US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

As for the rebuttal of “bUt ThE gDp”, there’s a counter-argument to be made that the GDP would have grown just as much with a higher diversity and stringent M&A regulations by spurring on new businesses and concepts, as opposed to mainstreaming fad after fad that seemingly solely benefits the established players. There’s another argument to be made equating GDP values to desirable targets creates a Goodhart’s Law problem, thereby making GDP as a measure of growth or success a bad metric; the rise of income and wealth inequality these past few decades, when there was increased focus on GDP as a target of growth or success, could be viewed as evidence supporting said argument.

It’s worth noting that this case against Google is likely to be the bellwether for future divestments and breakups. Whatever comes next will be an invaluable learning experience for both sides, just like AT&T and Microsoft’s own anti-trust woes were learning experiences for the current crop of companies.

Youtube may be the only viable company that can come out of Google. Rest will either have to charge a lot of money or die.

And we will be left with an even more profitable ad giant, that sends back all profits to it’s share holders.

In fact, it almost seems like the only people able to produce great things in the 1970s were massive entrenched corporations like Ma Bell.

Funny, that.

Come to think of it, wasn’t there a much more vibrant browser ecosystem in the late 90s and early 2000s, before Google used its dominant position in the ad market to undercut the competition? There used to be a lot more mobile operating systems out there, too.

I wonder what happened to all that competition? It’s almost like some sort of massive anti-competitive influence came into force in the tech scene somewhere in the 2000s. . .

Most browsers have consolidated over time because we are constantly updating web standards and bar for security is so high. On top of that everything has to be insanely backward compatible

WebGPU is a good example. Implementing that securely in a nightmare

There are lots of distos out there, but we all use the same core and make it better & safer together.

The latest changes to chrome that breaks plugins like ublock origin allows them to keep maximising their advertising revenue.

I think these two being open source is a major reason why they have been so successfully adopted. It isn’t direct revenue, but the control and indirect revenue that comes from that which is the driver

Chrome synergizes with the rest of Google’s portfolio.

But I agree that default search with being Google must have heavily blocked competition.

Comparing how much they pay Mozilla and Apple to maintain search, it would be reasonable to estimate Chrome’s implementation to save them $1b a year

But I highly doubt they make any back given > 1k people work on it

For example, if google didn’t control the most popular browser, they probably would have had to say goodbye to third party cookies a long time ago, but since they do they’ve been able to delay it for quite a while, at least for a considerable portion of users.

It’s everyone else who wants to keep them around.

I think you are underestimating it. There must be a reason why google is trying to work around ad blockers on their platforms.

> But I highly doubt they make any back given > 1k people work on it

Where did you find that number? I highly doubt it. Maybe if you are counting contributors to chromium.

Not in the US they don’t; it’s a minority share, split across many different manufacturers who all have their own flavor of Android, their own (crappy) app stores and pre-loaded crapware apps, etc. Apple has a clear majority of the US smartphone market (and it’s a vertical monopoly, with Apple controlling the phone hardware and the app store and not allowing any alternatives), but no one’s looking at breaking them up.

>I think these two being open source is a major reason why they have been so successfully adopted.

iOS isn’t open-source, and it has a commanding majority of the US smartphone market.

This case is about US antitrust law, so what happens outside US borders isn’t really that important, except as far as it affects the companies’ revenues and profits. Supposedly, the actions of any antitrust action are to protect consumers/the general public, but what that really means is consumers in the US. Consumers outside the US are irrelevant. And the simple fact is that, by your own numbers, consumers in the US are mostly using iOS, not Android.

Regardless, 42% (in the US) is still a huge market share. Huge doesn’t have to mean majority or even plurality.

With the extra clarification that just the size of the company or its market share aren’t in and of themselves enough to constitute a crime. It’s how the company acts once it has that power that constitutes the crime.

You could be a huge company, or dominate a market and still not run afoul of anti-competitive laws because you didn’t abuse the position (0). The abuse of position particularly (or only, depending on jurisdiction probably) if it brings harm to consumers is what lands a company in hot water.

(0) https://thehustle.co/originals/the-worlds-cutest-monopoly

I’m not sure in what world 42% isn’t huge when it comes to market share. iOS having a majority isn’t really relevant to this point.

And regardless, GP didn’t say “in the US”; globally, they are far ahead of iOS. Sure, this anti-trust action is a US matter, but a break-up would absolutely affect Google globally.

No it doesn’t, because I define all ads as bad, so Chrome’s ad “blocker” is does not even remotely meet my needs.

> You just can’t programmatically decide which resources to filter

That “just” is doing a ton of work there. Declarative ad blockers aren’t terrible, but they’re not great either. And I don’t want my browser fetching ads (which could also be malware) at all. Downloading them and then hiding them is insufficient.

No, that is horseshit.

The goal of blocking ads isn’t to only allow in “good ads”.

It’s to block ads. Not some ads. Not a few ads. Not just malware delivered via ads. Not just Google’s competitors.

It’s to block ads. All of them. To stop the relentless harassment of the advertising industry claiming other peoples’ screens and time as their own.

You don’t like it? Go out of business and have companies that are able to operate at the price consumers are willing to pay rise up in your place.

Actually no, it’s worse. Ad companies take everything they can from you using any method they can including monitoring everything you browse or watch on TV or say near your phone or TV or in your car or what you look at in every shop or what you buy or who you chat to, compile massive secret databases and sell ‘you’ to anyone willing to pay, regardless of what the information is used for.

I don’t see what is confusing here. Consumers love the ad-model because they can get things “free”. If the real cost of ad-supported products is too much for you, then its too expensive for you to use.

Like someone found the backdoor to the movie theater, and people just go in that way rather than pay for a ticket, and then these same people go on rants about how movie tickets are a rip-off and they make you watch 30 mins of ads before the movie, and candy is 5x overpriced, and proudly declaring “I will never pay for a movie ticket again!”, as if they are some righteous moral champion standing against the greed of people wanting to get paid for their work.

Straighten out your head, then come back and make an argument.

I’d be happy to pay for no ads, and I have before for streaming services. But as time goes on it gets harder and harder. Often the only choice is ads, at which point I block or move on to a different service.

Ads use up my time and attention. Which, to me, is much more valuable than a small amount of money.

which is really just absurd when you think about it. I don’t care about another hour of battery life, but even if I did, I’d be perfectly happy if Chrome just told me “hey these extensions aren’t very battery-efficient!” and I got to make my own decision about that.

If you’re stuck having to run a ton of shitty JS code with ad malware in it, because your web browser doesn’t allow you to effectively block it, that’s probably going to cost you more in battery life than the overhead needed by MV2 to block that stuff.

Jolla/Sailfish make a mobile operating system with a handful of people, and even though that system pretty minimal, I’d say the added value on the Android side is the ecosystem of apps and porting to devices, which is done by other developers and manufacturers than Google. And I’m not sure how many people work on Firefox itself on any given day.

I guess it’s just really hard to get a clear picture on what all those people in large companies are really doing day to day. The overhead must be enormous, and likely a lot of engineering effort is thrown at the wall to see what sticks.

My biggest question is how long they can stay at a handful if they become popular. The increased burden of security patches alone would likely turn that handful into a small army.

Security through obscurity is often mocked (for good reason), but it actually does work in cases like this as long as you don’t reach Android’s scale.

OSS would be fine without Google, it was great before Google ever existed. There are intrinsic motivations to contribute, which is why thousands of companies do.

Most companies intentionally waste money on expenses to help drive future growth, or atleast avoid taxes. This is why you hear constantly Amazon pays almost no taxes compared to their revenue.

The money Google spends internally either on development or on cross subsidies is no profit and is what most of the issues in this discussion are addressing.

Profits is just money they couldn’t find a place to spend on growth.

(Also a maximum of 30% goes to app devs which isn’t a majority any way you measure it)

How do you know how much Google funnels of its profits (are you sure you mean this?) into Chrome and Android’s open source projects? Do you work at Google and have access to this information? Are you sure you know what you’re talking about here?

1. Google is fined/broken up due (in part) to paying for the default search engine position.

2. In the newly broken off chrome company, they auction the default search engine position.

3. Google cannot bid on it. So I guess Microsoft is going to win that position? Who else is going to pay for it?

I can’t imagine this is what happens. This would just make the DoJ look absolutely foolish and would basically put the DoJ in the position of being Microsoft’s personal attack dog. But on the other hand, what else could happen? It’s still ridiculous even if it’s anyone other than Microsoft that is the winning bidder.

It prompts the user to pick a search engine on install? And let’s be honest, most people will probably pick google anyway.

But then the question is, how will companies like Mozilla and a spin-off company for chrome make money if they can’t auction off the default search engine anymore?

This is not a good reason to break up anti-competitive monopolies: that it would harm the technology their monopoly depends on

Microsoft didn’t stop developing EdgeHTML because it’s too hard, they stopped because Google kept giving them the fuck around on sites like YouTube.

The whole point of web standards is that you can have multiple implementations for the same thing – there’s zero reason that post-Google, Blink needs to be maintained by a single entity.

Microsoft can maintain their own fork of Blink, or bring back Edge, or adopt WebKit, or whatever works for them.

Opera and <insert laundry list of chrome-but-not-chrome browsers> have the same options, sans EdgeHTML.

The whole reason these companies are using Chromium/Blink is that Google has a stranglehold on web standards, and by being a me-too Chrome-alike they get support for Google’s half baked ideas for free, to prevent the ever-fickle user base from switching browser because their browser doesn’t support the latest half-written web standards draft.

Now it seems to me that 0.5 billion is the “cost of not technically being a monopoly” when they are indeed a monopoly, and it’s a net win if they’re pulling say 10 billion synergistic monopolistic profit from not being broken up into baby googles as a monopoly trust buster case.

I would say this is capitalism in a pure form, the kind the communists rail against, the kind where a monopoly crushes out all the benefits to the people, government corruption, etc. True “for the people” style capitalism would mean two browsers truly competing, ideally more than two (duopolies are monopolies by another name and poison our society broadly). One browser as part of an american zaibatsu, with the zaibatsu punting a little money to save face and claim competition exists – by propping up the competition financially – is absolutely a disgusting thing. To say “oh no, the thing they’re propping up will no longer be propped up” is also disgusting and capitalistically twisted.

