I think we need a better term than monopoly, that separates it from what people usually mean which is 'the best product'. I literally cannot think of any sort of product or service with lower switching costs than internet search. Typing bing.com takes 0.8 seconds and costs $0. Hundreds of orders of magnitude easier than switching to a different railroad if only one goes through your town.
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.
I read through some of the documents of the original complaint. This is mainly not about Google being the dominant search engine for consumers. It's more to do with their anti competitive behavior in the ad tech market. As a consumer, switching is easy. As a company that wants to advertise, switching is not easy if Google holds all the users. But also they've bought up all sides of the market, so what used to be competitive is now entirely controlled by one company. And, once they had that control, they started squeezing both sides, advertisers and sites that run advertising.
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.
Google doesn't have an advertising monopoly. Facebook all by itself does about half of Google's revenue in ads. Then you have twitter, amazon, snap, all kinds of stuff. Google would be lucky to have 40% of online ads, and then once you include all advertising they are way down, maybe 15-20% or something.
The judge found them to be a monopoly. They are strictly a monopoly. Unless the case gets overturned, they are exactly a monopoly.
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.
I agree with you on the premise of the complaint but I think the parent's point still holds, the reason why you don't want to switch to another ad company is because all the people are with Google but they're with Google because they like it.
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.
> problem with talks of "splitting up Google" is that Google is an ad company
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.
Google is offering a free browser, while making a good browser costs money. They are subsidising that by their huge ad-business.
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.
There was exactly the same kind of lawsuit in France some years ago: free Google Maps insidiously put paid cartography companies without any special features out of business.
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.
But Opera and Firefox and others are all free browsers as well. I agree with the parent commenter that its not exactly a monopoly in the traditional sense. It's not even the default browser on Mac or Windows.
> Opera and Firefox and others are all free browsers as well
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?
How does your rationale explain Internet Explore/Edge and Safari which both have abundance of money and still can’t outcompete Chrome? This goes back to the original point about Google search being superior to Bing, and not just because it’s free.
Differing priorities. Edge is based on blink now anyway , so as a core browser engine they’re roughly the same. It’s the higher level UX that is differentiated.
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.
The irony there is for a while, I considered Blink based Edge better than Chrome. The issue is they added what are basically a bunch of pre-installed extensions to Edge that I really hated and kept making the UX worse to me.
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.
I would love to use safari but for years now it will randomly just start refreshing pages. I have no idea why or even where to begin to debug it so on chrome I stay.
Removing manifest v2 might be the kick to try Firefox again but I’d still like to fix safari
> How does your rationale explain Internet Explore/Edge and Safari which both have abundance of money and still can’t outcompete Chrome?
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.
And when a king does fall, it's never a guarantee who gets to stay in that throne. Even in actual political overthrows, there is no profession more dangerous than being the guy who led the revolution, and we can count in less than half a hand how many humans in history actually got the spot, got struck down and then made a legitimate democratic comeback afterwards.
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.
> How does your rationale explain Internet Explore/Edge and Safari which both have abundance of money and still can’t outcompete Chrome?
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.
> last month decided to abandon the plan to deprecate cookies and tracking
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.
Taking IBM as an example, they were one of the first in 2000 to make Linux business a reality, because in doing so, it makes their own Aix development costs lower, and eventually played so well that they own Red-Hat, without which, many key projects like GCC and GNOME would lose their main source of income.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> Google is a big ass company and enjoys outsized market share because people choose to use it.
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...
Google's payment to Apple isn't advertisement. It's to prevent Apple from rolling their own search engine, or selling the default to the next highest bidder.
Apple has a business agreement to use Google search, and it seems it is a similar agreement to what they made to OpenAI - we as Apple will use your service by default, we pay you nothing, and we take a percentage of your monetization.
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.
I used DDG for a long time, it's crap, I switched back to Google, I suspect a lot of people would do the same. There isn't a lot of competition.
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.
Worth retrying now. I tried again recently and the results are so much better. Combine that with the domain block/raise/pin feature and the search engine is way ahead.
I'm 10x happier with Kagi than Google, and I was very skeptical (having followed Google's devs very closely as acquisition specialist for ~10+y). If you can afford Kagi, I'm curious to know why you don't stick with it. Or I'll assume that because the Google brand is just too strong, in which case we have a particular case of a monopoly.
You are literally agreeing with the parent commenter. It's anticompetitive but not a monopoly. The parent is also talking about Chrome, not Google Search.
I never said I disagreed with their entire comment, I was responding to the statements saying "switching search engines is easy and google is obviously the superior product that's why it's used instead of bing.com".
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.
Just have to say this again even if everyone already knows it: If the US Government / EU hadn't threatened Microsoft they would have embedded their browser in Windows and tied it to the OS to the extent where normal people would only use their browser. I don't know if Google could exist in that alternate world, but I suspect Microsoft would have "deprived them of Oxygen" and they would be bought or crushed.
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.
Google is so critically important to the infrastructure of the internet itself that I really struggle to understand why a for profit entity with incentives that are not aligned to the public should be in charge of the most important search engine.
Because they created the search engine, and truthfully profit motives produce better products at lower costs than non-profits generally across the board. The alternative is having government creating software and it’s hard to point to any public US website/app where I’m amazed.
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.
True, but the ramifications can be really harmful.
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.
Google can be more easily understood as a bunch of businesses that funnel traffic into an ad marketplace. Search, Android, GMail, Maps, Chrome, everything is just about having enough traffic and enough behavioral data to make them the biggest ad seller ever. But they are also the broker and price-setter. That's how they make money, not on the quality of their services --which OK, they have to maintain to a competitive standard: easy to do when you are printing money.
So, the solution is relatively simple: break off their ad marketplace business. Break off their ad display business. Let the funnels fend for themselves.
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.
The issue isn't having a monopoly, it's exploiting vertical integration in digital platforms.
- 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).
> I think we need a better term than monopoly, that separates it from what people usually mean which is 'the best product'.
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.
It's a fine thesis, google the humble search engine, easy to compete against. Sure. That argument stands. But.. ... google is not a search engine. There's the google duopoly with facebook (ads, user data). There's the google duopoly with apple (phone operating system), there's the gmail system not exactly the same as search. There's google the web browser, duopoly(ish) with firefox. There's the youtube (duopoly with netflix? monopoly?). Probably a bunch of other various duopolies.
