrictions that it was effectively unusable. The spirit of the law (allow anyone to make apps without a gatekeeper and fees) was not what happened.
Is "Chocolate Factory" a typo?
2. Give Google search competitors access to Google’s search data so these new AI search engine companies can compete. Without these huge amounts of data, they have no chance.
Done!
The infra for a decent crawl is prohibitive. There's a bit of black magic in crawl scheduling, and a bit in de-duplication, but most of the challenge is in scale.
I used to work on Google's indexing system, and sat with the guys who wrote the Percolator system that basically used BigTable triggers to drive indexing and make it less batch-oriented.
I know France has made at least a couple of attempts at a government-funded "Google killer" search engine. I think it would be a better use of government money to make something like a government-run event-driven first-level indexing system where search engine companies could pay basically cloud computing costs to have their proprietary triggers populate their proprietary databases based on the government-run crawling and first-level analysis. When one page updates, you'd want all of the search engine startups running their triggers on the same copy of the data, rather than having to stream the data out to each of the search engine startups.
Basically, you want to take some importance metric, some estimate of the probability some content has changed since the last time you crawled it, combine the product of the two plus some additional constraints (crawl every known page at least some maximum period, don't hit any domain too hard, etc.) as a crawl priority. You then crawl the content, convert HTML, PDF, etc. to some marked-up text format (UTF-8 HTML isn't bad, but I think UTF-8 plain text plus some separate annotations in a binary format would be better). You strip out text that's too small or too close to the background color. You calculate one or more locality-sensitive hash functions over the plain text, cluster similar texts, pick a canonical URL for each cluster. You calculate the directed link graph across clusters. The PageRank patent has expired, so you could calculate PageRank and several other link-graph ranking signals across canonical clusters. You'd presumably compute some uniqueness scores, age scores, etc. for each canonical URL, and then in parallel run each of the search engine startup's analysis over this package of analysis data each time you find a change for a particular canonical URL.
You might have some startups providing spam scoring or other analysis and providing that (for fees, of course) to search engine startups, etc. Basically, you want to modularize the indexing and analysis to provide competition and nearly seamless transition between competing providers within your ecosystem.
I think that's the way to drive innovation in the search engine startup space and properly leverage economies of scale across search engine startups.
This is kind of going the other way. Google had a monopoly on search (arguably - Bing would like a word). All these other actions are to keep that from being eroded. They didn't do Chrome because they wanted to own the browser market, they did Chrome because they wanted browsers to not be owned by somebody else who could make the default search engine be not-Google. That's entering other businesses to protect your main one. IANAL, but that may not be against antitrust law. It's at least not the main thrust of antitrust law.
I don't think there would be much benefit to society by breaking up google. Whereas I do think there would be great benefit to breaking up Apple or MS.
I consider Apple by far the most insidious, since they leverage your friends and family against you to put heavy social penalties on not submitting. They then use this dominance to bend devs to their will, and take an egregious cut of their profits while doing it.
If your family & friends use WhatsApp, they'll eventually be "pressured" by others to use iMessage, simply because the people that they know don't use WhatsApp.
This effect cascades, and now everyone is back to <existing solution> since the "pain" that solution inflicts on a couple individuals is not nearly big enough to make everyone switch.
Some people are painfully unaware of what it looks like on the ground here...
Hum... I'm sure you've heard about that famous one called AT&T.
Or Microsoft a decade later.
Particularly given how more "friendlier" has turned for corporations in the last 30 years.
- Microsoft's biggest monopoly candidate is Windows, and outside of business the PC space is too small for this to be as problematic as it once was
- Apple's devices have competitors, although they are really bad about sucking people into their ecosystem and mistreating the outsiders
- No one is forced to use Amazon, although they do have scummy tactics for their sellers I believe (you're not allowed to sell it cheaper elsewhere or something like that?).
I'm sure similar arguments could be made for Google though.
That being said, the trial is the basis for the action taken against Google:
> However, the Circuit Court did not overturn Jackson's findings of fact, and held that traditional antitrust analysis was not equipped to consider software-related practices like browser tie-ins.
Another interesting outcome of the trail was that it established a playbook that others, namely Google, could follow to avoid antitrust litigation. I would argue that Google's ability to operate as a monopoly for so long was largely a result of the outcomes of the Microsoft trial.
That's a bit of an oversimplification. Key parts of the original ruling were overturned because the legal analysis performed by the original judge was done incorrectly. Or more specifically, for the case of bundling IE with Windows, analyzed using the wrong legal framework (per se analysis vs rule of reason).
