81–90 of 524 posts
If what comes after is not better, then we waited too long to break this monopoly up. We either start ripping this band-aids off or we will just continually have a worse and worse internet.
What about Microsoft?
I feel like the US should have serious conversations about it's regulation of monopolies, especially on internet giants. The current system seems to be woefully ineffective. On the one hand, it's not clear it's necessarily, Google isn't a particularly old company it hasn't had a strangle hold for long and it doesn't look like it's business is unassailable. So why go after it at all. On the other hand, the anti-monopo…
Google was incorporated 26 years ago, in 1998. Microsoft was founded in 1975, 26 years before US v. Microsoft was decided. Google is exactly as old as Microsoft was at the time, and while it's harder to measure my sense is that their stranglehold on search is at least as long and at least as unassailable as Microsoft's was in OSes.
You can't have it be both too early to go after Google and yet too late to have gone after Microsoft.
If what comes after is not better, then we waited too long to break this monopoly up. We either start ripping this band-aids off or we will just continually have a worse and worse internet.
It appears to me that your two paragraphs contradict each other. If we break up Google and what comes afterwards is worse, then break it up or we'll get worse? Is it worse if we do and worse if we don't? Which "worse" is worse? Or do I misunderstand your point? The whole point of breaking up monopolies is not moral principle. It's so that things get better for customers. If they don't, then what's the justification f…
I'm very curious to see what a breakup looks like. Past breakups involved "uniform" businesses: - American Tobacco: Commodity - Standard Oil: Commodity - AT&T: Utility - Northern Securities: Railroads - Swift & Co: Meatpacking - Kodak: Film - Paramount: Movie Theaters Google is more of a synergistic conglomerate. How would spinning off an individual business like Chrome, Android, or AdWords reduce their respective do…
Maybe we do want to make everything a little worse for the average customer so that more businesses can compete in the marketplace. But I, for one, will miss being able to attach Drive content smoothly to my emails, or being able to use my voice to trigger map navigation on my phone.
Google's "search results" are the textbook definition of a monopolized good/service. The whole thing is almost a casino, rigged to the point of absurdity. There has been nothing in my life so disillusioning as working on a Web app for a company that is more or less required to play Google's game.
> There has been nothing in my life so disillusioning as working on a Web app for a company that is more or less required to play Google's game. Have you built any iOS apps?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about Microsoft?
The funny thing is this is going to be benefit Microsoft significantly. Much of what Google did Chrome, Android, etc. was to prevent Microsoft from destroying it like Netscape, Novell, Lotus, Wordperfect, ... It's probably no coincidence that Google's first external CEO Eric Schmidt was the CEO of Novell.
I think Google can win this easily by using the public opinion against the regulators. They just need to say that they are gonna start charging for all their services because without the level of integration they have it doesn't make sense to keep running businesses that otherwise would lose money.
I don't see this succeeding. Not only is tech extremely hateable as a demographic, not everyone is a corporate bootlicker (outside of this forum)
Oh boy is this incorrect.
Outside the Silicon Valley / well-educated upper middle class / tech worker bubble, tech companies are more trusted than most political parties and government and religious institutions, and this is true across the world as polls show. People who are not into tech have no idea about Google's business deals or App Store anti-steering provisions. They use Google as long as it delivers great results, and switch to searching on Tiktok or asking Chat GPT if it doesn't. HN is probably one of the most anti-tech places on the internet, maybe outside of Mastodon.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about Microsoft?
The funny thing is this is going to be benefit Microsoft significantly. Much of what Google did Chrome, Android, etc. was to prevent Microsoft from destroying it like Netscape, Novell, Lotus, Wordperfect, ... It's probably no coincidence that Google's first external CEO Eric Schmidt was the CEO of Novell.
Google's "search results" are the textbook definition of a monopolized good/service. The whole thing is almost a casino, rigged to the point of absurdity. There has been nothing in my life so disillusioning as working on a Web app for a company that is more or less required to play Google's game.