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Break Up Google

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Re: Break Up Google

#31

Post by jldugger »

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…

I imagine android would probably survive via search engine placement fees similar to safari / iOS / firefox.

Re: Break Up Google

#32

Post by jhowell »

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…

> YouTube wasn’t profitable for a while. Even if it is now, it is probably barely so.

First search result...

"YouTube generated nearly $5 billion in ad revenue in the last three months, Google revealed today as part of parent company Alphabet’s fourth quarter earnings report."

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-al...

Re: Break Up Google

#33

Post by quonn »

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…

> The word "monopoly" doesn't appear once in the whole article

„For many years, the astonishing torrent of money thrown off by Google’s Web-search monopoly [...]“

Re: Break Up Google

#34

Post by nabaraz »

Is anyone else tired of seeing the same hate Facebook, Zoom and Google narratives every single day.

So, we want to break up Google because it has gotten too big. What about Luxottica? It has over 80% market share on eyewear brands. What about Pearson? It has over 60% market share on testing market? What about Paypal? It has over 80% market share on online payments. What about Aetna (merged with Humana) on health care market? List goes on..

Re: Break Up Google

#35

Post by aliante »

peteretep wrote: post #22

> 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 emi…

> the unelected Page and Brin having all that power with no recourse for the market

The effective market when it comes to voting shares consists of hedge fund managers like Carl Icahn and Bill Ackman.

Nobody else is organized enough to beat the activist investors and they do all sorts of terrible things with that kind of power.

Re: Break Up Google

#36

Post by supermatt »

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.

I agree - There is no way that Youtube could compete without access to google resources. If they had to pay for their own bandwidth, hosting, transcoding, etc while surviving off adsense revenue (paying same google "commission" as everyone else), they would quickly drive themselves into bancruptcy simply due to their popularity!

They are stifling competition because they have unlimited funds to throw at anything they want. They should definitely be split up.

Re: Break Up Google

#37

Post by zerocrates »

Funnily it doesn't actually say where the broken-off Search is supposed to go. Along with the ads division? Doesn't really feel in line with the break up idea...

Disconnected from the other stuff it subsidizes, what is the massively profitable search business actually supposed to use that money for? Massive dividends? Diversifying into anything just gets them into the same kind of problem immediately, no?

It sort of feels like the main benefit here would be from the proposed privacy law vs. breaking up Google.

Re: Break Up Google

#38

Post by kats »

Yeah, let's break up Google! I've been depending on their software for almost 15 years now, I use something they made practically every hour that I'm awake, and never paid a cent for it! I'm really getting a raw deal here!

Re: Break Up Google

#39

Post by [deleted] »

peteretep wrote: post #22

> 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 emi…

[deleted]

Re: Break Up Google

#40

Post by ijpsud »

markdown wrote: post #18
AndrewUnmuted wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their transcode, storage, and compute costs are what lead me to also believe YouTube is not profitable, or just barely profitable.

If those costs were high they'd have long ago banned the spam accounts that upload autogenerated garbage.

"[In Q3 2018] YouTube removed about 1.67 million channels and all of the 50.2 million videos that were available from them. Nearly 80% of the channel takedowns related to spam uploads, YouTube said."

https://www.businessinsider.com/r-youtube-under-pressure-for...

The remaining 20% were apparently taken down due to nudity and other policy violations.

To be clear: I have no idea whether they're profitable or not. Just pointing out this article.

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