The case was remanded back to the district level for re-analysis under the rule of reason, and that would have been necessary regardless of the judge's behavior.
I don’t see how apple beat epic but google lost. Lawyers
Depending on how this goes, companies will need to change how they act in fear of the hammer coming down on them next.
I can choose iOS over Android. Bing over Google. Yahoo over Gmail. Dailymotion over YouTube.
Why is it a problem that google makes a superior product and people choose it ?
In all studies, when consumers get faced the decision to choose freely any search engine, most of them keep going back to google. Why is that a problem at all?
I'll be candid, it's good ... it's a hair less annoying than google, the results are just as hit or miss.
Here is the thing, if I need to BUY something Kagi falls flat on its face.
I find myself going back to google to shop, and to be candid it has drawn a contrast for me on spending. The "extra step" to buy has slowed me down.
I dont think breaking up google changes consumer behavior. It creates a hydra out of a snake.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Antitrust_Act_of_1890
https://www.economicshelp.org/microessays/markets/monopoly/
This article states that 25% of market share may be sufficient. That is not how I learned it in my economics classes: there we said it's 60% and values below that could be oligopoly (a small number of companies holding ~90% market share).
As for why it's bad: a single provider may choose to degrade their service, or increase charges, or create an unacceptable TOS. They would likely not be able to do that if there is an acceptable alternative.
Google commands a higher market share % of search than Microsoft does of personal computing OS.
We either start ripping this band-aids off or we will just continually have a worse and worse internet.
It's probably no coincidence that Google's first external CEO Eric Schmidt was the CEO of Novell.
Microsoft came out with Bing in 2009. Some say that Bing is "Bing is not google" Much like Windows NT was rumored to be Novell Terminator.
Now Google does invasive popovers within the page, etc., and this time with them in charge of the browser they are ahout to implement a plan to block extension makers from stopping it well.
It's not exactly a hot take nowadays that all the Big Tech companies are probably overdue for serious antitrust action.
The solution is simple (the word simple here is doing a lot of work, I know); Meta, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Apple and any other similarly sized behemoth should be nuked, and not just in the tech world. Microsoft should've been properly nuked 30 years ago with the original anti-trust, yet alone now, same goes for the others.
They use the money from their cash-cow businesses to artificially prop up their other lines of business, insulating them from having to actually compete on an even footing.
That's textbook abuse of monopoly (or market-dominant) position.
Break them up to? Break everyone up.
Ask me any company over 5k employees. It should probably be broken up.
Or do I misunderstand your point?
The whole point of breaking up monopolies is not moral principle. It's so that things get better for customers. If they don't, then what's the justification for breaking them up?
So breaking up Google would have resulted in worse outcomes for consumers 10 years ago, but it would be even worse today? Then it wouldn't have made sense to break them up 10 years ago and it would make even less sense today.
I'm not claiming there aren't any good reasons to break up Google (I don't know), but this line of argumentation doesn't work as far as I can see.
Your argument only makes sense if you start from the premise that Google should be broken up, and then try to back into an argument supporting that premise.
I don't think it's a good sign that you decided to resort to baseless personal accusations in reaction to a simple request to support your baseless clams.
The question is very simple: does it still make sense to break the company today? Not a decade ago, but today. It you believe so, why?
This argument is perplexing. Isn't the whole point of this sort of intervention to fix things that are broken so that everyone is better off? You're arguing for major interventions at a time they are arguably not needed at all and would expectedly leave everyone worse, and the only mitigating factor you could come up was that perhaps who knows things might "eventually get better". Maybe. I don't know?
What's the point, then?
Why does Google search use Google adwords? Is it because adwords has given them the better terms than their competition or because they have no choice by virtue of being the same company?
Regardless, there is not competition in their business in areas where there should be according to monopoly rules.
I believe this falls under the rules against exclusionary conduct. https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
Google intentionally built the best ad serving engine, in large part by buying the competition out.
Your timeline is not right. Google was created in 1998. DoubleClick was acquired by Google +9 years later in 2008.
AdWords was a homegrown Google project starting around 2000. AdWords was an internally built auction-based system selling keywords using some ideas from Goto/Overture.
In contrast, Doubleclick was an ad-exchange-network marketplace for publishers and advertisers. This was a different market from AdWords that Google wanted to expand into.
Today, yes, both products are more integrated with each other.
I don't know if you have any personal experience from that time period, but AdWords was magical for an online business in the mid-00s. You could get conversion rates orders of magnitude higher than display ads like DoubleClick. Whole businesses were built off of providing a solution to a problem that people were searching for. It was also a hell of a lot less intrusive than the banner ads that occupied the web in the late 1990s - AdWords was text only, and worked because you had a need, somebody had a solution, and Google matched them up. You didn't have to see all these products that you didn't need.
