I don’t hold my breath until they really do it.
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
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?
I think Apple could catch up.
Just spinning off Android would shake up map software. It’s how they get traffic and other data.
Many apps for Android rely on Google Play Services which I don’t know exactly what it’s doing but collecting data is a good bet.
Do we end up with worse maps then?
By my understanding google play services is basically just shared libraries and APIs for doing stuff and not as tied into Google specifically as its name might suggest
If you swapped 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, only to find that probably doesn’t work either.
Just apple maps and bing under the hood though.
What we really need is some non-super monopoly competition like osm
Yea! OSM is the Wikipedia of maps.
If they forced them to split Waze off and make it independent again it probably could, it’s probably the only non default app I see people use regularly
Oh, did they actually keep Waze? I assumed they bought it to kill it.
Still using it, so still going right now.
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.
No, Amazon next.
How would the US JD break up a Swiss corp?
Instead of invading Africa to control people and steal resources, the usa could kick Nestle out of their plantations.
Any brands protected by American law must be independently-owned, with full transfer of all branding, patents, trade secrets, intellectual assets and physical assets.
So, for example, for even a single bottle of Perrier to be sold in America, it needs to have been made by a company registered with the brand name of Perrier, with exclusive use of that name within the country, independently owned and under zero control by Nestle, being manufactured using the exact same process with the exact same ingredients, and having control of the exact same patents and American-side infrastructure.
America is such a large marketplace that it would be impossible to split a company like this. Patents alone would prevent this, forcing Nestle to divest themselves of each individual subsidiary.
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.
It would depend on the actual file formats. For example I can import a live after effects file into premiere and all the updates I make will apear on premiere’s timeline, without needing to render out. The same goes for bringing photoshop or illustrator files into After Effects. I guess we’d just have to rely more on third party plugins that connect these programs like Overlord
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.
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?
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.
Making YouTube its own thing again wouldn’t be that hard.
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).
Fuck that. Any Canadian will tell you, you don’t want an oligarchy
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
But if they’ve only been found to monopolize search, how does that remedy the search monopoly? Presumably the new separate Google Search company would still have a search monopoly.
Because that search monopoly allows them to boost their other products above all others. It’s not an impartial search result anymore. There is a financial incentive to favor their own products.
without search and their abuse of that monopoly, google wouldn’t have dominant positions or massive market shares that many of their other properties (products, services, software, etc) have.
I’m speculating, but perhaps the thought would be that separating Google Search from the rest of the company would deprive them of the alternative revenue streams they used to maintain their market position? If I remember the ruling against them correctly, one of the key pieces of evidence cited by the judge was that Google spent like 30 billion dollars a year to have 3rd parties use their engine by default.
But the ads on search are the big revenue driver for Google overall. Presumably those stay with the Google Search subunit, and they would have plenty of cash to do whatever?
Google search has some features that alternative search engines don’t. I use DuckDuckGo for 99% of everything, but I occasionally use Google to see local busy hours, or sometimes any hours, reviews, phone numbers without navigating a shitty website, etc.
I think there are ways to break up Google search on its own, and make some of those features separate and accessible on other search engines.
Then there’s the matter of advertising, data collection, SEO, exclusivity with corporations like Reddit, etc.
Google is doing things with its search that seem to intentionally reduce the ability of other search engines to compete with them, and that’s really all that the antitrust laws are meant to prevent.
I think you go about it the other way: break data analytics and advertising off from everything else. If every unit has to be self-sufficient without reliance on data collection and first-party advertising I think you fix most of the major issues.
They removed something that I used to use: using “-word” to exclude a keyword. Apparently it is because advertisers don’t want you doing that, so they turned it into a weighting. So there are features and antifeatures too. I’ve seen ddg do that too before, but right now it works :)
If you seperate Youtube from Google, I cannot see youtube surviving. It’s probably a loss leader for them.
Pretty sure youtube is revenue generating on its own now. Youtube doesn’t work as a loss leader because it’s so different from all other products.
