
Break Up Google - robin_reala
https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2020/06/25/Break-Up-Google
======
LatteLazy
This is another article where the author goes on a flight of fantasy about how
these services work. He conflates public good with public provision. He first
states he doesn't know where the revenue comes from and then makes a lot of
detailed decisions based on revenues (android apparently needs only a few
buildings and engineers).

I think this is a perfect example of the sort of wooly and confused thinking
behind break up X articles. To some extent that's inevitable as no one knows
what parts of big businesses make money (the author thinks this is intentional
opaqueness but its actually very difficult in a big business to determine who
"makes" a profit). But if he really wants to convince people to enact massive
change like this, he needs to do better.

People need to be clear what they are doing by first being clear what they
want to achieve and what the side effects will be. If you want privacy, ask
for privacy, and admit that that has costs. Trying to get privacy by smashing
Google by dividing it up in ways you know don't work isn't privacy, it's just
wrecking a service lots of people need.

Similarly, the author isn't upfront about the costs. Are you willing to switch
to a Gmail equivalent that costs 50usd a year? Is the average third world user
willing to pay the same to have an email address? Do you want to go back to US
government issue maps full of errors with no guide to what's in any of the
buildings?

I'm not willing to do that. I'm actually very pro privacy and anti-advertising
but we need a practical working solution. These pieces are the equivalent of
luddites saying we should close the Mills and go back to making everything by
hand.

~~~
MattGaiser
> He first states he doesn't know where the revenue comes from and then makes
> a lot of details decisions based on revenues (android apparently needs only
> a few buildings and engineers).

He proposes 5 spin off companies.

Advertising is fine.

It’s not clear that YouTube is profitable. And it does have a big synergy in
the immense infrastructure.

Android he admits isn’t a business beyond trying to bill every user for using
it.

I doubt Maps has much value except in combination with the ad business unless
they stopped doing consumer stuff and mostly focused on GPS and corporate
guidance systems. It would be fundamentally different.

With Cloud, he assumes that it is the vendor of every other service. Why would
they bother with consumer stuff if they now have to pivot to infrastructure
for the successor companies? It would turn into the equivalent of a REIT and
would just pay a dividend. That is where investors take companies that have
reliable cash cow businesses with limited growth potential.

~~~
LatteLazy
To me it felt really dishonest because at least some of these services would
die and others would become the sort of shitty cash hungry monopoly we see
elsewhere in the economy if it weren't for Googles (far from perfect)
stewardship.

I even empathise with the monopoly/privacy/advertising concerns. I just think
he's either writing a protest article he knows can never be implimented (or
taken seriously) OR he's trying to achieve his goal by tricking people into
something most don't actually want.

~~~
tarsinge
Shitty cash hungry monopoly like OpenStreetMap? I’m ready to bet Google Maps
dying could lead to a huge interest in improving OSM instead of the opposite
today.

Also email is an interoperable standard so I don’t see a monopoly coming soon,
it’s not AOL era anymore.

Before monopolies there is competition, and if monopolies come then break
them. It’s not like it never happened before and “these times it’s different”.

Edit: I have nothing against Google but it’s not a charity, if some of their
services are now essential and are not adequately provided by private entities
then it simple it’s a public service. What would you say if Google was
starting a service to give free food? I’m not it’s the big Corp displacing
government dystopia future I want.

~~~
LatteLazy
Do you really think Openstreetmap is an alternative to Google maps? Really?
This is our vision for the future? Anyone who spends 5 minutes on there will
be begging to give Google their data.

We're meant to be improving things, not just reverting to the 1940s approach
but with a website to look at the paperwork on...

~~~
emptysongglass
I use OSM all the time in the form of the app, OsmAnd. Fantastic app, gets me
where I'm going, has most shops indexed: the few times it didn't I added them
myself and benefited everyone.

I especially like that, as a cyclist, it _always_ picks the greener path for
me to get through Copenhagen. Huge feature over Google Maps for me.

I'd really like to see better transit directions. OsmAnd does have them but
not stop-by-stop.

------
balanced009
These type of posts are now starting to sound like propaganda. Just emotional
catharsis of some sort.

There are plenty of large companies on this planet.

Why do you focus on Google?

and why do we see these posts frequently making it to top ten of hacker news?

~~~
quonn
Yeah, but there are, for example, at least five car companies at the top end
that have kind of equally attractive products and 20 others. But in tech it‘s
different.

Additionally, I don‘t think anyone working in the tech industry should want a
future where a few large companies control everything. In the long run, this
is not in our interest.