We're unfortunately going back to the brand advertising days of a corporate monoculture, largely because Google Search (and the web in general) sucks now.
Say the Search product is split off, it would instantly collapse as without the crutches of the Ad business it has no way to support itself. Maybe if we normalise paying for web products, and have some sort of "10 searches for free per day" starting point. That could open the door for a sustainable product that actually does what it needs to do. Perhaps the classic (and not in-line) ad sidebar with clear markings (and different markup) could provide some coverage there as well. But others have tried that (from scratch, with no brand recognition) and haven't really become a household name so far...
Google has essentially built a software Ouroboros, and if you try to take any of the critical (the most well-known) parts out, it fails and everyone is left with nothing.
I even have an Android phone, it still works fine with all the Google crap nuked.
My perception is that there are too many politicians trying to pick winners for their own benefit.
The way to break up companies is to win antitrust lawsuits against them. Except in cases where the companies are actually tied together in some meaningful way (ie, they're not fully separate companies in practice), there's no way to link such suits to each other; each one has to stand or fall on its own merits, and on its own timetable.
I think it would be hard to argue that Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc are actually arms of the same company. Thus, each of these Big Tech antitrust suits needs to happen separately, and some of the remedies might end up combining in counterproductive ways, because they are generally not able to consider each other's situations (the remedies have to be based on the facts of the individual case, AIUI).
It sucks, but it's the only antitrust system we've got right now.
Zooming back out, whatever pain comes from breaking Google up today will be less than the pain of doing so in a decade. Even more broadly, the pain of breaking up any monopoly (a matter how small) today will be less than when their breakup is as or more pressing than any of the historical antitrust cases.
As Senator John Sherman put it, "If we will not endure a king as a political power we should not endure a king over the production, transportation, and sale of any of the necessaries of life."
Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, ATT/Verizon/Tmobile, and hoards of smaller but similarly situated companies behave as kings shaping markets, acting without accountability or culpability, and shaking down the public at their whims. The gospel of the stock market has paralyzed our legislators from taking action to put these corrupt, wasteful, polluting and abusive businesses in their place or out of operation.
I don't follow your point. All rates are set arbitrarily according to the monetary policy followed on any specific moment.
What leads you to believe that arbitrarily setting a rate one way is natural, but arbitrarily setting it another way is more natural?
> Zooming back out, whatever pain comes from breaking Google up today will be less than the pain of doing so in a decade.
Will it, though? Think about the problem for a second. Do you think it would be more painful to break up Yahoo now than it would have been a decade ago? What about Intel? What about IBM? I mean,do you think Google of all companies is doing great?
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-hutchins-center-expla...
I don't follow your logic, because it does not have any logic.
Can you clarify your line of reasoning? I mean, if breaking up a company creates more problems than the ones it solves, what leads you to believe that anticipating the breakup would have any impact whatsoever in the fact that breaking up the company creates more problems than the ones it solves?
This world would be much poorer a place without this open source work & protocols.
I struggle to think of how else we would have got this, what action we would have taken to keep this outcom, while not "waiting too long".
You do not follow it because you do not wish to.
Think of Google as a cancer.
You can ignore it for the rest of your life, and your quality of life may get shittier and shittier until you die.
Think of anti-trust like surgery, you may be permanently harmed, lose a limb, skin, organ, etc... but you will be better in the long run. Sometimes surgery has no side effects, sometimes it harms you, we won't know until we are out the other end.
In this case, we may have waited so long the cancer might kill the host by removing it. I don't believe that to be the case however.
I could see Android and Chrome as a combined company.
The cut should be in the vertical integration stacks. Like in Apple's case between the hardware and OS, between the OS and the App Store.
In Google's case, their hardware is already open, they mostly keep apps in their walled garden (and take their 30% troll tax) with things like GooglePlay and other Google "services", not sure how that would be something to break apart.
Realistically, the best outcome we can hope for is breaking Ads away from Search.
There are some head scratching serious leaps of logic here. Why would Meta start running android if it became an independent business?
It's never explained.
This article is rather clumsy FUD.
If we mandate that our electronics and software must be repairable then these companies will automatically no longer be able to hold monopolies on their platforms.
The idea that the government has to force people to buy things they don’t want never ends well.
Search is about to get disrupted by LLMs. Heck, aren't teens searching on Tiktok more than Google nowadays?