To repeat the question from above, where is the downside?

Microsoft only abandoned EdgeHTML and adopted Blink because Google owned sites like YouTube were deliberately breaking in Edge.

At this stage I don’t imagine they’d go back (to EdgeHTML as their engine) specifically, but it’s not hard to imagine a world where MSFT maintains its own fork of Blink for use in Edge, Opera potentially the same.

As for Firefox: they get money for being the default search engine – if Google is broken up, the search engine company that emerges will have even more reason to want to be the default search engine on as many browsers as possible (and thus incentive to pay money to other browsers).

> So if Google dies then we’ll have more diverse browser and mobile ecosystem

Initially, this won’t be true. A lot of the browser ecosystem relies on Google right now. Eventually it would be replaced. I just don’t think that it would be immediately true.

Google ads would be fine on its own. They’d continue to dominate.

Google Analytics would probably have a problem. The big thing going for it is that it’s free. Without being able to funnel their data hoovering into the rest of the ecosystem they’d probably lose that. If they _did_ have to charge, would they release a simpler tier that isn’t so mind-bogglingly complex? That’d be nice.

Docs? Yeah, I don’t see a way forward with that unless they charge a lot. There are some competitors, but they suck, and they struggle, and google docs seems one of the major nodes of interoperability between a lot of their products. It’s be really hard to replicate that if you’re broken up.

Calendar. Hah. Well. Everybody gets to suffer given that google calendar uses its own protocols. It’s not like everybody could just switch to DAV and have close to the same functionality, at least out of the gate.

I agree with you re: Chrome and Android, but I will say that current FOSS forks of Android seem to do well. I think they have enough runway to continue making a good product. It would put phone makers into a bind, but I personally think their suffering is also a good thing. Fewer phone makers == less e-waste. Maybe people start holding onto their phones for a few years.

Honestly I couldn’t care less about Chrome, except that I hope it does die. But Microsoft could take over the engine and use its hegemony to continue funneling money into developing it.

Firefox would be in a tough spot. They’d have to find another sponsor. I know they’ve been trying to diversify but I think we’d see a very different browser from them within 3 years of the breakup.

The good news is that there is no shortage of oligarchs to help pick up the pieces. Which is good because I bet Alphabet is going to start whinging about “massive layoffs” soon.

My initial search produces a lot of speculative numbers, but nothing verifiable. Admittedly, this is a realm I have little experience with, so perhaps I am looking for the wrong terms. It was also my understanding that the books of large companies like this are typically closed unless demanded by legal entities.

Chrome maybe but for Android, it’s debatable at best to state it as OSS. AOSP doesn’t run on a single phone on earth, not even the emulator and the freedom of users to modify it is very limited in practice.

I’d put it as “mostly source available” instead of open source.

No, that is incidental. What is the first and principal thing it does, what needs does it serve by making open source browsers and operating systems?

Control. Google maintains appreciable control over mobile devices and the web by making their own mobile operating system and browser. In cases such as these, it is only a matter of time before they tightening the screws. They already have.

> we will be left with an even more profitable ad giant, that sends back all profits to it’s share holders

But not one that can kill ad blockers or ram remote attestation down people’s throats.

GTM and GA probably live with Display Ads

Chrome and Android probably live with Search

Who knows where ChromeOS, and all the hardware devices go

Innovation requires reliable funding, such as monopoly profits or government funding. Monopoly leads to undemocratic concentrations of power and various private taxes on the public (e.g. in the case of Google, your personal information). Bell Labs was funded by monopoly funding with a law directing a certain amount to research.

Competition improves the balance of power, but destroys the ability to innovate except on relatively easy to engineer variations of existing tech within a 1-5 year window projects. The recipients of monopolist largess (such as OSS) whither on the vine as competition drives profits to zero over time (which then causes consolidation and monopoly formations…).

The answer I prefer of course is to create the efficiencies and innovative capacity of large scale industry but control them democratically. Nationalize Google.

People eventually recognise a good idea, you don’t need a well funded research group to have one. You need an environment where it’s plausible for the new thing to work and be profitable.

Breaking up a giant like google seems that it would make it easier to promote an new idea, as it has less risk of being crushed by the interests of a tangentially related company.

Telecoms in Australia is probably the best modern example I can think of, the nbn was given a monopoly and now delivers an expensive inferior product, and there is no real way to compete or innovate around it.

It doesn’t exactly take them out of the market, it just creates a enterprise with legal protections and non market motivations for what it actually does.

Nationalizing anything is an absolute disaster for innovation. What innovations did Aeroflot develop?

The free market and a thriving entrepreneur ecosystem creates innovation. The profit motive is a powerful one. Taking risks to invent the next big thing is what drives entrepreneurship in the first place. Governments are corrupt, inefficient, and don’t get punished by the markets when they fail.

This idea that governments are democratic is a myth. I didn’t vote for tethered bottle caps in the EU. I didn’t vote to send money to fund wars. In the U.S., one can vote, but the policies that actually happen are the result of what lobbyists spent the most money buying the relevant congressmen.

The answer to this is smaller government. The most democratic thing there is is the free market. Everyone can vote or not vote with their money. And the results are seen nearly immediately and companies have to respond.

If we could choose to pay taxes on a line-item basis, that would be the most democratic thing ever. Because a rep that you voted for on one issue and is wrong on another issue gets his “wrong” initiative defunded and his “right” initiative funded. We should bring free market principles to government not government principles to the free market.

No one can predict the future. HN commenters love to try, every day. For example, speculating about a “breakup”.

If neither side changes their position, Google will be fighting the US government for many years to come. That we can say with reasonable certainty. Regardless of the remedy sought.

As a shareholder I do not want the company to be fighting the US government for years to come. It’s not good for business.

But Google fans no doubt read the news and spin it to be positive. No matter what, in their minds only Google can win. Self-delusion.

Meanwhile, the legal process will continue. More money for the lawyers.

After Bill Gates rode on a golf cart with Bill Clinton, he realized the need to pay the expected tribute to the politicians.

Of course, I wish things did not work this way. But isn’t it a bit naive to think it doesn’t?

Source? (They settled with Multiven.)

> isn’t it a bit naive to think it doesn’t

No, it’s naïve to think that level of influence can be bought. Not an uncommon mistake. Bankman-Fried made it, and it’s increasingly looking like Bytedance did too. But D.C. is a town obsessed with power over money. People regularly toss aside lobbyists and their clients if it’s politically expedient. In part because it’s not like the lobbyists (or their clients) ditch them after being spurned.

Corruption on the highest levels is very similar. Not everyone is on the buyers club.

This is unfalsifiable. To the extent electeds can be bought or lobbied, it’s on the fringes–they didn’t know about crypto and now they do and have a mildly favourable view towards it instead of not giving a shit. Certainly not around something involving the DoJ.

The naïve view is electeds in America can be bought and sold like a Patek Philippe. You can just buy one of those, for the simple reason that there exists a secondary market. Power, on the other hand, is perishable. Go back to Bankman-Fried’s downfall and note how many people thought he had banked favours with his cash. (I sometimes think he thought he bought favours with his cash.) That isn’t how D.C. works. It isn’t how power centre works. Power is personal and perishable, and that makes it unique in comparison with the things we usually trade money for.

Ferrari still curates their customers. If you buy a Ferrari and paint it pink, you get on their “nope” list. You also cannot buy a new Ferrari today unless you have a previous relationship with them, or are very very rich.

BTW, if you’re not dressed properly, some high end stores have a security guard who won’t let you in. This can get tricky these days, as many wealthy people dress like slobs.

I once wandered into Cartier’s in NYC, dressed in my trademark slob clothes. The security guard tailed me about a foot behind me, obviously trying to intimidate me into leaving. I just kept me hands in me pocketses, took a look around, then left.

An article I read around 2000 about why the DoJ didn’t go after Cisco, despite Cisco having a monopolistic position at the time.

Sorry I don’t have a photographic memory.

> it’s naïve to think that level of influence can be bought.

Not at all. Where do you think the money for the Clinton Foundation came from, for example?

The only thing the government will be interested in is the spying which they aren’t allowed to do, but unaccountable corporations are allowed to do. As people become more aware of this it means google becomes less and less useful.

When companies buy ads with Google they’re quite literally bidding for microtargeted user intent data.

No, you can’t buy user data on 1 specific person (then again, there’s many examples of people buying ads on a persons name to catch them googling themselves), but you can buy user data on small groups of people.

Demographics: Target users based on age, gender, parental status, household income, and more

Interests: Target people based on their interests, even if they’re visiting pages about other topics

In-market audiences: Target users who are actively looking for products or services similar to yours

Custom intent audiences: Create and target audiences based on their search behavior and interests

Remarketing lists: Reconnect with users who have previously interacted with your website or app

Customer match: Use your first-party data to reach and re-engage with your customers

Similar segments: Expand the reach of your best-performing audiences by targeting new users with similar characteristics

Affinity audiences: Reach people based on a holistic picture of their lifestyles, passions, and habits

Life events segments: Target users

– I sell red bowling shoes

– I pay Google for access to anyone searching for ‘red bowling shoes’

– Once they land on my site I know who came via the Google ad (via the URL params)

– A certain percentage converts, and I get their personal info and payment info

I personally don’t think there’s anything wrong with that chain of events! It’s a win-win for both buyer and seller.

However, to argue that no data was sold is disingenuous at best. Google is the monopoly broker of the intent data on every buyer in the world.

Why should I let Google profit off of my thoughts/interests? Why shouldn’t I be making the money that the bowling shoe manufacturer paid to access my thoughts/interests?

When a TV station sells ad time to a company, and then someone sees the ad, comes into the store, and says “hey, I saw your TV ad while watching Law & Order”, we don’t say that the TV station has sold data to the merchant.

You pay to show your website to people searching for red bowling shoes.

> However, to argue that no data was sold is disingenuous at best.

No user data has been sold.

The entire topic is dancing around the question of what corruption looks like in jurisdictions where you can’t just buy the government, and the answer is, mostly, regulatory capture.

