Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google is a monopoly – the fix isn't obvious

theregister.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 524 posts

Re: Google is a monopoly – the fix isn't obvious

#181

Post by marcosdumay »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #151

I'm flumuxed that Google is the first tech company to be ruled a monopoly. I would put them fourth on the tech monopoly list, behind Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, in that order. I don't think there would be much benefit to society by breaking up google. Whereas I do think there would be great benefit to breaking up Apple or MS.

> I'm flumuxed that Google is the first tech company to be ruled a monopoly.

Hum... I'm sure you've heard about that famous one called AT&T.

Or Microsoft a decade later.

Re: Google is a monopoly – the fix isn't obvious

#182

Post by pahkah »

fny wrote: post #31

I'm very curious to see what a breakup looks like. Past breakups involved "uniform" businesses: - American Tobacco: Commodity - Standard Oil: Commodity - AT&T: Utility - Northern Securities: Railroads - Swift & Co: Meatpacking - Kodak: Film - Paramount: Movie Theaters Google is more of a synergistic conglomerate. How would spinning off an individual business like Chrome, Android, or AdWords reduce their respective do…

At the very least, spinning off individual businesses prevents self-preferencing. Google can right now leverage its dominance in one area to increase market share in another. For example, if I load my GMail account in a browser other than Chrome, Google will "helpfully" suggest that I change my default browser to the "recommended" Chrome. This behavior makes it harder for upstarts to get a foot in the door across a wide range of products — by removing these synergies we reduce the grip Google has across all its lines of business.

I suspect the AT&T example may be more similar to the current situation than you're thinking. AT&T wasn't just the network, they also manufactured the phones themselves through subsidiary Western Electric. They leveraged their monopoly in phone service to drive customers toward leasing their phones, similarly (if more aggressively) to how Google drives customers from one product to another. Whether this remedy will be so far-reaching beyond search I don't know, but in the abstract there would be benefits to splitting up the conglomerate.

Re: Google is a monopoly – the fix isn't obvious

#183

Post by [deleted] »

jonhohle wrote: post #175
bentice wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To exist on the internet you need to pay Google. Google is essentially the government of the open web. The problem is that government like monopolies do arise especially when there are network effects. We need to regulate search and app stores like it is a public utility. Pricing should be dutch auction or something provably fair. 20-30% for in-app purchases is obviously insane when credit cards do 1.5-3.5%. I worry…

Credit card companies do one thing - process payments. What cut do VOD or music hosting sites take? Bandcamp takes 15%. eBay takes 15% on things they never physically touch. It’s hard finding hard data, but it seems like YouTube, on average charges $15CPM and pays $5CPM to the highest paid YouTubers. What is the value of download hosting and store platform?

[deleted]

Re: Google is a monopoly – the fix isn't obvious

#184

Post by IX-103 »

mcpar-land wrote: post #65
fny wrote: post #31

I'm very curious to see what a breakup looks like. Past breakups involved "uniform" businesses: - American Tobacco: Commodity - Standard Oil: Commodity - AT&T: Utility - Northern Securities: Railroads - Swift & Co: Meatpacking - Kodak: Film - Paramount: Movie Theaters Google is more of a synergistic conglomerate. How would spinning off an individual business like Chrome, Android, or AdWords reduce their respective do…

Breaking up their individual businesses can cause each business to have incentives that line up better with their customers / users. Example: if Chrome was separated from Google, they won't have as much of an incentive to push back against adblockers with things like Manifest V3. Or include APIs that are only available to google websites (Which it has! https://x.com/lcasdev/status/1810696257137959018 )

I agree with your premise, but you're example is unfortunate. The manifest v3 thing was due to an API change to improve performance by pulling the renderer out of the critical path for network requests. Adblockers can still block ads (as in not show them), but they can't throttle or block requests.

It would be better to point out that Chrome is the only browser not getting rid of third party cookies. Chrome promised to, but then has reneged on that promise in favor of "user choice". I don't for a second think Chrome would have kept then around if they weren't tied to an advertising company.

Re: Google is a monopoly – the fix isn't obvious

#186

Post by vundercind »

arder wrote: post #54

I feel like the US should have serious conversations about it's regulation of monopolies, especially on internet giants. The current system seems to be woefully ineffective. On the one hand, it's not clear it's necessarily, Google isn't a particularly old company it hasn't had a strangle hold for long and it doesn't look like it's business is unassailable. So why go after it at all. On the other hand, the anti-monopo…

We ruined antitrust enforcement in the 70s and 80s by switching from “we know companies having too much of a market is bad, so that’s enough” to “we must show specific harm of specific kinds before we can do anything”.

