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Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business

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Re: Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business

#211
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.…

You don't need to be closer to GOOGL to look at their 10-K.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204426...

On page numbered 60, you can see the Disaggregated Revenues.

The $30B quote seems to be referencing "Google Network" revenues declining from $31B in 2023 to $30B in 2025. "Google Network" is grouped with "YouTube ads" and "Google Search & other" to comprise the "Google advertising" category of revenues which increased from $238B in 2023 to $295B in 2025.

So yea, "ad tech" does not represent the whole of Google's advertising revenue.

Re: Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business

#212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That’s one half. The other, more interesting half, recognizes that unscrambling the egg is difficult, so we must take more precautions before scrambling it in the first place.

I’ve been saying that an easy solution is just don’t allow companies with even modestly large overall sizes to merge or acquire other companies. At all. For any reason.

I think that despite this reform being a blunt instrument it would work surprisingly well.

It would allow companies that should have declined to decline and it would give massive incumbents a major incentive to innovate in-house.

Re: Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business

#213

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.

Yes, this is obviously the ask: why doesn't government unmix the omelet. Your very body unscrambles the omelet and makes you. It's what intelligent things do when they are moving agency into the proper places.

what is the purpose of regulation except to resist entropy in such strategic places?

Re: Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business

#214
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Microsoft got pretty close to getting broken up in 2000, but settled in time to avoid the split

I won’t lie, I asked Copilot (of all things) first, in order to be more confident I wasn’t forgetting even one breakup, and it also pointed out that “almost” one.

Re: Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business

#215

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 have less sympathy for Facebook/Meta. Zuckerberg is on record as saying IG can hurt us. The Whatsapp co-founder Acton saying "it's time. delete Facebook". The fact Zuckerberg's engineers were apparently specifically asked to merge the backends to make them harder to break up. I have very little sympathy for that specifically. I'm not thrilled with a lot of the things Google has done with (say) Youtube - people LOST THEIR ACCOUNTS because of forcing the link to Google+ - but I don't think it's in the same league

Chrome is one of those nebulous areas. If they're dictating web standards they deserve at least an antitrust glance

Re: Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business

#216

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…

I think a better framing we should ask ourselves is why is the onus on the government to make sure a breakup is clean? Nothing in the constitution guarantees the rights of corporation.

Re: Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft got pretty close to getting broken up in 2000, but settled in time to avoid the split

Hot take? But I think antitrust trials should not he subject to settlement. It only proves to reinforce the accusations when a company is big enough to pay off the government.

...then how do you maintain an adversarial proceeding?

Like, it's a pretty basic part of American law that courts only hear "cases and controversies" - that is to say, you need to have two parties who disagree before judges are allowed to do anything. If both parties no longer disagree, a settlement is how they call the lawsuit off. But if they're not allowed to settle... what happens? Are we going to force both parties into the court to argue positions they no longer hold? Like, what stops the government from just arguing the case really badly to intentionally lose? That would be worse: now, instead of a prosecution leading to a weak settlement, you have every weak case being carried to term, resulting in a miscarriage of justice as each judgment forms negative precedent against future antitrust action. This is a recipe for eroding antitrust faster.

What you're thinking is that government lawyers are just there to extract the settlement, ergo if we force them to go for the kill, they will get more kills. The reality is that the current social class of lawyers and judges hate antitrust. They successfully recast it from an argument about market power to an argument about price controls, and well, most monopolies don't actually raise prices[0], so building a case against them is very difficult.

Hell, in the Microsoft lawsuit, the reason why the government settled was because the initial judgement to break up Microsoft got thrown out, because the judge who issued it blabbed about it to the press. Keeping the case going would not have produced a better outcome than a negotiated settlement.

Furthermore, while the current "monopoly is about prices" argument is new, the judicial contempt for antitrust is not new. It took three tries and FDR threatening to pack the courts before we got judges consistently applying antitrust law as anything more than a mere ban on unions. While courts are ostensibly neutral arbiters of law, they bend to the fiscal interests of the nation and are inherently political entities, because courts have no inherent power but what they are given by the state.

Or, in other words, if you want more antitrust breakups you need Congress to start appointing more neo-Brandeis leaning judges.

[0] Strictly speaking, there are lots of businesses where monopolies are economically efficient. A monopolist that raises prices is

Re: Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business

#218
post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, this is obviously the ask: why doesn't government unmix the omelet. Your very body unscrambles the omelet and makes you. It's what intelligent things do when they are moving agency into the proper places. what is the purpose of regulation except to resist entropy in such strategic places?

Progressive corporate taxation would give the market an incentive to do spinoffs and undo the merger wave.

Or we could just roll antitrust policy back to what it was before Ronald Reagan and Robert Bork installed the Consumer Welfare Standard, the idea that companies must be allowed to merge if they can scribble a tall tale with crayons on butcher paper about how the merger will benefit consumers, for sure, pinky promise. This is obviously mega-rigged, it comes from the Robber Baron era, it was defeated before (look up Louis Brandeis) and it can be defeated again (look up Lina Khan). They didn't even change the talking points (dontcha know, the Standard Oil monopoly reduced the price of Kerosene by 70%?!) -- time is a flat circle when it comes to anti-trust policy. Let's spin it back to the part of the circle where we win.

Re: Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business

#220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The law could make mergers executed provisionally for up to X years, with a binding plan to "unmerge" that must be updated every Y months. The FTC already half-does this with post-merge divestiture requirements.

This still amounts to "don't mix" which is far easier than unmixing once it's happened.

Yes, that's the point, making something hard means that sometimes it will not happen. Only comparing to the cases where it does happen is missing the entire point.
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