More on topic: It was a neat idea, but given how consistently every single walled garden has ended up hindering progress and exploiting users in the long term, I’d rather go back to that 90’s geocities era where users had to be mindful of their content instead of letting an algorithm scroll for them showing what maximizes engagement. The experiment has failed with aplomb.

Break up Google, break up Microsoft (again, kind of), open up Apple, shake down Steam. Make this new money show why old money was historically regulated into being a proper public service instead of a winner take all conglomerate.

So I don’t want Google to be broken up and lose business only for MS, Apple, Amazon and Facebook to gobble up its business

And for the people who think nationalizing businesses leads to socialist/communist hell, at the very least, if you’ve decided that a business is critical to national security, it should be funded at least in part by the government (with the government having a real, if not controlling, stake in it), and heavily, heavily regulated.

Google is an ad business. It sells human eyes and ears to businesses. They own a massive chunk of the ad business and everything they make benefits ads. People who are buying ads (businesses) might benefit with more competition, because as it stands, we have dumb stuff like lawyers in Missouri buying ads and people in Bangladesh clicking them. Google gains money even though that ad was completely ineffective to the customer.

Plus google’s goal is to funnel everything into ads. Search sucks ass. It’s all astroturfed or straight up fake content these days. Users are getting scammed clicking on these links. Small businesses are getting strangled out because they can’t pay protection fees that the megacorps that aren’t flooded out by AI generated and SEO-optimized slop can. We all suffer because of that.

Google has a stranglehold on email. Try sending a non-gmail message to a gmail account as a normie and you’re probably going straight to the spam bucket. How much has it costed people who had their messages lost because they won’t hand all their data over to Google?

Technically, competition “exists”, but it’s strangled out to the point of basically not existing. Other companies can offer all these services if they grow big. The problem is there’s no other company that can compete with google in the US. And whenever a new company comes along that can shake up the game, Google/Apple/Microsoft buy them out and shut them down, unless they’re part of the club already (e.g. OpenAI)

I contend the even more disturbing mirror is the trust/monopoly/cartel structure of virtually all industries and markets in the United States.

The ultra rich are a symptom, not necessarily the cause: we need a massive breakup of practically every sector in the United States, and it’s not just for what the parent of this comment says about wealth creation: increased employment, more job mobility, more innovation, overall competitive advantage in the world, more resilience to global supply chain disruption, and innumerable other national security and economic concerns.

Monopolies are really bad for freedom. As we see with the closed no-appeal ban systems of internet companies and utter lack of customer service, your very day to day freedom can sharply be curtailed at a whim by the centralized power of monopolies.

Sorry for the snark, but no one anywhere needs advertising. Advertising in it’s current form is a plague on humanity.

But there have been businesses based on lead pipes for drinking water plumbing, asbestos for residential insulation, and so on. You could make an argument that these technologies enabled many businesses as well. That doesn’t mean we should allow lead pipes for drinking water or to use asbestos in residential homes.

An alternative effect could be that online ads are an avenue for better resourced established companies to out compete and stifle upstarts. Startups are always pressed for resources and running an effective online ad campaign can take significant resources.

You’re surely right that some small businesses have benefited from the online ad market, but I suspect that on average larger companies have benefited to a greater degree.

(0)https://www.uschamber.com/small-business/small-business-data…

And it still doesn’t justify Google.

Put yourself in the mind of someone making a THING, how do you plan to reach your possible customers for THING?

THING is the best in class, better than the competition but how would you make the world aware of THING existing?

trade shows, trade magazines, word of mouth, window-dressing in the THING-quarter, …

why are personalized ads on a website indispensable?

They aren’t. This is exactly what I mean by modern advertising.

If ads were just contextual based on the content of the page, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

Plumbing is good and useful. Plumbing using lead pipes is harmful.

Advertising can be good and useful. Modern advertising that requires tracking everything a user does is harmful.

That X enables many businesses to exist doesn’t mean that X is a good thing on balance, because X itself can have harmful effects that outweigh the benefits.

This is of course true, and I can look past the inelegant phrasing.

But to make this a credible argument you need to argue for why the costs of advertising outweigh the benefits.

They’re looking for depth where there isn’t any. You’re attempting to prove advertising is bad by claiming it’s like lead pipes, on the basis of them both being bad. It’s tautology. One could similarly “prove” ad blockers or puppies by this analogy to be whatever because they, too, can be good or bad.

Google ads was (and is) incredibly good for niche companies, since it makes it possible to advertise to people who are interested in your product instead of the general public.

So if you sell Warhammer paraphernalia, you can buy ads to be shown only to people who have searched for Warhammer related words, rather than “everyone in Wisconsin”.

This lowers ad costs by many orders of magnitude, and makes a lot of businesses possible that simply couldn’t exist before.

I’d want some damn good reasons to go back to the old ways!

Tracking people and shoving your wares in their faces is not the only way to reach interested parties. You could go to a Warhammer convention, join a Warhammer forum and offer to send members samples, or just post images of your stuff in a sharing thread, whatever. Engage with people while they’re searching for the thing you’re offering.

Of course, word of mouth requires you to actually make a good product whereas with advertisment it’s enough if your product looks good.

IME this is only true about drop shippers and similar business models. The vast majority of small businesses are, as a rule, awful at advertising. The few ads I see they are very poorly put together.

Even when they manage to get people to the business, small businesses are almost inevitably awful about maintaining their web presence, which makes it moot. Here’s an example thread about such from the local reddit. Including some hostile responses from, charitably, overwhelmed small businesses about how you need to call to confirm a price https://old.reddit.com/r/Calgary/comments/1ewlsib/open_lette…)

I’m assuming most of the places that redditor contacted to buy UPS batteries from are B2B shops that aren’t geared to selling to people off the street.

I’m assuming this because sometimes I buy replacement UPS battery strings, and I pay with a purchase order after talking to or emailing an inside sales person, not with a credit card at a register.

Places like this don’t even need to advertise, the professionals they’re selling to know where to find what they need.

I think a lot of these businesses could succeed using alternative promotional strategies. Some of them might suffer because the owners have more money than time and advertising is a good tradeoff in that case, but overall good products are still going to do well.

Advertisements can be good (when the business is good and genuinely wants you to know about good new product), and they can be bad (when the business if bad / misleading / scammy). An optimist would say there are more good than bad. I suppose you wouldn’t consider yourself an optimist.

No, they’re an amazing benefit to your business. I’m sure your candles are great, but society doesn’t need them (your candles, specifically) to survive. People would continue to find candles without your advertisements. Maybe candles that aren’t as nice as yours, but people will get by just fine, and wouldn’t know (or care) what they were missing.

> Advertisements can be good (when the business is good and genuinely wants you to know about good new product)

Advertising is emotional manipulation. Why do I need to know about good products, even genuinely good ones? If I have an actual, articulated need for something, I can go out and look for it. But if I’m not actually looking for something, but someone advertises to me and convinces me to buy their thing, likely I would have gotten along just fine without it.

> An optimist would say there are more good than bad. I suppose you wouldn’t consider yourself an optimist.

False dichotomy. Whether there are more good companies that honestly try to hawk their wares, or more bad companies that try to trick people into buying their garbage, is irrelevant. Advertising is a blight on society.

The thing that really makes my stomach churn, though, is that if I ran a company, I’d absolutely advertise. It’s the prisoner’s dilemma. Because advertising exists and others will use it, I can’t opt out of using it myself. I feel super gross about this fact.

With regard to modern advertising, you are absolutely correct!

That said, I fully understand and agree with the usefulness of advertising. What I’m against is the modern state of advertising. If all ads were simply contextual based on the content being shown and not the user, I don’t think many of us would have problems with the ads industry.

If I were browsing a mountain biking forum, I’d see ads for mountain bikes and other related services. They would be MORE relevant, rather than the current ads I get for the product I bought 2 months ago.

>or through a UI element on the website that lets the visitor choose the language.

This is nonsensical too. People don’t just speak only one language. If I’m going into an English website and you’re giving me a language pop up I’m going to pick English. But ads that are in English are not relevant to me whatsoever.

Also, I would like to note that language redirects are, in my experience, absolute trash. It makes using sites like Adobe awful.

Even the language settings in windows lead to a bad user experience. I have to keep English as my first keyboard language and locale to make sure that websites don’t default to other languages for me.

I have zero faith that they would get this right.

What people don’t like is the current advertising business, which is intrusive, a blackhole of privacy concerns, rarely useful, and full of abusive companies (clickbait sites, for instance) that exist on the back of scummy behavior that hurts the advertiser (costing them money) and annoys/infuriates the consumer.

They don’t like having an ad-free 7usd Netflix/Amazon/etc account that is now 12usd with ads, or 22usd without ads and the same privileges.

I utterly despise how so much of the Internet has been gentrified and sanitized to appeal to advertisers at the expense of communities and culture.

BTW, back in the olden days, magazines were sold, but the bulk of the magazine revenue came from advertising.

Without advertising, the magazines would have cost the consumer quite a bit more.

And, as someone who paid for ad placement in computer magazines, the sales directly corresponded to the advertising.

Why do you think Google provides you with free searches? It isn’t because they are altruistic. It’s because companies pay to advertise on it. If everybody installed an ad blocker like you, you’d find yourself having to pay for search.

> *Advertising in it’s current form* is a plague on humanity.

Magazine ads were not highly targeted towards every user that bought one. We liked magazine ads, they were high quality and usually contextually relevant.

Modern advertising is nothing like magazine ads. We don’t take screenshots of ads on webpages, print them out, and hang them on our walls like we did with magazine ads.

> Why do you think Google provides you with free searches?

To deliver ads. The same reason Google does everything else.

Who pays for it? Not my problem. I’ll use whatever free service exists, there will always be one.

Without a search engine? The internet would fail and targeted ads would cease to exist.

No, Marketing. Advertising is only one form and the most antisocial one. There is a huge difference between making it possible for people interested in your product to find you versus going out of your way to shove your product in front of the eyes of people who are doing something at best tangentially related.

GDP? Have people forgotten that a vibrant ‘Free Market’ requires breaking up monopolies?

