Justice Department considering push for historic break up of Google after landmark antitrust ruling: report
Justice Department considering push for historic break up of Google after landmark antitrust ruling: report
Do it! Then, do every single major conglomerate they've allowed to form over the last 30 years
Keep going I’m almost there
😂
Jesus Christ Fedi
How about we start restricting how many businesses a company is allowed to buy out in a year. Maybe allow like 1-2 mergers a year. There no reason we should allow one company to buy everyone and then kill their products and services leaving the consumers holding the bag that will no longer function because the server is gone.
I would say even one a year would be too much.
That unless the business has failed and is no longer operating, for a merger and acquisition to occur they would have to petition the courts for permission first.
Imagine the shit that Microsoft and Google and Adobe and Amazon would be doing if they had to start their companies from scratch and compete against the already extant players in the field?
It would create so many jobs, and create an excess of consumer choice opportunity, lowering prices and fighting against inflation far more than a couple of percentage points on the interest rate index ever would.
I'm tired of only being offered incredibly overpriced very shitty low quality options in every single category.
We don't need $100,000 cars. We need $5,000 cars.
We don't need $1,000,000 homes, we need $25,000 homes that anyone in America who works a full-time job regardless of if they're slinging fries at McDonald's or digging ditches can afford.
We don't need $100 a week grocery bills. We need $5 a week grocery bills.
Your arguments are all invalid because capitalism
(I fully agree with your post, I sorry the world is shit)
And ponies!
We don’t need $100,000 cars. We need $5,000 cars
A lot of this cost is in materials, quality control and safety testing, plus requirements by trade agreements for where components are allowed to be manufactured and assembled
We don’t need $1,000,000 homes, we need $25,000 homes
Most of this cost is land. A tiny home can be self built for a few thousand, and starts at ~20k professionally built, and a small, say 800 sq foot house that someone might actually want to live in can generally be built for under 100k.
Most houses aren't worth that much but the land under them is. So more townhouses, duplexes and smaller lots, smaller lawns and a lot more apartments and condos will help
One thing that I've always found interesting is that silicon valley has a common start up strategy that is basically: do well enough to get bought buy your bigger competition. Basically, be a threat so your VCs can cash in when a Google, Facebook, etc buys you.
I'm other words, Silicon Valley has a start up culture that feeds an anticompetitive/anti-trust ecosystem. No one complains because they are all making money. It's the users who slowly suffer and we end up were we are not with 5 companies running the modern web and Internet infrastructure.
Buyouts shouldn't be allowed by default. The only cases where it should be allowed are when the business being bought out is struggling to the point where a buyout is really the only way to prevent bankruptcy. It should never be a good deal for the selling company and only a last resort to stop closing doors completely.
Can I vote for YOU for president?
Buying out companies takes longer than a year usually.
Ah yes, but you see, the US government only cares about faceless corporations, business owners and other rich people, and not about the average citizen, sorry. In fact, I would argue most governments are like this.
I'd go further, restrict the market cap for businesses so they have to spin off if they get too big. Add to that a value limit for the number of boards you can sit on so 30 companies can't be controlled by the same people.
Maybe if all their shadiness hadn't been allowed in the first place they wouldn't have been able to become a monopoly.
But please, I beg of you, do Adobe next.
I remember the days of google being a cool startup that had just made news releasing gmail with a whopping 1GB of storage making everyone go crazy for the invites. It's a strange feeling.
Yeah, I thought Google was so cool around 2004. Now I can't wait for them to become irrelevant. I need to stop using "googling" as a verb...
Hell, do all the "to big to fail" megacorps.
I worry what a broken up Adobe would do to workflows. One of the reasons I can do what I do is because Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects and Premiere all work with each other.
Now if we want to save Behance and Frame.io, substance, Mixamo, etc, I am all for that.
I don't know how deeply their different programs integrate with each other (I don't do video or illustration seriously) but one would hope that it might encourage them to adopt more open standards and formats. For example, in my photography workflow I can import and catalogue a RAW image with Shotwell, which passes it through to my RAW developer (Rawtherapee), which in turn passes it through to my raster editor (GIMP). These programs are all developed separately from each other by people with much less resources than Adobe, so I think it's a matter of choice rather than a technical limitation.