This is like requiring overwhelming evidence that a radiation source caused a particular case of cancer—not other problems, like birth defects, just cancer, and we’re gonna assume the cancer wasn’t caused by the radiation source until you can convince us otherwise—before being able to move against an actor exposing the public to radiation.

Re: Google is a monopoly – the fix isn't obvious

#187

Post by serial_dev »

jonhohle wrote: post #175
bentice wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To exist on the internet you need to pay Google. Google is essentially the government of the open web. The problem is that government like monopolies do arise especially when there are network effects. We need to regulate search and app stores like it is a public utility. Pricing should be dutch auction or something provably fair. 20-30% for in-app purchases is obviously insane when credit cards do 1.5-3.5%. I worry…

Credit card companies do one thing - process payments. What cut do VOD or music hosting sites take? Bandcamp takes 15%. eBay takes 15% on things they never physically touch. It’s hard finding hard data, but it seems like YouTube, on average charges $15CPM and pays $5CPM to the highest paid YouTubers. What is the value of download hosting and store platform?

Let's figure it out?

Let's allow anyone to do in-app purchases, and app stores, then the market would tell us. Currently, we need to trust these quasi-monopolies that there is no way they can make it cheaper (and for some strange reason still, they don't want to open things up).

Re: Google is a monopoly – the fix isn't obvious

#188

Post by arder »

lolinder wrote: post #82
arder wrote: post #54

I feel like the US should have serious conversations about it's regulation of monopolies, especially on internet giants. The current system seems to be woefully ineffective. On the one hand, it's not clear it's necessarily, Google isn't a particularly old company it hasn't had a strangle hold for long and it doesn't look like it's business is unassailable. So why go after it at all. On the other hand, the anti-monopo…

> Google isn't a particularly old company it hasn't had a strangle hold for long and it doesn't look like it's business is unassailable. So why go after it at all. On the other hand, the anti-monopoly moves have been slow and ineffective. When Microsoft finally got hit... Google was incorporated 26 years ago, in 1998. Microsoft was founded in 1975, 26 years before US v. Microsoft was decided. Google is exactly as old…

Well to push the point a little - Imagine that Microsofts anti-trust case was in 2008, not 1997 and the iPhone was out and clearly gaining traction. Suddenly Microsoft doesn't look like some perpetual juggernaut. That's where we are with Google today - we can see the product that's likely to displace it. Windows is still big today, but it's not anywhere near the strategic force it was in the early 2000s. In the same way, I don't think Google is likely to be in the same place in a few years time.

I kind of am asking to have it both ways - they should be able to move against these companies earlier by levying smaller sanctions. That way they don't need 1 big killer case to get a judge to order the entire company broken up or spun off.

Re: Google is a monopoly – the fix isn't obvious

#189

Post by taeric »

at_a_remove wrote: post #154

I have no love for Google but, in light of the Google Graveyard, I am at a loss to see how to cut it up in a way where almost anything can remain profitable on its own. Imagine chopping Search and Ads out to be their own things. GoogAds turns into just another advertising company. Perhaps viable but uninteresting. GoogSearch, well, almost nobody wants to pay for search, so they seek some kind of way to get money, and…

Oddly, breaking it up may give some items a better chance at living? Ostensibly, one of the main drivers of that graveyard is the monorepo nature of how they rollout changes, combined with them moving people off of projects. Splitting them directly addresses both of those?

Re: Google is a monopoly – the fix isn't obvious

#190

Post by nordsieck »

deepsquirrelnet wrote: post #171
nordsieck wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ads and search are the two businesses that most directly collude and which could both survive and thrive independently. I'm skeptical that search is viable as an independent business at scale. I know DDG is making a go of it, but the business only has to pay a single salary.

I’m skeptical that Google search contains any search results. So maybe that part of their business is already dead and they just need an honest rebranding to ad search.

> I’m skeptical that Google search contains any search results. So maybe that part of their business is already dead and they just need an honest rebranding to ad search.

I don't know about you, but I remember the time before Google where search engines openly offered paid search listings.

Google's search quality has declines over the years, but I don't think we're at the point you're talking about yet.

Post reply on HN