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
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 we need a better term than monopoly, that separates it from what people usually mean which is 'the best product'.
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.
In terms of the control they have over people's livelihoods when it comes to the play store and admob, and their incredible lack of care/customer service, yeah they're getting away with murder and totally a monopoly and acting like one.
Or all of their investment? Considering that very few end-users use Bing, ditching Google is like ditching the internet for much of their target audience, at least, most likely
Nope, you missed the point. Google isn't paying apple for advertisers, they are paying for distribution of eyeballs. You get the eyes, you get the ads.
You’re right that there is a cost to producing a product, but the question was about the switching cost to the customer. At very least there is a direct labour cost to move the ads from Google to something else, so it is obviously not 0 like the out-to-lunch comment claimed earlier. Although I think we all know the switching cost is going to be way higher than that as the aforementioned spend on building the product isn't fruitless.
The person was referring to the user of search. You might think it's clever to point out that the person paying the bills is the ads user, but that's not what they meant, it's clear that's not what they meant, and the concerns about payments to apple to be the default search engine are related to search users.
And you might think it is clever to have no idea what is going on around you, but we are clearly talking about the customer, which was specifically asked about earlier in the thread.
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.
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?
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.
> The thread started by someone saying switching costs are zero.
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.
Debate is for maladjusted high school students. All we have here is laughing at he who thought that there are no costs to transition from using Google's ad service to something else, and continuing to laugh at the doubling down on the out-to-lunchery that followed.
I'm very curious to see what a breakup looks like. Past breakups involved "uniform" businesses:
- 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.
Breaking up their individual businesses can cause each business to have incentives that line up better with their customers / users. Example: if Chrome was separated from Google, they won't have as much of an incentive to push back against adblockers with things like Manifest V3. Or include APIs that are only available to google websites (Which it has! https://x.com/lcasdev/status/1810696257137959018)
Users are not Chrome's customers. Even if Chrome is separated into a separate company that would still be true. Users are unlikely to pay for a browser when every OS comes with a free one.
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
Right now the main paying user of Chrome is Google as a tool to deliver product integrations and guarantee browser based ad delivery. It's just that all of that is seen as internal expense in developing Chrome instead of an external source of revenue from Chrome. If Chrome were split off the main paying user of Chrome would probably be large enterprises and educational institutions - that'd be a massive change.
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.
Chrome Enterprise Premium and ChromeOS/Chromebooks are existing paid offerings. They could probably squeeze a few more things out of the enterprise management toolset too though.
It's an interesting hypothesis, but it's entirely possible that separated from Google, Chrome is either not a viable business model (browsers don't make money on their own) or is incentivized to get into bed with some other ad company to make money, to effectively the same result.
Aren't you pointing out the exact problem with Google? If Chrome wasn't a viable business without Google's ads subsidizing it, isn't its existence in its current form exactly the kind of anti-competitive outcome we would be better off without?
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?
The original value-proposal for Chrome was: The more people browse the web in general, the more Google profits. So the mere existence of a good free, fast, and safe browser would inherently benefit Google at large in general. And that rationale is why we get to have Chromium at all.
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.
That's likely not the real rationale. If people browse with Chrome, then google is the default. That is immensely valuable to google, as google's payments to apple, mozilla and android manufacturer's show.
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.
By the time Chrome came out Google already was in the position where everyone knew to set their default homepage to Google in IE in the same way they automatically go to install Chrome now.
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.
Correct. Google's real concern was not that people wouldn't use them as their favorite search engine; it was that relying on Apple and Microsoft to be stewards of access to the web was a huge business risk because, hypothetically, if Apple or Microsoft decided to block google.com at the browser level (or pick your favorite equivalent scenario, like failing to implement a standard that Google absolutely was going to be relying upon to provide service), Google was screwed.
What possible browser competition can exist? The market price for a browser from a consumer perspective is $0. I will never pay for a browser. All that will happen is new ad placements from smaller companies, directly in the browser.
> The market price for a browser from a consumer perspective is $0.
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.)
But do we have any reason to believe that in the absence of Google, the next dumper won't just come along and take their place? The government isn't exactly signaling a willingness to change the fundamentals of the market here.
> 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.
> But do we have any reason to believe that in the absence of Google, the next dumper won't just come along and take their place?
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?
> All that will happen is new ad placements from smaller companies, directly in the browser.
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.
The precedent is that every browser out there currently has one of:
- 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).
No one pays $0. All that slurping of user data is used by other corps to maximize their profits.
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.
But there's an obvious difference between shelling out $60 up-front or $5 a month or whatever and shelling out $0 (and then being tracked, or having your data harvested).
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?
But they aren't capitalizing their data, because they're paying more in the end. That's my point.
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.
If your argument is "Browsers are subsidized by advertising driving up the cost of goods," I don't think I disagree but I don't think the consequence of stopping that model is the cost of good goes down.
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?
If the cost goes up, then the cost will come down. It doesn't happen overnight, and yes a browser is a minimal part of the market.
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.
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.
I absolutely would have donated large sums of money to Firefox development if they had allowed me to do so. Sadly you can only donate to the Mozilla Foundation which does a lot of other stuff. Wikipedia shows that projects can get very stable funding through donations.
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.
AFAIK, the foundation only does "other stuff", and the development is fully funded by the corporation (i.e. Google), so you can't really sponsor Firefox development at all, except by buying unrelated services like Pocket and the VPN (and who knows where your money goes then).
If Google is broken up, Apple will still have Safari and Microsoft will still have Edge. There is no reason to believe the market for non-$0 browsers will suddenly manifest absent a Google-integrated Chrome.
The people have already spoken with their wallets on this topic.
Microsoft gave up on maintaining their own browser engine (Trident) almost a decade ago, and therefore are now dependent on Chrome's engine (Blink). Since then there have only been three independent browser engines: WebKit (Safari), Gecko (Firefox), and Blink (Chrome, Chromium, Opera, Brave, Edge, ...). Maintaining a performant + featureful + safe browser engine is a massive task, requiring many expensive engineers -- and Blink/V8 in particular has a lot of complexity (sea-of-nodes repr, their weird DSL, ...) that other engines don't. So if Google dropped Chrome, Microsoft would have a hard time picking it up, but would need to if they wanted to keep providing Edge.