When did supporting a ‘Free Market’ turn into, “don’t touch our giant corps”.

The Baby Bells started their re-merge back in the 90s. In 2000, when Verizon was formed, it was a combination of Bell Atlantic (New Jersey Bell + Bell Company of PA + Diamond State + C&P), NYNEX, and GTE. (I watched this all in real-time, as my father worked for Ma Bell -> New Jersey Bell -> Verizon for more or less his entire adult life.) I’m sure similar things happened in the rest of the country with other Baby Bells, though I don’t know the history very well.

The break up occurred in the 80’s. and since then through mergers/acquisitions, they have re-joined.

So we have monopolies again.

Somehow we have lost the will-power in government to impose the needed actions to ensure a free market. Like also denying mergers that would create monopolies.

Like how was Ticketmaster even allowed to happen. We let it buy its competitors and now it is a monopoly.

You would rather ruin everyone else than have a functional economy? That says a lot about you.

This isn’t because the US broke up their chip monopolies, though. This is because chip companies believed they could save money by shipping their expertise overseas and building things there instead. And they were right. They only had to put the US’s economic future in jeopardy to do it.

I think there’s two big things wrong with this. For one China is actually breaking up its tech companies or even culling entire sectors, like education tech, as they do in AI, this kind of argument is basically just American oligopolists inventing a red scare to stave off regulation.

Secondly American companies have a lot of trouble abroad, in gigantic markets like the EU and increasingly India and Japan with stricter privacy regulation on the way because they’re so large. So if anything, American anti trust would send a good signal to most markets that the US is in line with global trends.

I don’t use meta for much. Google on the otherhand takes some pretty dedicated behavior to avoid.

Absolutely not discounting all of that; there are some pretty strong parallels between the data you can infer on a person based on their gmail graph versus their fb messenger graph, for example.

Meta has a lot more “self-revealed-preference” data, though. Which of $thesePosts did you engage with? Does this pattern continue if we mix in $someOtherVariable? How long did you dwell on that one post before like/dis-like? Are you more likely to come back and spend time here if we tell you that $thisPerson has commented on your post instead of $thisOtherPerson? … etc.

I think only YouTube serves as a plausible source of dwell time in the “at what part of $thisVideo did you click the like button” sense. If you don’t use YouTube or use it signed out then it’s (slightly) harder for google to attribute your actions to you. Facebook doesn’t really have _anything_ that can be accessed without logging in.

Legally speaking, Google’s not supposed to be correlating most of this data. But, as we know well, that doesn’t mean they aren’t doing it.

Scale’s great, but it often comes with a societal cost. For every efficiency made, there’s less agency and decent jobs to go round.

Seems unfair to make such decisions ad-hoc though, and string it out through years of court cases and m/billions of lawyer fees.

Why not establish rules of the market where once a company gets x% market share, the company ‘wins’, the CEO gets the ability to run for high office, the nation thanks shareholders and gives them a big payoff for supporting innovation, and those 1 run down the food chain get to spin off their own companies and go for gold.

Life and death is a part of everything sustainable in life. We should embrace these cycles and utilise them, not let old hat stagnation strangle and squeeze all what’s good from life.

Think of Bell Labs.

Google has a number of Bell Labs style projects ongoing that massively benefit scientific research. Transformers, AlphaFold, etc.

It’s hard to see how a smaller, more focused company would be able to justify that type of R&D.

That said, I do see an issue where some of the smartest people get sucked up by big tech. Instead of working on fundamental advances in image processing they end up working on beauty filters for Instagram. That can’t be right.

Typically that’s solved with R&D happening in academia or semi-public space.

How much this happens depends on the opportunities to do it in private companies, so entities like Google paying big salaries for R&D probably means we don’t see what alternatives they would be if they stopped doing so.

It was, but not any more. The crazy capital investments often come from private companies as well. And that’s not a problem. They’re spending their money rather than your money.

Ok, and from whom did their money come? They didn’t magic it into existence.

Google spending money that came from advertisers who got it from people buying their products isn’t much different than a research team spending public money, just with fewer middle men and a (generally) lower negative impact on society.

That is ignoring the many moral arguments against targeted advertising, unnecessary consumerism, etc.

Can’t you say the same thing if you go back 80 years and talk about the smartest minds in the world instead of working on energy for the masses they’re working on the atomic bomb?

What is the possible societal-positive outcome of another social media filter? Or improved ad targeting algorithm? Or more attention-grabbing social media feed?

I could have asked the same thing about a weapon of mass destruction 80 years ago. I don’t have an answer for how we can use those things in ways to better society. But I’m not convinced that there are _none_.

I don’t believe there is anyone in the general public or who is an expert in any of the aforementioned fields (which have been around for 1-3 decades) that truly believes they are net positives.

The issue is that these are near monopolies, so the market isn’t efficient.

In other words, if those companies didn’t have monopoly power, other businesses (or non-commercial entities) might be able to afford to hire some of these people as well, which might be beneficial overall for innovation.

That’s the economic argument and it’s pretty clean imo.

But as far as I’m concerned personally, I would really prefer to live in a world in which smart people work on human flourishing… rather than whatever that is.

That’s the reason why quantum computing and projects of this type would not exist if you didn’t have behemoth companies with extra cash lying around.

From an economics perspective, if there is a monopoly, there is no free market, so you can’t rely on the market for efficiency. A monopoly can be efficient, but it can also be arbitrarily inefficient and still keep its position.

A rational company would lower the price if that broadened the market and netted more profit by volume. Drugs aren’t Veblen goods.

The impetus for jacking up drug prices is that the market is captive, and those who need the drug will obtain it. That and insurance/government is often the payor.

You might think it is is inefficient to have a miracle cure for cancer tied up on patent for 20 years, but what are you comparing it to.

Is it? As consumers you may be noticing the impact now but as a developer I’ve felt the impact of Google’s “scale” for years and it has not been pleasant.

It’s bought by the gov (“payout to the shareholders”), regulations are enacted to delimit what it can and can’t do, and the whole thing is setup to make sure it’s for the benefit of the larger public, with additional consideration on how to reintroduce competition on part of its mandate.

We’ ve seen it with postal services and telecom, and if the whole thing becomes outdated it can spun out as a private entity again.

If you have a free market finding competition isn’t an issue, but maintaining profitability is. If we had a free market when Google came onto the scene, everyone else would have copied PageRank the next day, and then you’d have hundreds of search engines all as good as each other, each sharping their pencils sharper and sharper in an attempt to win customers over on a price basis until there is nothing left. At which point there is nothing left to further innovation.

To combat that, we grant short-term monopolies over technology to allow their inventors time to build up a decent business before opening the flood gates, with the intent to balance what makes mixed-market economies great without ending up with no competition. The problem is that those monopoly procedures were established when time moved slowly. Back then, 20 years was barely enough time to get your product to and recognized in the market. These days, you can get there in a few years, or even less, which leaves nearly 20 more years to focus on killing all the competition.

Ultimately, we would have been better off if Google was pushed out into a free market after a few years. We benefitted from it having some head start, but it went on much too long.

Interesting term. On a geopolitical scale, how is the US/NATO’s position any different? There are export controls around advanced semiconductors and encryption algorithms.

Is it okay to do this between countries but not within societies? (Genuine question. I really don’t know where I stand on this, for either side.)

Long distance was expensive for quite a while even after the break-up. If you called up an out-of-state friend or relative to catch up, you expected the call to cost you at least a few bucks. (And you hoped they would be the ones to call you next time.) Even into the 90’s, long distance at $0.10/minute was considered cheap. And in most rural areas, everywhere past a mile or so out of town was long distance.

I remember buying long-distance calling cards to bring our phone costs down. For about 5 years, it was cheaper to just get a local-only phone line and then buy your long-distance as phone cards. Each card came with a certain number of minutes pre-loaded. You’d dial the 1-800 number on the back, scratch off your PIN, enter it, and then you’d dial your destination number. Other than the hassle of buying and using the card, the major downside was that your own number didn’t (usually) show up on the caller ID.

They were also good if you stayed in hotels a lot, since hotels would charge upward of usurious amounts for both local and long-distance calls but they would typically allow toll-free calls to go through without charge.

– An office software suite

– Global maps and GPS, City Guides

– Video entertainment

– Mobile and Desktop OS

– Web Browsers

Also, pay no mind to their competitors in all of those markets AND in their core business of search, being feeble multi-trillion and multi-billion global corporations

“But my data”
Have your ever sold your data? Would the value you could ever possibly receive for your data ever equate to the value you get from the free services?

Likely No and No.

Is the free ad supported city newspaper free? Yes it is in fact free, just like FM radio is free, and broadcast television is free, and sidewalks next to billboards are free

Someone creating something appealing and giving it away for free in order to make up for it through ads in front of eyeballs does not in any way mean that the free thing isn’t free

My data has been sold, yes. By me, no, because I don’t have the means. But by others and especially by nefarious actors, absolutely.

So indeed, it’s not free. Just because data isn’t liquid at the individual level doesn’t mean it has no value.

I would argue that the question of “Is it free?” should not be restricted to monetary payments. If I offer you dinner for an hour of yardwork – are you receiving the food for free? If I would offer you that same dinner in exchange for letting me watch you use your computer for a while, is it free?

I think ads do incur a cost on you: In usability of a service, in your attention span / desensitization and your ability to focus, in the money you would not have spent were it not for ads.

Googles services are free in the sense, that you don’t spend cold hard cash on them, but I would still argue, that you pay for them. That 2 Trillion Dollar valuation has to come from somewhere… 🙁

#2. You can pay? Also is the argument somehow that the free thing isn’t free because the ad in it makes the UX worse?

Also curious to know how many ads exactly do you get while using google workspace? drive? android? maps?

Finally: You can literally use Chrome, Workspace, Drive, Android and Maps without seeing a single ad, without an ad blocker, without EVER using google search, for free.

Those semantics aside:

– Maps has ads in the form of sponsored results all over the map.

– Android is only a decently functional platform with Play services installed, which includes ads. I don’t have an Android phone handy but I’m pretty sure there’s up-sells included in quite a few places, I just can’t name any right now.

– Chrome is a browser you cannot use for its primary purpose without seeing ads.