Other feasible way to avoid this would be keeping Google ads to subsidize them, but then what's the point of change? This is why the remedy should touch very specific illegal practices. Structural changes need proper legislation which targets the entire market. Otherwise, you'll just see balloon effects in action.
There has been nothing in my life so disillusioning as working on a Web app for a company that is more or less required to play Google's game.
Have you built any iOS apps?
DDG/Kagi/ChatGPT/Reddit/HN/etc for searching. Fastmail/myriad order email providers. Openstreetmap/Apple for maps.
YouTube and Chrome Remote Desktop are what I use Google for, but those have alternatives too.
When I was at Amazon the majority of direct product traffic did not come internal search, it came from Google. In some areas they were competitors, Amazon was beholden to Google as the starting point for most customer’s browsing experience.
"iPhone Families" is a very real thing that Apple has gone out of it's way to solidify. Or try being an (American) 15 year old kid and get included in group chats with an android phone.
It's pretty gross when a mega-corp is so powerful that it can leverage your friends and family against you, forcing you into their walled prison err.. garden.
I think at a time a phone could be considered an appliance. But that's changed, and for many people their smartphone is their only general personal computer.
IMO they can either keep the duopoly and deal with regulation or they can keep full control of their platform. One or the other. Same goes for Android.
It’s not the web. It’s not a PC. It’s a sandboxed console.
> MO they can either keep the duopoly and deal with regulation or they can keep full control of their platform.
Then they’ll keep they’re platform and not be regulated ;-) (I know what you meant).
Yes. If a product becomes essential for participation in the economy and lacks substantial competition, regulation is the only mechanism we have to protect the people. Why should it matter how it got there?
The secure solution is to treat every app as malicious and put it in a sandbox where it can not cause harm. See also Android and ChromeOS.
So, no, sandboxing everything in sight isn't a useful solution. Your sandbox will just imprison us all.
Why do you believe there is no free market on mobile phones? I mean, what exactly forces you to pick an iPhone over anything?
Don't want to sign up to one multinational behemoth? Well, your choice is to sign up to one other multinational behemoth.
I don't think that the manufacturer assertion is true at all. You can go to any random online store and get dozens of brands and manufacturers. It just so happens that popular demand focuses only on a hand full of manufacturers who are outcompeting everyone in the free market.
Take a look even to Android's market share. You have four manufacturers with double digit market shares, and a couple of dozen entriee. Is that what you call a monopoly?
https://www.appbrain.com/stats/top-manufacturers
The OS comment is even more badfling.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_mobile_operating...
A good way to think about it is this: if Windows was as closed down as iOS, and took a 30% cut on every application purchase, would regulators have intervened?
OP was whining over Google's role in Android. Pointing out Apple's control of iOS, and the fact that iPhone is by far the dominant platform for handhelds, does refute OP's personal assertion.
Defining a market as a specific search engine's search results is wild. Wouldn't every search engine have a monopoly over it's results? A grocery store monopoly over its shelves?
Etc.
I am a DDG user and even I recognize they are barely a blip.
Your 500 mile analogy simply does not apply.
If you were in a position where you could just put things online and they may or may not be useful to people, you wouldn't be having this problem. But you're not; you're working for a taskmaster that demands attention or they can't justify their existence.
If Google evaporates tomorrow, there's no guarantee that your product gets customers. Indeed, in the absence of Google, most content on the internet is harder to find, not easier. The knob your overseer wants you to turn happens to be attached to Google, but when Google goes away there's going to be a different knob.
Yes, capitalism is a problem, but it's also true that Google is a problem because Google's scale makes a poor combination with capitalism. Which is worse, the match or the gasoline? Both, if they are used to cause a devastating fire.
The product is not search, it’s ad placements.
YOU are the product, being sold to advertisers, and Google search is the channel through which you are sold.
And I would say that Google can fairly be called a unique product in the market. They are the default search engine on almost all browsers and operating systems, their mobile phone operating system owns 70% of the global market share, and most of these devices give Google's search engine preferential treatment, their name is synonymous with searching on the web, their market share is over 90%, they have more data on their users than probably any other company and can provide more personalized search results than anyone else, their web index is clearly more complete than e.g. Bing's (if you do a domain-restricted search, Google often finds twice as many results as Bing).
It's true that alternatives to Google exist, but Google's overwhelming market dominance makes it imo difficult to argue that they aren't a monopoly in practice.
We need to regulate search and app stores like it is a public utility. Pricing should be dutch auction or something provably fair. 20-30% for in-app purchases is obviously insane when credit cards do 1.5-3.5%.
I worry that the government will not do sensible regulations and instead play investment banker and try to create spin off companies.