Good point. That suggests a significant nonzero possibility that unless MS decides it's strategically meaningful enough to them to maintain a foot in the door on the browser space (much like Google chose to do), they might abandon the project, which would severely crimp the money-faucet for maintenance of the core engine.
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."
I don't that Edge would survive without Chrome. I think it would be more fair to say that without Chrome, there will only be Safari, Firefox, Ladybird, and Verso. Yes, the latter two aren't ready yet, but I get they would gain fast traction in Chrome's absence.
An unfortunate additional consequence of this antitrust lawsuit is that it is likely it will end The Google payments to Mozilla every year. That's 80% of the revenue, so the odds of them being a viable business afterwards are low.
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.
I'm a bit more hopeful about Mozilla. I think there would be a collapse of the business without the Google cash flow, but expect the browser itself would be continued by the community for its importance.
I have about as much faith in the open source community maintaining a machine as complicated as a full browser without significant corporate backing as I have in OpenOffice displacing Microsoft Office in my lifetime, but hope springs eternal.
Consider that KHTML, the grandfather of just about every modern engine that isn't Gecko, was a fairly small open source project. Ladybird is open source and surprisingly usable for its youth and single developer.
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.
Safari may also be facing the same issues; even before this, the rules about browsers in iOS were (to my non-lawyer eyes) suspiciously similar in market impact to Microsoft's Internet Explorer in Windows 95, for which they got in trouble.
I dunno, man - a competitive market for browsers likely involves the browser itself inserting a bunch of ads all over the place. It becomes another axis for enshittification, rather than a mostly-neutral window into the web. It's not enough to hope that a business model appears... Ask any journalist.
> It's an interesting hypothesis, but it's entirely possible that separated from Google, Chrome is either not a viable business model (browsers don't make money on their own)
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.
You're imagining things. Google hasn't been prevented from that at all, yet, and may not be. We are discussing remedies here that have not happened yet. You cannot discount one possible remedy because of the existence of another possible remedy.
The more I think about your example the more it is a viable business model as you have the incentive to make people bid for the data, rather than defaulting it to Google, which is the point of the monopoly issue.
I agree with your premise, but you're example is unfortunate. The manifest v3 thing was due to an API change to improve performance by pulling the renderer out of the critical path for network requests. Adblockers can still block ads (as in not show them), but they can't throttle or block requests.
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.
> The manifest v3 thing was due to an API change to improve performance by pulling the renderer out of the critical path for network requests.
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.
If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck it’s a duck. They used the “improved security” as an excuse while leaving other just as big holes in their security. Show me how AdGuard or ublock origin abused the current system in v2
They've used the UK regulators as a very convenient excuse. But realistically the problem is that Google's DoubleClick has a monopoly on both sides of the ad marketplace. If that wasn't the case, the regulators would not have a problem with Chrome deprecating cookies.
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...
> Example: if Chrome was separated from Google, they won't have as much of an incentive to push back against adblockers
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.
The “intangibles” you reference have a name. It’s called vertical integration.
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.
Also, websearch would equally not be able to survive on its own. We know it from the fact that the competitors in the search field that put quality over ads, are doing it as a paid service.
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.
Manifest v3 exists to increase security and privacy, not to break ad blockers. I suspect that an independent Chrome would implement it even faster because they don't have to worry about the perception that they're doing it for ads.
Ads and search are the two businesses that most directly collude and which could both survive and thrive independently.
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.
> Ads and search are the two businesses that most directly collude and which could both survive and thrive independently.
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’m skeptical that Google search contains any search results. So maybe that part of their business is already dead and they just need an honest rebranding to ad search.
> I’m skeptical that Google search contains any search results. So maybe that part of their business is already dead and they just need an honest rebranding to ad search.
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.
I'm skeptical of us ever being able to run the required real world experiment to prove your point of view without Google being broken up and search split out as it's own thing.
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.
Why wouldn’t Google search be viable if it could negotiate rates with multiple ad networks? IMO there would be more net revenue generated from competition in the ad space.
1. Doesn’t that bring us back to a monopoly? One dominant seller of ad space with many buyers? Do we just recursively split out the ad sales and then ask search to sell ads?
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?
Personally, I think Search should be a public, not private, effort. Indexing the internet should be a global endeavor beneficial to world governments in unison. The issue is that the potential for censorship is rife, but I think including many govs on a board might solve this.
Google has already specifically deranked Russian government media and media promoting the lab leak theory during COVID. Obviously China would require the index to exclude any mention of Tiananmen Square. If it's anything like the UN, Jerusalem Post will be deranked in favor of Al Jazeera on every search relating to the Middle East.
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.
Splitting ads and search is a nonstarter. Ads on the search page are very different from ads on other pages since search ads can leverage information retrieved during the search. Ads on other pages have to use contextual or remarketing signals, with much poorer results.
I don’t think I follow. Whatever the technical integration between Google search and Google ads, why could it not be done with multiple, competing ad networks?
At the very least, spinning off individual businesses prevents self-preferencing. Google can right now leverage its dominance in one area to increase market share in another. For example, if I load my GMail account in a browser other than Chrome, Google will "helpfully" suggest that I change my default browser to the "recommended" Chrome. This behavior makes it harder for upstarts to get a foot in the door across a wide range of products — by removing these synergies we reduce the grip Google has across all its lines of business.
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.
People don't realize, you couldn't just buy a phone - you had to use the one provided by your monopoly phone company.
It was only after breakup that there could exist an ecosystem of phone peripherals like answerphones, direct-attach modems (this is why acoustic couplers were a thing), cordless phones, etc.
I’m frankly shocked that Google continues to think the juice on that annoying, constant Chrome-in-Gmail popup is worth even a marginal additional anti-trust attention squeeze.
It's worth a lot. People regularly fall out of Google's funnel and they must get them back. You think every user that switches to Firefox is a user Google's willing to walk away from?
There are probably only a small number of services that could successfully spin off on their own, but a lot of the value is in integration, which as others point out is also how some things seem 'free'.
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.
Microsoft for a good long while made money on two things: Office and Windows. You could break them up into "Office", "Windows", and any combination of "everything else", and for the most part what would happen is that the Office and Windows parts would make more money proportionally, and most if not all of the "everything else" would die. Even products that could nominally have survived on their own if they had grown up on their own would die because by the time the corporate culture adapted to the new realities they'd mostly already be dead.
