
Will Obama Break Up Google? - rms
http://www.businessinsider.com/will-obama-break-up-monopolist-google-2009-2
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jwesley
This will probably not be a popular opinion, but I think that Google must
eventually become public property. Once their search share approaches 100%,
they will have a strangle hold on the flow of information. This is too much
power for any profit-driven entity to have. Think of what you do when you have
a question about basically anything? You go to Google. If the ethics of the
engine become even slightly compromised it could be disastrous for society.

I'm not saying this is an issue now, but as corporations grow, they are
constantly pressured to increase earnings. Over time, they morph into
institutions that no longer resemble their origins. It's tough for us to
imagine the Google we all know and love becoming a corrupt, blood sucking
corporation, but what if they never discover a new Golden Goose? There will be
extreme pressure to draw more profits from search in any way possible.

Of course there are tremendous issues with putting Google under government
control. The government is quite possibly an even less trustworthy entity. But
unless a major competitor emerges in the next decade, something big will
happen on this front.

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brand
How is Google's search share nearing 100% any different from Microsoft's OS
share nearing 100%? Microsoft could have quite easily done whatever it wanted
with the flow of information during the mid-late 90's, with a huge market
share and very little competition.

The government won't just 'take control' of a public company; it may attempt
to break it up, perhaps, but the Internet is, as of now, about as much of a
free market as exists anywhere. If Google has near 100% market share, perhaps
it deserves it?

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mpc
How is it that they have a monopoly on Search and Cloud Computing exactly?

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jncraton
They definitely don't, at least not right now.

They are a big company with a huge market share, and that scares people.
However, they don't generally do things that give them an unfair advantage
over their competition.

Yahoo, Ask, etc are definitely competitive in the search market. Google is the
clear front runner, but they are not without significant competition.

The idea that they have a monopoly on cloud computing is completely absurd.
They don't even have online storage for normal users live yet. They provide
users with a place to store and edit documents online, but they are far from
the only company doing that. They don't come close to competing with S3.

The only reasonable allegation is the charge of having a monopoly on online
advertising. I'm still not entirely sure why they were able to buy
DoubleClick, and I would not be too surprised if the advertising portion of
Google was forced to split at some point in the future. As far as a monopoly
on search and cloud computing go though, I would definitely agree that those
are not valid in the current market.

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whughes
Wouldn't forcing the advertising division to split destroy Google? It seems
like that would create one company with huge profit but not much else and
another company with lots of projects and engineers but no profit source.

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brandonkm
This article failed to take into account Eric Schmidt's connections to the
Obama Administration. Wasn't he part of his economic advisory team?

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jerf
I don't see how to break up Google in any remotely sane way. Whichever of the
Baby Googles got the search engine would win, and the rest would lose. That's
not a monopoly-busting action, that's just insane.

Which I normally wouldn't put past a politician, but I'm not seeing the upside
for them, either. Is there a public outcry against Google? No.

This is probably an extortion attempt to get "donations" to make sure this
legal action just never seems to quite manifest in concrete form.

But, if it absolutely had to be done, one interesting possibility would be to
_fork_ (in the Unix system call sense) pieces of Google, such that every Baby
Google gets full rights to the same search engine. Tricky, though. Very
tricky.

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endtime
_Google is “quickly gathering market power in what I would call an online
computing environment in the clouds,” she said_

This quote really gives the impression that she doesn't know what she's
talking about.

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herval
Make it rain, then! You have the power to do so... (not mr endtime - talking
about Miss Varney)

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critic
We must not allow any single company to have a monopoly on clouds!