I really don’t understand why people have that believe. They’ve heard over a decade ago that Youtube wasn’t making a profit (which was mostly because they reinvested everything to grow and become the monopoly they are now), but by how much money it’s raking in every quarter and with how monumental Google’s infrastucture is, I find it extremely hard to believe Youtube isn’t a big money machine by now. They’re really squeezing everything out of it not because they have to, but because they have a monopoly as a user generated video platform that has more to offer than just shorts.
I think it’s a combination of the old news, how expensive hosting video is compared to anything else, and how Twitch is basically a boat - a hole in the water that you throw money into.
People lose the connection that burning money like it’s going out of fashion is only step one in the game. Step two is capitalizing on the market share that you acquired in step one. And, as every social media company has shown, ad revenue and data harvesting are very profitable. Otherwise, every tech giant wouldn’t have pivoted to that years ago.
So YouTube shall fail.
I’m drooling at the thought.
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.
There was more discussion of potential remedies in the article than that.
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
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.
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.
Best news I’ve heard all day! Break up Meta, too, while you’re at it!
Amazon.
Disney, Bayer, Unilever
Walmart, Kroger, Safeway (the latter two are in the midst of merging as well)
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.
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.
Not like the CIA doesn’t already have full access to your browsing history already
Can’t disagree there. It’s not like Google is trustworthy or resists the govt/CIA. But I do still think the official change in ownership would hit people differently.
Why would we support UBISoft? They haven’t released any good games recently
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.
The idea stems from the propaganda tool that would be if it were state owned. Other countries would seriously discourage or ban its use, but as it is useful they’d need a replacement. Hence a thousand shitty ones.
The idea stems from the propaganda tool that would be if it were state owned.
How is it not currently a propaganda tool? It’s owned by shareholders like blackrock and vanguard. At least with it being nationalized it’s possible to control it democratically.
Our options are:
- An open source nationalized search engine (which would promptly run into problems with SEO, because anybody could see what would get their site the #1 spot). This option can’t honestly be called propaganda, because everyone would know what weights if any are placed on results.
- A blackbox search engine that has been nationalized, with limited ability of the people to know/modify the algorithm, which could be called propaganda, especially if this is controlled by a failed democracy.
- A blackbox search engine owned by the likes of blackrock and vanguard, with no ability to democratically modify the algorithm
None of these options are good, but the third is clearly the worst. The rich should not dictate what results pop up.
Other countries would seriously discourage or ban its use, but as it is useful they’d need a replacement. Hence a thousand shitty ones.
There is only ~200ish countries out there depending on how you count it. Most of them share search engines across borders, and that is unlikely to change, because if they were to see a nationalized search engine as a security problem, they would have already seen google as a security problem. So even if every third country made their own, there would only be a few dozen search engines.
But even assuming there would be 1000 search engines, 1000 shitty search engines is better than 1 shitty search engine with 85% market share. At least with the 1000 shitty engines there is competition. As of now, google is free to mess around with their black box engine however they like, showing and hiding what they like, all at the behest of blackrock, vanguard & company.
So I don’t see how this would be to everyone’s disinterest. Killing google and nationalizing it is exactly in everyone’s interest.
Lol… Democratically.
Just because the U.S. is a joke of a democracy doesn’t mean democracy as a whole is a joke.
*Constitutional Republic.
How is it not currently a propaganda tool? It’s owned by shareholders like blackrock and vanguard. At least with it being nationalized it’s possible to control it democratically
It is somewhat, but it’s not as bad as if it was run by Trump and co.
Which is how x would become the whole internet.
Which is why the best option. Which you didn’t include, is splitting Google up. Split the advertising from search. This is the surest way to make them cater to us. Especially if we can force them to compete with other search engines.but it’s not as bad as if it was run by Trump and co.
The U.S. isn’t a functioning democracy though, which is why that’s a problem. And just because a nationalized service is controlled democratically doesn’t mean it is controlled by a president. There are a lot of different ways to have democracy.
And we no longer live in an era of horse and buggy, so democracy can be far more direct than it has in the past.
