US Considers a Rare Antitrust Move: Breaking Up Google
US Considers a Rare Antitrust Move: Breaking Up Google
A rare bid to break up Alphabet Inc.’s Google is one of the options being considered by the Justice Department after a landmark court ruling found that the company monopolized the online search market, according to people with knowledge of the deliberations.
Yes please. Google has become a monster.
This is yet another reason we need President Harris.
Trump will let Google get away with it.
What we really need is President Biden. This is all happening thanks to him. There's some hope that Harris would continue his policies if elected, but there are strong rumours that some donors are supporting her with the agreement that if she wins she gets rid of Lina Khan.
What we really need is President Biden. This is all happening thanks to him.
No on both counts. Don't give him credit for other people's work.
He might have been the final one to sign off on them, but cabinet appointments are decided by committee and I guarantee you that the former Senator of the most corporation-friendly state of them all wasn't the one who suggested Lina Khan OR Lauren McFerran at the NLRB.
his policies
Again, it's not HIS policies. Stop giving the old man with 900 years of conservative policies the credit for the stellar work of young women many times as progressive and in touch with the realities of regular people as him.
This is not going to be over by November. That's why we need Harris.
I'm not sure about that... He doesn't like Google. The precedent would be a problem for his sponsors, though.
Breakup Divesting the Android operating system, used on about 2.5 billion devices worldwide, is one of the remedies that’s been most frequently discussed by Justice Department attorneys, according to the people. In his decision, Mehta found that Google requires device makers to sign agreements to gain access to its apps like Gmail and the Google Play Store.
It would be wonderful
Break them up. and then don't let them slowly re-consolidate in the following 20 years.
ISPs/Telecom too!
I wish I could get ripped off by someone other than Comcast.
“Too big to fail” banks are much more important to split up.
don’t let them slowly re-consolidate in the following 20 years
I too remember how AT&T was broken up only for most of its Baby Bells to remerge back into Ma Bell.
To prevent this for future breakups, I say the content and services sold by big tech should be made competitively compatible and interoperable via nullification of DRM laws; people buy music and movies and cloud storage; let them legally move their purchases to any competitor and big tech companies will break up naturally as local competitors emerge from people who dislike big tech for their own reasons. Monopolies cannot be trusted to lower prices for content and services. Legally nullifying DRM is like the FCC telling customers in 1968 that it was finally okay to ignore the “Bell equipment only” legal warning that had kept them locked into leasing their telephone sets for usurious amounts from AT&T for decades. A few years later, in 1982, AT&T was broken up. AT&T is almost a total monopoly again, but phones remain interoperable.
This was a great comment. You argue this so effectively that it will influence how I argue about monopolies in future — I don't think it's reasonable to expect people who critique aspects of the world to know how to fix them, but it certainly does help if one has specific points for how things should be different.
I like how at the same time apple decided to fuck Patreon users (not even the first victims), and no one can or is willing to do anything, except maybe for eu in some cases. I say if we go for monopolies, let's go for all of them!
“Too big to fail” finance companies should have been sliced and diced.
Apple is one of the planet's biggest companies and definitely a monopolistic player in many ways. Holding entire supply chains hostage, entire corporations and countries hostage. Hell, I was once laid off because Apple threatened my company's sales and the company flinched and wanted to keep shareholders happy. Their influence is palpable in way too many industries and lives.
Another commenter somewhere else on the internet posited that they're trying Google first to get the process down. Then go after the big fish with that defined precedent. Hopefully that is the case.
If this goes through, every big tech company could be in the crosshairs.
I'm all for it.
Imagine living in a post Google internet.
The power vacuum would be insane, realistically speaking, Meta, Xitter, Amazon and Microsoft would race to fill it. It could be a good thing to split Google but it could also go sideways very quickly.
Kroger next 👏👏
They just raised prices for you for saying that.
I'll believe it when I see it but it was nice to have a court case actually convicting them.
Edit:
the most likely units for divestment are the Android operating system and Google’s web browser Chrome, said the people. Officials are also looking at trying to force a possible sale of AdWords, the platform the company uses to sell text advertising, one of the people said.
That would be so nice, there was already a huge thread about how much Google screws over Android too.
Battery life would suddenly be through the moon if all their tracking and metrics gathering in Android was removed. Wonder what the carbon footprint of all that is at scale.
Break em up! Break em up!
The interesting thing about a possible Google break-up is that there's only one part of the company that generates revenues.
YouTube, Google Search, Google Maps, Gmail, Android, Chrome, Google Drive, etc. are all money losers. Many of them don't even offer an option to pay for the service. And, those that do generate tiny revenues compared to the ads machine.
Android is a huge money loser, but it's worth it because all the things Android's required to have end up showing people Google ads. If Android were split off, what would happen? Would Samsung etc. have to pay a fee to license the OS? Since it's an open source project, isn't it more likely they'd fork the code and just roll their own distribution? Maybe Samsung just buys Android? If so, what happens to Huawei, Lenovo, Xiaomi, etc? Maybe all the Chinese firms band together and support a fork of Android?
With Chrome, Google can afford to spend hundreds of millions a year developing it and then give it away for free because it not only sends people to Google Search, but it also collects all kinds of data on people's browsing habits that can be used to tailor the ads they're shown. If it's spun off then what, do they think that for the first time ever people are going to be willing go spend $79.99 and actually buy a browser? Or a $19.99 monthly browser subscription? Almost certainly not. Which means people would use a free browser. On non-Apple OSes every browser other than Firefox uses the Blink codebase, which is basically Chrome, and developed by engineers working for Google. If Chrome is split off into its own company, what will happen to Blink? The existing codebase is open, but what's the business model for coders at the new Chrome Inc. to keep working on it? So... does Microsoft now start paying Chrome Inc. to keep working on Blink? Or do they bring the browser back in-house again and we see the return of Internet Explorer? As for Firefox, it spends hundreds of millions per year on developing software, mostly Firefox. But, 90% of that money comes from Google, and that's almost certain to stop. So, they'll need to find a new business model too.
