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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

#51

Post by blackeyeblitzar »

It’s amazing to me that Google is still so rich given how lazy their culture is and how incompetent their product strategy has been. It just goes to show the power of their size and all it brings. Things like capital, monopolies (search), control over platforms (Chrome), network effects (YouTube and ad networks), and just plain old momentum.

This break up is long overdue but we also need a drastic rethink of antitrust law and corporate taxes to shift the economy towards innovative smaller instead of concentrating it in a few megacorps that are as powerful as some governments.

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

#52

Post by blackeyeblitzar »

dehrmann wrote: post #41
akoboldfrying wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Google is famous for not innovating on anything successfully PageRank Gmail Maps MapReduce Chrome Protocol Buffers Go

Didn't some of the early GPT work come out of Google?

The popular transformer paper, which went on to be used in things like ChatGPT, was authored by Google employees. But “come out of Google” is giving the organization too much credit and the individual too little. Also transformers were themselves a continuation of prior work like multi head attention. And it is possible that transformers were not needed - see this discussion from the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41732853

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

#53

Post by shiroiushi »

ripped_britches wrote: post #32

It will be really ironic if this kills Mozilla / Firefox

That's one of several scary scenarios.

What if it kills Android, and everyone has to buy an iPhone? (Yeah, I know, Android is OSS and the phone makers could just maintain/improve it as a consortium without Google, but looking at how these companies operate I don't think they're capable of doing this.) (And no, I don't think the USG will break up Apple if this happens. They're already showing highly preferential treatment to Apple compared to Google.)

What if it kills YouTube, and the only viable alternative is TikTok? I recommend everyone start downloading all their favorite YouTube videos with yt-dlp right away, just in case.

What if it kills Google Maps? Again, there's no real viable alternative here unless you have an iPhone.

I can see a lot of ways things could go horribly wrong here if you're someone who doesn't want to be an Apple user.

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

#54

Post by dehrmann »

chipgap98 wrote: post #34
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

Harris has been thin on policy, so it's hard to say, but seeing that she's from the Bay Area, she might be more careful more careful to not break one of the country's key industries.

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

#55

Post by kolinko »

akoboldfrying wrote: post #21
LightHugger wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a theoretical benefit which is directly at odds with the benefits of competition in a healthy market. For google, my observation is the "big kahuna" benefit of google basically does not exist and competition needs to be restored. Google is famous for not innovating on anything successfully, they produce graveyards of trash. Instead what they do is buy other companies then enshittify them in an anti competitiv…

>Google is famous for not innovating on anything successfully PageRank Gmail Maps MapReduce Chrome Protocol Buffers Go

Gmail was revolutionary at the start, but stopped innovating 10 years ago - why don’t we still have a good search engine within it?

MapReduce would be invented anyway (I implemented it from scratch before learning of it’s existence).

Chrome is just a slightly upgraded Firefox (and novadays Safari is just as good if not better with ai)

PageRank was what gave Google monopoly, it’s not a result of monopoly.

Go - I can give you that. ProtoBuf - not my field, but isn’t it just a format that someone else would develop to fill a niche? (unlike say mp3 that had new compression algorithms baked in)

Maps - I can give you that. Some people might argue that it was an acquisition, but without Google’s muscle, Street View would not be feasible.

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

#56

Post by pjmlp »

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 only became a success, because ATT initially wasn't allowed to charge real money for research work.

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

#57

Post by dehrmann »

shiroiushi wrote: post #53
ripped_britches wrote: post #32

It will be really ironic if this kills Mozilla / Firefox

That's one of several scary scenarios. What if it kills Android, and everyone has to buy an iPhone? (Yeah, I know, Android is OSS and the phone makers could just maintain/improve it as a consortium without Google, but looking at how these companies operate I don't think they're capable of doing this.) (And no, I don't think the USG will break up Apple if this happens. They're already showing highly preferential treat…

> And no, I don't think the USG will break up Apple if this happens. They're already showing highly preferential treatment to Apple compared to Google.

The largest business by far is iPhones. It has 16% market share in the PC business, behind Lenovo, HP, and Dell. The only business that makes sense to peel off is the iPhone services (Apple Music, News, etc.) because that's the place it uses its dominant position to help its own products.

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

#58

Post by [deleted] »

akoboldfrying wrote: post #24
shiroiushi wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not so sure this is a problem. They're not completely blocking ad-blockers, just neutering them somewhat with MV3. You can still use uBOL (the "Lite" version of uBO) and get a lot of ads blocked on Chrome. Remember, Chrome is not installed by default on Windows PCs; Edge is. People are using Chrome because they want to. They could just as easily download Firefox and uBO, like more-savvy users do. Unfortunately, t…

>Chrome is not installed by default on Windows PCs; Edge is Whenever this is brought up, the silence is deafening. Edge is a good browser, and users are notoriously lazy; most won't read a dialog box before clicking it away. And yet... ~everyone on Windows still downloads Chrome.

[deleted]

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

#60

Post by porridgeraisin »

akoboldfrying wrote: post #21
LightHugger wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a theoretical benefit which is directly at odds with the benefits of competition in a healthy market. For google, my observation is the "big kahuna" benefit of google basically does not exist and competition needs to be restored. Google is famous for not innovating on anything successfully, they produce graveyards of trash. Instead what they do is buy other companies then enshittify them in an anti competitiv…

>Google is famous for not innovating on anything successfully PageRank Gmail Maps MapReduce Chrome Protocol Buffers Go

Comparing the innovations of Bell Labs with..... _Protobuf_ of all things makes me gag.
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