US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case • Hacker News Board

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

#551

Post by Apocryphon » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 3:27 AM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #373

What country wouldn't love to have a Google? And the US wants to break its good fortune up. Like all dominant companies, Google will eventually fall via strangulation by its internal bureaucracy. There's no reason to hand the market over to another country.

2017 article so pretty old by now, but:

> Microsoft in the year ended June 2016 had $20.1 billion in foreign income and a domestic loss of $300 million. Microsoft’s income tax expense was $3.3 billion, for an effective rate of 16.5%. Alphabet, the parent company of Google, posted a $4.7 billion tax expense, or 19%. Such “avoision” will continue as long as foreign income is subject to lower rates than domestic.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2017/04/18/wh...

> There's no reason to hand the market over to another country.

Who's to say that the other country's Google-killer won't prove to be a greater boon to American consumers? Let the global market decide.

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

#552

Post by zen928 » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 3:30 AM UTC

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.

> Whenever this is brought up, the silence is deafening.

Because it's a bad faith argument meant to dismiss all context surrounding the situation to be a reductive 'gotcha' point. Anti consumer practices are still harmful even if people willingly opt into them, and there's no cute soliloquy for you to publicly muse onto us here that would be able to suggest otherwise to dissipate the sentiment.

Your parent poster commented on the nature of learned helplessness to an obvious problem by framing it as leading a horse to water. They were talking about people like you.

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

#553

Post by fragmede » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 3:30 AM UTC

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #548

dmonitor wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My concern is that breaking up Google without breaking up Microsoft will basically just be giving MS a huge advantage in the multitude of categories in which they compete with each other, so we'll be left in an even worse situation than before.

Microsoft is categorically incompetently run at this point. They chose to cede both the web and mobile platforms entirely to Google for free. They couple some of their most impressively engineered OS releases with things like preinstalling Candy Crush to ensure that any gain of respect their engineering deserves is immediately burnt goodwill from shoddy behavior. Apple is mostly too dependent on vertical integration…

Folding phones are interesting things to use.

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

#554

Post by EasyMark » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 3:31 AM UTC

pawelmurias wrote: post #415

ssklash wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What part of being a massive ad company whose raison d'etre is to collect as much personal information about you as possible (with limited or no consent) to enable other people to try to convince you to buy stuff even remotely a net positive for the world?

I would prefer to see ads for things that I want rather then see ads for stuff I couldn't care less about. If I get convinced to buy useful things it's a win/win.

That could an opt in option, but the rest of us don’t want it. Google (or whatever ad company replaces it (Addled?) could give you the chance to opt in to ads and leave the rest of us alone. I’m fine with seeing ads about hunting when I’m on a gun sales website or local restaurants if I’m looking at recipes on Epicurious, just stop following me around, creeper (google)

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

#555

Post by EasyMark » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 3:33 AM UTC

mmastrac wrote: post #185

Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon -- the US could easily break all of these up. There's a huge risk to stagnation and over-optimization once these companies get as big as they do.

I think that’s a bad idea, those other companies have lots of competition and haven’t abused their positions nearly as much as google has.

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

#556

Post by Apocryphon » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 3:33 AM UTC

nickff wrote: post #239

thefaux wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You could potentially determine it by comparing other companies he could've gone to work for, such as say IBM, and determine their pay in comparison.

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

#557

Post by rqtwteye » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 3:34 AM UTC

hkand wrote: post #512

rqtwteye wrote: post #457

I think as a general principle it would be best to break up companies automatically from a certain size on. We need more competition and less powerful corporations. I don’t see any benefit that these trillion dollar companies are providing for society. Only downside

To say you can't see any benefit at all is probably an overstatement. These trillion dollar companies were often able to invest into big money-losing moonshot projects that benefited consumers massively - in Google's case, GMail and Google Maps - which were truly unimaginable at the time even though they're taken for granted today, so there's clearly some benefit in the form of innovation. Who else can afford to buil…

" in Google's case, GMail and Google Maps"

They did this when they were much smaller. I haven't seen anything impressive from the huge tech companies in the last years, be it MS, Google or Apple. All the the cool stuff was done years ago when they were much smaller. Their main achievements is to buy up or just crush potential competition before they become competitive.

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

#558

Post by ekianjo » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 3:35 AM UTC

hzia wrote: post #446

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…

I think most people do not understand that Google funnels a lot of their profits to make Chrome and Android into OSS. Youtube may be the only viable company that can come out of Google. Rest will either have to charge a lot of money or die. And we will be left with an even more profitable ad giant, that sends back all profits to it's share holders.

Android is hardly the best example of OSS out there. It's clearly controlled by Google.

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

#559

Post by whatever1 » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 3:37 AM UTC

ensignavenger wrote: post #542

whatever1 wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get your point. There is certainly demand lift from Google ads, I am not disputing this. But because it is a monopoly currently businesses pay way more than the value of the actual conversions Google ads achieve. Nobody should be willing to pay above, yet they do because the competition is willing to speculate on the value of these and take extreme positions.

My point is that advertisers still "win". Even if they might be paying less if the market were more competitive or transparent.

Ad professional and ad firms probably get some cut of that but that is not very relevant. The problem is that the cost for the companies and hence the consumer is up.

You can test it yourself. Try to promote your website with Google ads and you will see the insane prices they ask for. Btw you don't know if someone else is paying that number, google tells you that that is the price.

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

#560

Post by ekianjo » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 3:37 AM UTC

ineedasername wrote: post #456

hzia wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think most people do not understand that Google funnels a lot of their profits to make Chrome and Android into OSS. Youtube may be the only viable company that can come out of Google. Rest will either have to charge a lot of money or die. And we will be left with an even more profitable ad giant, that sends back all profits to it's share holders.

The Android Play Store alone generates about $100B/year for Google. I saw $40B as what Google has spent over the years on Android. That seems like a viable business.

People still consider revenue = profits?