Thread https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1451619916994396164.html
Thank you! Why DO people insist on posting essays as 1,001 tweets!? The mind boggles.
An enormous thread on alleged Google Facebook collusion
71–80 of 365 posts
Re: An enormous thread on alleged Google Facebook collusion
#72Best part for me:
Users were led to believe they were encrypted. They were not. @MikeIsaac
Google knew users were mislead. See quotes: >>
Re: An enormous thread on alleged Google Facebook collusion
#73I remember when google was the shining light of “be nice company” that we all dreamed of working for, at odds with the evil that was M$crosoft. And, from reading all the “why I left google” posts and hearing about them leaving China, the old google of 20 or even just 10 years ago was the good or even just a better google. With how google went from “do no evil” to this, with how Facebook has always been profits over e…
Yep...in a very short amount of time they went from "dont be evil" to "hide your evil".
“See no evil”?
Re: An enormous thread on alleged Google Facebook collusion
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unlike Microsoft, where at least some of the business units could do pretty well on their own, if the company was broken up, I doubt the same would be true for Google. Other than search and ads, I doubt other part would do particular well. Breaking up Google would result in a lot of people losing their job. I’m not arguing that you’re wrong in the idea of breaking up Google, but I doubt it will happen.
I can see at least five entirely separate units with very little synergy: 1. Search + Maps 2. GSuite + Gmail 3. GCP 4. YouTube 5. Android + Chrome Each can probably support its own P&L sheet, other than perhaps the last (not sure about that one). Such a move would surely limit innovation (I can’t see these smaller entities doing things like mobile ASIC development, although if TPU is under Search it would continue),…
Though this isn't is a bad idea, if we really want to avoid the inefficiencies stemming from monopolies, we need to not just break up by business unit, but even more so ensure those business units are not themselves little monopolies. That would likely mean breaking up the units too; i.e. not just 1 search provider, but at least two; not just 1 android but at least two, etc.
Having each smaller niche served by its own monopoly is perhaps better than having just 1 monopoly with a larger niche, but it'll still just converge towards today's ever more feudal society.
There is 0 polical interest in dealing with that though, and it would be a really tricky issue - after all, if you're serious about wanting to support capitalism, google is by no means the only company that needs to go. It would mean a fairly dramatic restructuring of the corporate landscape, and you'd need to have answers for scenarios where economies of scale are so lucrative, they outweigh the benefits of competition (would those be non-profits with multiple competing clients?) Also, the laws around intangible value (i.e. intellectual property) are pretty much designed for monopolization. Finally, we don't live in a vacuum; how will you deal with transnational corporations, and specifically with overseas monopolies that can play off the now smaller intra-national non-monopolists against each other? As tax-avoidance schemes have shown, corporate structures can get quite complex, so it's quite possible some kind of mutually dependent franchise system might develop with the true ownership still centralized and monopolistic - but external.
All in all, the path towards the idealized capitalist system seems implausibly long. We're going to want ways of mitigating the damage before we get there, and that implies ways of dealing with these kind of non-capitalist entities in non-capitalist ways; perhaps a special huge-size tax and a more interventionist state. And even that seems like wishful thinking in today's political climate...
Re: An enormous thread on alleged Google Facebook collusion
#75I remember when google was the shining light of “be nice company” that we all dreamed of working for, at odds with the evil that was M$crosoft. And, from reading all the “why I left google” posts and hearing about them leaving China, the old google of 20 or even just 10 years ago was the good or even just a better google. With how google went from “do no evil” to this, with how Facebook has always been profits over e…
I think any tech company that is growing, and has not achieved profitability by a clear mechanism that you're ok with is a risk.
Re: An enormous thread on alleged Google Facebook collusion
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can see at least five entirely separate units with very little synergy: 1. Search + Maps 2. GSuite + Gmail 3. GCP 4. YouTube 5. Android + Chrome Each can probably support its own P&L sheet, other than perhaps the last (not sure about that one). Such a move would surely limit innovation (I can’t see these smaller entities doing things like mobile ASIC development, although if TPU is under Search it would continue),…
The only two of those I’m pretty sure could survive on their own is search and YouTube. Android and Chrome pretty much doesn’t have a business case. GCP might be big enough at this point, but is still just burning ad money. GSuite/GMail is again a maybe, but can it afford the infratructure? They would at least have to cribble the free tier.
I worked on GCP until recently. I remember celebrating (in-office) our product within GCP surpassing one million dollars of revenue per day. GCP would be fine.
Re: An enormous thread on alleged Google Facebook collusion
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Such a move would surely limit innovation [...] but increase competition Wouldn't increasing competition also increase innovation as more companies can actually enter the market with new ideas? Sure, the innovation at Google itself might go down, but that should hardly be an argument against solving their anti-competitive behavior.
There are some things requiring capital investment at a scale that wouldn’t be feasible for a company outside the 100bn market cap club. Data centers, intercontinental data links, high end VLSI development, high end smartphone hardware and things like Waymo all come to mind. It’s more than cash alone, it’s low cost nature of their mistakes (because everything is paid for by Search anyway) that enables that.
With more companies competing, there will be more innovation overall.
Re: An enormous thread on alleged Google Facebook collusion
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
The only two of those I’m pretty sure could survive on their own is search and YouTube. Android and Chrome pretty much doesn’t have a business case. GCP might be big enough at this point, but is still just burning ad money. GSuite/GMail is again a maybe, but can it afford the infratructure? They would at least have to cribble the free tier.
Here, let me help you out with ways to find hard data that disprove these conjectures. > Android Take a look at recent court documents about the size of the Play Store revenues. It’s a multi-billion-dollar cash cow after paying off the carriers and device makers to keep their spyware loaded. > Chrome Google single handedly kept Mozilla running for over a decade with their search deal. The deal for iOS is worth billio…
It’s hard to say how a split would happen. I guess I would assume a different split, which would force Android and Chrome out of any type of ad business, meaning that Chrome could not take money from search and where Android would be forced out of any user tracking.
Other than GCP, which I still think would fail, if split out in the next year or do, you make a good point.
Re: An enormous thread on alleged Google Facebook collusion
#79Google seriously needs to be broken up into small pieces or disolved entirely. Their leadership just cannot be be trusted and the internet would be better off without them around.
Can we trust the leadership of "smaller versions" of Google ?
Is the current Google leadership a shining beacon of trustability?
Re: An enormous thread on alleged Google Facebook collusion
#80I remember when google was the shining light of “be nice company” that we all dreamed of working for, at odds with the evil that was M$crosoft. And, from reading all the “why I left google” posts and hearing about them leaving China, the old google of 20 or even just 10 years ago was the good or even just a better google. With how google went from “do no evil” to this, with how Facebook has always been profits over e…
None of them, I am quite old to have learned in a capitalist society it is always about the money. Company mottos, cultural values, we are family, and all the marketing garbage that they sell for new hires to feel good is just that, plain marketing. When things get though, the "values" hardly matter to get deals or fire people.
And now you know the true reason for age discrimination. It takes time, no matter how intelligent, to see through such dogma.