– Workspace is a directly paid-for product.

Google is an ad company. Essentially all of its products are supported by advertising, and it’s slightly odd to suggest they are not.

I would like private businesses to offer transactional costs. I do not want businesses leveraging diffuse costs; I’d prefer that only my governments use diffuse costs and that private businesses have limited ability to use diffuse costs. At least with government I get a vote.

And here we see the ostrich. When faced with the horrors of reality, sticks its head in the sand. It’s simpler in there.

The advertisers paying to get their ads placed in front of those eyes disagree.

And ye, since another comment questions this, data or “eye-time are similar – they can be broken down to the individual.

The advertisers pay some price expecting a certain number of people to see the ad, and even if data about people is sold in bulk (too) there is a price per individual. It’s a simple division to see the price they pay per person to view that cinema ad, or for one person’s data, even if they always purchase those in bulk.

After all, they get to the bulk price by multiplying how much they are willing to pay for one individual with the expected (or in the case of data packages known) number of individuals.

Theres a reason that you have to log into a Google account to use those services, which means agreeing to their rather large TOS.

Buying something doesnt necessarily mean you have to pay money for it. Your time and information is worth something too.

Also Chrome exists primarily to ensure their ads business remains healthy i.e. they have massively watered down privacy restrictions.

I don’t want to sell my data. I want companies to stop collecting it.

In fact, I don’t think I’ve seen anyone here wishing they could sell their data.

However the value is not nothing, and if you are a company with multiple billion users, that value of data can get pretty big pretty fast

Which is a bad thing and should stop. Right now!

Ps: it’s also not like you’re paying so little that you could say you’re getting it for…… free

Very weird.

It’s a good deal for the individual, that’s why Gmail is popular.

Trading something of low value for something of moderate value is not what “free” means…

Say the data from me or any of my peers was worth 1/100th of a cent and we give that away… that means I am trading something of minor value for something else…

Google’s search advantage could be taken away with another website that’s better. There’s no installed base or corporate lockin to contend with. Same with email. Same with maps. While Google uses data from each of these services to better target ads at you, the services are not very tied into each other, and you could easily grab one of those services away from Google if you just provided a better standalone service.

To me, that’s not a good case for breaking up Google.

Office/GCloud does feel like the two big players but I’m sure competition would creep up here if GSuite went away (and I doubt it would, even as a standalone company).

Working for big corps these days I see that supporting Apple devices is pretty standard.

I’d say Microsoft is way less entrenched than it was 10-15 years ago technically – but they do a great job of selling Azure to enterprises. And even there AWS is a huge competitor without Google.

Hyper relevant I’d say, although the Microsoft corporate touch seems to kill every studio they buy.

> Office/GCloud does feel like the two big players but I’m sure competition would creep up here if GSuite went away (and I doubt it would, even as a standalone company).

Office is orders of magnitude bigger than GSuite. It is gigantic. Governments release documents in Word format instead of OpenOffice. It’s so big. GSuite is still a minnow in comparison.

Apple is mostly too dependent on vertical integration to truly take over a market. If they allowed their OS on other hardware or something, they could pull Google power but they are entirely built around being their own unique bubble.

If Google finally gets broken up, you’ll probably see hardware manufacturers like Samsung and LG truly start doing interesting things again.

I honestly would love it we would ditch surveillance capitalism and went back to a simpler option of paying for products and services. I think that essentially all of the complaints you here about Google (their lack of any responsiveness/customer support, their constant spying on users, the constant “Google graveyard” of discontinued products, their current corporate ossification, etc.) can be directly linked to the fact that users don’t pay for their products.

Excellent criticism too that the evil monopolist that devilishly gives away extremely useful and value-add products and services in order to expand its evil monopoly is also famously criticized by the victims of those free data-mining products for sometimes discontinuing them without giving them proper notice! Surely Google can’t just stop mistreating them without adequate prior notice!

They started doing public long distance on their own (railroad) network in the 1970s. They were restrained (and frequently sued by) AT&T. The breakup opened the floodgates. They were sold like a half dozen times in the 80s.

But, MCI was AFAIK the largest early fiber pioneer.

I did a search for books about building the internet infrastructure and it turned up some other recommendations but I haven’t read them so can’t vouch for quality or content:

Network Geeks: How They Built the Internet by Brian E Carpenter

The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim Wu

Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet by Andrew Blum

How the Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone by Brian McCullough

Maybe someone else here has read them and can comment.

You’re repeating someones posthoc thesis as obvious fact.

It’s probably a good point to share. Let’s just have a little more skepticism and openness to other analysis.

I have a lot of issues with Google as a company, but I do not envy their position when it comes to the web search. It is a cursed problem no matter how you look at it.

Look at any two sided market: Amazon/Etsy’s third party sellers also want to be at the top, and there are bad actors trying to scam the intermediary and the customer. The same low friction onboarding that allows the company to succeed as an intermediary is also facilitating the fraud. Merchants can be fraudsters, advertisers can be fraudsters, users can be fraudsters producing fake clicks. There’s economic incentives everywhere. See the relatively recent news of spotify getting generated songs, which are then played by fake listeners.

The companies are entering this situations with their eyes wide open. It’s a necessary problem when you want to be an intermediary at a large enough scale. And if you don’t have the scale, the per-interaction costs are really high, and your company gets beaten by someone with an easier onboarding funnel.

But the funding model is also extremely blessed: you have a stream of people telling you every page load what they’re interested in at that exact moment, and it’s not hard to match them up with advertisers for those keywords.

And arguably the SEO parasitism problem is worsened by their monopoly — to the extent that optimizing a site for one engine deoptimizes it on on others, the stronger the lead engine #1 has the more incentive there is to game it.

When you search for “vacuum cleaner”, you either want online stores or you may want a local store. In either case it’s a business query rather than looking for reviews or specs.

What’s really polluting search, including Google, is the on-demand content generation based on your query. It’s a sea of flotsam.

How many millions do you need to spend to decrease your own spending on AI for every query?

Arguably this is not their fault – I really wish iOS/MacOS Safari let you set a custom search engine instead of picking from a fixed list.

The links points however are a bit ridiculous, they’re entitled to their opinion but may be surprised to find people, at the businesses they use, have opinions that differ to theirs, and these businesses aren’t always well-oiled machines.

For a consumer facing business with no lock in, the tax thing makes absolutely no difference in your life using the product.

If it was really a concern you’d simply no longer have access and change search engine, until then it doesn’t matter. You’d be surprised what tax issues even large billion dollar companies have.

“Are they actually planting these trees?” and “How would I possibly verify?”

“Does Microsoft actually pay them? All I’m doing is clicking? Is that worth enough?”

“How does anybody verify, and how is it not just an optimization for Ecosia to farm clicks for money? Chinese/Indian/Bangladeshi/Nigerian/MechTurk click farms don’t cost that much. Seen the prices on MechTurk?”

(1) https://www.ecosia.org/

The only earn money if people click ads, just like any other search engine. Microsoft isn’t paying them to show them Bing results.

After reading the founders thoughts, if they were any sort of sizable company they would immediately have a GDPR violation. “emails and any info you give to use voluntarily (search prefs) is not PII and as such you can’t have your data back.” :0

For example, if you are discussing manufacturing issues in China, talking about how good drop-shippers on Amazon are is irrelevant.

A general one: Whenever I search for something that was relevant in the past, but the keywords are now hijacked by some current events. Note that setting an upper date limit does not help: My problem is the content itself, not when the content was created. Somebody could still create content today about a historic event.

A concrete example that you guys can try for yourself is that I tried to find a certain Greek fable, because it became important to me because I deeply understood yet another layer of it only recently, decades after hearing the story and the usual interpretations:

Three philosophers discussing… stuff got tired and took a nap under a tree. Some mischievous boy put a black paint mark on their head while they slept. When they woke up, they all only saw the black mark on the other philosophers’ heads and laughed at each other. It took a while for one of them to realize that he too must have such a mark.

I tried many questions and keywords and many search engines. The only one that found the fable was – ChatGPT!. All the search eng8ines only showed completely irrelevant stuff. I even tried avoiding the word “philosophers” because there are three well-known ancient Greek philosophers and plenty of results with that exact wording for those guys.

For example, if Alice is very interested in Sports News, coding, and movie reviews, they might get great results.

And then Bob runs searches on cooking recipes, interior design, and music, and gets terrible results.

Most likely you care about something that the other person doesn’t, biasing your search results greatly.

I switched to DuckDuckGO about 1.5/2 years back, and it was awesome at the time. But it has gradually gotten worse to the point where I @google search pretty much 70% of the time. Now that could be me being in a bit in the honeymoon phase with DDG at the time and it wore off, or maybe it’s actually been getting worse.

My pet, unproven, theory. Is that DDG has been “improving” but that’s been making the search worse somehow. Perhaps the context and “fanciness” of a search is not something we all value and that’s what we’re experiencing.

I think alternative search engines would have better chances if they provided alternative interfaces to refine search queries instead of trying to compete with Google/Bing.

So yeah, I find DDG perfectly adequate.

This is a common tactic of tech giants, and the direct consequence of it is… what we have today.

Edit: Per Wiki, Google has also bought and killed the following search engines/services that nobody has heard of: Outride, Kaltix, Plink, Like.com, Orion, Metaweb, Awkan Technologies.

Hard disagree. Google almost delights in not showing what you want. For political stuff it’s very biased. If you search for something more obscure, Google really likes to “correct” your search and eliminate terms.

Although Google is better in my maternal language and for images (but AI is ruining image search for everyone).

Even when you do get the results your after, and get sent to the page you want, the goal of that page is to serve you adverts, not to give you the content you want.

> I get why 90% of people use google. I’m no google fan, but it still baffles me how bad the alternatives still are.

> Finally, the filing said Google’s dominance over search text ads needed to be addressed by lowering barriers to would-be rivals or licensing its ad feed to others, independently from search results.

What Google has is a monopoly on search (which is bad), but I don’t think having a monopoly for advertising on your own property is a bad thing. If anything, from a privacy perspective, I’d rather that only one party (the publisher, in this case Google) gets to see my searches, rather than the publisher and an ecosystem of low-scrupules ad platforms.

