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Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business

nytimes.com

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Re: Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business

#171

Post by thrance »

FazJaxton wrote: post #158
pstuart wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the turn of the century (yikes!) Clinton reconfigured the DNC to serve the corporations rather than labor. I left the party after that but am compelled to vote blue as the least worst option. Partisan politics allows capture of the government by creating a duopoly of power. Washington warned us of this threat.

You are correct, but it's largely our first-past-the-post voting system that forces only TWO political parties on us. Voting reform is necessary to help make other parties/candidates electable.

You can change the details of the numbers game that is played every 4 years, but that won't solve the structural issues. I live in France, in any given election we have between 10 and 15 candidates from as many parties. Yet, we're still ruled by corporate interests.

The media makes sure to qualify any candidate threatening the interests of capital as a "dangerous extremist", while "pro-business" candidates receive the lion share of donations for their campaigns. And there are many other guardrails in place to ensure nothing impedes the slow erosion of our infrastructure and public services under the strains of austerity in profit of the few.

Re: Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business

#172

Post by wilg »

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.

It is in fact true that the Trump administration is corrupt on a significantly different level than any prior administration. It is harmful to paper over this.

Re: Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business

#173

Post by [deleted] »

golem14 wrote: post #160
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…

And yet, Bell was split.

[deleted]

Re: Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business

#174

Post by Arainach »

saghm wrote: post #167
Arainach wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing was skipped - the point is that this is directly analagous to unscrambling an omelet. Separating mixed things is significantly more difficult than mixing them. "The laws says X" doesn't change whether X is possible or not.

Do you really think it's impossible to pass legislation that makes something that's currently easy hard without making the reverse any harder as well?

Yes, because the difficulties in separating integrated pieces have nothing to do with a merger.

What makes splitting a company out difficult isn't (directly) a financial or paperwork burden - it's that tightly integrated systems are very difficult to untangle. There is nothing analagous that could be introduced in the merger process. You could add a mandatory delay, but that's not making it "as hard", it's just making it slower.

Re: Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business

#175

Post by bbor »

strictnein wrote: post #9
jordanb wrote: post #2

That "Lake America" is doing a hell of a lot of work for Google

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.

Also worth a shoutout is the fact that Google also got off scott free for their main monopoly case (the "will they have to sell Chrome?" headlines from a while back). I won't pretend to have even a vague idea of why exactly both rulings (sentencings?) came down so leniently, but it does seem even more unlikely that any sort of executive branch interference was at play.

Re: Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business

#176

Post by saghm »

Arainach wrote: post #174
saghm wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really think it's impossible to pass legislation that makes something that's currently easy hard without making the reverse any harder as well?

Yes, because the difficulties in separating integrated pieces have nothing to do with a merger. What makes splitting a company out difficult isn't (directly) a financial or paperwork burden - it's that tightly integrated systems are very difficult to untangle. There is nothing analagous that could be introduced in the merger process. You could add a mandatory delay, but that's not making it "as hard", it's just makin…

I don't understand why you think the only possible ways to make mergers harder need to be "analogous". If they put a hard cap on the size of companies allowed to merge, that would make it harder, without making it harder to break them up. It's hard to take seriously the idea that you think there's literally no possible legislation that could end up changing the relative difficulty in the way the parent comment describes when I was able to come up with an insanely trivial example without needing to think about it for more than a couple minutes.

Re: Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business

#177

Post by [deleted] »

Arainach wrote: post #152
makeitdouble wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why skip this part ? > legislation needs to either make it just as hard to merge two companies as it is to unmerge them

Nothing was skipped - the point is that this is directly analagous to unscrambling an omelet. Separating mixed things is significantly more difficult than mixing them. "The laws says X" doesn't change whether X is possible or not.

[deleted]

Re: Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business

#178

Post by godwinson__4-8 »

andrekandre wrote: post #164
godwinson__4-8 wrote: post #146

The United States government is fractured and can't get its act together. No one has a credible plan to solve this. Electing your preferred president doesn't solve a broken Senate and other structural problems. The presidency is likely to keep bouncing between parties that care as much (if not more) about undoing the previous four years as they do sketching out a coherent plan for the future four. How is wielding thi…

> Meanwhile China is operating on government initiatives china fosters intense internal competition though; they don't just create and then subsidize some monopoly... avoiding breaking up mono/oligopolies feels the opposite (and a loosing strategy long-term imo)

It is a good and important point. But again this is paired with vast amounts of public investment. So to focus on the government's prevention of single sources of power (that which could eventually threaten the primacy of the Chinese central government itself) obscures the issue.

In the United States we don't have the same reliability of public initiative. That's the point I'm making. Therefore, in such a context breaking up and weakening the companies that do makes us competitive doesn't strike me as a good strategy. And I wish more people would acknowledge that tradeoff in their anti "big tech" rhetoric.

Re: Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business

#179

Post by TylerE »

mpalczewski wrote: post #89
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To all the people pissed about the "Lake America" stuff: why in the actual fuck do you want Google of all organizations to be arbiter of geographical info, instead of federal institutions that are (at least nominally) operated under democratic principles? Don't you understand the horror of what you're suggesting: "I want Google to impose it's own personal value judgments over the government's." Yes, I think it's incr…

I do wonder how many people that criticize the renaming, were criticizing Obama when he rename Mt McKinley. What are the principles here? Or is it just names I like vs names I don't like.

That was reverting a rename. Denali was the original name.

Re: Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business

#180

Post by positr0n »

edgyquant wrote: post #155
Arainach wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing was skipped - the point is that this is directly analagous to unscrambling an omelet. Separating mixed things is significantly more difficult than mixing them. "The laws says X" doesn't change whether X is possible or not.

It’s quite literally not analogous as breaking up companies has happened a bunch but no one has ever unscrambled an omelet

fwiw I thought it was a good analogy. Sure splitting a company is possible and scrambling an omelette is not, but it sure takes a lot more effort to effectively undo entropy.

In a merger you can take as long as you want to go from

1. Two separate companies except at the end of the quarter we add their revenue and expenses together in a spreadsheet to transition to

2. One fully integrated organization

And usually you are becoming more efficient and saving time and money as you integrate.

Splitting a company needs to happen quickly or you'd get all sorts of weird effects where coworkers are ostensibly competitors whilst sharing resources during the transition. And you have to expend a huge amount of effort. Just a couple random complex systems that need to be untangled off the top of my head: physical property and leases, IP space for every IT service you run, multi-year contracts with every vendor from janitorial to SaaS, multi year contracts with customers depending on how the split goes, and of course all the intermingled finances and HR and spreadsheets every company in the world lives on. I'm sure there's thousands more considerations.

I agree antitrust is a big problem that needs to be solved. But "it should be the same amount of effort to merge and split a company" is just fantasy.

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