God I hope it ends up splitting off Chrome. I think Google has done a great job with Chrome. But the recent Manifest v3 makes it clear they're going to greatly degrade their users' experience for Google's bottom line. And they're using their market dominance to do it.
What does that even look like as a business model, though? There's an expectation now that you don't pay for web browsers. What would a standalone Chrome, Inc. look like?
Something very close to Mozilla in my opinion. They'd have the browser as their core product, a few more apps as a logical extension of that (maybe a mail client like Thubderbird), perhaps Chrome Inc would inherit google's office suite? That would be a breath of fresh air. Maybe revive a few of Google's killed ventures that seemed more than promising.
Isn't Manifest 3 about 3rd party tracking cookies?
Everyones going ape about UBlock, but that's an unintended consequence.
I'm very happy to have 3 party cookies more limited. FB already tracks me everywhere everywhen.
(But I will be very very sad when UBlock doesn't work anymore)
That's what they want to focus on. And hey, that's great. But there's no reason they need to limit how a user installed plugin can filter API requests. Ad blockers and the like were tools to help with the ads and tracking issue. So it's great Google's trying to help. But it mostly just seems like PR at this point.
Do it do it do it do it do it do it...
Smash them with a hammer. Google should not exist as it is. Not for decades.
Break up AdSense, chrome, search, android, shatter them all into separate companies that can stop selling out literally every waking aspect of life as their sole business model.
and then prosecute them for antitrust if those companies conspire together
Would adsense even be worth it without the search? I really don’t want that popping up in even more places. My thoughts would be
Google Search + ad sense Chrome Android Waze YouTube G Suite FitBit Nest
And then there’s a ton of other misc stuff I’m unaware of
Don't stop with them
Crush corporations, swiftly and without fanfare rebuild capitalism with worker co-ops, seize the means of production without all that stagnation and failure that usually follows.
Don't 'break it up', nationalize it, and do the same with all these other giant corporations.
Profits could support UBI instead of encouraging billionaires.
That's not in anyone's interest. It's the surest way to have a thousand national search engines which are all shitty. National walled internet Gardens etc
Break it up instead
Not sure where you're getting the idea that there would be thousands. But as for the shitty part, it's already shit. Google's search engine utterly fails at it's job, and not just because of the rise in LLM/SEO. They waste billions on fancy new AI searches that nobody wants, they accept bribes to get pages to the top of the search, and even when you're looking at an actual for real result, it often isn't even what you want.
When a critical industry fails to do its job, it is time to nationalize it. With that said, the criticality of search engines is debatable. I'm cool with breaking it up at a bare minimum. The list of corps in need of getting broken up is way to long.
How would there be thousands? There aren't thousands of nations, and everyone would still use Google.
If you break it up, that's how you get thousands of shitty versions.
Maybe some countries might disable Google if it was owned by the US, but I have a feeling those countries already have their own issues with Google as it stands now.
I just think if the monopolistic corporations are too big and too essential to take down, then nationalization is a solution with many more positive traits than negative.
Why would we support UBISoft? They haven’t released any good games recently
Unfortunately one of the big ideas republicans have conditioned half our population into believing is that government itself is basically a flawed idea and that our government will not ever be able to do anything right. So it would be a tough sell to say the least.
And also as an American, I imagine many people around the world would not be thrilled with the prospect of the US government owning the web browser they use.
There is a kernel of truth in that sentiment though. The government has a tendency to be grossly wasteful of resources, but I feel this is offset by the fact that they aren't profit driven in their goals and less likely to skyrocket prices to line shareholder pockets. Corporation are also "wasteful" in a sense, where they charge insane markups over actual cost and refuse to pay taxes on them, the difference here is that corporations move their profits offshore and out of Americans pockets, where the government always ends up paying private contractors more than they should. In the end corporations do more with less while government controlled services are always WAAAAAY cheaper than their private counterparts for the consumer despite them being inefficient.
This is the part they don't get. Do you want zero waste and ever rising prices for the sake of some worthless rent seeking billionaire cocksucker, or do u want some inefficiency, but you pay less overall. One makes someone else rich at your expense, the other allows you an affordable life while preventing another billionaire from existing.
"Give me the fruit of some else's labor!!!!" Gross.