For sure I might be biased as I used to work on Google Ads, but I also know quite a bit about how the sausage is made and how the industry is. That being said, I really don’t see how “licensing the ad feed” would do any good for end users.

Where one might run afoul is using your monopoly in one market — search, in Google’s case — to gain an advantage in another market — advertising. It’s kinda interesting because they clearly don’t treat “search” as a market given they don’t sell it to anyone but it also clearly has value, otherwise people wouldn’t use it.

Now I wonder if it is without precedent that the supposedly-monopolistic thing they’re using as a carrot for their advantage in a different market doesn’t actually generate revenue itself; not sure if that context has ever been tried in court.

There is another ongoing case regarding Google’s Ad business (concerning Display Ads and more specifically the ad auctions) which seems pretty strong. But again, it’s not about preventing Google from owning the ad platform for their own properties.

Preventing companies from owning the advertising platform for their own properties is a pretty terrible idea (got an idea for a new ad format that no network supports? Tough luck!). But, preventing a player with a monopoly in one sector from having an ad platform for other players, that’s sensible.

They sell access to their search API, even to competitors.

I’m worried that what’s actually going to happen is Google getting broken up and M$ just swooping in to feast on the carcass, leaving us in an even shittier position. Out of all the evils coming from the FAANG world, M$ and Meta are by far the worst IMO, so not breaking them up alongside google is just idiocy

Netflix waited until they had sufficiently killed off cable TV, then went back to creating the same problem it fixed. No ads in ChatGPT today, but soon as it (or a competitor) gains meaningful marketshare, there will be ads.

Not necessarily true. Physical billboards are ads but (mostly) without privacy concerns, until they start putting cameras on them watching who walks by and looks.

After I make my decision and buy one (online, or in person), I no longer search for “vacuum cleaner reviews”, but I search instead for “skiing in January” and I no longer get adverts for vacuum cleaners, I get it for ski resorts.

Odd take IMO that Google’s ever encroaching ads make their product better. Heck, Larry and Sergei even wrote a treatise (it used to be available directly off google.com, can’t remember the name) about how they would be different from search engines at the time, how they wouldn’t sell search position, and how the ads model was fundamentally at odds with end user experience. That’s hilarious now as Google has gone to great lengths to make ads as indistinguishable as possible from normal search results, and for some terms my entire front page is ads. Compare that to “early” Google where ads were clearly identified in top and right sections with a yellow banner.

Hey! You just bought a filter for your air purifier! Want to buy a new one! For a different purifier you don’t own!

No, talk to me in six months.

What does that even look like, practically speaking? Is sponsored segment an ad? Is wearing branded apparel an ad? Is doing a press junket for a new movie an ad?

Most newspapers require payment but have no ad free option either.

I’m not convinced.

Not running ads is what you do when you care about user experience. If you start running ads it’s because you care more about money than user experience.

As long as there is robust competition the consumer’s preferences will be favored, because success comes at their discretion.

So I think it’s more like “wherever the consumer isn’t the customer there will be ads”.

Company B has ads. Company B makes more money and can therefore provide more features / more content. Company B ends up providing more of what users want.

This is the short story of what happened in the local telecom deregulation, which I’m pretty sure will happen if you were to break up Google. Consider this took place over the course of 20+ years, but I see the same things happening.

After the Ma Bells breakup, there was a huge push to deregulate the regional carriers to increase local market competition. This was put in place in the late 90’s here in Minnesota. Suddenly anybody could start a local telecom, lease lines from Qwest Communications (now CenturyLink), resell them and then compete with them in the local market.

This spawned hundreds of companies that were living on razor thin margins. Many were able to exist up to the 2000 initial dot com bust. Many went out of business during the recession. Those who survived? Many of those merged with each other, or were bought by larger regional carriers who wanted to get into the Minneapolis market.

This is what I see happening. You break Google up into smaller companies and within a decade, they will have all merged back together in some form, under different names, or they’ll be bought by other companies seeking an advantage by using their technology. Its the same thing I saw happen in telecom. They tried to increase competition by deregulating the market and all it did was create a short-term gold rush and long-term crash.

The problem will be the same with Google. Qwest at the time owned the infrastructure and hardware. Nobody had the financial resources to build out an entirely new network to compete with them so they took the path of least resistance. Which lead to a myriad of other problems. Billing, installation, nefarious things Qwest would do to hamper competitors from switching their lines, etc.

You can break up Google, but over a few decades, we’ll look back and understand it wasn’t worth it.

I hope this is true. I’m not sure breaking up Ma Bell was a good thing long term. All they did was break them up and then all the regional bells and smaller companies just re-constituted themselves again in some other form. The deregulation created more competition, but it was short lived because of economic pressures.

For many business customers, their first dealings with local telecom companies that were competing with Qwest at the time were horrific. Business customers would lose their landline and internet service for days without any idea when it would be restored. Cutovers were problematic and a total crap shoot if they went smoothly. Qwest regularly tagged the wrong lines that needed to be cut over. The billing nightmares of moving off of Qwest to a local company were too numerous to remember. Many businesses would switch for the savings and within a few months, would switch back because it was just one thing after another these companies couldn’t get right. Suddenly paying a little more for the peace of mind far outweighed any savings they were getting.

I suspect Google customers will have the same experience so I’m still on the fence whether it will be worth it long term. The one argument you can make is that Google isn’t simply a company that needs competition, but that’s its actually doing damage by how they manipulate their search rankings and what results they’re delivering to people – so in that regard, they absolutely need to be broken up.

It would be like if we here in Denmark started breaking up Novo Nordisk. Our economists would probably do a public lynching of any government official who suggested doing that.

However as a European I can’t help but welcoming the US shooting themselves in the foot like this. Something tells me we will see more of this as more reddit-brained American millennials get political influence.

Ever bought something you didn’t actually want? Were you persuaded to want something? What was the exact mechanism? Were you lied to? “Made to” somehow?

> net positive for the world

How exactly do you find out what is “net positive for the world”? Who assigns the the values and who does the tallying?

Even now I will go out of my way to watch adverts for things like films I might be interested in.

Need to be careful with word of mouth though, many adverts are spread by word of mouth, especially on the internet where people are paid to say “hey this new $product is great”. Those are worse that clearly marked ads.

No we don’t. I need a better mouse trap, but I already have mouse traps that work, so if you make a better one you need me to find out about it otherwise I’ll just buy the same old not so good ones out of habit thinking they work as good as any other one. There are also problems that I don’t even know I have. There are a lot of houses with terrible insulation that the owners really need some advertisement to get them to upgrade – it will pay off in just a few years.

For the avoidance of doubt, Wintel was Big Tech. The status quo now is Big Ad Tech.

The main economically positive thing for the US (and something Europeans absolutely screwed up in relative terms versus the US and increasingly China) is the early investment and adoption of Tech. Digitization as such is a great enabler.

But you don’t need Big Tech oligopolies for a vibrant digital economy.

But even more importantly, you don’t need bizarre Big Ad Tech commingled business models that build the economy’s entire tech infrastructure – many parts of it having a critical utility like role – on the back of… ads.

But there is little scope for European schadenfreude. Arguably the US antitrust gears are moving precisely because people slowly wake up to the limits on economic opportunity placed by the Big Ad Tech status quo.

In Europe we are good at words and criticizing mistakes but deeds are scarce.

Our economy is absolutely benefiting from Novo Nordisk’s size right now, but if/when their demand weakens or they’re out-competed, we’re going to end up with a lot of unemployed biotechnicians and massive roads to Kalundborg which will need to be maintained.

Personally I am skeptical that they have enough technically capable and charismatic leaders to pull this off.

You can speculate that something better would emerge from the ashes. It’s possible you’re right. But you have to admit this would be a huge gamble.

This isn’t like Bell where you can just split the company into geographically distinct regions and call it a day. Google’s services are intricately linked together and tightly integrated, and you can argue that’s a huge part of where their value lies.

I’m not entirely sure where I stand on this, but I think I’d be more in favor of laws to force interoperability and promote competition rather than a full fledged break up, at least in the short term. Or maybe a slow, carefully planned breakup where individual services get spun out one at a time over a few decades, with time to reverse course if that proves to be a bad idea.

We saw this with AT&T Bell research labs with their inventions of transistor and Unix, among others. The same thing happened with Google research with (arguably) deep learning and transformer.

Split them up at your own (US) perils, not unlike killing own Golden Goose.

When you talk to a researcher, do they strike you as someone who chases handsome amounts of money, or someone who chases ideas?

You bring up research labs. I listened to Alan Kay’s numerous talks over the years (as an example of a prominent CS researcher), not once does he mention that he joined for the money at Xerox PARC. Yes, he was paid, but the main advantage was being given free reign to conduct research with the best experts in their fields, i.e. to invent and pursue ideas.

The important part from a financial perspective, is to be able to have finances to back a research division, where you can spend billions on building a new type of technology, if need be, that may not pan out. You don’t need a monopoly to accomplish that.

You know who does chase handsome amounts of money? Day traders and everyone gambling on the stock market.

A company in an industry with very tight margins has much less money to invest in fundamental research. All the recent growth in generative AI has been driven by companies with very high margins; Google, Facebook, Amazon. If all those FANG were in tightly competitive markets and hence had low margins, they wouldn’t have had billions of dollars to spend on the GPU compute necessary to develop modern language models. Which is evidenced by the fact that no companies in more competitive sectors have produced any large language models.

It’d be way more efficient and cost effective to just set up a well-funded government labs to do that research.

It’s not about building and owning the next best thing, it’s about preventing someone else building and owning the next best thing.

“Given that production could be carried on without any organization, Coase asks, ‘Why and under what conditions should we expect firms to emerge?’ Since modern firms can only emerge when an entrepreneur of some sort begins to hire people, Coase’s analysis proceeds by considering the conditions under which it makes sense for an entrepreneur to seek hired help instead of contracting out for some particular task.
The traditional economic theory of the time suggested that, because the market is ‘efficient’ (that is, those who are best at providing each good or service most cheaply are already doing so), it should always be cheaper to contract out than to hire.

