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

Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 383 posts

Re: Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business

#131

Post by slg »

ElProlactin wrote: post #106
strictnein wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The judge was appointed by Clinton, so they've been in their role for decades now. It seems unlikely that someone who has served that long in her position would rule based on making the child in the White House happy.

> It seems unlikely that someone who has served that long in her position would rule based on making the child in the White House happy. The US is a corporatocracy. It's apparently a lot easier for Americans to convince themselves that the current administration is corrupt and end there than it is to acknowledge that the entire system has been corrupted and it won't change once the administration changes.

Two things can be true at once, the entire system is corrupt and the current administration is much more corrupt than any prior administration.

Re: Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business

#132

Post by xp84 »

dragontamer wrote: post #121
xp84 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the powers that be are corrupt we can simply keep calling it Lake Ontario This is the same logic that the right wing used when they disagreed with Obama on some issues, so they blocked his Supreme Court nominations just because anything Obama does must be bad. Sounds like your social circle is in denial. There are certainly plenty of things Trump, buffoon and graft-a-holic he is, has done that are corrupt. Renam…

The President doesn't have an ability to officially change the names of these locations. They have the ability to change name services in some database somewhere. But it's not actually an official name change. So all this hand wringing about official names or whatever ignores the reality of the situation. This is just another temper tantrum by Trump that we reasonable people can ignore. The easiest way to do that is…

> They have the ability to change name services in some database somewhere. But it's not actually an official name change.

Is it Congress who officially holds that power, then? And are you saying that if Congressional Republicans passed a bill renaming whatever, and Trump signed it, you'd then acknowlege it? Given how vanishingly little they accomplish in Congress already, I'm not sure we'd be better off distracting them from their semiannual debt ceiling/budget hostage situation in order to debate these inconsequential things.

Re: Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business

#133

Post by cyberax »

paaloeye wrote: post #114

Arguably tangential, but for how long more will Nvidia and CUDA avoid the US anti-trust?

Why would they be subjected to anti-trust? There's a robust competition from AMD and Intel, and NVidia is not using any obviously illegal competition tricks.

Re: Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business

#134

Post by rigrassm »

Arainach wrote: post #116
xahrepap wrote: post #113

Slightly tangential thought: My belief is: legislation needs to either make it just as hard to merge two companies as it is to unmerge them, or make it just as easy to unmerge two companies as it is to merge them. It's insane to me that for how often companies merge and cause competition issues, we effectively never see the opposite happen. I know there's a ceremonial approval for merging two companies (at least in t…

> or make it just as easy to unmerge two companies as it is to merge them. [Disclaimer: I work at Google, all words my own and not representative of anyone, etc.] There's no such thing. Let's stick to software since it's what HN knows best, but it's a universal truth. Merging two companies: you take the two sides and they keep running. You probably need some extra accounting work to make sure the mandatory reports fr…

I suspect a large majority of the issues you brought up with splitting can be addressed by legislation.

Off the top of my head, something along the lines of having a mandatory period of time where the company being acquired must be kept separate enough that the merger can be dissolved in a timely manner should it be deemed necessary. How long that window should be would be up for debate but personally I'd argue the window should scale somehow based on things like the valuations of each company involved, headcounts, and maybe even competitive landscape.

An example would be requiring both companies to perform a pre-merger assessment to determine positions/roles, technology use and regulatory requirements that must be maintained for a clean separation and creating a plan that gets filed with the relevant agencies to be used if/when the merger needs dissolving. If the time comes that they need to dissolve the merger but they don't maintain that separation, they still have to do it and you slap a fine on them equal to some percentage of that mergers cost to be paid by the parent company.

Hell, that idea alone would accomplish both making it harder to merge and easier to dissolve the merger.

Re: Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business

#136

Post by romanows »

vlovich123 wrote: post #120
xahrepap wrote: post #113

Slightly tangential thought: My belief is: legislation needs to either make it just as hard to merge two companies as it is to unmerge them, or make it just as easy to unmerge two companies as it is to merge them. It's insane to me that for how often companies merge and cause competition issues, we effectively never see the opposite happen. I know there's a ceremonial approval for merging two companies (at least in t…

You're basically advocating for unscrambling the omelet to be easier. Should be obvious why it's harder to unmix than it is to mix.

I don't think it's particularly unusual for a company to spin off another company?

Re: Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business

#137

Post by xp84 »

Drunk_Engineer wrote: post #105
xp84 wrote: post #87

> Google’s ad tech business brought in $30 billion last year, or about 8 percent of the revenue for its parent company, Alphabet. Its ad tech revenue has declined for 16 straight quarters, and analysts estimate it accounts for less than 1 percent of the company’s profit... “This is a business no one cares about" Can someone closer to GOOG explain this? The phrase "ad tech" seems to have a very specific meaning here.…

If it is a business no one cares about, then why has Google been fighting this?

The money is nbd, but it's much more important to Google (same as it would be for any of the other tech giants) to keep a certain streak going - 42 years now and counting since the government forced a large or important company to do anything even resembling breaking up. A loss here would serve as precedent (either legally, or at minimum in people's emotions) that you CAN force a divestiture. If Google can be forced to divest this business, why not Chrome, YouTube, or Android? Why can't Apple be forced to divest the App Store business, or Amazon be forced to divest AWS?

Re: Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business

#138

Post by falcor84 »

siliconc0w wrote: post #135

We should just progressively tax monopolies. Companies will break themselves up to compete, no decade long DOJ case needed.

Yes, this, and we need to have this progressive tax be over the company's total assets, including subsidiaries.

Re: Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business

#139

Post by rectoverso »

vlovich123 wrote: post #120
xahrepap wrote: post #113

Slightly tangential thought: My belief is: legislation needs to either make it just as hard to merge two companies as it is to unmerge them, or make it just as easy to unmerge two companies as it is to merge them. It's insane to me that for how often companies merge and cause competition issues, we effectively never see the opposite happen. I know there's a ceremonial approval for merging two companies (at least in t…

You're basically advocating for unscrambling the omelet to be easier. Should be obvious why it's harder to unmix than it is to mix.

PE companies do it all the time.

Re: Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business

#140

Post by hammock »

rigrassm wrote: post #134
Arainach wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> or make it just as easy to unmerge two companies as it is to merge them. [Disclaimer: I work at Google, all words my own and not representative of anyone, etc.] There's no such thing. Let's stick to software since it's what HN knows best, but it's a universal truth. Merging two companies: you take the two sides and they keep running. You probably need some extra accounting work to make sure the mandatory reports fr…

I suspect a large majority of the issues you brought up with splitting can be addressed by legislation. Off the top of my head, something along the lines of having a mandatory period of time where the company being acquired must be kept separate enough that the merger can be dissolved in a timely manner should it be deemed necessary. How long that window should be would be up for debate but personally I'd argue the w…

What can’t be solved with legislation?
Post reply on HN