Right? Fucking billionaires
Welcome back from your 6 month bad take hiatus.
Ignoring the snark in your comment...
I assume you take issue with UBI?
Would you feel different if we 'required service' for UBI? For example, some countries have mandatory military service. If we nationalize these giant corporations, we could make working there a way to qualify for UBI.
Do you think UBI is just taking money from the average person and giving it to lazy people who do nothing? Or do you enjoy the separation of the rich while the rest of us struggle for scraps? Do you understand that the UBI would apply to you as well?
Or am I missing deeper thoughts given to your comment?
Separate the search engine from anything that stinks of advertising so it can return to what it’s supposed to do: return the most relevant results.
Because even appending
udm=14only gets rid of promoted links and in-page advertising, it does f**k-all to correct manipulated search results.Can you elaborate on the business model of a search engine that has no ads?
Let's not make them a business. Search Engines are fundamental core services for the modern globalized and connected world. It's just like your post-office service. Make it an internationally owned and funded non-profit organization with open-source and the goal of enabling the unrestricted sharing of knowledge over the internet.
even appending
udm=14FYI all this is doing is going to the "Web" tab of the results. You can just click it instead of modifying the URL.
I guess where it'd be useful is modifying the search URL in your browser so that searches always add
udm=14by default.
Not sure how that would work...
I'm old enough to remember the breakup of Ma Bell and the way that worked was the creation of a bunch of regional telecom services, that's not going to work on the Internet.
I guess they could mandate spinning off Android, but that's not really the problem addressed in the antitrust case, is it?
Maybe split the AdWords side from the Search Engine side?
I'd guess it would be a vertical breakup rather than horizontal: separate android, cloud, youtube, search, chrome, ads...depending on how aggressive they want to be.
I think each of these needs to be handled in separate ways. For example, search could continue to be a conglomeration that includes maps, mail and possibly cloud. Android can just be split very easily into a separate company and same for Youtube, since that would basically be another Netflix or whatever.
Ads, in my opinion, is the most important one though. That absolutely has to be shattered into thousands of tiny pieces, all of which need to be forced to compete with each other, for the benefit of all internet companies anywhere. It would be a massive boon to companies everywhere and would provide an opportunity for lots of innovation in the advertising space, ie. trying ads that are less intrusive or ones that are cheaper because they don't rely on tracking information.
And another thing I think people need to understand about search is that building the search engine is not the hard part - the hard part is figuring out how to pay for it. Search is really expensive - crawling websites, indexing, fighting spam abuse. That's what really makes Google successful - the fact that they coupled it with advertising so that they could cover all the expenses that come with managing a search engine. That's much more important than the quality of the results, in my opinion.
And as for Chrome: well, personally I think that monopoly has been the most damaging to the internet as a whole. I would love to see it managed as part of a non-profit consortium. There should not be any profit motive whatsoever in building a web browser. If you want a profit motive, build a website - the browser should just be the tool to get to your profit model, not the profit model itself. And therefore it should be developed by multiple interest groups, not just one advertising company.
Anyway, I know this is all an impossible fantasy. Nothing in the world is done because it's right or wrong, it's done because it serves whoever holds the most power. But if there were a just world, this is what I think it would look like.
I think the problem with Google is that none of their side projects actually make any money. I don't have a solution here
I'm drooling at the thought.
Not breaking up Google because the effects would be inconvenient would literally be letting a monopoly regin because they're a monopoly.
Shut down services if needed. We can adapt.
Never forget that the baby bells slowly reassembled themselves. They’re not a single company but they’re down to 3 or 4 now
Which is exactly where it should be... having regional phone companies sucked. Having 1 phone company sucked. Having 3-4 is the least sucky, but we have real competition.
Before tearing apart Google and Amazon, I'df much prefer we have 3-4 choices for internet providers (unless we can turn them into utilities, then we should do that).
Making YouTube its own thing again wouldn’t be that hard.
Neither you nor almost anyone who upvoted you or replied to you read the article, huh
FTA:
"DOJ attorneys could ask Judge Amit Mehta to order Google to sell portions of its business"
That's the author of the article speculating, they don't know what it would actually look like any more than you or I do.
Bonus, as I noted, it doesn't address the primary issue of a search monopoly. Even if they sell off those business unit, the search monopoly remains.
