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EU suggests breaking up Google's ad business in preliminary antitrust ruling

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Re: EU suggests breaking up Google's ad business in preliminary antitrust ruling

#121

Post by pb7 »

gylterud wrote: post #67
Mountain_Skies wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to believe that company breakups should happen automatically when they reach 1% of the country's GDP. There are lots of ways companies could avoid having the government decide how to break them up such as issuing dividends instead of hording cash, spinning off non-core businesses, setting up independent IP companies that would license back IP to the core company (and as an indpendent company, be required to li…

How about an automatic nationalisation in stead? Where you take companies which have grown too big out of the private ownership’s hands.

Nationalization is corporate civil asset forfeiture.

Re: EU suggests breaking up Google's ad business in preliminary antitrust ruling

#122

Post by veave »

aurareturn wrote: post #102
jacooper wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and that's great. They don't want surveillance Capitalism.

99% of the people don't care. That's why there are 2.1 billion people on Facebook. Without surveillance capitalism, prices for services would go up or would cease to be free. The ad-driven business model is a legitimate one. I assume that you use a free service from Google/Facebook/Microsoft? So you must not care about surveillance capitalism either. At least not care enough.

[flagged]

Re: EU suggests breaking up Google's ad business in preliminary antitrust ruling

#123

Post by csomar »

nisegami wrote: post #39

As expected, the comments here seem generally in support of such a move. But, it is really unclear to me how such a move would improve my life or the lives of most typical users. Genuinely open to having it explained to me.

In the same way the EU GDPR cookie banners made your life worse and barely changed any practices. These are highly complex companies and trying to simplify them into a couple laws is why communism failed. Breaking a big company will create a hundreds of companies with more shady practices, tax evasion, etc... that will be harder to control.

And am not saying don't do it... because this liberate the potential from one big hand to multiple ones. I am just answering your question whether this is a positive or not.

Re: EU suggests breaking up Google's ad business in preliminary antitrust ruling

#125

Post by kakapo88 »

gylterud wrote: post #67
Mountain_Skies wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to believe that company breakups should happen automatically when they reach 1% of the country's GDP. There are lots of ways companies could avoid having the government decide how to break them up such as issuing dividends instead of hording cash, spinning off non-core businesses, setting up independent IP companies that would license back IP to the core company (and as an indpendent company, be required to li…

How about an automatic nationalisation in stead? Where you take companies which have grown too big out of the private ownership’s hands.

Changing the ownership does not address the problem, which is market concentration. You're still left with a company with too much power. That aside, look at the historical data. Nationalization has generally been disastrous and leads to all sorts of other pathologies.

Re: EU suggests breaking up Google's ad business in preliminary antitrust ruling

#126

Post by Yujf »

gumballindie wrote: post #77

And microsoft is walking scot free. They can happily control operating systems, office tools, a slice of search, ides, ads within their os, are allowed to buy large game makers and soon ai. As a bare minimum they should be forced greater compatibility with running their software on linux and ideally be banned from doing ads, ai and gamedev.

I agree they should be forced to offer office on Linux. It is one of the things that really keeps Linux down for normal people.

Why should they not be able to offer ads in their own products though? I don't like ads but I do not immediataly see the issue. I think they should absolutly be allowed to do AI but things like only allowing bing chat in Edge should be banned. The amount of pushing they do is clearly not OK. And same for google they should not be allowed to push chrome on you when you go to gmail or google in a non chrome browser

Re: EU suggests breaking up Google's ad business in preliminary antitrust ruling

#127

Post by cccbbbaaa »

pmoriarty wrote: post #91
wongarsu wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EU already made multiple attempts to get that under control, notably first with the Cookie Law and later with GDPR. The problem is that those have mechanism that allow the user to accept tracking, and Google does its best to get website owners to make their user agree by any means nessesary. In analytics there's some competition, and I can run self-hosted cookieless Maomo or plausibly.io if I want to get actionab…

Cookies have not been necessary for user tracking for decades. Browser fingerprinting and countless other techniques can and are being used as well. The outrage over cookies is quaint, and only demonstrates that people who freak out over them don't understand modern tracking technology at all.

Sure, but remember that:

- the so-called “cookie law” is not limited to cookies (see ePrivacy article 5(3) for more information, it's actually any technique allowing to store or retrieve information from a user's terminal);

- ePrivacy exists since 2002 (so, decades);

- any kind of tracking allowing to identify unique users will require consent, cookies or not.

Re: EU suggests breaking up Google's ad business in preliminary antitrust ruling

#128

Post by tremon »

donatj wrote: post #36
Etheryte wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think either one of those points are true. The result of unregulated Google is most definitely not a positive online experience, it's rampant tracking and hoarding of information, both of which have had very real negative real world consequences. Similarly, the world does not "run on Google", what does that even mean? Gmail is but one email provider out of many. Google search is the largest player in the spac…

> it's rampant tracking and hoarding of information, both of which have had very real negative real world consequences Namely? I can’t imagine any real world consequences that aren’t positives? I am better served for my preferences?

There's very little need to imagine anything. Does e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36300410 sound like a positive consequence to you?

Re: EU suggests breaking up Google's ad business in preliminary antitrust ruling

#129

Post by nonethewiser »

Gareth321 wrote: post #82
YetAnotherNick wrote: post #22

Google will rather split up the internet by pulling out of Europe than follow this. And isn't ads the only profitable business Google has? If they sell it, there Google search, Gmail etc couldn't exist.

EMEA is Google's second largest market, and it's not even close for competition. There is no way Google would be willing to cut revenue by $90 billion annually. It would be corporate suicide. The single greatest loss event of investor capital in history. They'll comply, just like Apple will comply with the DMA. They have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders. Unlike the U.S., E.U lawmakers can't be bought.

But how much is it from the ad business that the EU is breaking up in this hypothetical?

Re: EU suggests breaking up Google's ad business in preliminary antitrust ruling

#130

Post by emanuele232 »

pb7 wrote: post #60
holoduke wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to see Google leaving Europe. I bet within a few weeks proper maybe even better replacements appear in Europe. Maybe even one of mine :) Google is an ad company. None of its services are critical to maintain a stable society. I would even argue that Europe would be better of without the American tech giants.

Europe would return to the dark ages if all American tech companies pulled out overnight. But it is a humorous thought that the only way there can be European alternatives is if there are no American companies to compete against. What is it about Europe that puts it so far behind the US and Asia in innovation? >None of its services are critical to maintain a stable society. Except Android, Maps, Search, Gmail, YouTub…

proton is swiss boi
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