------
jaspax
Here's the rub: I strongly suspect that YouTube is not profitable, or is just
barely profitable, such that it would be difficult to run as a separate
company from the rest of Google. This is even more true for Maps. Breaking
apart Google would substantially risk those businesses.

On the other hand, maybe that's a good thing.

~~~
kangaroozach
How could that be? Server costs? Seems like YouTube would be raking in the
cash.

~~~
moonchild
The sheer magnitude of video data they have to deal with is enormous. They,
along with netflix, comprise the _majority_ of all internet usage. Yes, the
videos you see on your front page with 10s of millions of views are raking in
the cash and have negligible hosting cost. Those videos are subsidizing the
10s of millions of videos that get 4-5 views apiece.

~~~
saagarjha
> Yes, the videos you see on your front page with 10s of millions of views are
> raking in the cash and have negligible hosting cost.

But they must have huge hosting costs…

------
v7p1Qbt1im
Realistically what would happen if you break Google up as described:

Microsoft, Amazon, FB, Tencent, etc. swoop in to grab the market share.

Besides, subsidized services are a special case. Especially Maps and maybe
YouTube. Yes, YouTube makes a lot of money. But imagine paying market rates
for storage, egress/ingress. They would need to focus even more on monetizing
absolutely every interaction on the platform.

For all its faults I value the fact that literally every user can create an
account and start uploading (practically) unlimited amounts of video for free
and have it be available to over 2.5b+ people. All other issues I would put
below that very unlikely accomplishment.

------
peteretep
> Page and Brin each own 25.9% and 25.1% of Alphabet's voting power,
> respectively, accounting for over half of the company's controlling shares.
> That's because of Alphabet's super-voting structure, which gives 10 votes
> per share of its Class B stock.

also:

> Mark Zuckerberg owns the majority of the voting rights to Facebook due to a
> dual class structure that weights certain shares over others.

I would like to see eminent domain used to restructure these companies with
weird controlling shared structures in to being truly publicly traded
companies as a first step. I have no problem with Zuck getting all the money
his shares of Facebook are worth, but I have a big problem with him and the
unelected Page and Brin having all that power with no recourse for the market.
Am I being foolish?

~~~
kelnos
> _I have a big problem with him and the unelected Page and Brin having all
> that power with no recourse for the market._

I just don't get that mindset. Private-company Google said "hey, we're down to
be public, but Larry and Sergey will always control the company... cool?" And
the market said: "yeah whatever give us those shares".

It's not like anyone was holding a gun up to anyone's head, forcing them to
buy GOOG. They went into it knowing that their shares' votes would be useless.

Page and Brin _are_ elected: the shareholders have validated their control
every day since Google went public; anyone who owns GOOG has either been ok
with that arrangement, or foolish to hold those shares.

~~~
peteretep
> They went into it knowing that their shares' votes would be useless.

I don't disagree with that at all, and I would see the current holders
compensated for their shares. What I _am_ saying is I don't think society is
benefitting from this structure.

> the shareholders have validated their control every day since Google went
> public

What? No, that's not how that works. The market has decided solely on the
current price for Google shares. There's no nuance about what the market
thinks about Page and Brin other than they think that the stock is currently
accurately price, no more and no less.

~~~
Zanni
There are all sorts of things that don't benefit society directly that are
consequences of things that _do_ benefit society. In this case, maybe society
doesn't benefit from the structure of Google, but it does benefit widely from
the notion of private property, and the one is a consequence of the other.

~~~
peteretep
I hear your argument, and it’s a good one. That said, we break up monopolies,
we confiscate dangerous animals that people privately own, we tax
inheritance... and we have well established rules of eminent domain for just
this reason. As I said, I have no trouble with them being compensated fairly
for it, and I think that protects the economic system.

------
Traster
I think this article is kind of wild. I would expect someone arguing for the
break up of Google would be arguing for it on the basis of a good
understanding of the company and the dynamics that would result from the break
up. Instead a huge part of the argument is simply that the author doesn't know
what makes Google profitable and think it would be great to split them up so
we find out.

Google Maps is a great example. The author has _no idea_ if Maps is
profitable. What happens if it isn't? You spin it off as its own company, it
turns out Google is spending billions driving those camera cars around and has
no revenue model (because you just split off Google's advertising business)
and within a couple of years Maps can't afford to keep itself up to date, its
an expensive unsustainable business (which is why no one else does it) and it
either has to sell itself cheap and no one can buy it - because they all know
what happened to Google and they don't want their business exploded by
regulators. If Google Maps is a huge money spinner (seems unlikely but could
happen) well great, you've just created a monopoly that no longer has any
incentives for anything other than exploiting their position as a monopoly.