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.
Sure, but why should we think that those deals will be better than what “Search Google” has with “Ads Google” today?
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?
If things are broken up, we will get open standards for integration. The value of open standard would be much higher than today. Think how XMPP might have evolved if everyone had an interest in keeping it open.
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.
Chrome and Android are particularly interesting to me. What would splitting those projects off from Google possibly look like?
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.
An interesting read on the matter comes from Cory Doctorow (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-shat...). The uniform business here is ads.
Google controls the supply, the demand and the marketplace, effectively setting whatever price they want and whatever quality of service they want.
Smaller business cannot enter the market as competitors, while customers (here the people wanting to put ads on the internet) are chocked out.
Then if you add that Chrome enforces how browser experiences are designed and how tracking is done, you see the problem emerging.
One of the potential remedies is to require Google to open source their crawling data. This should make it easier for others who want to build a competing search engine.
Websites these days are often pretty hostile to crawling aside from the Googlebot. Other crawlers are asked not to by the robots.txt, fully blocked, or put through captchas.
Good point. Now I think about it Google is actively contributing to that with their Reddit deal which has them blocking all scrapers besides Googlebot, even known legit search engine crawlers like Bingbot.
> Surely the crawling is the easiest part? The AI goldrush has seen dozens of new players gobbling up the entire internet.
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.
If they break up the ad business it could be helpful. Otherwise search and youtube are like you say synergistic and there is no obvious way to break them up.
Keep in mind that without the Ad business, most of Google's products cannot exist. Search gets paid by Ads, same with YouTube. Most of the free product are just Ad delivery platforms, and they are all pretty much on the verge of losing money as-is. The Ad business itself has margin enough to cover that, and without a set of outlets like those services, it wouldn't be able to exist.
Vimeo has tried a different approach, but it's hardly in the same league as YouTube.
YouTube has been profitable in recent years -- thanks to an investment in hardware transcoding reducing costs. So that is potentially separable.
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.
The larger point is youTube should sell its own ads. As should search. Double click as an agency that sells ads for other websites shouldn't be allowed to sell to the previous google properties, and vice versa.
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.
And, indeed, there's a case to be made that there's net consumer harm to breaking up the synergy.
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.
While we're at it, we need to break Microsoft and Amazon asap. I don't know how Microsoft is not up for discussion when it's a behemoth (GitHub, LinkedIn, Azure, Windows, Office, etc.). The same applies for Amazon.
But Microsoft has misused their market power plenty of times, such as when they bundled Microsoft Teams with their enterprise contract at zero cost, destroying Slack's market value overnight.
Or how about the fact that basically no one uses Windows by choice, they use it because they need to for some app, and because of that Microsoft makes the entire OS constantly harass everyone to try and trick them into signing up for Microsoft services.
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.
No idea what functions or services Windows has that doesn't exist on other platforms in an equal or superior way. PowerShell maybe?
"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.
Let’s be real: Windows is practically a monopoly. They use it to push their online services in ridiculous ways. I doubt >10% of the current Edge userbase is through conscious decision. Teams obviously cannot compete on its own terms with any competitors, its prevalence only comes from being part of Microsoft’s all in one office suite package that no individual company can compete with.
I don't think it's true that Windows is a monopoly anymore. You could always get a mac. Most people I know use macs, in fact. I still use Windows but I'm in the minority. I tried going to Linux earlier but I still feel Windows has smoother performance.
Bad counter example. Have you tried using Google ads or analytics without using BigQuery? What about server containers (not the type of containers in the docker sense you’re thinking of)? The data exfil costs for anything else tie you to gcp.
It is so easy to switch away from Google I just can't take any break up attempt seriously.
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.
ATTs customers were phone users, hence it was difficult for them. Google's customers are ad companies, and for them, switching away from Google is impossible. By thinking of how easy it is for you to switch, you are not considering the correct customers. And this shows in your statement about better search engine, better search engine cannot come without customers (not you) having option to switch.
> Google's customers are ad companies, and for them, switching away from Google is impossible.
Billions (probably trillions) of dollars are spent every year on advertising through other channels than Google, including online. Let's stick to reality.
Easy to switch away from Google? We're techies, so we don't see a lot of what is going on. Turn off your blockers for ads and trackers. Look at the number of websites that have Google trackers. Look at where the ads come from. That doesn't even count search, and Google search has also become a platform for Google-driven ads. Add in YouTube and other Google properties, and "monopoly" is an understatement.
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...
Part of the problem is that tech products tend to be natural monopolies. If you split android off Google, it will probably just lose out against iOS in the West and some Chinese Android version elsewhere. As the article says, that's not necessarily better.
People say this but there's nothing "natural" about Google's monopoly, to get to where they are today, they had to make a dozen major acquisitions, and if the last few administrations hadn't been bought and paid for, the FTC could have said no to any of them. In particular they should have looked very very hard at Doubleclick. I mean who are we kidding, they should have said no to Doubleclick.
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."
If the marginal cost of delivering your product is close to zero, markets will tend to monopoly. A search/ads company that has 10% of the market share that Google does (and no one gets even to that), has roughly the same costs but only 10% of the income (and only that if they are as good as Google is in making on money off search). On top of that, having access to the query stream is really important keeping search quality up.
> Part of the problem is that tech products tend to be natural monopolies.
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.
and other markets where network effects tend to create monopolies tend to be very highly regulated or state owned: telecoms and financial markets, for example.
Utilities are monopolies because it makes no sense to spend tons of resources running extra pipes and wires to each and every house. It’s called a structural monopoly.
Network effects are just so strong. Once a particular option has ingrained itself for a particular use-case they can make it extremely difficult for any alternative to become viable even if it's technologically superior. Just look at Windows vs Linux.
Network effects are huge. Also consider the velocity of tech. A superior product can dominate the market in 10 years or less, where other industries take decades or more and first movers don’t get as far ahead.
Google has collected multiple businesses in its conglomerate structure that gives it far too much power and control over society beyond the simple monopoly charge.
YouTube, Search, Email, advertising, are all controlled by the same people and that is a problem for freedom and the economy.
