Live data from Hacker News

Justice Department, states likely to bring antitrust lawsuits against Google

wsj.com

21–30 of 502 posts

Re: Justice Department, states likely to bring antitrust lawsuits against Google

#21

The big one is Amazon. The revenue from AWS funds the ability for them to crush the high street on the shopping side. They should be forced to sell off AWS as a separate company.

Agreed. Facebook brekup doesn't make sense nor a google. Amazon has two different businesses.

Re: Justice Department, states likely to bring antitrust lawsuits against Google

#22
post #11
post #3

Amazon and Facebook should be next. Break them all up with extreme prejudice and put strict new anti-trust laws around acquisitions in place for the future. We're going to do this and open technology back up to innovation and progress, or just watch the tech giants continue to grow in power and abusiveness year after year while new startups continue to decline.

Break them up into what?

"Facebook could be forced to get rid of Instagram and WhatsApp, Amazon might divest Zappos and Whole Foods, Google may lose YouTube, and Apple could part with its App Store."

https://www.cnet.com/news/momentum-grows-to-break-up-big-tec...

Re: Justice Department, states likely to bring antitrust lawsuits against Google

#23
I will continue to believe that this is another tentacle of William Barr's political harassment of Google and tech in general until he leads the same crusade against other 'monopolies' of the same degree like Comcast, Apple, Boeing, Amazon, United Airlines, etc.

Re: Justice Department, states likely to bring antitrust lawsuits against Google

#24
post #3

Amazon and Facebook should be next. Break them all up with extreme prejudice and put strict new anti-trust laws around acquisitions in place for the future. We're going to do this and open technology back up to innovation and progress, or just watch the tech giants continue to grow in power and abusiveness year after year while new startups continue to decline.

Ever wonder why innovation takes place? Wonder why we are not still reliant on locomotives for transportation? Economic incentives for innovation and disruption are greater when a monopolistic entity is over charging for it's good or service. If they are not over charging then there is not as great an incentive to innovate or disrupt. If the latter is the case, why bust a monopoly that is providing a fair service?

> Economic incentives for innovation and disruption are greater when a monopolistic entity is over charging for it's good or service.

Care to back that up, or are we supposed to take your, frankly, very unorthodox views at face value? Every industry I can think of with entrenched monopolies sees almost no innovation until things get so bad that they are finally disrupted: aerospace, energy, advertisement, telecommunications, and the list goes on and on.

Re: Justice Department, states likely to bring antitrust lawsuits against Google

#25
The big problem with this is the extreme mediocrity of every other industry. Amazon and Google are winning everything because none of their competitors have even attempted to do better than they did 10 years ago.

Amazon should have won in very few of the markets it entered. Instead, its competitors just decided to lie down and die, with a couple of yelps on their way to their death.

Re: Justice Department, states likely to bring antitrust lawsuits against Google

#26

I don't have a problem with this. But I wonder why there isn't similar willpower to pursue, say, telecoms, banks, Monsanto, Luxxotica, Disney, and the like. Why is it just big tech?

Telecom, etc. are far, far more harmful IMHO

Re: Justice Department, states likely to bring antitrust lawsuits against Google

#27
post #11
post #3

Amazon and Facebook should be next. Break them all up with extreme prejudice and put strict new anti-trust laws around acquisitions in place for the future. We're going to do this and open technology back up to innovation and progress, or just watch the tech giants continue to grow in power and abusiveness year after year while new startups continue to decline.

Break them up into what?

If you were going to bother, you'd split Amazon and AWS. Amazon becomes mostly a retail company again. Without the AWS subsidy margins, they'll be down to retail margins and the ad business (with ads, it's plenty). They can perhaps keep the gadgets, splitting every major aspect apart might be going too far.

AWS is a $400 to $600 billion market cap company right now if it were trading on its own, based on its operating income and the insatiatable market demand for anything cloud. The ticker is even available conveniently. They'll get to $150+ billion in sales and $25+ billion in operating profit in the next six to seven years (average of 21% annual growth over seven years; very much within reach). It might approach being a trillion dollar company a decade from now (at MSFT type multiples).

You'd split Facebook and Instagram as the most obvious separation line (and then do something with WhatsApp, it can be spun off or go with either or; FB already has messenger, so it probably shouldn't go with that entity).

Instagram is a $100+ billion publicly traded company on its own plausibly. There is some question on erosion in both FB and Instagram once you detach them from eachother. They both lose a huge protective moat and cross promotion (Instagram has become a lot more mature at this point, it'll be more at risk to userbase erosion going forward, versus say five years ago; and FB is definitely at high risk for userbase erosion with fewer moats).

Re: Justice Department, states likely to bring antitrust lawsuits against Google

#28
post #20

This is interesting because it seems like the DOJ's definition of monopoly is changing, which I think is a good thing. Since the late 80s (roughly), antitrust litigation has only been brought on the basis of a monopoly's negative impact on consumer prices (i.e. does the existence of a monopoly cause the consumer to have to pay higher prices?). That ignores monopolies that impair the ability of smaller companies to en…

Planet Money did a pretty good episode on this last year: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/02/22/697170790/anti...

Re: Justice Department, states likely to bring antitrust lawsuits against Google

#30
post #11
post #3

Amazon and Facebook should be next. Break them all up with extreme prejudice and put strict new anti-trust laws around acquisitions in place for the future. We're going to do this and open technology back up to innovation and progress, or just watch the tech giants continue to grow in power and abusiveness year after year while new startups continue to decline.

Break them up into what?

In Amazon's case, there's actually a lot of shareholders that would like to see AWS spun off into a separate business.
Post reply on HN