~~~
yuhong
This reminds me of the Street View Wi-Fi gathering privacy scandal. And yes I
suspect that it is not cheap, especially during the 2007-2008 recession when
gas was expensive. To cover one city probably require hundreds of miles of
driving.

------
MattGaiser
Yes, let’s destroy one of the few large companies which has found a viable
method of long term innovation instead of endless cost cutting and
outsourcing.

Let’s force Google to be like every other company in needing to constantly
extract money from every project quarter by quarter.

Not to mention that it is not clear that any except advertising are viable
businesses by themselves.

YouTube wasn’t profitable for a while. Even if it is now, it is probably
barely so.

Not sure how Maps would make sufficient money without deep integration with
advertising.

Android would just be dead.

~~~
jhowell
> YouTube wasn’t profitable for a while. Even if it is now, it is probably
> barely so.

First search result...

"YouTube generated nearly $5 billion in ad revenue in the last three months,
Google revealed today as part of parent company Alphabet’s fourth quarter
earnings report."

[1] [https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-
al...](https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-alphabet-
earnings-revenue-first-time-reveal-q4-2019)

~~~
aliante
That doesn't demonstrate that it turned a profit though. Video streaming is
costly and they pay over 50% of that to creators.

[https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/4/21121370/youtube-
advertisi...](https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/4/21121370/youtube-advertising-
revenue-creators-demonetization-earnings-google)

~~~
searchableguy
Maybe people should just pay for it?

Oh no. How could they make us pay for the software services. Imo, this
mentality needs to go. People spend $$$ in cafe, buy expensive branded
clothes, transportation, hanging out with their friends, outside food, and so
on. All of those are not necessary but they pay for it. They should pay for
the digital services they spend most of their time on now a days. What's
different?

~~~
aliante
Except, they don't. People aren't willing to pay much for non-physical goods
anymore.

~~~
majewsky
/me looks at my Patreon bill

Yeah, no. The problem is Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is garbage, and
people don't like to pay for something that is mostly garbage.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~~~
tuwtuwtuwtuw
> M$

Really?

------
namanaggarwal
How do we decide which companies to break up ? Similar argument can be made
for any big conglomerate. Look at Reliance in India or Samsung in Korea, they
sell anything and everything possible. Could it make companies hide businesses
as well, just to not want to break up.

~~~
kevingadd
Well, this is not a new problem. Antitrust enforcement and breaking up
companies has been a thing for decades (if not at least a century)

Starting with companies that make over a billion dollars a year and are in
multiple markets seems like an uncontroversial place, though.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
_Starting with companies that make over a billion dollars a year and are in
multiple markets seems like an uncontroversial place, though._

The problems don't occur when companies are in multiple markets, arguable that
is better for competition and hence the person on the street. The problem is
when a company or two dominates a single market.

~~~
kevingadd
You're correct that dominating a single market is bad, but using your
dominance of a single market to bankroll taking over other markets is pretty
nasty and you can't trivially do something like that if you aren't already
fabulously wealthy from dominating a market.

In the case of the article, it's specifically talking about how Google is
doing that.

------
zerocrates
Funnily it doesn't actually say where the broken-off Search is supposed to go.
Along with the ads division? Doesn't really feel in line with the break up
idea...

Disconnected from the other stuff it subsidizes, what is the massively
profitable search business actually supposed to use that money for? Massive
dividends? Diversifying into anything just gets them into the same kind of
problem immediately, no?

It sort of feels like the main benefit here would be from the proposed privacy
law vs. breaking up Google.

~~~
searchableguy
Break Google's ad business and their other products. Imo, that is the way to
go.

------
jwilber
Didn’t feel much substance in this, though to be fair I felt the same wait
from his aws farewell (maybe I just don’t relate to his writing style?).

Anyways, I think all the talk about breaking up google/Facebook etc feels
performative at best - never seem see any solid reasons Or arguments. Would be
nice to see tech people use their clout for actually monopolies, eg intel, ykk
group, Tyson, etc.

------
nabaraz
Is anyone else tired of seeing the same hate Facebook, Zoom and Google
narratives every single day.