I don't think the vast majority of the internet understands how the business model of the internet works.
The actual computational resources required to provide search would be a fraction of Google’s operating costs
Added benefit would be pitting private providers against each other so they’re incentivised to provide better outcomes, as opposed to the current decoupling of utility and market position
The current situation is immensely wasteful of everyone’s time and resources (Alphabet shareholders aside)
It really is a Standard Oil situation, but as it’s just inflaming - but not halting -the global economy, it’s been flying under regulators’ radar until a few years ago
No moat is too wide for the flick of sufficiently powerful pens, business models be damned
Let's allow anyone to do in-app purchases, and app stores, then the market would tell us. Currently, we need to trust these quasi-monopolies that there is no way they can make it cheaper (and for some strange reason still, they don't want to open things up).
Whats stopping that now on Android? I have a second app store on my phone.
If they must charge 20% why don't they also let apps take credit cards? 20% is for the payment, its a tax. Why should Spotify have to pay 20% and Apple music effectively doesn't.
There are also a range of topics google will not return the best ranked information. There are a ton of political issues (due to advertiser pressure) where the different results are huge when you search in duckduckgo vs google. This is monopoly power to decide what gets seen and what doesn't get seen.
So, no different than every company on any given day under capitalism?
Darn these regulators for trying to allow competitors to enter the market. Everybody knows, competition only makes things worse!
/s
Azure, VS code, Github, CoPilot... the emergence of teams...
> I wish Microsoft owned
A large chunk of the engineering stack?
Google leadership (according to public info) was in a panic about ChatGPT and rightly so. It was eerily similar to what Google once was at its inception: a no bs way to get better answers to your questions.
Luckily for Google, hallucination is a significant issue. Just “GPT it” is already in the modern vernacular. Google is in serious danger of becoming Facebook: only used by boomers (now millennials) while the new gen gets their adds on Insta, TikTok and could soon be served Llm generated product reviews and comparisons with link to buy from ChatGPT.
Search and web are dead media. in 10 years no one will care.
They just need to say that they are gonna start charging for all their services because without the level of integration they have it doesn't make sense to keep running businesses that otherwise would lose money.
In a world where the competition's price for most of those services is "free", charging for used-to-be-free stuff sounds like a sure-fire suicidal business strategy.
But otherwise I don't think an average non-tech person would be likely to notice a difference between Bing and Google. And ms, ddg, Kagi and perplexity would love to see lots of people actually looking for alternatives.
Docs/sheets/pages/whatever wouldn't change since they're supported by the paying users. The rest, Google is going to kill at some point anyway like they did with hundred other projects.
They only one I really don't know how it would be affected is Android.
If standard oil had control of the information space history would be very different. Not even Ma Bell had the power that google has
Meanwhile just about every product Google has I can use someone else.
They don't even ban you (it's very hard to get banned on youtube) and it's the advertisers themselves who decide this.
>nor did they scan people’s communications They don't scan emails and never have.
And you could move to an alternative browser/search/youtube (if someone could host one profitably) by the end of the day.
But sure, being de-monetized on a website, that's way worse.
And yes, Ma Bell had the ability to listen in to every conversation had on a wire. Not just some, all. Meanwhile most conversations I have on the internet don't involve Google in the slightest.
Google can be your email, your phone, your ISP, own your health data, control what you watch, listen, search for, it can control your ability to make money or even control access to your data and documents.
Can be.
Google doesn't control what I watch. Google doesn't control what I listen to. Google doesn't control my email. Google doesn't own my health data. Google isn't my ISP. Google doesn't control my data and documents. Google doesn't control my ability to make money. Google doesn't control what I search for.
Meanwhile with Ma Bell, it was Ma Bell or just don't have telecommunications.
Apple levels of arrogance.
Apple tried the same approach when the EU was slapping them down with DMA and few were having it, calling Apple out for their immature responses delusionally thinking that because people were glued to their phones they would some how value that above their representative government.
Oh boy is this incorrect.
Outside the Silicon Valley / well-educated upper middle class / tech worker bubble, tech companies are more trusted than most political parties and government and religious institutions, and this is true across the world as polls show. People who are not into tech have no idea about Google's business deals or App Store anti-steering provisions. They use Google as long as it delivers great results, and switch to searching on Tiktok or asking Chat GPT if it doesn't. HN is probably one of the most anti-tech places on the internet, maybe outside of Mastodon.
I think HN is more the bellwether.
The bar is that low huh?
If you are specifically referring to Apple becoming an even bigger monopoly, that would be a bad thing but I think in the US they've already effectively won.