I so want this to happen, but at the same time I'm scared that Samsung or whoever will buy AOSP and enshittify it completely
Isn't it already licensed under permissive Apache v2? Anyone can fork and carry on the project without the permission of Google, every manufacturer already does as a result of the license.
The OS is but the Google Play backend isn't. Google has a monopoly over Android by keeping a monopoly on the appstore which dictates that you must allow google spyware to run on your OEM fork to be able to qualify as a "Secure Device".
Several Chinese OEMs have China only variants that don't use GPlay and also ship with some some other cool apps, but they can't sell it globally because Google says "screw you" since no one publishes apps outside Gplay, and because several major apps refuse to run on Googless android which GrapheneOS has threatened to sue
This is still just the tip of the iceberg though. Google already got sued for GPlay monoply last year and reached a $700 settlement just for developers.
On top of that, several of Android's underlying features are considered archaic and dated. They always have huge kernel patching issues because no OEM (especially Qualcomm) releases the source code for proprietary binaries, meaning no one easily upgrade kernels (practically impossible for FOSS android, expensive for OEMs). The android runtime is imo a piece of crap compared to some low power optimized linux distros. ADB is still needed to delete system apps. Settings lies about permissions, which themselves are poorly sorted. Oh and Google hired the dev behind Android rooting (magisk) so they could kill magisk hide which circumvents system app abilities to tell if you are rooted and therefore not worthy of running proprietary apps.
There's so much more the deeper you go, it's just really hard for any contender to step up because of the sheer might Google has over the market. They have so much power that they coerced Samsung into dropping RCS support which makes Google Messages the only app on android that supports RCS, even though RCS is an open OEM standard from 2008
A dog that barks doesn't bite.
"Considering" means they want to get something from Google in exchange for not breaking it up.
"you kids break it up or I'm gonna do it for ya"
- your mom probably, also the justice department
My mom would punish me regardless of which side I were in the event, because I "should have been smarter".
That's off topic, what I meant is there's no mechanism in Google which would make it voluntarily stop being a monopoly/oligopoly in good faith. It's not a person making that decision even, it's the whole organization. Every single person making decisions there may be good and willing for peace on Earth and goodwill toward men, but that's not how the mechanism as a whole will work.
Now break up Coca-Cola, those tax dodging fucks.
coca-cola, apple, windows, amazon...
Let's include the airlines in that too. Fuck em!
Will this work out for consumers if other tech giants like Apple, Microsoft, or Amazon, etc. aren't also broken up simultaneously? Won't Google's assets just get sucked up into another existing monopoly and we'll be right back where we were but with one less choice than before?
I'm genuinely curious.
It won't. It simply benefits Apple and Amazon who should have been broken up a decade ago
Amazon literally has had a mostly worldwide monopoly
Don't forget that the right wing has a hard-on for Google. People like them are Apple's target market (I guarantee their families were the first to get iPads) and don't forget their really warped questions during the congressional hearings which demonstrated that they had done absolutely no research and had a huge inherent bias. Stupid questions like "if I walk 3m to the right, can you guys see that". Or, why does president Trump come up as the first hit on Google for loser
I support this, but only if it happens to all 3 companies simultaneously . Otherwise, we're just transferring more power to Apple (who honestly have followed some Trump style tactics over the last 25 years)
I get the idea behind a duopoly, but from an economics and game theory point of view, but, if applied unequally, another monopoly will simply take advantage.
Capitalism finds a way.
Fully support the action, don't know how the timing works...
Best case, you only start to basically outline what this looks like before the election. Worst case, you enliven the complacent, left-centrist billionaires to vigorously join in with the perpetually batshit right wing billionaires to get trump in to "live to fight another day" with the reasoning of, "we need to save ourselves first, then we'll deal with trump when he goes full fascist" and then they either won't be able to or won't care to because they won't want to upset their share price.
Yea, I'm afraid of that, tbh, if more corpos go full elon.
PS: actually, they should be the ones afraid of the organized citizenry anyway, but we're too fragmented ideologically, spatially, communicationally, see if voting can make up for it.
Well, something, but that action is only temporary because those companies that were the result of the division are reunited to form or are acquired by other large companies.
Obviously they will no longer be what they were in the original company. But something is something.