Coase noted, however, that there are a number of transaction costs to using the market; the cost of obtaining a good or service via the market is actually more than just the price of the good. Other costs, including search and information costs, bargaining costs, keeping trade secrets, and policing and enforcement costs, can all potentially add to the cost of procuring something via the market. This suggests that firms will arise when they can arrange to produce what they need internally, and somehow avoid these costs.

There is a natural limit to what can be produced internally, however. Coase notices ‘decreasing returns to the entrepreneur function’, including increasing overhead costs and increasing propensity for an overwhelmed manager to make mistakes in resource allocation. This is a countervailing cost to the use of the firm.

Coase argues that the size of a firm (as measured by how many contractual relations are ‘internal’ to the firm and how many ‘external’) is a result of finding an optimal balance between the competing tendencies of the costs outlined above. In general, making the firm larger will initially be advantageous, but the decreasing returns indicated above will eventually kick in, preventing the firm from growing indefinitely.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm

>”Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that’s easier to criticize. Assume good faith.”

Have these people even read the white papers that Google releases? They are mostly marketing pieces.

When systems and technologies are not publicly reproducible, why should scientists and (most) engineers care? I will not take Google at its word and would not recommend it to others.

AT&T copyrights led to linux, and linux, independent of unix, has been a huge boon for good, and for unixness.

the threat to unix now is all the people who by nature prefer Dave Cutlerness, and can’t see that their way is the wrong way, now they are using linux (because it won) and trying to ruin it.

Novell bought UNIX and has some grand plans for “SuperNOS”, which also never shipped. It certainly wasn’t anything like K8s.

You’re not wrong, but it didn’t last. Google jumped the shark in its first decade. I remember giving an internal presentation in 2010 or 2012 about how little of the screen real estate in a Google search result was actually search results.

Also I believe that even when working optimally the Darwinian mechanism can’t solve certain problems. Some things need to be dealt with by a group of motivated people working for other goals than profit.

Markets gave us compuserve and facebook while CERN gave us the open web, for example.

– Providing a free alternative to Microsoft’s monopolized office suite and desktop OS

– Provide a free alternative to Apple’s mobile OS, spurring a revolution in access to the internet for the world’s poor

– Provide free global maps with streetview sights

– Provide a free to access video platform with invaluable educational resources that allows millions of creators to make a living and that likely wouldn’t exist save for Google’s monumental investments and ability to sustain years of losses

– Research given away for free that ignited the current AI revolution

– Research given away for free that is revolutionizing medicine and drug development

In sum, truly a horrible thing they’ve done

Like for example having youtube be free until they’re the only game in town then start charging 14 dollars monthly to avoid 30% ads. Or targeting ads to gmail users so you can artificially provide a cheaper mail service than anyone else.

There’s an actual law saying you can’t do stuff like that.

Companies getting too big are natural; Letting them get too big is what happens when your state borrows a trillion per semester: Your state is obese, intervening in every little sector of the economy (thus the opposite of liberal), and not playing its regalian role.

You should indeed reduce the size of both the state and the largest companies, to let the economy self-regulate, but then, how would the US govern the rest of the world?

– AlphaFold (just won a Nobel prize)

– Transformers (the “T” in GPT)

– Waymo (autonomous vehicles)

– Sycamore (quantum computing)

These are just a few off the top of my head.

If your idea of innovation is a better RSS reader, then sure, I agree with you. But in terms of things that push the forefront of technology, I have a hard time thinking of another company with greater impact in recent years.

I just given you the deep learning and transformer benefits.

There’s a reason why the darling of AI Renaissance namely transformer was not invented at MIT, Stanford or Berkeley.

MapReduce would be invented anyway (I implemented it from scratch before learning of it’s existence).

Chrome is just a slightly upgraded Firefox (and novadays Safari is just as good if not better with ai)

PageRank was what gave Google monopoly, it’s not a result of monopoly.

Go – I can give you that. ProtoBuf – not my field, but isn’t it just a format that someone else would develop to fill a niche? (unlike say mp3 that had new compression algorithms baked in)

Maps – I can give you that. Some people might argue that it was an acquisition, but without Google’s muscle, Street View would not be feasible.

Wat. It’s like saying that an apple is a slightly upgraded orange. I would understand if you mentioned KHTML and Safari as relatives, but “slightly upgraded” does not fit anyway.

> PageRank was what gave Google monopoly

I don’t think so. PageRank has been successfully implemented elsewhere, and outmatched. What helped Google build a monopoly was the first mover advantage, the network effects, and the incessant streams of money from AdWords (invented by Google), DoubleClick (acquired) and a bunch of other advertisement tools.

> Maps – I can give you that.

Don’t 🙂 Google Maps is an acquisition from 20 years ago. (As is Android, AdSense, and many other core flagship products of the Google brand.)

If you want a relatively recent, successful Google service for general public, it’s Google Photos.

This is comical. When Google acquired Android, it was nothing more than a 3000 line JavaScript demo. The Android OS was created entirely at Google.

Not sure about your experience, but I used to subscribe to a lot of mailing lists just so that I can search for mailing list content using gmail, because the search function implemented by those mailing lists were generally worse.

Typical HN comment writing off significant thoughtfulness as “not an innovation” lol

Competition is a prerequisite for healthy Capitalism. Lack of competition is the Achilles heel.

Is it the free maps? free mobile OS? free email? free cloud storage? free video service? free office suite? free desktop OS? free AI chat?

I.e, the first company to reach x% browser market share will receive $x million (billion?) in prize money

or, the first company to build an LLM-based search engine with x% market share will receive $n million

Or structure as a direct investment or heavy tax breaks.

Always better to incentivize competition versus punish success.

Or even better, if government wants to break up “ACME corp” then just tell the employees that, if you leave “ACME corp” and start your own company competing with ACME corp, we will waive taxes on all income for your first five profitable years.

An open source, public benefit search engine would be a really valuable thing to have, which no private company does or ever will find it viable to provide. And I don’t even want it to be the only search engine. Commercial search engines will probably still have the edge in various ways, for various use cases. But why not have a public option as one point in the landscape?

If someone is going to “organise the world’s information” I’d prefer it to be a democratically controlled government, not an unaccountable for-profit corporation. I know that’s an ideological position that many here won’t share.

The entire antitrust concept is concerning honestly.

This seems like the opposite of what the government should be doing to incentivize competition and innovation.

Like all dominant companies, Google will eventually fall via strangulation by its internal bureaucracy. There’s no reason to hand the market over to another country.

> Microsoft in the year ended June 2016 had $20.1 billion in foreign income and a domestic loss of $300 million. Microsoft’s income tax expense was $3.3 billion, for an effective rate of 16.5%. Alphabet, the parent company of Google, posted a $4.7 billion tax expense, or 19%. Such “avoision” will continue as long as foreign income is subject to lower rates than domestic.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2017/04/18/wh…

> There’s no reason to hand the market over to another country.

Who’s to say that the other country’s Google-killer won’t prove to be a greater boon to American consumers? Let the global market decide.

Sorry guys, but because Google made itself into a monopoly you can no longer sell default positions on your platform (Which is essentially a company buying an ad placement).

I’m really curious what the Judge decides the remedy is for this issue. Anyone have any possible remedies in mind that doesn’t completely tank some of these other guys revenues?

These trillion dollar companies were often able to invest into big money-losing moonshot projects that benefited consumers massively – in Google’s case, GMail and Google Maps – which were truly unimaginable at the time even though they’re taken for granted today, so there’s clearly some benefit in the form of innovation. Who else can afford to build things like that?

The questions to ask are, can startups and venture capital take on the role of innovating that these big corps have done? I’m doubtful, since there’s been no startup in the past ten years that put out anything nearly as genuinely innovative and helpful as Google Maps was for me, mainly because the risk/profit ratio is so bad without the network effects that these big companies have.

Do the benefits outweigh the costs? Ten years ago, when the big companies were innovating so much to the benefit of consumers, I’d answer unequivocally yes. Now it’s much less clear.

And finally, is there any way to rein in the negative effects of these big companies while bringing out the positive effects to the benefit of consumers?

Maps was created because it allowed google to be more competitive, not because they were already on top of their game and could just pour billions into any product.

They did this when they were much smaller. I haven’t seen anything impressive from the huge tech companies in the last years, be it MS, Google or Apple. All the the cool stuff was done years ago when they were much smaller. Their main achievements is to buy up or just crush potential competition before they become competitive.

Basically, a company would pay a very progressive tax on its revenue (not profit) which reaches 100% at some high threshold value. This tax would be flat zero for the vast majority of enterprises, but would approach 100% as the company’s revenue approaches something that is big enough to be relevant on a countrywide GDP scale. Since it would be applied to individual companies only, splitting a company up wod reduce the tax or more even eliminate it entirely.

The exact point at which it makes sense for a company to split itself up the depends on the industry and other circumstances, but thst ppind exists and as society we can control in which type of scale it lies.

Just thought it was a neat proposal, although it would of course require careful legislation to avoid loopholes and edge cases. It surely ald be quite difficult to implement, given the opaque ownership structure of many companies and the companies they in turn own. But maybe the fact that this is so complicated should already give us pause…

And others they have either competed with other big tech such as Microsoft or Apple, or just is a player in the race.

Compared to say Amazon, Apple, meta or heaven forbid Microsoft that is.

I do think though if they get broken up then I’m fine with Google getting nuked and we all collectively wag the finger against the employees.

This is a bit scary. Hopefully this would not be retroactive, and only apply to searches made after the enforcement date?

“During that event, Cardiff Garcia did a fascinating interview with Paul Krugman, at the end of which Joe Wiesenthal asked a critical question. The United States, under Joe Biden, is embarking on an aggressive program of industrial policy even as it pursues increasingly vigorous antitrust enforcement. Aren’t there tensions between these goals? Responding to an antitrust investigation of NVIDIA, Dylan Matthews similarly asked, “Here you have a tremendously successful national champion in a strategically critical industry. Is that exactly what you want(?)”

