Google is a monopoly – the fix isn't obvious

People don't realize, you couldn't just buy a phone - you had to use the one provided by your monopoly phone company. It was only after breakup that there could exist an ecosystem of phone peripherals like answerphones, direct-attach modems (this is why acoustic couplers were a thing), cordless phones, etc.

I think we need a better term than monopoly, that separates it from what people usually mean which is 'the best product'. I literally cannot think of any sort of product or service with lower switching costs than internet search. Typing bing.com takes 0.8 seconds and costs $0. Hundreds of orders of magnitude easier than switching to a different railroad if only one goes through your town.

Google is a big ass company and enjoys outsized market share because people choose to use it. Everyone who buys a MacBook or Surface computer or smartphone does one thing immediately and that's to download Chrome. It's literally the first thing people voluntarily choose to do after powering on the device for the first time.

I'm not sure why we need government interference here which in all likelihood would change no customer behaviour but probably just add a few extra clicks in front of the Chrome downloading process.

When Alphabet begins doing something like banning Google Fiber customers from accessing bing.com, that will be interesting. But there honestly very minimal anti-competitive behaviour like that happening at the moment.

With search, there are actually 2 different products. The index itself is a textbook natural monopoly. There's no upside in having more than 1 web crawler as long as it can be trusted to just crawl the web but there's plenty of downside in the form of increased bandwidth costs for web sites. The actual search rankings are where competition makes sense. So spin the Google search index off as a non-profit that makes its product available at a reasonable cost to anybody who wants to run a search engine.

Then you spin off the rest of Google as separate companies. Android/Pixel, Google Ads/Analytics, Youtube, Chrome, Gmail/Docs/Drive and Maps/Cloud would all be separate businesses. Chrome would likely be best spunoff as a non-profit as well, operating an open source web browser project.

Of course, if you're going to break up Google you also have to break up the rest of FAANG too or they're just going to step right into the space vacated by Google and probably buy up the Baby Googles[0]. Apple would probably need to be broken up into a hardware company, a software company and a services company. Amazon would need to be broken up into AWS, Amazon Shopping and Prime Video. You could arguably even break Amazon Shopping up into the online store and the logistics company. Microsoft would need to be broken up into Windows, Office, Xbox, Bing and Azure. Xbox would then itself need to be broken up to unwind all of its purchases of independent video game companies. If you're breaking up Xbox, you also have to do the same with Playstation (spinning them loose from Sony and unwinding their own acquisitions). It might also be a great idea to then do the same with major 3rd party video game companies like EA, basically unwinding all of their acquisitions. Meta would need to be broken up into Facebook, Oculus, Instagram, WhatsApp and Meta Ads.

Once you start breaking up Google, you open up Pandora's box and basically have to keep going until you break up the entire tech sector. That's why it is so tricky to do it. Once you're done with tech, it'd be a good idea to look at other sectors such as health care, Hollywood and the news media where consolidation has been rampant over the past few decades.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_Bell_Operating_Compan...

> The market price for a browser from a consumer perspective is $0.

The market price for search is $0. And yet we have Kagi because Google is now so ad infested. Ads are now bad enough that there is money in killing them.

The market price for email is $0. And yet we have Fastmail.

The problem with Google is dumping. The cross-subsidization means that YouTube, Gmail, Chrome, etc. can run at a loss indefinitely and soak up huge chunks of the consumer base. Forcing those services to stand on their own doesn't solve all the problems, but it sure makes competing with them a hell of a lot easier.

(YouTube, on the other hand, should be sued into oblivion for not implementing identity checks for upload. The fact that any published video will wind up monetized on YouTube 20 seconds later is genuine theft.)

> because people choose to use it.

Incorrect.

Google spent ungodly amounts of money to make sure that their search engine was the default in as many places as possible. People didn't "choose" to use it, they use the defaults.

And in some cases, like my Android phone, google is the only option for integrated searches. I cannot use another search engine without opening a browser then opening up the search engine of choice.

Monopoly may not be the right term, but anticompetitive is. They outspent every other search provider to make sure their product was used. They paid off apple to not develop a search engine and instead use theirs as a default. These are things in the court documents which caused the ruling to go against them.