161–170 of 524 posts
I agree that Google has an inordinate amount of power in the market and that it has to be restrained. That said, I do not like the 'better' qualifier here. It depends too much on who is reading it. Hell, it is not impossible average user will dislike the change ( but they always do).
Nonsense. It has no more power than Microsoft or Apple.
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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.
Without Google subsidizing Chrome, a real competitive market for browsers might emerge, with more vendors investing more effort into competing for users, without having to compete against one of the richest companies in the world that sees its browser as a loss-leader for its ad business, has the ability to dump infinite money into its product, and can advertise it on the one website that 90% of people regularly visit?
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Why does it have to be more of a monopoly than Microsoft to be considered a monopoly?
It doesn't. But if B is less of a monopoly than A, and the regulators are going to break up B, but not break up A, that does lead to questions. Why start with B? Why not start with A, and then do B?
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> Google Search has competitors and is not even selling its search product. The product is not search, it’s ad placements.
Your comment specifically called out their search product. If your argument is that they have a monopoly on ads, I don't believe that's true either.
YOU are the product, being sold to advertisers, and Google search is the channel through which you are sold.
Yes, everybody is still super upset that Microsoft got hit by antitrust in 2001 and shifted heavily to B2B. We've really missed out on having more fantastic Microsoft software forcibly intertwined in our daily lives. I wish Microsoft owned all of desktop AND mobile computing AND the internet so I was forced to do everything via the fantastic Microsoft Windows! Darn these regulators for trying to allow competitors to…
> and shifted heavily to B2B Azure, VS code, Github, CoPilot... the emergence of teams... > I wish Microsoft owned A large chunk of the engineering stack?
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.
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They're not. Textbook definition: "A market structure characterized by a single seller, selling a unique product in the market." Google Search has competitors and is not even selling its search product.
In this context, "selling" can't just mean "exchanging for money", it has to mean something like "exchanging for a valuable consideration." The valuable consideration that you provide in exchange for using Google is your attention on their ads, and your behavioral and personal data that can be sold. And I would say that Google can fairly be called a unique product in the market. They are the default search engine on…
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.
The bigger problem is that by conglomerating all of these businesses that are operating in different industries, Google has cut out competition from companies that would provide those services. Why does Google search use Google adwords? Is it because adwords has given them the better terms than their competition or because they have no choice by virtue of being the same company?
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.
To exist on the internet you need to pay Google. Google is essentially the government of the open web. The problem is that government like monopolies do arise especially when there are network effects. We need to regulate search and app stores like it is a public utility. Pricing should be dutch auction or something provably fair. 20-30% for in-app purchases is obviously insane when credit cards do 1.5-3.5%. I worry…
I don't think the vast majority of the internet understands how the business model of the internet works.
1. Forbid Google from paying Apple and Android OEM’s to be the default search engine. Also, detach Google search from Android and forbid Google from forcing it to be included on every Android phone. 2. Give Google search competitors access to Google’s search data so these new AI search engine companies can compete. Without these huge amounts of data, they have no chance. Done!
2 is not how the US breaks up monopolies