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Break Up Google

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Re: Break Up Google

#21

Post by skinkestek »

MattGaiser wrote: post #15

Yes, let’s destroy one of the few large companies which has found a viable method of long term innovation instead of endless cost cutting and outsourcing. Let’s force Google to be like every other company in needing to constantly extract money from every project quarter by quarter. Not to mention that it is not clear that any except advertising are viable businesses by themselves. YouTube wasn’t profitable for a whil…

> Force Google to be like every other company in needing to constantly extract money from every project quarter by quarter.

I agree with the article but have my upvote: this is good counterargument to parts of it.

Re: Break Up Google

#22

Post by peteretep »

> Page and Brin each own 25.9% and 25.1% of Alphabet's voting power, respectively, accounting for over half of the company's controlling shares. That's because of Alphabet's super-voting structure, which gives 10 votes per share of its Class B stock.

also:

> Mark Zuckerberg owns the majority of the voting rights to Facebook due to a dual class structure that weights certain shares over others.

I would like to see eminent domain used to restructure these companies with weird controlling shared structures in to being truly publicly traded companies as a first step. I have no problem with Zuck getting all the money his shares of Facebook are worth, but I have a big problem with him and the unelected Page and Brin having all that power with no recourse for the market. Am I being foolish?

Re: Break Up Google

#23

Post by mtgx »

> For many years, the astonishing torrent of money thrown off by Google’s Web-search monopoly has fueled invasions of multiple other segments, enabling Google to bat aside rivals who might have brought better experiences to billions of lives.

When a company makes so much more money than it needs to invest to remain competitive and grow in its primary business, I believe that's a HUGE red flag that the company should be classified as a monopoly or under some much stricter rules, and also that governments should look at anti-competitive practices the company might employ. Because in almost all cases, when a company has more money than it knows what to do with, it must have employed some anti-competitive practices.

Re: Break Up Google

#24

Post by moonchild »

kangaroozach wrote: post #11
jaspax wrote: post #9

Here's the rub: I strongly suspect that YouTube is not profitable, or is just barely profitable, such that it would be difficult to run as a separate company from the rest of Google. This is even more true for Maps. Breaking apart Google would substantially risk those businesses. On the other hand, maybe that's a good thing.

How could that be? Server costs? Seems like YouTube would be raking in the cash.

The sheer magnitude of video data they have to deal with is enormous. They, along with netflix, comprise the majority of all internet usage. Yes, the videos you see on your front page with 10s of millions of views are raking in the cash and have negligible hosting cost. Those videos are subsidizing the 10s of millions of videos that get 4-5 views apiece.

Re: Break Up Google

#25

Post by quonn »

balanced009 wrote: post #8

These type of posts are now starting to sound like propaganda. Just emotional catharsis of some sort. There are plenty of large companies on this planet. Why do you focus on Google? and why do we see these posts frequently making it to top ten of hacker news?

Yeah, but there are, for example, at least five car companies at the top end that have kind of equally attractive products and 20 others. But in tech it‘s different.

Additionally, I don‘t think anyone working in the tech industry should want a future where a few large companies control everything. In the long run, this is not in our interest.

Re: Break Up Google

#26

Post by easytiger »

kangaroozach wrote: post #11
jaspax wrote: post #9

Here's the rub: I strongly suspect that YouTube is not profitable, or is just barely profitable, such that it would be difficult to run as a separate company from the rest of Google. This is even more true for Maps. Breaking apart Google would substantially risk those businesses. On the other hand, maybe that's a good thing.

How could that be? Server costs? Seems like YouTube would be raking in the cash.

Well just think about how much it would cost you to host, encode in many many formats, billions of hours of video, consuming exabytes of storage, providing a fully reliable service for 15 years.

Might also be worth considering why there are effectively zero competitors.

Re: Break Up Google

#27

Post by eitland »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #13

I know that there's a quota of at least one "Google bad" article at the top of Hacker News each day, and that's fine and all, but I feel like the bar for them is getting lower. There's a pretty good case for breaking up Google, but this article doesn't make it. The word "monopoly" doesn't appear once in the whole article, which is pretty weird in an article about how to break up Google and the justifications for doin…

> I know that there's a quota of at least one "Google bad" article at the top of Hacker News each day, and that's fine and all, but I feel like the bar for them is getting lower.

Feel free to make a better one, I'll upvote that as well ;-)

Re: Break Up Google

#29

Post by xzel »

kangaroozach wrote: post #11
jaspax wrote: post #9

Here's the rub: I strongly suspect that YouTube is not profitable, or is just barely profitable, such that it would be difficult to run as a separate company from the rest of Google. This is even more true for Maps. Breaking apart Google would substantially risk those businesses. On the other hand, maybe that's a good thing.

How could that be? Server costs? Seems like YouTube would be raking in the cash.

I've heard the line they're right on the edge of profitability but I've never gotten any real confirmation. I was younger when I heard that and I always though youtube was just a cash cow. But think of how much servers (huge streaming metrics for each person watch + encoding servers), bandwidth and CDN must cost them. Ever with their own cloud, that has got to be huge. I worked at Amazon Instant Video and our CDN bills made my eyeballs pop out like I was a loony toon character. Traditionally they've only made money video advertising but I'm just not sure thats a great business model for video anymore. And, also throw in live streaming that people have been using, especially during covid, which is also free, and you have even more load they pay for free.

An idea I always had was embedding a big zip or something into the mp4 format and uploading it for storage. Would they save the original files for download or would they be encoded to a lower bit rate and make them unusual. Maybe data encoded in an audio track would be better? Sounds like more than a weekend of experimenting but would be a cool little project.

Re: Break Up Google

#30

Post by smnrchrds »

jaspax wrote: post #9

Here's the rub: I strongly suspect that YouTube is not profitable, or is just barely profitable, such that it would be difficult to run as a separate company from the rest of Google. This is even more true for Maps. Breaking apart Google would substantially risk those businesses. On the other hand, maybe that's a good thing.

Wouldn't this be more in favour of breaking up Google? If YouTube is unprofitable, then Google is essentially dumping this service. It is harming competitors who do not have deep pockets of Google to bankroll their service. Breaking up YouTube means there would be a more level playground.
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