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Break Up Google

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Re: Break Up Google

#141

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

akira2501 wrote: post #53
nabaraz wrote: post #34

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…

All these companies obtained this market share by purchasing competitors or integrating surrounding businesses. You're right though, they're all problems and shouldn't have been allowed to acquire so casually to their current market positions. That being said, Google gets primary access to your personal data and habits, and then also gets to sell advertising based on that data. That's certainly more unseemly than hav…

> All these companies obtained this market share by purchasing competitors

And Google has acquired hundreds of companies in the last 20 years.

Re: Break Up Google

#142

Post by mythz »

korantu wrote: post #102
mythz wrote: post #2

Break Up Amazon & Facebook too.

Current (US) laws, if I understand correctly, designed to prevent leveraging success in one market to harm your competitors in another. For example if Chrome would only work with google docs and not microsoft live. USA does not have laws to break up companies simply for being too big or even for being used by majority of customers.

US Anti trust laws applies to monopolies [1] where one of the penalties for abusing a monopoly is breaking up the company which was famously done to Standard Oil and AT&T. The EU have found Google guilty of antitrust violations and fined them a record €1.5 billion.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law#Mo...

Re: Break Up Google

#143

Post by kevingadd »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #17
kevingadd wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, this is not a new problem. Antitrust enforcement and breaking up companies has been a thing for decades (if not at least a century) Starting with companies that make over a billion dollars a year and are in multiple markets seems like an uncontroversial place, though.

Starting with companies that make over a billion dollars a year and are in multiple markets seems like an uncontroversial place, though. The problems don't occur when companies are in multiple markets, arguable that is better for competition and hence the person on the street. The problem is when a company or two dominates a single market.

You're correct that dominating a single market is bad, but using your dominance of a single market to bankroll taking over other markets is pretty nasty and you can't trivially do something like that if you aren't already fabulously wealthy from dominating a market.

In the case of the article, it's specifically talking about how Google is doing that.

Re: Break Up Google

#144

Post by kevingadd »

kats wrote: post #38

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!

Are you sure you've never paid a cent? Many products or services you buy are probably funneling some money into Google's pockets - perhaps licensing fees or agreements with Google, company profits being handed to Google for advertising. If you've ever bought an Android app or In-App Purchase, 30% of that went directly to Google.

If you think you're getting Google products and services for free, you're just not paying attention.

Re: Break Up Google

#145

Post by MattGaiser »

LatteLazy wrote: post #134

This is another article where the author goes on a flight of fantasy about how these services work. He conflates public good with public provision. He first states he doesn't know where the revenue comes from and then makes a lot of detailed decisions based on revenues (android apparently needs only a few buildings and engineers). I think this is a perfect example of the sort of wooly and confused thinking behind bre…

> He first states he doesn't know where the revenue comes from and then makes a lot of details decisions based on revenues (android apparently needs only a few buildings and engineers).

He proposes 5 spin off companies.

Advertising is fine.

It’s not clear that YouTube is profitable. And it does have a big synergy in the immense infrastructure.

Android he admits isn’t a business beyond trying to bill every user for using it.

I doubt Maps has much value except in combination with the ad business unless they stopped doing consumer stuff and mostly focused on GPS and corporate guidance systems. It would be fundamentally different.

With Cloud, he assumes that it is the vendor of every other service. Why would they bother with consumer stuff if they now have to pivot to infrastructure for the successor companies? It would turn into the equivalent of a REIT and would just pay a dividend. That is where investors take companies that have reliable cash cow businesses with limited growth potential.

Re: Break Up Google

#146

Post by netcan »

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…

> 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.

My first question is "why?" What is this trying to fix or achieve, on behalf of who? Shareholders themselves can choose to buy or sell as they please, so I'm not worried about them.

The context of this article is monopoly. My feeling on this issue is that (a) it is a major factor in economic and tech progress (2) our current frameworks, in theory and especially in practice, are totally insufficient to deal with it. (3) Monopolistic positions are, paraphrasing Thiel, what most of the tech industry is about.

Beyond that, there is a lot that can be wrong with shareholder control too. One underlooked problem (IMO) is that "a committee is a committee." If money managers have all the control, we have the same company over and over again.

Re: Break Up Google

#147

Post by MattGaiser »

kevingadd wrote: post #131
MattGaiser wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having lots of profit just means it is a good business. It doesn’t demonstrate that it is a monopoly nor that it is a harmful monopoly. There are plenty of other highly profitable areas of business. They just usually take their earnings instead of investing them in new things.

"Having lots of profit just means it is a good business." Are you going to seriously argue that's the case? The companies that created the opioid crisis made a truckload of money off it. Health insurers make tons of money. For that matters, dealing illegal drugs is very very profitable and that's why crime syndicates are involved in it. So is selling weapons to the military, or generally involving yourself in foreign…

Yes I am going to argue that case.

Profits alone do not indicate something evil. Evil things can be profitable, but the inverse is not necessarily true.

Re: Break Up Google

#148

Post by ricardo81 »

The author asks how gmail makes money. Their "business email" where you bring your own domain costs about 5GBP a month, and that's their cheapest plan.

Re: Break Up Google

#149

Post by jhowell »

aliante wrote: post #71
searchableguy wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe people should just pay for it? Oh no. How could they make us pay for the software services. Imo, this mentality needs to go. People spend $$$ in cafe, buy expensive branded clothes, transportation, hanging out with their friends, outside food, and so on. All of those are not necessary but they pay for it. They should pay for the digital services they spend most of their time on now a days. What's different?

Except, they don't. People aren't willing to pay much for non-physical goods anymore.

> People aren't willing to pay much for non-physical goods anymore.

Anecdotal

Re: Break Up Google

#150

Post by beachy »

peteretep wrote: post #123
beachy wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> We force corporations to do all sorts of things that harm shareholder value in pursuit of benefitting society.

True, but those things are not the driving force of the corporate, they're things that the corporate has to do to remain in compliance with the laws of the land. There's a very different mindset between compliance (stuff you do as cheaply and minimally as you can) and your purpose - your raison d'être - the theme that earns the big promotions and holds the attention of the stockholders.

And as for voters deciding what they want the role of a corporation to be... well yes, in the same theoretical sense that voters can decide what sort of healthcare system they want. Or what tax system they want. Which is to say, not at all.

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