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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

#31

Post by farts_mckensy »

brendoelfrendo wrote: post #22
teleforce wrote: post #8

There's side effect benefit of big kahuna companies mainly on the significant breakthrough and game changing research output because these excellent researchers are paid handsome money compared to conventional universities or research institutions. We saw this with AT&T Bell research labs with their inventions of transistor and Unix, among others. The same thing happened with Google research with (arguably) deep lear…

So wait, markets don't work, then? A free market, theoretically, promotes innovation by ensuring that businesses must advance their products in order to compete with one another. You're saying that a lack of competition promotes innovation by concentrating all of an industry's capital under one roof.

Both can be true in varying degrees at certain points in time. They're not mutually exclusive. There are benefits to centralization and concentration of capital. Competition is the same exact process that leads to monopolistic entities in the first place.

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

#33

Post by qnleigh »

waveBidder wrote: post #23
teleforce wrote: post #8

There's side effect benefit of big kahuna companies mainly on the significant breakthrough and game changing research output because these excellent researchers are paid handsome money compared to conventional universities or research institutions. We saw this with AT&T Bell research labs with their inventions of transistor and Unix, among others. The same thing happened with Google research with (arguably) deep lear…

just skip the middle man skimming off the top and 10x the national labs funding.

I wish this were a viable option, but it is not. US national labs are horribly, horribly mismanaged. For some slower-moving fields like particle physics where institutional knowledge is key, they hold up alright, but for fast moving fields like quantum they are very behind. They are stagnant bureaucracies. I could tell stories, but better to just compare the output of national labs in many fields to those of the top universities in the States.

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

#34

Post by chipgap98 »

eastbound wrote: post #27

There has been many announcements of lawsuits based on antitrust in the last 3 weeks. We can assume the message is “If you reelect the current party, we’ll finish these lawsuits.” There are two perverse effects: - It positions the alternate party as the party that Google should sponsor, - The good choice after reelection will then be to delay the next step of those popular antitrust cases to 3 weeks before the end of…

Weren’t some of these cases begun under the previous administration? Neither party is a fan of big tech

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

#35

Post by fsh »

teleforce wrote: post #8

There's side effect benefit of big kahuna companies mainly on the significant breakthrough and game changing research output because these excellent researchers are paid handsome money compared to conventional universities or research institutions. We saw this with AT&T Bell research labs with their inventions of transistor and Unix, among others. The same thing happened with Google research with (arguably) deep lear…

Clearly this model no longer works. Bell labs had 11 nobel prize winners. What did Google invent? Slightly better generative neural networks whose offsprings now pollute their search results?

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

#36

Post by pixxel »

kibwen wrote: post #25

Google is such a rudderless mess that breaking it up may be the only way to salvage anything of societal value from this company.

>societal value

Genuine question: what societal value would be lost if Google was erased tomorrow (all technical reliance their services was magically replaced overnight with alternatives by pixies)?

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

#37

Post by lfmunoz4 »

iml7 wrote: post #17
teleforce wrote: post #8

There's side effect benefit of big kahuna companies mainly on the significant breakthrough and game changing research output because these excellent researchers are paid handsome money compared to conventional universities or research institutions. We saw this with AT&T Bell research labs with their inventions of transistor and Unix, among others. The same thing happened with Google research with (arguably) deep lear…

The split of ATT killed Unix2, so we spent 30 years re-implementing Linux+k8s. These things that existed in Unix2 & Plan9 were re-implemented by Plan9 employees in Google Labs.

UNIX exists because ATT was split. They could not profit from software (by law because of an agreement with the government) so early versions of UNIX where made free.

This should be well known, simple google search:

https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-general-1/why...

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

#38

Post by flomo »

iml7 wrote: post #17
teleforce wrote: post #8

There's side effect benefit of big kahuna companies mainly on the significant breakthrough and game changing research output because these excellent researchers are paid handsome money compared to conventional universities or research institutions. We saw this with AT&T Bell research labs with their inventions of transistor and Unix, among others. The same thing happened with Google research with (arguably) deep lear…

The split of ATT killed Unix2, so we spent 30 years re-implementing Linux+k8s. These things that existed in Unix2 & Plan9 were re-implemented by Plan9 employees in Google Labs.

Seconding info about "unix2". I used to pour over the trade tabloids, and I've never heard of this.

Novell bought UNIX and has some grand plans for "SuperNOS", which also never shipped. It certainly wasn't anything like K8s.

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

#39

Post by dtquad »

Hilariously shortsighted. Big Tech companies have been a GDP-doubling runaway success for the US economy.

It would be like if we here in Denmark started breaking up Novo Nordisk. Our economists would probably do a public lynching of any government official who suggested doing that.

However as a European I can't help but welcoming the US shooting themselves in the foot like this. Something tells me we will see more of this as more reddit-brained American millennials get political influence.

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

#40

Post by ruthmarx »

pixxel wrote: post #36
kibwen wrote: post #25

Google is such a rudderless mess that breaking it up may be the only way to salvage anything of societal value from this company.

>societal value Genuine question: what societal value would be lost if Google was erased tomorrow (all technical reliance their services was magically replaced overnight with alternatives by pixies)?

What would happen if you replaced Google with a perfect functional equivalent? Well, nothing.

You don't happen to know where one could find these magical perfectly compatible and functional drop in replacements, do you?

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