Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google is a monopoly – the fix isn't obvious

theregister.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 524 posts

Re: Google is a monopoly – the fix isn't obvious

#91

Post by shadowgovt »

mcpar-land wrote: post #65
fny wrote: post #31

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…

Breaking up their individual businesses can cause each business to have incentives that line up better with their customers / users. Example: if Chrome was separated from Google, they won't have as much of an incentive to push back against adblockers with things like Manifest V3. Or include APIs that are only available to google websites (Which it has! https://x.com/lcasdev/status/1810696257137959018 )

It's an interesting hypothesis, but it's entirely possible that separated from Google, Chrome is either not a viable business model (browsers don't make money on their own) or is incentivized to get into bed with some other ad company to make money, to effectively the same result.

Re: Google is a monopoly – the fix isn't obvious

#92

Post by airstrike »

matthewfelgate wrote: post #58
bearjaws wrote: post #30

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?

"What about Y" has no bearing on X. Go ahead and spawn that separate thread.

Re: Google is a monopoly – the fix isn't obvious

#93

Post by coldpie »

andrewla wrote: post #75

> A fitting though unlikely outcome would be for Google to be forced to turn Chrome and the open source Chromium project over to Mozilla. That would probably involve the creation of an independent non-profit foundation that didn't reduce browser diversity – so Chrome and Firefox could continue to lead independent lives. Okay ... that is some serious wishcasting.

Hahah, yeah. That paragraph is where my opinion of the article turned from "maybe interesting" to "just some guy on the Internet rambling".

Re: Google is a monopoly – the fix isn't obvious

#94

Post by JKCalhoun »

arder wrote: post #54

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…

I think you meant "berth" rather than "birth".

> If you could point at one bad thing Google did...

Agree. But then there are the more nebulous ones — like Google's ad/search entanglement.

Re: Google is a monopoly – the fix isn't obvious

#95

Post by treyd »

hoosieree wrote: post #71
dosinga wrote: post #11

Part of the problem is that tech products tend to be natural monopolies. If you split android off Google, it will probably just lose out against iOS in the West and some Chinese Android version elsewhere. As the article says, that's not necessarily better.

> tech products tend to be natural monopolies Based on what evidence? Isn't the simpler explanation "VC wants big return; VC funds tech; therefore VC encourages monopolies"?

Network effects are just so strong. Once a particular option has ingrained itself for a particular use-case they can make it extremely difficult for any alternative to become viable even if it's technologically superior. Just look at Windows vs Linux.

Re: Google is a monopoly – the fix isn't obvious

#96

Post by graemep »

Gormo wrote: post #38
dosinga wrote: post #11

Part of the problem is that tech products tend to be natural monopolies. If you split android off Google, it will probably just lose out against iOS in the West and some Chinese Android version elsewhere. As the article says, that's not necessarily better.

> Part of the problem is that tech products tend to be natural monopolies. Middleman platforms often become natural monopolies due to network effects, but how does this expand to tech products in general? I don't see any structural incentives that lead to natural monopolies in search, email, or a wide variety of other products that Google is dominant in.

and other markets where network effects tend to create monopolies tend to be very highly regulated or state owned: telecoms and financial markets, for example.

Re: Google is a monopoly – the fix isn't obvious

#97

Post by kmmlng »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #69
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Breaking up Google gets worse the longer we wait.

That seems to be in support of the parent's point.

So breaking up Google would have resulted in worse outcomes for consumers 10 years ago, but it would be even worse today? Then it wouldn't have made sense to break them up 10 years ago and it would make even less sense today.

I'm not claiming there aren't any good reasons to break up Google (I don't know), but this line of argumentation doesn't work as far as I can see.

Re: Google is a monopoly – the fix isn't obvious

#98

Post by macNchz »

jsheard wrote: post #63
criddell wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the potential remedies is to require Google to open source their crawling data. This should make it easier for others who want to build a competing search engine.

Surely the crawling is the easiest part? The AI goldrush has seen dozens of new players gobbling up the entire internet. The hard part is turning that staggering amount of unstructured data into a useful search engine, and in particular fighting off black-hat SEO.

Websites these days are often pretty hostile to crawling aside from the Googlebot. Other crawlers are asked not to by the robots.txt, fully blocked, or put through captchas.

https://knuckleheads.club/

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/14/technology/how-google-dom...

Re: Google is a monopoly – the fix isn't obvious

#99

Post by Forgeties79 »

ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #72
uptownJimmy wrote: post #39

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.

>Google's "search results" are the textbook definition of a monopolized good/service. Defining a market as a specific search engine's search results is wild. Wouldn't every search engine have a monopoly over it's results? A grocery store monopoly over its shelves? Etc.

When you are the only grocery store for 500mi yes you functionally have a “monopoly over your shelves.”

Re: Google is a monopoly – the fix isn't obvious

#100

Post by ToValueFunfetti »

tirant wrote: post #43
matthewfelgate wrote: post #7

How is Google more of a Monopoly than Microsoft?

How is google a monopoly at all? There’s competition and alternative for each of their products. And people can keep using the alternatives if they want. I can choose iOS over Android. Bing over Google. Yahoo over Gmail. Dailymotion over YouTube. Why is it a problem that google makes a superior product and people choose it ? In all studies, when consumers get faced the decision to choose freely any search engine, mos…

Google pays $20 billion a year to be default search on Apple. Alphabet's net income was $74 billion in 2023. Why would they reduce profit by 20% to get Apple users to use the search engine that they would use anyway?
Post reply on HN