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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

#281

Post by briandear »

fpoling wrote: post #280
majormajor wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A progressive tax on the size of the company can do this.

Don’t we have enough taxes? Taxes should fund government not be used to force people to do things.

Re: Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business

#282

Post by briandear »

schmidtleonard wrote: post #222
qlte wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Happened with Dow-Dupont! A three-way split, even (from a two-way merger). Took roughly two years and was the shareholders' plan from the start. By most accounts it went very smoothly. [1] https://www.investors.dupont.com/news-and-media/press-releas... [2] http://www.dow-dupont.com/

Progressive corporate taxation could make it happen for reasons other than dodging the ghosts of chemical sins past!

Can we stop with taxing everything you don’t like? Taxes should be equal and used to fund the government, not as tools to make people do things you like.

Re: Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business

#283

Post by londons_explore »

majormajor wrote: post #249
condiment wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The real benefit of a merged company is that where the two original companies were competing in the same market, it would be illegal for them to collude to set the same prices as eachother.

However, when merged, they can do exactly that - which allows them to extract more profits.

Rather than denying mergers, I suggest merged companies have an extra sales tax for ever on all goods they sell where they used to be competing - with the size of that tax set by the regulator to estimate the benefit they get.

Re: Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business

#284

Post by andriamanitra »

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.

I think "avoid naming things after people without a deep personal connection to the thing being named" and "prefer established names used by locals" are pretty good principles to follow.

> The Koyukon people who inhabit the area around the mountain have referred to the peak as "Denali" for centuries. In 1896, a gold prospector named it "Mount McKinley" in support of then presidential candidate William McKinley, who later became the 25th president.

Re: Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business

#285

Post by Arkhaine_kupo »

briandear wrote: post #281
fpoling wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A progressive tax on the size of the company can do this.

Don’t we have enough taxes? Taxes should fund government not be used to force people to do things.

> Don’t we have enough taxes?

Objectively no. For example carbon taxes or other environmental taxes have been proposed by free market advocates since the 70s and never been implemented (from the left you see advocacy for environmentalism but not related to taxation)

Also if we had enough taxes, the wealth inequality would not be ramping up to great depression levels and basic necessities like healthcare and housing would not be catastrophically related to bankruptcies in america.

If you are a worker, specially one in the upper middle class range of salaries, then yes. You are being over taxed. But that is simply because those below you have nothing to contribute and the system refuses to tax those above you appropriately. You are a local maximum in a system that is not globally efficient, so you have too much tax, the country doesnt

Re: Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business

#286

Post by lelanthran »

franga2000 wrote: post #265
lotsofpulp wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A product/service that can drastically reduce the top cause of injury and death, as well as give safe mobility to so many who do not currently have it is not a "cute tech project". >I would rather pay substantially less on anything I buy, and have the free market sort out self-driving cars. Alphabet's entire revenue divided by the total amount of goods and services sold is miniscule, so I don't see how it could be ma…

Self-driving cars are an absurdly inefficient way to reduce traffic deaths that exists only because it makes substantially more money for shareholders than the alternatives. You are being witheld a good and cheap solution now for the promise of a worse and expensive solution some time in the future. All the while people keep dying. Oh, and what's this "those who don't have it" bullshit? If anything, turning driving i…

> Oh, and what's this "those who don't have it" bullshit? If anything, turning driving into a subscription service will mean mobility becomes harder for many people, as dirt-cheap used cars slowly stop being available.

Too many people are in the "You Will Own Nothing And You Will Be Happy" camp.

Apparently the thought of lifelong indenture is a plus to these people :-/

Re: Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business

#287

Post by selfhoster1312 »

sawjet wrote: post #258
dylan604 wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Crazy to think that, despite trump existing, the Democrats still lost two elections to him.

Well they had their chance for "change" with Obama, just like the french PS had their chance for "changement" with Hollande. And both betrayed their electoral base and honest people by empowering multinational corporations against consumers and small businesses. Who could have predicted that noone would want to elect them again?

Re: Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business

#288

Post by Panzer04 »

londons_explore wrote: post #283
majormajor wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The real benefit of a merged company is that where the two original companies were competing in the same market, it would be illegal for them to collude to set the same prices as eachother. However, when merged, they can do exactly that - which allows them to extract more profits. Rather than denying mergers, I suggest merged companies have an extra sales tax for ever on all goods they sell where they used to be comp…

Merged companies are more able to compete. Combining duplicate corporate structures let them save on costs, etc.

It's not a strictly bad thing - iirc spirit? Airlines? Wanted to merge with someone, got denied, and went bankrupt anyway, depriving people of any competition at all.

Re: Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business

#289

Post by hakimg »

armedgorilla wrote: post #181
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…

A theory behind busting trusts is that monopolies stifle innovation, and thus growth, in the long term. When it comes to "competing with China" (which, to be naive, I'm not sure the meaning of), many nationally competing firms will have a better result for future consumers than if there were a single "national champion." Here is an hour long video where Lina Khan makes this point to the Council on Foreign Relations m…

That's how the theory goes but I would argue the observable evidence says otherwise. TSMC is Taiwan's national champion and effectively a global monopoly, Samsung is the same for Korea and is highly effective on the world stage, same again with ASML.

When a country does what it can to support its key industries those companies often out compete their global rivals and this is exactly the strategy China is using against the west with their support of domestic electric car manufacturing, solar panels, battery tech.

Alternatively the west is often anti big business and we've repeatedly seen national championions go under.

Re: Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business

#290

Post by mschuster91 »

mastermage wrote: post #269
majormajor wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

100% we do not need one company that makes everything hi there Samsung.

Conglomerates may not be as nimble and agile as single-focus companies, but they are uniquely more resilient to economic shock events, and branches being "unprofitable" for a time can be supported by others.

Unfortunately, MBA beancounter/neoliberal extremism aka "throw out everything not the core business" has become the norm... and so, with Covid, Ukraine and Trump's tariff and Iran wars, we got a ton of "single focus" companies that are struggling hard, and with everything deemed "not the core business" including internal IT, cleaning etc. sourced out, many a corporation has become internally enshittified.

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