Will the old method of breaking up a company work enough on modern tech companies? Will the 2nd best map software ever catch up in market share?
If you switched most people from google into DDG without telling, most would hardly notice, I venture. Mapping is different.
Perhaps, though I am dubious (when it comes to things like searching for business open hours or street view).
However it's not like choosing which restaurant to go to. They just type their search in the Google browser textbox and use the same search engine they've always used, the default. They'd need to encounter a failed search and think to try another.
I think Apple could catch up.
So they're breaking up Google but giving Intel more free money after it cut 15k jobs?
Google also cut 12000 jobs in Jan 2023, but it does not have an AMD or Nvidia to kick its ass in search when it fucks up.
Intel is a near monopoly and it controls the physical hardware that runs the entire universe with the exception of mobile devices and embedded.
If you're going to break anyone up that's who I would go for first but because of the pipe dream of making computer chips in 'Murica these idiot politicians keep propping up Intel's Wall Street investors while its employees get fucked over.
At the very least the x86 duopoly has to end. It's not only legal but kept the way it is because of legal contracts. The courts need to declare them void because their enforcement leads to the violation of antitrust laws.
How is this related?
PBMs/healthcare conglomerating needs to be looked at as a top priority
And this Kroger Albertsons thing needs to be stopped for good
It would probably do Google a world of good, depending on what gets split or spun off. A lot of Google products have unrealized potential that’s hamstrung by poor leadership and privacy issues. Maybe at least some of their products will be able to thrive on their own.
What about Microsoft and Facebook?
How do the people who make this comment every single time something like this happens, expect change when no one's allowed to be first?
Microsoft already lost an anti-trust suit in 2001. It's in the article if you care to read it.
We already had first Microsoft anti-trust suit, but what about second Microsoft anti-trust suit?
No one reads the articles man. I won't lie, I'm guilty of it, but it's mainly cuz Im lazy and go to the comments hoping someone will give a synopsis.
Thanks
"They said smugly without an ounce of depth in their argument."
The people here who 1) think a breakup of Google will actually happen, and 2) think that a paid subscription model for a search engine have all been spending too much time in their Linux bubble.
If Google did this, everyone would just switch to Bing, or open AI's new thing they are making. The general public will not be on board with that.
I don't hold my breath until they really do it.
keep the administration blue and watch the dominoes fall over the next 5 years.
Lina Khan and Letitia James are going after scalps.
NY Post
Going to need a much better source than this.
Thanks.
Justice Department officials are considering what remedies to ask a federal judge to order against the search giant, said three people with knowledge of the deliberations involving the agency and state attorneys general who helped to bring the case. They are discussing various proposals, including breaking off parts of Google, such as its Chrome browser or Android smartphone operating system, two of the people said.
...
Last week’s ruling that Google was a monopolist was a landmark antitrust decision, raising serious questions about the power of tech giants in the modern internet era. Apple, Amazon and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, also face antitrust cases. Google is scheduled to go to trial in another antitrust case — this one over ad technology — next month. Any remedies in Google’s search case are likely to reverberate and influence that broader landscape.
TIL, the ruling might actually carry some consequences. I guess we'll see where this takes us.
Okay now do Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia, Blackrock, etc etc
Good luck, I'm all for it, but good luck
Cool. Take their search stuff, open source all the software, spin out an account service and 6 baby search engine companies.
Do the same with each of their massive properties.
This.... Isn't how large scale technologies work. Not even close, not even "same planet" close. That's also not how antitrust breakups work, why open source private technologies? How do you think that's supposed to work? How does that precedent work?
You could open source all ~15,000+ repos from my company, and be entirely incapable of actually operating the grand majority of it. And we're, maybe, 1/10,000th the size of Google on the tech side.
You also can't just "split" a single technology apart, that's gloriously, ignorantly, simplistic. You're talking potentially years of dedicated work by hundreds, thousands, of individuals to achieve something like that. How do you expect that to operate?
It's going to be a nightmare to just rip seemingly unrelated, but interdependent, verticals of Google apart. Your request here is wholely unrealistic.
Woah woah woah hold on.
These are judges and lawyers, not software engineers.
Personally it sounds like the lawyers and whatnot can do the whole splitting up the business. It will simultaneously create a HUGE demand in software engineers as all this stuff just sort of stops working.
