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Break Up Google

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Re: Break Up Google

#121

Post by Zanni »

peteretep wrote: post #80
kelnos wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have a big problem with him and the unelected Page and Brin having all that power with no recourse for the market. I just don't get that mindset. Private-company Google said "hey, we're down to be public, but Larry and Sergey will always control the company... cool?" And the market said: "yeah whatever give us those shares". It's not like anyone was holding a gun up to anyone's head, forcing them to buy GOOG. The…

> They went into it knowing that their shares' votes would be useless. I don't disagree with that at all, and I would see the current holders compensated for their shares. What I _am_ saying is I don't think society is benefitting from this structure. > the shareholders have validated their control every day since Google went public What? No, that's not how that works. The market has decided solely on the current pri…

There are all sorts of things that don't benefit society directly that are consequences of things that do benefit society. In this case, maybe society doesn't benefit from the structure of Google, but it does benefit widely from the notion of private property, and the one is a consequence of the other.

Re: Break Up Google

#122

Post by kevingadd »

aliante wrote: post #118
smnrchrds wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or a YouTube style site just wouldn't exist...

There are other sites out there offering similar services, albeit at a different scale. You could argue that some of them (like Twitch) are being dumped on the market in a similar manner, though.

Twitch's feature set is not that different from YT's at this point. They both have very elaborate streaming services, a financial support mechanism, viewable archives with seeking, automated muting for copyrighted content, and recommendations systems.

Re: Break Up Google

#123

Post by peteretep »

beachy wrote: post #115
peteretep wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They went into it knowing that their shares' votes would be useless. I don't disagree with that at all, and I would see the current holders compensated for their shares. What I _am_ saying is I don't think society is benefitting from this structure. > the shareholders have validated their control every day since Google went public What? No, that's not how that works. The market has decided solely on the current pri…

To be fair, it is not the role of a corporate to "benefit society", but instead to benefit shareholders.

We force corporations to do all sorts of things that harm shareholder value in pursuit of benefitting society. Voters get to decide what they want the role of a corporation to be.

Re: Break Up Google

#124

Post by kevingadd »

silasdavis wrote: post #116
supermatt wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Would users get a better service from the successors of YouTube? Would we have to watch more ads?

Impossible to know for sure, since any better service is going to get suffocated by Google's market power unless it's backed by another huge player like Amazon.

Re: Break Up Google

#125

Post by aliante »

SirLotsaLocks wrote: post #90
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 get what you're saying but what if because of this people start to use decentralized alternatives? Open source programs with sufficient support don't take as much money to run and develop as a proprietary service would. Obviously not everything would work but I imagine if we moved social media to something like the fediverse which has already proven sustainable enough it might even be better. Also with android dead…

> like the fediverse which has already proven sustainable enough it might even be better.

Is that going to scale to more than a couple non-technical users?

> if you tried to cut out google entirely from your life your quality of life would drop substantially to the point where it might affect your job and well being. That is the main problem with google and that's why people think it needs to be broken up.

You can say the same about Microsoft Word. When will that be broken up in PowerPoint, Word, and Excel?

Re: Break Up Google

#126

Post by sudhirj »

balanced009 wrote: post #113
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…

They did not do anything illegal. How is this connected to "break up Google" argument? If this was illegal, I'm sure the SEC would be on it not just for Google but for the million other companies doing the same.

The expression ‘break up a company’ carries some moral judgement in it, as if it’s a punishment for doing bad things.

Not sure exactly what it is, but it’s more a societal move that smells a bit of socialism. Google is a capitalist company in a capitalist system, but the breaking up companies / anti trust is a non-capitalist power above it that is willing to sacrifice money to create societal wealth.

Re: Break Up Google

#127

Post by opk »

When breaking up a tech company, an option that never seems to be considered is to give the products to both child companies. That way they start to compete with each other. Admittedly, only one can have, e.g. the youtube domain or associated employees but many things are just a case of making a copy.

Re: Break Up Google

#128

Post by kevingadd »

imafish wrote: post #114
jimbob45 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly agree. I find it telling that no competitor has ever been successful despite YouTube making every wrong design choice possible.

How about twitch?

Twitch is bankrolled by Amazon at this point so it's hard to say whether it's actually a good example. It started out as a live streaming service (for games only!) and slowly pivoted towards YouTube while YT pivoted towards Twitch with the addition of live streaming, subscriptions, etc.

Re: Break Up Google

#129

Post by peteretep »

Zanni wrote: post #121
peteretep wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They went into it knowing that their shares' votes would be useless. I don't disagree with that at all, and I would see the current holders compensated for their shares. What I _am_ saying is I don't think society is benefitting from this structure. > the shareholders have validated their control every day since Google went public What? No, that's not how that works. The market has decided solely on the current pri…

There are all sorts of things that don't benefit society directly that are consequences of things that do benefit society. In this case, maybe society doesn't benefit from the structure of Google, but it does benefit widely from the notion of private property, and the one is a consequence of the other.

I hear your argument, and it’s a good one. That said, we break up monopolies, we confiscate dangerous animals that people privately own, we tax inheritance... and we have well established rules of eminent domain for just this reason. As I said, I have no trouble with them being compensated fairly for it, and I think that protects the economic system.

Re: Break Up Google

#130

Post by kevingadd »

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?

The post literally mentions other big tech companies that are similar candidates for enforcement.
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