(1) https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2024/09/27/industrial-polic…

Facebook: Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus

Google: DoubleClick, YouTube, Android, Waze, Deep mind

Amazon: Whole Foods, Audible, Zappos, Ring, One Medical

Arguably, I think things would be better if a bunch of these acquisitions were never allowed in the first place. But most of Apple’s acquisitions have been of the “acquihire” type where they got specific technologies to enhance their products – Beats is the only one I can think of off the top of my head that has basically remained separate.

I’m not saying acquisitions are the only benchmark for breaking up big tech, but to me it feels like the places where Apple is anti-competitive (e.g. App Store) can be remedied with much smaller changes than a full break up. With the other 3 it seems easier to identify places to “cleave”.

If they had to separate their operating systems into another company, they would have to freely compete to put their app stores on their devices.

Or even better, spin off their hardware divisions if you want.

Either way Apple shouldn’t be able to control their operating systems or their hardware unless they open up their devices and allow consumers easier ways to both repair their devices and install alternative operating systems on them.

I think it’s a much harder argument to make that Apple should get to control all application software used on a device, and furthermore that they have a right to a cut of all revenue of app software sold for a particular device.

It’s why I added they should be legally compelled by a consent decree to provide parts, schematics, and the ability to change operating systems seamlessly if they want to keep their monopoly.

What if it kills Android, and everyone has to buy an iPhone? (Yeah, I know, Android is OSS and the phone makers could just maintain/improve it as a consortium without Google, but looking at how these companies operate I don’t think they’re capable of doing this.) (And no, I don’t think the USG will break up Apple if this happens. They’re already showing highly preferential treatment to Apple compared to Google.)

What if it kills YouTube, and the only viable alternative is TikTok? I recommend everyone start downloading all their favorite YouTube videos with yt-dlp right away, just in case.

What if it kills Google Maps? Again, there’s no real viable alternative here unless you have an iPhone.

I can see a lot of ways things could go horribly wrong here if you’re someone who doesn’t want to be an Apple user.

There’s tons of video hosting options but what makes YouTube special is access to a large audience and monetization. TikTok’s monetization is garbage and not even a contender really. Large content creators are already negotiating their own brand deals to the point where YouTube’s ad money is merely the cherry on top. I actually think breaking up YouTube would be good for audiences and in the long run creators themselves. Content creator networks would make a return in a big way.

There is already OpenStreetMaps. MapQuest existed before Google Maps and still does.

You can’t get turn-by-turn directions because they don’t (consistently) have things like lane permeability, turn restrictions, directionality, etc. You can’t get accurate ETAs because they don’t have speed limits or free flow speeds. And traffic data of course. Unless things have changed, routing class and surface type are also unreliable, so a shortest-path graph algo will take you down neighborhood streets or unmaintained roads.

There is a ton of under-the-hood map data, invisible to the end user, that you need to have to be able to deliver a modern phone navigation experience.

My phone tends to overheat when I stick it under the window to use for directions, so I tend to prefer the dedicated GPS units anyway.

MapQuest doesn’t have any of this stuff either. Apple Maps is probably the closest, but it falls very far short of what Google Maps can do.

The largest business by far is iPhones. It has 16% market share in the PC business, behind Lenovo, HP, and Dell. The only business that makes sense to peel off is the iPhone services (Apple Music, News, etc.) because that’s the place it uses its dominant position to help its own products.

total revenue | percent from google | total expenses |software dev expenses

$593 million | 81% ($480 million) | $425 million | $220 million

so basically 168 million in the bank in 2022. the math has been basically this the last 10 years. in 2018 they lost 1 million but in 2019 they gained 330 million. a lot of their software expenses probably comes from the busywork features they saddled upon themselves like pocket or whatever, since it was only $63 million in 2010 and has only gone up by a couple hundred million from there.

So just over the last 10 years from my back of the envelope map from that table on wikipedia, they should have a good 1.5 billion in the war chest by today assuming the mozilla foundation did not make investments with it, which they probably have this entire time so probably even more valuable. At a certain point, maybe already, the org should have enough cash socked away in investment to just pay for operating expenses out of dividends alone.

How would you, for example, stop a rouge indexer from spewing an unlimited number of bad indexes to spam their garbage into the distributed protocol? Or how would you address just bad/misleading/faulty indexes?

If a federal judge finds X/Twitter to have a monopoly on short-form nonsense, yes.

Typically because they can easily get it for free. Perfect case study is WinRar. How many people actually bought a license for software they used daily?

I do wish they had some sort of GSoC style programs to do what Alpha Go Fold Zero did for the world.

Today ad auctioning is the ultimate scamming game. The force everyone to pay more, and nobody wins except the ad venue.

But because it is a monopoly currently businesses pay way more than the value of the actual conversions Google ads achieve.

Nobody should be willing to pay above, yet they do because the competition is willing to speculate on the value of these and take extreme positions.

You can test it yourself. Try to promote your website with Google ads and you will see the insane prices they ask for. Btw you don’t know if someone else is paying that number, google tells you that that is the price.

…

In addition to potential spin-offs, prosecutors said remedies could include banning the exclusive contracts at the heart of the case — in particular the $20bn that Google pays Apple each year to be its default search engine — as well as imposing ‘non-discrimination’ measures on Google products such as its Android operating system and Play app store.

The DoJ is also considering requiring Google to share its vast trove of data gathered to improve search ranking models, indices and advertising algorithms, which prosecutors argue was accumulated unlawfully.”

In practice, investors usually discount larger companies for efficiency reasons. You can see this with acquisition announcements where the acquirer usually goes down in price. The synergies often fail to pay off because there aren’t actually many synergies between making microwaves and running a TV network, and the sprawling empire turns into mostly independent fiefdoms.

You don’t happen to know where one could find these magical perfectly compatible and functional drop in replacements, do you?

What drop in equivalent exists for Google maps? I have used OpenStreetMap for a personal project and have tried other proprietary options. If Google maps disappeared, life would go on but I would be worse off.

What equivalent exists for Chrome? Even on desktop I prefer Chrome over Firefox. On mobile, Firefox falls far behind Chrome.

How about which single reasonable replacement offers the same services with the same level of integration?

Using Yahoo Mail and Amazon Cloud and Office Online and whatever other products isn’t quite the same offering as what Google offers.

Yup, and that’s what people want. So what is the integrated service you are saying exists that can be a drop in replacement for the way so many organizations use Google’s integrated services?

There we go. So if we go back up to your first comment where you say there are separate replacements for some services, you can see that isn’t really relevant since what is being discussed was a drop in replacement for Google, and not an individual service they offer.

Aside from that though, Google’s offerings are not a walled garden.

Don’t mistake the limited-purpose US Government for your state government. Colorado does quite a bit, from healthcare to environment to policing. And so does the US, for those subjects it has jurisdiction, and has been doing so for hundreds of years.

>That thought may be comforting, but no.

Why would that be comforting?

Tell your friends to use Firefox, people.

The hard protocol ban is heavy handed.

Fine-grained permissions are a good thing, even though they do unfortunately make things more challenging for developers.

Not all do, some do. And it only takes a few to spot something fishy and start reporting problems.

> This also doesn’t address the threat model

It actually does, because few extensions need broad permissions. The threat is significantly reduced if a change in required permissions goes up a new dialog pops up which encourages the few users that read the thing to ask “Hey, why is this asking for so many more permissions?”

This model works. It works so well that the security model of pretty much every app store is exactly the same. The risks are also identical.

I’ve tried uBlock Origin Lite on Chrome and it works… perfectly. I haven’t noticed a single ad get through.

And isn’t it supposed to be a lot more performant?

Before, I assumed Chrome really was trying to gradually stop ad-blocking. But now that I see it’s had literally zero impact, at least on the sites I visit, I’m starting to wonder what all the fuss was about. Was manifest v3 really about performance and security all along, and not about eliminating ad blockers?

Meanwhile, you can’t install adblocking on iOS Safari as an extension at all. But I never hear anybody bringing that up.

There are a bunch of safari ad blockers in the app store that work the same way manifest v3 blockers work.

Remember, Chrome is not installed by default on Windows PCs; Edge is. People are using Chrome because they want to. They could just as easily download Firefox and uBO, like more-savvy users do. Unfortunately, too many can’t be bothered. Should they be saved from excessive and intrusive ads? Again, they can easily install uBOL on their Chrome instance, or they can download and install FF+uBO. Or use something else like Brave.

>Tell your friends to use Firefox, people.

Absolutely, yes. Just don’t be too surprised when you visit them later and they’re still using Chrome (or Edge) with no ad-blocker at all. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.

Whenever this is brought up, the silence is deafening.

Edge is a good browser, and users are notoriously lazy; most won’t read a dialog box before clicking it away. And yet… ~everyone on Windows still downloads Chrome.

Interestingly, making such an accusation when it is unwarranted, as is the case here, is itself a bad-faith argument.

But I suppose this is just another cute soliloquy that I am “musing onto” you.

This break up is long overdue but we also need a drastic rethink of antitrust law and corporate taxes to shift the economy towards innovative smaller instead of concentrating it in a few megacorps that are as powerful as some governments.

Your drivers’ license could have a chip in it capable of FIDO2 etc. and it could be linked with an OAuth provider. I know login.gov already exists but it’s not built to be used everywhere.

I think governments often to do it badly, but I think it’s a muscle we (broadly speaking) should try to strengthen, not just concede that we’ll never be able to do it well.

I was really frustrated by Australia’s COVID app rollout, which was just done in typical government style – by throwing money at a big consulting corporation which delivered trash. But the solution isn’t “give up”. It’s “do better”. The solution to corruption in the public sector is to fight the corruption, not abandon the public sector.

If a site has no login options other than designated OIDC providers then I’d say they de facto don’t allow anonymity.

Search engine marketing (search ads) are quickly declining, losing ground to Amazon.

YouTube Video ads have tons of competition from all other streaming providers.

Web search is a dying product, as time spent has moved to streaming video, social video and social media.

Once again FTC and Antitrust are 10+ years behind, just like they were with Microsoft. By the time any action was taken against Microsoft, antitrust concerns resolved themselves.

Meanwhile FTC is spending hundreds of millions on a case, and Google has to spend a similar amount. Consumers will lose out on both ends: higher subscription prices, higher ads prices , higher taxes.

What happened to the constitution?