I feel like the US should have serious conversations about it's regulation of monopolies, especially on internet giants. The current system seems to be woefully ineffective. On the one hand, it's not clear it's necessarily, Google isn't a particularly old company it hasn't had a strangle hold for long and it doesn't look like it's business is unassailable. So why go after it at all. On the other hand, the anti-monopoly moves have been slow and ineffective. When Microsoft finally got hit their crimes were pretty egregious and they actually never faced any consequences, the law suit they lost eventaully got turned over on appeal and by the time it was all resolved the market looked markedly different.
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.
> Google isn't a particularly old company it hasn't had a strangle hold for long and it doesn't look like it's business is unassailable. So why go after it at all. On the other hand, the anti-monopoly moves have been slow and ineffective. When Microsoft finally got hit...
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.
Well to push the point a little - Imagine that Microsofts anti-trust case was in 2008, not 1997 and the iPhone was out and clearly gaining traction. Suddenly Microsoft doesn't look like some perpetual juggernaut. That's where we are with Google today - we can see the product that's likely to displace it. Windows is still big today, but it's not anywhere near the strategic force it was in the early 2000s. In the same way, I don't think Google is likely to be in the same place in a few years time.
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.
Microsoft still owns 70% of the PC market 15 years after your hypothetical and is still a "perpetual juggernaut" in that market. Because you don't care about that market and think smartphones are more important doesn't mean the rest of us stop caring about PCs and the harm Microsoft's ongoing monopoly in that market creates.
Sure, but the "PC Market" isn't anything like what it was. In the data centre their market share probably looks more like 20% and they have almost no presence on mobile. So yes, they continue to dominate 1 sector (and even that they aren't as dominant as they were) but that sector is now just 1 part of a market that has several significant sectors they are not dominant in.
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.
We ruined antitrust enforcement in the 70s and 80s by switching from “we know companies having too much of a market is bad, so that’s enough” to “we must show specific harm of specific kinds before we can do anything”.
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 Apple deal had two sides engaged in monopolistic behavior. One was Google buying out that default provider option. The other was Apple, having that default option.
> The other was Apple, having that default option.
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."
Search without a setting configured should open the Settings dialog to the page which configures search.
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.
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.
> A fitting though unlikely outcome would be for Google to be forced to turn Chrome and the open source Chromium project over to Mozilla. That would probably involve the creation of an independent non-profit foundation that didn't reduce browser diversity – so Chrome and Firefox could continue to lead independent lives.
Mozilla is a bit of a stretch for sure, but I could see Chromium and maybe Android moved off onto their own independent organizations so they are not beholden to Google/Alphabet's whims. I am imagining something like the Linux Foundation.
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.
Not Mozilla, no way! If Chrome gets split off, give it to anyone but Mozilla. They already ran one browser into the ground, they don't need to destroy a second one.
Chrome being made by the same company running the websites (search/docs/etc.) is still going to provide bad incentives even if with ads & youtube seperated out the worst ones would be gone.
I think forcing google to break the buy side from the sell side of advertising is the most obvious and probably beneficial way to break it apart. This should have never happened in the first place , and similar things should be happening to other bigTech. Advertising money is the lifeblood of this industry
With search, there are actually 2 different products. The index itself is a textbook natural monopoly. There's no upside in having more than 1 web crawler as long as it can be trusted to just crawl the web but there's plenty of downside in the form of increased bandwidth costs for web sites. The actual search rankings are where competition makes sense. So spin the Google search index off as a non-profit that makes its product available at a reasonable cost to anybody who wants to run a search engine.
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.
> The index itself is a textbook natural monopoly.
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.
> the index itself should be something operated by the public rather than privately
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.
> what incentive does the indexing company have to keep improving it?
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.
> 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.
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.
NHS is a pretty terrible example. Since it relies on public funding without a direct monetary profit, it is an easy target for defunding when the government needs to cut expenses. And lo and behold that is exactly what has happened.
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.
It's only absurd if it's ran as a public-private cooperative. The government directly running something like this can be every bit as efficient as what any private entity could do.
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.
> It's not as if the gov doesn't already employ in several sectors skilled software developers.
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.
> The index itself is a textbook natural monopoly.
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 can't begin to imagine what this world would look like, but I can keep dreaming...
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.
Amusing to me that we have a $3.5T company, and the solution is to break up it's only competitor to make it weaker and that company an even bigger monopoly.
The solution is to break them both up but you cannot do that at the same time because they are different kinds of monopolies that require separate government attention. Your assumption that we need to allow one megacorporation to get even more evil to take on another evil megacorporation is silly. End megacorporations instead of empowering them to maybe fight each other (or maybe just collude like in the $20B annual Safari search payment.)
What about "de-DoubleClicking" Google, iow, separating the ad business from the rest of Google/Alphabet? I'm not sure how that would work, but IMO what reduces the quality of Google products and noticeably makes them worse for consumers is that the products either improve ad dollars or they get cut/receive no funding.
Are you talking about The Register here? That's a fairly strange accusation for a news outlet that goes out of it's way to be provocative to the entire industry.
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.
I don't see how a Google breakup can be operationalized. There's just no way the company's stack can support it without decades of work. It'd be like dismembering a person and expecting all the pieces to go off and thrive.
They could take the search team, flip a coin for each employee, and split it, maintaining rank. The team that's forced to leave to start their own search company will be able to leave with the full Google search codebase and dependencies (yes I know they have a monorepo, but figure it out).
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.
The root of all the “evil” here is ads. I have no particular solutions to suggest — though banning paid ads altogether sounds like a worthwhile idea, apart from the definitional difficulties — but I believe that’s the aspect that needs to be tackled one way or the other.
It’s true. If you look at the history, breaking up companies often results in each division doing well and maybe not an improvement as Youtube/Android/Search/Gmail/Adwords/Chrome all need to earn a profit independently.
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.
Google pays Apple $20 billion per year to be the default search engine. I assume they either have some say or Apple want to increase the value in paying or the other search engines pay to be listed or there is some reason why safari doesn’t allow any search engines beyond a very short list. I doubt it’s an accident that you only get about 5 choices where google is the only decent choice
The obvious and least painful change for Google is to make the top 3 most popular browsers on any platform have to allow any search engines supplied by the user. The user has to paste a custom url into a text box supplied by their favorite search engine’s website. That way people can use meaningful search engines like Marginalia, Kagi, or others. It’s such a simple change that would have a massive impact in forcing meaningful competition in the search sphere.
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.
