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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

#241

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

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.…

By "ad tech" they apparently mean AdX, the part of Google that used to monetize the old open third-party Internet we used to have. (That old Internet that Google itself killed in favor of their walled-garden ecosystem.)

Re: Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business

#242

Post by tavavex »

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…

But what are you trying to say about the greater argument? The parent had two parts to it - make merging as difficult as unmerging, or make unmerging as easy as merging. While you're right that the wiggle room for making unmerging a lot easier is very constrained, this doesn't say anything about the feasibility of the other part of the 'or' and the actual argument they're putting forward. Unless you're trying to extrapolate this to saying that both these changes are impossible, it just comes off as being pedantic.

Re: Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business

#243

Post by BLKNSLVR »

adestefan wrote: post #227
dylan604 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It was GW Bush winning the election that allowed Microsoft to a settlement.

... for those who think that Trump is an outlier. No, just a slight acceleration to a very much established trend.

Re: Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business

#244

Post by dylan604 »

BLKNSLVR wrote: post #243
adestefan wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was GW Bush winning the election that allowed Microsoft to a settlement.

... for those who think that Trump is an outlier. No, just a slight acceleration to a very much established trend.

People used to joke that W was the bottom of the barrel, then the GOP did a hold my beer and dug a little deeper.

Re: Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business

#245

Post by billfor »

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.

The principal is it's OK if a democrat does it. For example: It's OK to rename something named after a Republican president who was shot (Mt Mckinley). It's not OK to rename or change something about a Democratic president who was shot (ie. The Kennedy Center).

Re: Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business

#246

Post by elromulous »

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…

I don't necessarily disagree, but in practice it's never as easy. Combing ingredients for a cake is always easier than separating them back out. Getting married is easier than getting divorced. It almost feels like some kind of fundamental law.

Re: Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business

#247

Post by cyberax »

benchloftbrunch wrote: post #230
cyberax wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Idk how you're defining "robust competition", but NVIDIA and CUDA definitely rule the GPU computing space right now, at least judging from a biased sample of what I read online. Those who experienced computing in the 1990s and 2000s know of the harmful effects that result when proprietary tech stacks become de facto monopolies. Think Adobe Flash, think Microsoft's "embrace/extend/extinguish" strategy. Perhaps antitru…

That's because CUDA had been better than alternatives for quite a while. But ROCm and MLX exist, and they are rapidly advancing. Google has its own chips, as does AWS.

There are also no signs of NVidia colluding against other manufacturers. For example, AMD's MI350[P] are all sold out for the next year or so.

I just don't see NVidia becoming the next MS circa year two thousand.

Re: Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business

#248

Post by tehlike »

condiment wrote: post #236
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…

This point of view has more to do with your information diet than it does with reality. Companies un-merge and spin out all the time, for many reasons. Mergers and acquisitions are more interesting because they are often associated with a growth story. We like success. Aswath Damodaran, who teaches corporate finance at NYU Stern, has a bunch of great talks and content about this where he discusses how companies shoul…

I would say google is still in its growth phase, albeit a slower one. Especially with capex spending etc.

Re: Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business

#249

Post by majormajor »

condiment wrote: post #236
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…

This point of view has more to do with your information diet than it does with reality. Companies un-merge and spin out all the time, for many reasons. Mergers and acquisitions are more interesting because they are often associated with a growth story. We like success. Aswath Damodaran, who teaches corporate finance at NYU Stern, has a bunch of great talks and content about this where he discusses how companies shoul…

This is true, I'd go much further than the OP here and say the barrier for merger should be MUCH higher than the barrier for spin-out or split.

There's no shortage of obvious problems that can arise from concentration of influence and control over a market. So just try to prevent it. Trade some max efficiency for redundancy + anti-corruption/pro-competition/pro-consumer market forces.

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