A Judge Can Break Up Google Right Now. Will He?
A Judge Can Break Up Google Right Now. Will He?
Google lost an antitrust case late last year to Epic Games. Now California judge James Donato is overseeing the remedy. Could that include a break-up?
I am going to guess that Google will not be broken up right now.
Betteridge’s law would agree with you.
If Google is broken up what changes? Are there going to two different companies creating a map app?
The breakup this is referring to is splitting off the Android operating system from the rest of Google.
Even if you split Android off from Google, the Play store is still the Play store, nothing would change except it wouldn't be under Google anymore.
There's a problem too saying "it's a monopoly", as long as Apple is running their app store and Google has theirs, there's no monopoly. Change phones. Problem solved.
Not sure what changes, but it's scary how much Google controls. Even if we just broke off YouTube from them, that would be a big deal.
Ideally we would split their search engine, YouTube, and chrome each into two competing companies. (Google A, Google B, Chrome A, Chrome B, YouTube A, YouTube B)
Because Google has so much power they can make changes that will break search results, websites, and browsers if you don't accept changes that are beneficial to them.
Without the rest of Google, Youtube doesn't exist, because it doesn't make any money and it costs a shitload of money to run.
Google's actual businesses aren't Android, or Chrome, or Youtube (not including Youtube TV). They're AdSense, Google Cloud, their hardware division, the Play Store, the aforementioned Youtube TV, etc. Those are the things that make Google money, and really the only things you could realistically split off from Google and expect to still exist in a year or two.
Alphabet 2, Alphabet 3, Alphabet Final Final V3 ...
Yeah, I would bet that Alphabet would continue to own (or immediately buy) any separate split-off company Android becomes and there would be absolutely no meaningful change. 100% pointless.
What would we do without one of the pillars of corruption and surveillance in America? There’s no way Google gets broken up.
Best case scenario is Judge breaks up google which then goes to the Supreme court which will then overturn the ruling.
What's the offshoot going to be called, "Soup"? Not like Alphabet is operating any more as "separate organizations" than Google was previously. Nothing changes there.
The offshoot running Android would hopefully just be called "Android"
Yup, just like it was before Google bought it.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
This week’s monopoly round-up has lots of news, as usual, including some victories for the Antitrust Division, the government causing big health insurance stocks to tumble, and a privacy bill deal in Congress.
Over the last ten years, we’ve heard increasing criticism of ‘Big Tech’ – the handful of trillion-dollar giants that organize the information commons in our society – resulting in the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission bringing sweeping antitrust lawsuits against Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and – most recently – Apple.
The answer to that question requires an understanding of the facts and evidence in the case itself, Google’s acquisition history, and the purpose of remedies to unfetter markets from anticompetitive conduct and restore competition where it was constrained.
Epic showed how Google forced agreements on smartphone manufacturers that required pre-installation and prominent placement of the Play Store on hundreds of millions of devices.
Such a remedy can be broad-based, anything from monetary damages to break-ups to creating internal compliance departments to voiding unlawful contracts to banning senior executives from the industry.
We’ll know Epic’s request soon enough, Google will file its own more limited proposal, and dueling economic experts will jump in another of Judge Donato’s “hot tubs” at the end of May.
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That McCloud looks like the "smarter every day" guy with a mullet