So, we want to break up Google because it has gotten too big. What about
Luxottica? It has over 80% market share on eyewear brands. What about Pearson?
It has over 60% market share on testing market? What about Paypal? It has over
80% market share on online payments. What about Aetna (merged with Humana) on
health care market? List goes on..

~~~
akira2501
All these companies obtained this market share by purchasing competitors or
integrating surrounding businesses. You're right though, they're all problems
and shouldn't have been allowed to acquire so casually to their current market
positions.

That being said, Google gets primary access to your personal data and habits,
and then also gets to sell advertising based on that data. That's certainly
more unseemly than having too few choices for eyewear, don't you think?

~~~
keith__talent
"That being said, Google gets primary access to your personal data and habits,
and then also gets to sell advertising based on that data." Then lets find
legislation that enforces privacy, but still allows them to work with
advertisers. The platform is here, but needs adjustment.

------
pmoriarty
Unfortunately, this is not going to be nearly good enough.

I'd adopt a salt the earth policy with respect to the spying parts of Google.
That'd be a start.

Sadly, there'll be plenty of companies that'll fill its shoes to continue
spying on people, and many more that already do.

So much of the modern internet is built on a foundation of spying on users,
and most companies will not willingly give up all the dollar signs they see
when they think of spying and even more spying on their users and everyone
else they can gather data on.

It's super depressing.

------
TedDoesntTalk
No court in the US is going to break up Google because Tim Bray thinks “The
world needs Google Cloud to be viable” and “YouTube is too important to leave
hidden inside an opaque conglomerate“. They May be broken!up, but not for
these ludicrous reasons.

Read a little about anti-trust first. Matt Stoller has an excellent,
approachable email newsletter called BIG about monopolies.

------
pwinnski
After reading Matt Stoller's book _Goliath_ , I've come around on breaking up
big companies like this, primarily as an act of undoing mergers and
acquisitions that should never have been allowed in the first place.

So splitting off YouTube seems obvious, since it should never have happened.
Some of the others are more difficult, since they're not the result of
acquisitions. Then again, DoubleClick was a large acquisition, so splitting
off Gmail and so on as a proxy for undoing the DoubleClick acquisition
probably makes sense, too.

As Bray points out, Google is deliberate vague about a lot of numbers, but
reverting acquisitions always seems like a good first step to me.

[0] [https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Goliath/Matt-
Stoller/...](https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Goliath/Matt-
Stoller/9781501183089)

------
mythz
Break Up Amazon & Facebook too.

~~~
korantu
Current (US) laws, if I understand correctly, designed to prevent leveraging
success in one market to harm your competitors in another.

For example if Chrome would only work with google docs and not microsoft live.

USA does not have laws to break up companies simply for being too big or even
for being used by majority of customers.

~~~
mythz
US Anti trust laws applies to monopolies [1] where one of the penalties for
abusing a monopoly is breaking up the company which was famously done to
Standard Oil and AT&T. The EU have found Google guilty of antitrust violations
and fined them a record €1.5 billion.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law#Mo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law#Monopoly_and_power)

------
ricardo81
The author asks how gmail makes money. Their "business email" where you bring
your own domain costs about 5GBP a month, and that's their cheapest plan.

~~~
aliante
It is curious to read someone who has clearly never used Google products
pontificating about restructuring Google.

------
jakuboboza
It is more dangerous to leave Amazon and Facebook in their current state as
Google but yeah all of them could be split into smaller companies. Also Apple
also.

~~~
robin_reala
Amazon I can see. Facebook and Apple? Neither of them have a monopoly to
leverage that requires breaking up.

------
Abishek_Muthian
I agree with the general premise of this content, but as a non-American I'm
curious to know if financials of a public company is not clear, shouldn't it
be addressed with the securities exchange(SEC)/companies regulator (or)
shouldn't they themselves investigate and penalise obscurity?

------
opk
When breaking up a tech company, an option that never seems to be considered
is to give the products to both child companies. That way they start to
compete with each other. Admittedly, only one can have, e.g. the youtube
domain or associated employees but many things are just a case of making a
copy.

~~~
aliante
> youtube domain or associated employees but many things are just a case of
> making a copy.

Who has the domain is not a small problem...

~~~
kevingadd
You could confiscate the domain so that both products have to compete from
scratch, or go with a domain-splitting solution sort of like how the european
regulators' "Browser choice" resulted in a randomized list of browser options
at first Windows boot.

Not sure I'd argue either of those would work, but there are options.