I agree that Google has an inordinate amount of power in the market and that it has to be restrained. That said, I do not like the 'better' qualifier here. It depends too much on who is reading it. Hell, it is not impossible average user will dislike the change ( but they always do).
No one is picking at anyone. I want the basic law enforced. I want all the "too big" companies brought to heel. Those entities already have way too much power at their disposal and there is a real social interest in reining it in. I do not think it is too much to ask. You want me to pick at MS too? Show me a path to breaking them up as well and I will gladly sign on to the appropriate effort to make it happen.
I guess I am weird. I want the rules enforced for all players.
I really hope that some portions are turned into public institutions (either directly or in the weird way organizations like USPS is) in some way. They've made themselves so deeply ingrained and essential to using the internet as loss leaders in some areas that it's impossible to imagine those services standing on their own and still making sense. That's what's responsible for their monopolization, and natural monopolies should be tightly state regulated. I hope we get case law on how network effects can kinda be natural monopolies when in the right technological context.
I'm scratching my head trying to think of something Google does that should be a public institution. Can you give an example? YouTube is the closest thing I can think of, but it is tightly bound to advertising.
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).
YouTube should be the main platform the government should form into a public institution. Not only due to its historical and cultural significance, but also due to the fact that it is (almost assuredly) unprofitable and thus at-risk.
If a for-profit company does not provide its annual profits, it’s safe to say it’s not doing well. Especially as Alphabet does so elsewhere. Additionally, would they have become so ad-aggressive in the last few years if they have been making a profit?
My major complaint is when cities/states/governments only use a Google product for hosting allegedly-public data — which is otherwise inaccessible (unless you allow access to e.g. Google Drive).
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.
I have no love for Google but, in light of the Google Graveyard, I am at a loss to see how to cut it up in a way where almost anything can remain profitable on its own.
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.
Oddly, breaking it up may give some items a better chance at living? Ostensibly, one of the main drivers of that graveyard is the monorepo nature of how they rollout changes, combined with them moving people off of projects. Splitting them directly addresses both of those?
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.
I mean, some of the items that have been killed were actively used while they were getting killed? Such that they may not pay a lot, but that does not mean they won't pay.
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?
Yeah I don’t know how this will go, but I’m not too optimistic.
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.
"Let's do nothing then. Let's all just let the megacorporations write their own laws and manage themselves autonomously with no consumer or competition protections at all. Why bother."
Oh yeah that’s not what I was going for here. Doing things is great. I just hope that they think through the pitfalls and loopholes of whatever they decide to do. I want to avoid the fates the article hinted at, stuff like “since you broke us up, we can’t possibly maintain Chrome for free anymore, that’s gonna be a subscription now”.
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.
I don't use Google for most searches anymore. Unfortunately, with relatively newer search engines it's taking time for them to be at parity with Google.
1. Forbid Google from paying Apple and Android OEM’s to be the default search engine. Also, detach Google search from Android and forbid Google from forcing it to be included on every Android phone.
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.
Right. Government-mandated access to proprietary data isn't how the US breaks up monopolies, but somewhat along those lines, it might make sense for some government to provide some similar data. This seems much closer to a European style government approach, and I wouldn't expect such a thing in the U.S.
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.
The way monopoly law works in the US, it's not illegal to have a monopoly. It's illegal to try to leverage your monopoly to acquire a monopoly on a different line of business. For example, it was found to be illegal for Microsoft to use the Windows monopoly to try to acquire a monopoly on web browsers.
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'm flumuxed that Google is the first tech company to be ruled a monopoly. I would put them fourth on the tech monopoly list, behind Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, in that order.
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.
If the US government didn't have the muscle to break up Microsoft, which had a pretty evident monopoly in the 90s, I am willing to bet they won't manage to put a dent to Google.
Particularly given how more "friendlier" has turned for corporations in the last 30 years.
Apple doesn't match the description of a monopoly, as far as I can see. Amazon might. But Google is dominant. You could add Facebook to the monopolies, unless you think it shares the same space as Twitter.
You generally cannot have friends as an American under 25 without owning an iPhone. Outside of HN tech heads, regular young Americans use phones that "can send pictures that don't look like garbage!".
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.
WhatsApp offers very simple high quality image/video sharing. If you are being excluded by your friends, it’s not because the image quality is bad. It’s because they want to exclude you.
Everyone already uses iMessage. It's like getting everyone in the EU to switch to Signal because Meta owns WhatsApp: it's impossible. There's not enough incentive to switch off of the current solution because the hurdles to doing so is getting everyone else to do so.
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.
Why would I get a whatsapp when I already have a perfectly working messaging app? Everyone needs to download this random app because one kid is too broke to get an iphone?
Some people are painfully unaware of what it looks like on the ground here...
Yes, if your friends and family are too lazy or unwilling to take 30 seconds to install a very widely used app for you, you are getting a valuable signal from them on where you rank in their social graph.
Lecturing people on their morals is fun but painfully useless. Peer pressure exists, and corps know how to leverage it, and that's a fact that we need to deal with.
Microsoft was arguably the first, the case fell apart and ended up a settlement because the Judge presiding over the case violated the court code of conduct by discussing the case with the media. Something laughable in 2024.
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.
> the case fell apart and ended up a settlement because the Judge presiding over the case violated the court code of conduct by discussing the case with the media.
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.
- 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.
It doesn't. But if B is less of a monopoly than A, and the regulators are going to break up B, but not break up A, that does lead to questions. Why start with B? Why not start with A, and then do B?
Because that creates a lot of additional work and controversy for no real gain. Do courts rank cases and hear them in the order of severity of the crime? It's exactly the same situation. I agree that both companies should be held to the same standard, but I don't think I really care about the particular order
How is google a monopoly at all? There’s competition and alternative for each of their products. And people can keep using the alternatives if they want.
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?
Good questions! You can find the answers in this article[1], and follow the sources linked at the bottom for even more information. If you really want to get into the weeds, you can read about US antitrust law here[2], which has a bunch more articles to other caselaw around monopoly abuse in the US.
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 owns ~90% of the search market and if you don't play by their rules, you're out of the game. The argument is that there's nothing really superior about their technology today, just market dominance to force everyone to operate in a way that serves their _ad_ interests as opposed to search interests.