In addition, there is already a multitude of positions filled/appointed/approved by the president. The administrator of NASA, the administrator of the EPA, etc. There is nearly 500 federal agencies like this.
So this would not be a problem unique to a nationalized search engine. So the solution is an actual democratic control of these agencies/administrators, not a wanna be dictator.
Another thing to keep in mind, what I’m proposing is something that would only ever work in an actual functioning democracy. So therefore I am not proposing this within the U.S.
Which you didn’t include, is splitting Google up
As I said, I think it is debatable if a search engine is even critical enough to warrant nationalization. I don’t think the need is there. And as I (admitted retroactively edited my comment to say), I have previously stated that I’m totally cool with breaking up Google at a bare minimum. The rest of this is just about the hypothetical of nationalization.
Split the advertising from search.
Short of publicly funding private companies, this would just result in a subscription model, which nobody wants. It’s either ads, subs, or public subsidization.
This is the surest way to make them cater to us.
It’s a half measure. The only real way to make them cater to us (aside from previously mentioned nationalization) is regulation, workplace democracy, and so on.
Even if Google got turned into a small company that only ever does search, they’ll still be a business running under capitalism, with all of the profit seeking motives that got us to where we are now.
I think what we’re running into here, is that you want to talk about removing capitalism. Which I’m all for, in the context of a functional democracy. Which isn’t the case in the US or anywhere in the world.
Until we know what that looks like, and its parameters you won’t admit how bad nationalising a search engine is without other privately owned alternatives.
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.
That hasn’t been the case if you look into what happened with Microsoft and browsers.
The other thing is
everyone would still use Google.
Is actually wrong, and what they proved with the antitrust case itself. A huge chunk of the anticompetitive activity was Google paying to be the default because people don’t change the default.
“Give me the fruit of some else’s labor!!!” Gross.
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?
I don’t worry much about people who have more than me. I am grateful to enjoy my work and my life. I don’t want the government to steal from me and I don’t want them to steal from others either. Even in the black and white world of marxists, exploitation of labor just moves from the oppressors to the government. The government becomes the oppressors. It has never worked, it will never work. People are naturally motivated by profit. It’s built in. Messing with that or short-circuiting the work-reward system is unsustainable.
Right? Fucking billionaires
I don’t agree with that guy but doesn’t that apply to the people running these companies. Profit can only be made by exploiting labour. There can’t be any other way
Profit can only be made by exploiting labour. There can’t be any other way
This is a bad take and suffers from overly-simplistic thinking. Corporations are force multipliers for labor and the economic value of your labor is increased by joining forces with others.
Why is it a bad take. How can there be any other way. Where exactly is profit created from?
Profit is created from the output of productive labor. The amount of profit varies depending on the efficiency of the market and the company.
Companies are force multipliers for labor. The company’s profit comes from that force mulitplication, not by withholding profit from the worker who generated it.
Welcome back from your 6 month bad take hiatus.
Who’s labor?
Who is labor?
Good luck, I’m all for it, but good luck
That’s what I like to hear!
invest in Sherman Antitrust Act memes now
Unless Savannah is some girl he knows, not sure this lands. Savannah, GA wasn’t really ever ravaged in the Civil War or anything.
Atlanta’s the one that got leveled.
Yeah. I just remembered from history class that he had given them a message saying basically “Surrender or I lay unholy seige apon the city and you either die by being blown up or starve to death.” and the name sounded good, lol. He did end up with the key to the city! Good old Sherman. Liked to laugh, sing, set fire to homes, sometimes with people in them, good old total war guy.
Like that is what you point out, and not the fact they got the wrong Sherman pictured lol. John Sherman ≠ William Tecumseh Sherman
I knew it was the wrong Sherman, but in the case of Google, I’d want the Total War Scorched Earth type.
Ha, another good point. I didn’t recognize the person so I just lazily assumed it was supposed to be “generic Union Soldier”
Here you go. Right guy.
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.
Great, now do the rest of them.
Alphabet soup
