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US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

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Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#231

Post by burningChrome »

As someone who spent time researching the Ma Bells breakup and being knee deep in the local telecom deregulation, I see a lot of the same proposals when discussing the breaking up of Google and Facebook.

This is the short story of what happened in the local telecom deregulation, which I'm pretty sure will happen if you were to break up Google. Consider this took place over the course of 20+ years, but I see the same things happening.

After the Ma Bells breakup, there was a huge push to deregulate the regional carriers to increase local market competition. This was put in place in the late 90's here in Minnesota. Suddenly anybody could start a local telecom, lease lines from Qwest Communications (now CenturyLink), resell them and then compete with them in the local market.

This spawned hundreds of companies that were living on razor thin margins. Many were able to exist up to the 2000 initial dot com bust. Many went out of business during the recession. Those who survived? Many of those merged with each other, or were bought by larger regional carriers who wanted to get into the Minneapolis market.

This is what I see happening. You break Google up into smaller companies and within a decade, they will have all merged back together in some form, under different names, or they'll be bought by other companies seeking an advantage by using their technology. Its the same thing I saw happen in telecom. They tried to increase competition by deregulating the market and all it did was create a short-term gold rush and long-term crash.

The problem will be the same with Google. Qwest at the time owned the infrastructure and hardware. Nobody had the financial resources to build out an entirely new network to compete with them so they took the path of least resistance. Which lead to a myriad of other problems. Billing, installation, nefarious things Qwest would do to hamper competitors from switching their lines, etc.

You can break up Google, but over a few decades, we'll look back and understand it wasn't worth it.

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#232

Post by thefaux »

nickff wrote: post #115
optymizer wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drawing from own experience working with Harvard, MIT and Google researchers, I could not disagree more. When you talk to a researcher, do they strike you as someone who chases handsome amounts of money, or someone who chases ideas? You bring up research labs. I listened to Alan Kay's numerous talks over the years (as an example of a prominent CS researcher), not once does he mention that he joined for the money at X…

Because you specifically mention Alan Kay, I just finished reading “Dealers of Lightning”, which is about PARC, and says that the researchers there were very handsomely paid. IIRC, they were paid 20% more than their counterparts in ‘regular’ Xerox R&D. Xerox was also a big company, making a lot of money when it started PARC; arguably a monopoly (depending on how you define the term).

That still doesn't prove that Kay worked there because of the financial incentives. I don't think that 20% is nearly enough for most top talent to bail to an otherwise less attractive company if they deeply care about what they're working on so long as they aren't wildly underpaid. There needs to be a combination of incentives to drive movement.

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#233

Post by ruthmarx »

idle_zealot wrote: post #230
ruthmarx wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What other services don't have perfectly reasonable replacements ready and waiting? How about which single reasonable replacement offers the same services with the same level of integration? Using Yahoo Mail and Amazon Cloud and Office Online and whatever other products isn't quite the same offering as what Google offers.

Interoperability is great, walled-garden integration is a trap like any sort of bundling. If someone wants to create a suite of products that work well together that's fine so long as they employ means that allow other products to integrate as well. Google has gone the other route and created a suite of products and services that integrate in ways that exclude competitors.

> Interoperability is great,

Yup, and that's what people want. So what is the integrated service you are saying exists that can be a drop in replacement for the way so many organizations use Google's integrated services?

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#234

Post by ruthmarx »

idle_zealot wrote: post #226
bhelkey wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What drop in equivalent exists for Android? I have no desire to move to iOS. What drop in equivalent exists for Google maps? I have used OpenStreetMap for a personal project and have tried other proprietary options. If Google maps disappeared, life would go on but I would be worse off. What equivalent exists for Chrome? Even on desktop I prefer Chrome over Firefox. On mobile, Firefox falls far behind Chrome.

Fortunately for you, Android and Chromium are FOSS and not going anywhere. For maps there is OSM with several available frontends, Bing maps, and Apple Maps has a web version.

No one is denying alternatives exist, people are denying alternatives exist that are anywhere near as good.

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#235

Post by hightrix »

loumaciel wrote: post #228
hightrix wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> nicely provide us with everything digitally that we could need... Advertising Sorry for the snark, but no one anywhere needs advertising. Advertising in it's current form is a plague on humanity.

Tons of small businesses rely on advertising. Tons of legit businesses only exist because online advertising became easy and widespread.

I fully understand that advertising enables many businesses.

But there have been businesses based on lead pipes for drinking water plumbing, asbestos for residential insulation, and so on. You could make an argument that these technologies enabled many businesses as well. That doesn’t mean we should allow lead pipes for drinking water or to use asbestos in residential homes.

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#237

Post by bormaj »

loumaciel wrote: post #228
hightrix wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> nicely provide us with everything digitally that we could need... Advertising Sorry for the snark, but no one anywhere needs advertising. Advertising in it's current form is a plague on humanity.

Tons of small businesses rely on advertising. Tons of legit businesses only exist because online advertising became easy and widespread.

Emphasis on _advertising in its current form_, I think it's a valuable means to be able to a). monetize something and b). to spread awareness. But I agree with GP that as a society we're allowing companies to grossly over-engineer our lives around ads.

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#238

Post by waveBidder »

yeevs wrote: post #211
tensor wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I'd love to see is regulation forcing companies to provide reasonably priced ad-free options. There should be a right to opt out of ads.

I'd argue almost every platform with ads do have this option. You just may disagree about what's reasonably priced.

Facebook immediately comes to mind. Does google even have an ad-free version? Youtube nominally does (though that doesn't stop channels from running their own).

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#239

Post by nickff »

thefaux wrote: post #232
nickff wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you specifically mention Alan Kay, I just finished reading “Dealers of Lightning”, which is about PARC, and says that the researchers there were very handsomely paid. IIRC, they were paid 20% more than their counterparts in ‘regular’ Xerox R&D. Xerox was also a big company, making a lot of money when it started PARC; arguably a monopoly (depending on how you define the term).

That still doesn't prove that Kay worked there because of the financial incentives. I don't think that 20% is nearly enough for most top talent to bail to an otherwise less attractive company if they deeply care about what they're working on so long as they aren't wildly underpaid. There needs to be a combination of incentives to drive movement.

I don't know how you could prove or disprove why Kay worked somewhere fifty years ago, short of a written affidavit produced at the time. Additionally, most professionals don't admit that they took a job because of the pay, even if that's exactly why they did it; they usually say they 'went for a new challenge' or something like that.

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#240

Post by duped »

sirspacey wrote: post #219
stego-tech wrote: post #188

Loving the discourse in the comments here. Speaking as someone who grew up alongside Google in a sense, I fall on the side of the "break it up" camp. It was novel at the time to have a single company so nicely provide us with everything digitally that we could need - G Suite, YouTube, Search, Maps, Advertising, Books, Reader, etc - but in hindsight, we gave too much power to too unaccountable an entity, who in turn u…

What MSFT learned from that was to open offices in Washington DC, lobby and sell to the federal gov. Hard to find the sense in this action.

Maybe if google sold more products to the feds they wouldn't be so brazen as to kill them off
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