------
kats
Yeah, let's break up Google! I've been depending on their software for almost
15 years now, I use something they made practically every hour that I'm awake,
and never paid a cent for it! I'm really getting a raw deal here!

~~~
kevingadd
Are you sure you've never paid a cent? Many products or services you buy are
probably funneling some money into Google's pockets - perhaps licensing fees
or agreements with Google, company profits being handed to Google for
advertising. If you've ever bought an Android app or In-App Purchase, 30% of
that went directly to Google.

If you think you're getting Google products and services for free, you're just
not paying attention.

~~~
kats
I guess Google has received 30 cents from when I bought something on the Play
store.

It still seems to be a pretty good deal when you compare the bill for GMail,
YouTube, Google Search, Drive, Docs/Sheets and Maps to the cost of the phone
bill, cable tv, and internet.

------
ss7pro
Yt infrastructure cost without Google would to be to high ... YT can only
exists due to cheap infrastructure that it can leave the thanks to Google
scale

------
kevingadd
Generally interesting article. Makes his case pretty well

"But YouTube definitely has to be its own thing; it’s got no real synergy that
I can detect with any other Google property."

This is a funny observation because YouTube was originally an acquisition and
its integration with other Google products is very strange. It has at most
points in time had its own rules about anonymity, privacy, multiple accounts,
etc. Supposedly the gender setting (now google-account-wide) was originally a
YouTube piece of data that got repurposed for use in G+ and other services
that needed it.

~~~
luckydata
You gotta be extremely shortsighted to fail to see how YouTube fits inside
Google. I’m really shocked Tim would say something like that.

------
skinkestek
> When? · The best time would have been sometime around 2015. The second best…

This makes sense.

Maybe then we would see some attention directed back to search quality and to
delivering a quality alternative smartphone os (I finally caved and went for
iPhone last year after 8 years of waiting for another good Android. Yes, that
means I used to like one or two of the early models.)

------
coronadisaster
Does the NSA need Google as-is, or could they just as easily get your data
from many smaller companies?

------
jldugger
> Google Apps and Google Maps are both huge presences in the tech economy. Are
> they paying for themselves, or are they using search advertising revenue as
> rocket fuel? Nobody outside Google knows.

Arguably Apple also learned the lesson of how valuable Google Maps is. Direct
ad revenue from maps is not the only source of revenue. Maps is a key feature
of Android phones, (and iOS really) and Android OS is valuable due as a source
of search engine traffic. And the money search engine traffic makes is able to
invest in more improvements in Maps.

> The online advertising business has become a Facebook/Google duopoly which
> is destroying ad-supported publishing and thus intellectually impoverishing
> the whole population

There is a pretty insightful twitter thread from a journalism prof I can't
find just now that made a persuasive case that newspapers killed themselves.
They had 30 percent margins in the 90's and instead of adding staff and
growing the business they focused on cost cutting. Ad-supported publishers
kinda did this to themselves, and it was craigslist who knifed their cash cow
(classifieds). And really, Craigslist sat on its ass too.

> The world needs Google Cloud to be viable because it needs more than two
> public-cloud providers.

IDK how Tim thinks public clouds are funded. Cloud vendors have massive
startup costs -- every server you buy takes years of customer billing to pay
off -- and I don't think anyone is gonna be down for a bond issue for 'we
promise to just be like Google but smaller' spinoffs. I can name a dozen
public cloud venders[1], but none have any where near the clout. And yet for
some reason Tim isn't talking about why Amazon is a near monopoly.

> the real reason Android exists is that Google needs mobile advertising not
> to become an Apple monopoly.

This is the same reason Apple Maps exists (and dozens of other services you've
never heard of). I have no idea what breaking up Android would accomplish
though; Android Inc would pretty much have to replicate the same state of
affairs via contracts with Alphabet, with diminished ability to integrate.
It's super weird that Nokia face planted a decade ago in their role of
providing a third option.

> What we do know is that people who try to make a living as YouTubers sure do
> complain a lot about arbitrary, ham-handed changes of monetization and
> content policy.

I don't see how a spinoff saves Youtubers any grief. Tim's general thesis is
that Google should spin off it's services, watch the profitable ones thrive
and let the break even (or worse) ones die off. If Youtube is a break even
affair, I don't see how viewers or content producers benefits from less
platform competition in the space. If it's capable of standing alone, what's
the harm in Google owning it?

[1]: Google, Oracle, AliCloud, Azure, Rackspace, IBM/Softlayer, Digital Ocean,
Saleaforce, VMWare, OVH, Hetzner, Linode,

------
blackrock
Just do it!