I think it's a brilliant way to handle this.
Plus the effect it would have on software engineer salaries in general. Not that I have any potential conflict of interest in stating this opinion, not at all.
May I recommended watching "The YouTube Effect" if you don't see the problem with big tech companies.
I'm guessing it can be found on YouTube?
lol, no :) I tried
the place is there, but it looks blocked to me, maybe it's a region thing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2Lle0vMBoM
if that don work, there are places to stream from e.g. https://pw1.unblockit.download/movie/1467291-the-youtube-effect
That’s what I like to hear!
Alphabet soup
Great, now do the rest of them.
"Kagi Search" looks cool. The examples of searches look far superior to even that of google.
But it's $5 per month. (No ads) Or $8 for couples. Even so I think I will try it. The search results look really good.
Has anyone here used Kagi Search?
I wanted to like Kagi, but their Brave fiasco turned me off of them for good
Brendan Eich should be blacklisted in the tech world. It's really too bad that they partnered with a bigot and his shitty company.
When I was younger, I thought Brendan Eich was a god for creating JavaScript and his contributions to web development. Then he started to speak about his personal views, and he instantly went from a god to an evil villain to me.
How can somebody so smart be so dumb and evil at the same time?
But it's $5 per month. (No adds)
The price seems reasonable IMO. Search engines are expensive to run, and I'm not sure they'd even be breaking even at the moment.
They have a "small web" search that searches through small sites like blogs, which I really like. Sometimes there's small sites that have great info but aren't ranked very high in Google due to all the SEO spam and Google's preference for major sites.
I've been using it for the last few months, and while it doesn't offer as many "nice to have" features as Google (like automatically finding mask results need in where you are), the core functionality works great, and the lack of ads is refreshing.
I tried kagi for a month and the results were probably as good or slightly better than Google for 90% of searches but it completely falls apart any time you want something local or hyper-specific. It made me realize that the personalization that people hate with Google's results actually saves a ton of time because I had to retry a lot of kagi searches with additional context.
Blocking ads and trackers in your browser and then using Google without an account will get you most of the way to what kagi is doing.
I've been paying for it for a few months now, I like it. You do have to be a more deliberate in search results, especially if you're looking for location specific info, but that's how old Google was too anyway. The summerize site and fastGPT features can be pretty useful too.
Just a silly example, I was playing skyrim and wanted a duplicate item so I could display it, put in "skyrim console command to spawn item" and it spit out the console command perfectly
I use it now, and like it. Do you have any questions about it?
Big tech needs far stricter regulations but I don't think people would like the internet very much if Google was forced to sell off services like YouTube. Nobody else is offering unlimited free hosting, discoverability, promotion, and bandwidth for video content and nobody ever will again. If the chromium project was sold off to some other shitty tech company, do you really think they'd keep the open source 'ungoogled' version readily available for everyone? A Google breakup would just mean that other tech companies like Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, etc get more powerful.
If there's an appetite for breakups why not start with the companies that control our food and news
It's not 2010, video streaming isn't unprofitable anymore and Youtube doesn't have a monopoly on it. Chromium is open source, and as far as I'm concerned, Google has been actively making it worse with their efforts to fill it with ads.
More breakups do sound good, though.
There's also how much of a pain that would be for the end user. Would I have to create new accounts for all their services? That would be a mess.
Do it.
How does this affect or concern me?
This could affect you in several ways:
Search Experience: If Google is broken up or forced to share data, you might notice changes in how search engines operate. Competitors like DuckDuckGo or Bing could become more competitive, offering better privacy, search results, or features, potentially giving you more choices. Privacy and Data: If Google is required to share data, there might be concerns about how your data is handled across different platforms. On the flip side, increased competition could lead to better privacy practices as companies vie for users. Technology and Services: Google’s services are deeply integrated into many products and platforms. A breakup could impact the availability, integration, or performance of these services, which might affect how you use technology in your daily life. Economic Impact: Google’s size and influence mean that any major changes could have broader economic impacts, potentially affecting industries related to technology, advertising, and beyond. This could indirectly influence job markets, investment trends, or even consumer prices.Overall, these changes could alter how you interact with the internet, your privacy, and the services you rely on daily.
No one really knows yet.