This is so different from previous break-ups. When AT&T was broken up, all that really happened was that instead of paying AT&T for their phone service, people now started paying NYNEX or Bell Atlantic or US West. But, now you're dealing with a company where virtually every service they offer is free, subsidized by the ads they show, which can only exist when that service harvests personal data to feed the ad machine.
My personal suspicion is that this is such new territory that the Justice Department is probably not going to try to break Google up. They're probably going to forbid things like paying off Apple and Firefox. They may force Google to license key search engine data. They may put restrictions on the ad machine. Breaking it up would be like knocking over a domino without knowing what the chain reaction would be. Also, I personally hope that if they take the win and choose a simple remedy, it will allow them to set a precedent and move on to all the other monopolies.
YouTube, Google Search, Google Maps, Gmail, Android, Chrome, Google Drive, etc. are all money losers.
Only if you view them in isolation. In fact, they are what enables Google's advertising dominance, by providing detailed insight into people's lives, thereby powering the targeted advertising of AdWords and making it as valuable as it is.
Android is a huge money loser
Have you forgotten about the Play Store?
With Chrome, Google can afford to spend hundreds of millions a year developing it and then give it away for free
We used web browsers just fine before Chrome existed, before even Google existed, and nobody was paying $79.99 for them. (In fact, Chrome was originally built upon one of the free engines.)
I would personally be glad to see Chrome disappear, since it is now starting to cause the same problems that Internet Explorer caused more than 20 years ago. Monoculture is bad in this realm. Yes, Google does seem to pour a lot of resources into their browser, but most of that is self-interest; very little of the results are actually needed for a useful, healthy web.
Breaking it up would be like knocking over a domino without knowing what the chain reaction would be.
The same fear could have applied to the Bell System. I'm not worried. :)
Have you forgotten about the Play Store?
Consumers spent about $47b in revenue on the Play Store, of that Google keeps about 30% so that's $14b. Google's total revenue is $306 billion, so the Play Store generates only 5% of Google's total revenue.
https://www.businessofapps.com/data/google-play-statistics/
We don't know how much Android costs Google. They have to develop the OS and maintain it, they have to develop all the android apps. They have to run the servers that handle the traffic from the apps, and so-on.
We used web browsers just fine before Chrome existed
Between 1999 when Netscape was acquired by AOL and when Chrome was launched in 2008, Internet Explorer absolutely dominated browser user share.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars
before even Google existed, and nobody was paying $79.99 for them
No, but Netscape had planned to start charging for their browser, until Microsoft drove them out of business by bundling IE for free with Windows, illegally leveraging their monopoly to drive the company out of business. Microsoft was willing to give away IE for free because they thought it was strategically important to control the Internet, and were willing to take a huge loss on the browser business to do that. They used the money from Office / Windows to subsidize their free browser, which was illegal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp.
Would be the most based thing the FTC ever did.
Too good to be true! There's a lot of monopolies. Please do Amazon too.
But if you break apart Google, how will they afford to keep killing off their own services!?!
Google NEEDS to be broken up badly. They are essentially a monopoly in the online space, from chrome to search to maps to youtube.
Every service is abusing the power of the others to grow their market share and kill competition.
I used to love Google. They pushed the web and tech in the right direction.
But somewhere along the way they've been taken over by marketing cunts that only looked at the bottom line and didn't care how evil or anti consumer they became.
Good, but why now? For years, Google has been way more dominant both practically and culturally until very recently, and only now after they stumbled hard with their AI venture, Bing catching up, and their public opinion dropping do they decide to break the company up.
Does this mean that a monopoly is good as long as it's successful, but once it starts stumbling and outlives its use that's when the government is gonna do something about it?
More people dislike Google now than before.
Way too rare, if you ask me.
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I love that the Judge's last name is Mehta
I'll believe it if I ever live to see it.
I'm worried about YouTube, but the rest of it can go. I don't think anyone has the storage space for YouTube except Google. I wouldn't be surprised if YouTube's data was in the exabyte range.
I love YouTube. But if YouTube died I would t be too upset. Something else would come along and take it's place.
It's not the platform I care about it's the backlog of existing videos that could never be replaced. Many would get archived but definitely not all.
Yeah, the only thing that's ACTUALLY good about YouTube anymore is the creators who can only be found there.
If YouTube was closed down, creators would quickly migrate to another platform, one that would probably be much better for end users in every way.
That's not the part I'm concerned about; I'm concerned about the fact that there are almost 2 decades of videos on YouTube. Like, I don't know how many videos are on YouTube, but it's gotta be in the billions at this point. Where is that all gonna go? Who's gonna archive it? You think YouTube will spend the money to archive it all if they're going bankrupt?
It's less the storage than the bandwidth. Both are huge though
Do they need to split off different departments? Since most of the stuff that Google dabbles in is digital, can't they just start a few new companies with the exact same IP and split up the work force instead?
"Sharing" the IP wouldn't really work. The point is to have multiple companies that are either not overlapping, or are competing with each other. If they're all working on the same IP but with different work forces, then you either have single products that diverge as multiple teams independently develop them (No longer the same product) or you just have a single large company with extra steps.