It's that Google can do things like force manifest V3 on users so that ad blockers are rendered useless, allowing Google to push ads onto those users. I.e. use their dominance in one area (web browsers) to benefit another area (ads).
Google pays $20 billion a year to be default search on Apple. Alphabet's net income was $74 billion in 2023. Why would they reduce profit by 20% to get Apple users to use the search engine that they would use anyway?
The housing and finance markets seem like a fitting example. Under and over investment respectively fueled bubbles that fed each other until their inevitable pop took the entire economy down and required a decade of artificially suppressed rates backed by trillions in debt setting us for bigger problems when an actual economic crisis occurs (Covid). We’re still weathering this storm of financial mismanagement on a national scale. Narrowing in, housing is now being over invested in fueling a bubble while the communities houses exist in are victims of underinvestment.
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?
The bigger problem is that by conglomerating all of these businesses that are operating in different industries, Google has cut out competition from companies that would provide those services.
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?
>AdWords was primarily built by purchasing the biggest competitor, DoubleClick.
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.
AdWords came out in 2000. Google acquired DoubleClick in 2007. AdWords was much better before the DoubleClick acquisition. It turned into crap as DoubleClick management forced the engineering-focused AdWords management out.
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.
They didn’t have to go into new business sectors under the same parent company. They chose to because it allowed them to control multiple sectors without competition.
Regardless, there is not competition in their business in areas where there should be according to monopoly rules.
> If what comes after is not better, then we waited too long to break this monopoly up.
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?
The main thing I specifically value about Google being whole is that there is a part of the business that is a firehouse of money, and some sizable % of this money is used in a Patronage system, supporting not the arts but open source technology & standards.
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".
> I don't follow your logic, because it does not have any logic.
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.
The system is very fundamentally not designed to support such an approach (much as I agree that it would produce a better result).
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.
In these types of discussions, people love bringing out the "But what about $OTHER_OBVIOUS_MONOPOLY?".
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.
Obviously nothing more than a coincidence, but very interesting this news came out days before 9/11. I wonder if this would have gotten more attention at the time.
Amazon is a funny example to imagine being broken up, since they famously try to isolate their business units from each other and keep them self-sustaining income wise. It might kill or dramatically change some business units like twitch, or IMDB though.
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.
The funny thing is this is going to be benefit Microsoft significantly. Much of what Google did Chrome, Android, etc. was to prevent Microsoft from destroying it like Netscape, Novell, Lotus, Wordperfect, ...
It's probably no coincidence that Google's first external CEO Eric Schmidt was the CEO of Novell.
By the time Chrome was released, Google was already a behemoth. I can’t think of another .com that was anywhere near their size. Microsoft was only 2x bigger by market cap. They were hardly a small company that Microsoft could push around and had the advantage of not being dependent on anything MS was doing.
Google toolbar came first. Slipped in a Google search box on everyone's browser in exchange for blocking Google's competitors' popup ads (Google didn't use popup ads).
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.
What this means is that we also need antitrust action against Microsoft (particularly since the first one was thwarted by the election of a very pro-big-business administration, that stopped the implementation of fairly sweeping remedies).
It's not exactly a hot take nowadays that all the Big Tech companies are probably overdue for serious antitrust action.
It appears to me that your two paragraphs contradict each other. If we break up Google and what comes afterwards is worse, then break it up or we'll get worse? Is it worse if we do and worse if we don't? Which "worse" is worse?
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?
That seems to be in support of the parent's point.
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.
> If your of the opinion that Google should not be broken up at all, ever, then your point is valid.
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?
If you are neutral on whether Google should be broken up, and breaking up the company results in consumer harm, then breaking up the company makes no sense.
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.
> Things may get worse for a while, but then maybe they'll eventually get better than (...)
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?
I'm not sure Search is the most important product (for users) at this point. It should be, but Gmail and YouTube come to mind as much more important services for end-users. People haven't really been 'browsing the web' for over a decade now. Search hasn't felt good for years, but Gmail for example has been pretty good for a long time.
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.
Android and Chrome are not great examples. They already open source projects (or 99.9% based on open source AOSP and Chromium codebases), which themselves only survive because Google is funding tons of engineers to work on them.
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.
The best way to tackle this is enforce right for repair and require opensourcing of various components. Breaking up google will be an impossible job.
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 problem of so-called "break-up" option is that there are not many buyers who can afford operating those services (those costs at least billions every year even if those could be purchased for free) and those who can afford are already serious monopolists. Imagine MS buying Chrome, Meta buying AdWords, Apple buying Android etc etc. You probably don't want that.
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.
It’s a publicity traded company they don’t need to be sold to be broken up. Each division retains its own value and shareholders get proportionate shares for the new stocks.
Google's "search results" are the textbook definition of a monopolized good/service. The whole thing is almost a casino, rigged to the point of absurdity.
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.
Just following this thought then the remedy will be forcing Apple to allow alternative OS and firmware on their devices, allowing consumers to choose what they do with the device hardware they purchased?
I’m not a subscriber to the “if I choose to buy a product, I get to dictate product design decisions for the company” school of thought. Buy it or don’t. If you want X there is no right do demand Y turn into X.
> There is a choice between very few phone manufacturers, and even less mobile operating systems.
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?
Why should they have to allow it? My smart TVs and video game consoles never allowed it, except that short lived Linux PlayStation. Nintendo is pretty hostile about reverse engineering the switch.
But those are gaming and entertainment devices, not general-purpose computing devices that everyone relies on for day-to-day work and life.
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?
Those should allow it too. Them setting a bad precedent doesn't mean we should continue to abide by it, just that there's more work to be done undoing it.
I think that would be the right decision, to me that makes more sense than forcing Apple to allow any app to be installed on iOS or allowing alternate stores.
Ownership and security are at odds. The only remedy would be forcing Apple to allow the owner of the device to run whatever they would like on it, unfortunately this does include malware.
In the broadest sense, an app that "can not cause harm" can't do anything useful. To the industry's dominant players, "causing harm" means empowering the user to venture outside their walled gardens... or even to see outside them.
So, no, sandboxing everything in sight isn't a useful solution. Your sandbox will just imprison us all.
Buying a phone from another vendor is only viable if Apple/Google didn't try to lock you in. Of course we know that's not true - you can't just go elsewhere and that's by design.
The concern is if you are developing for the web, how much time do you need to spend appeasing Google to show up in search results and be discoverable.
