Trust-Busting as the Unsexy Answer to Google and Facebook

> I was thinking just yesterday about how Clubhouse's strategy may (who knows really) have backfired, it seems to me by betting on FOMO-manufacturing

I was so fed up by the lack of the Clubhouse app on Android that I made one myself using reverse-engineered API docs. And, I managed to do it right when it was on top of its popularity. The amount of attention (and not very smart questions from journalists) I got was absolutely mind-blowing. Who would've known that a for-fun 2-day project could do that?..

By the time they did finally release an official Android app several months later, Clubhouse was largely forgotten.

I'll never understand this thing with an excellent iOS app but the Android app being an afterthought. No, there's not THAT much fragmentation any more. This excuse is no longer valid. You really only run into device-specific bugs when you use low-level stuff like video codecs, but even then, these are rare.

The problem is not really a monopoly (or at least market dominant position) in one business, it's using that dominant position to gain dominance in other businesses.

So, you split out the obvious things: youtube, search, adwords, media ads, g suite stuff, android + chrome OS, payment/wallet, cloud, some sort of bucket for the rest.

Require FRAND terms when baby Gs work with othet baby Gs and restrict the baby Gs from expanding into other lines of business. There's your actionable plan. It leaves you with a handful of mostly viable businesses that are still pretty dominant, but...

If YouTube has the same relationship with its ad network as any other video site could get, other video sites can have a better chance to compete.

Setting up an Android for people new to the internet won't require creating a gmail account and steer your choice of email providers, etc.

Geographic splits don't really make sense for Google. And really, I'm not sure it did for AT&T, except that local vs long distance was a useful split, and I don't know that a nationwide local phone company that can't connect long distance calls would make sense. We certainly didn't get competitive local residential phone service by breaking up AT&T. The telecom act of 1996 came closer to giving us that, until the FCC decided it didn't care.

However I don't think this will solve the issues raised in the original article or the general issues with monopoly.

People used to think that Microsoft had an unfair monopoly with its browser because of bundling. Well, Chrome took over market share pretty easily when it released something better. It turns out it wasn't bundling, but investing more dev resources than the competitor that made the difference. And you can do that if you have surplus profits from a monopoly. It is those profits that allow for more resources that make the difference, not any consumer-facing bundling problems.

So even if you completely eliminate the bundling, you'll still have a situation where off-shoot products by monopolies outcompete other self-funded products. Now, you have to complain not about bundling, but about subsidies -- basically making it illegal for the monopoly to branch out into another business, because all tech investment starts out as subsidies. But now you are really hurting innovation, because a large part -- I would say a large majority -- of innovation happens as subsidized R&D performed by monopolies. From the invention of C at Bell Labs to Android at Google. These are all side projects afforded to monopolies but not to private investors, who would never invest in such things. Thus no standard of consumer harm will result in making this illegal.

So you say, OK, we wont ban a firm from creating other products but we will ban it from purchasing companies. So that takes care of Youtube and Adwords, but not android, office, etc. But now if the monopoly has surplus profits, it has an edge at making competing products and outcompeting smaller incumbents. Yes, it's harder than just buying them, but you have not fundamentally changed the landscape. It's an improvement, yes, but only a marginal improvement.

It's really a tough call, and not at all the same thing as the previous US push on anti-trust, which was conceptually much simpler until you had the ill-advised ATT breakup, which showed the limits of the old approach. Merely longing for the old days of anti-trust in which we were busting up Standard Oil doesn't address any of the reasons why we have moved past that period.

Competent competitors will do that naturally. See TikTok vs Reels.