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.
It’s not just monopoly it’s googles abuse. How many times have they been sued successfully and fined by the government for abusing the position as a large corporation, I’d say it’s legion. I wish the government was more vigilant in using their power to kill corporations outright after so many abuses of power
> While true and a fair point, iOS is Apple’s platform in a way that the web is most certainly not Google’s.
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.
It’s odd how this is lost on people. Want to develop a game for PlayStation, Sony will need to approve. Want to develop a Facebook app, FB will gatekeep. If you wanted to make apps for the Danger Hiptop, you published through Danger. iOS is Apple’s consolized OS for their own hardware. It’s not a PC platform that anyone can put on whatever device they want. For better or worse.
I think there is a reasonable breaking point though, where the platform becomes so ingrained in society that you are left out of social groups if you don't join.
"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.
Personally, I think the breaking point is when the device transitions from "appliance" or niche device to general computer.
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.
When you're a part of a duopoly on a product that is necessary for participating in the modern economy with as much friction as iOS has for switching to the only viable competitor... what makes it so fundamentally different from the web?
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.
> So if a business mode is successful, regardless of whether it’s actively thwarted competition or acted anticompetitively, it should be regulated?
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?
To exist on the internet you need to pay Google. Google is essentially the government of the open web. The problem is that government like monopolies do arise especially when there are network effects.
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.
Credit card companies do one thing - process payments. What cut do VOD or music hosting sites take? Bandcamp takes 15%. eBay takes 15% on things they never physically touch. It’s hard finding hard data, but it seems like YouTube, on average charges $15CPM and pays $5CPM to the highest paid YouTubers. What is the value of download hosting and store platform?
If the app is free they still have to maintain the app store. I have a free app apple checks it. Running an app store is part of the cost of the phone. No one would buy the phone if they couldn't download apps.
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.
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).
Not OP but as a public utility it would be paid for through both taxes and usage
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 them make profit. We probably should have to pay for traffic and advertisement on the web. But regulate it so that there cannot be price gouging. For instance there are maximum interest chargeable on loans. You should be able to loan money at interest but there is a point where you are just using your power to economically exploit others. Especially if there is no option.
What are you even talking about? you actually do not need to pay Google a dime to be on the Internet, if you have good SEO you can be on the top of the page
Why does anyone pay google to advertise? Most people don't have adblocker they get a paid for link often.
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.
>Google's "search results" are the textbook definition of a monopolized good/service.
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?
As a business owner you can’t tell all of your present and future customers you’re only going to be in Bing results going forward. This isn’t about what an individual chooses to use. Google is effectively the Yellow pages of the internet. In that era you could take out ads in the newspaper, but no one was looking there when they needed to find a resource they needed now.
They're not. Textbook definition: "A market structure characterized by a single seller, selling a unique product in the market." Google Search has competitors and is not even selling its search product.
In this context, "selling" can't just mean "exchanging for money", it has to mean something like "exchanging for a valuable consideration." The valuable consideration that you provide in exchange for using Google is your attention on their ads, and your behavioral and personal data that can be 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.
They're dominant but mainly due to the quality/cost of their products, not because competing with them is impossible. Android is open source. There's Bing and many other search engines. Google Mobile Services (Android is open source) and Google Search could disappear tomorrow and would be quickly replaced.
Your problem isn't Google, your problem is capitalism and the limited attention economy.
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.
I disagree with this. Capitalism may be a problem, but Google's specific technology and size, enabling them to reach people at high-speed, is also a problem. The fact is, capitalism on a small scale (trade with money in local communities) is much less damaging than on a global scale due to the anonymizing effects of scale and the economies of scale being much more efficient at effecting tragedy of the commons.
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.
Google is about to pull from its war chest to create a PR frenzy to make this a very bad thing for consumers/users. They'll appeal to conservative and neoliberal circles. Personally, as a former Google employee, I want them smashed to pieces.
Yes, everybody is still super upset that Microsoft got hit by antitrust in 2001 and shifted heavily to B2B. We've really missed out on having more fantastic Microsoft software forcibly intertwined in our daily lives. I wish Microsoft owned all of desktop AND mobile computing AND the internet so I was forced to do everything via the fantastic Microsoft Windows!
Darn these regulators for trying to allow competitors to enter the market. Everybody knows, competition only makes things worse!
Google’s deal with Apple is def problematic but apart from that I really don’t think it’s a monopoly.
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.
Like US vs Microsoft, by the time a resolution arrives, it will be 10 years out of date. No one cared about IE bundling, and IE had already lost dominance.
Search and web are dead media. in 10 years no one will care.
I think Google can win this easily by using the public opinion against the regulators.
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.
> Not only is tech extremely hateable as a demographic
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'm not so sure. You sound like you're describing the older generations and their tech swoon. What I am hearing lately, and from coming-up generations, is very much anti-tech.
Do you honestly think that would have any effect beyond Gmail users? (those would really hurt)
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.
I’d pay for consumer tier (which we’ll pretend was the former free tier) if I got proper customer service number I could call. I don’t use it enough to pay for a business tier
It does, but they're useless for anything that isn't already a Google search away. They can't help with actual account/service issues, and don't seem to have a way to escalate to the right teams that can.
>I think Google can win this easily by using the public opinion against the regulators.
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.
Ma Bell didn’t have the power to cut off advertising revenue to YouTubers who say things the company does like, nor the power to shape the global access to information with search, nor did they scan people’s communications
Ma Bell had the power to make it so you couldn't talk on a wire, at all. They owned all the wires. They owned all the phones.
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.
More control over a narrower aspect of life, vs control over many parts of your life.
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.
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.
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.
breaking it up will also weaken US Dominance in Tech, the fact that Android and Chrome are under them same umbrella helps them share IP across the company and decreases RD costs because some of the costs are shared.
regulation in the EU may no longer work independently from regulation in the US thus US laws they need to collaborate and compromise, they are weakening western tech dominance
Japan tried to curb the Yakuza by enacting laws to specifically punish them. Not only it didn't work as well as they thought, but other criminals also flourished in the underworld by virtue of not being Yakuza.
Whatever they do to go after Google must be really well thought and coordinated otherwise they will just be passing the crown to someone else a little bit smarter.
You're analogy isn't exactly good. In this case, other businesses flourishing is a good thing.
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.
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.