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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

#621

Post by WalterBright »

elzbardico wrote: post #510
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cisco reputedly avoided an anti-trust action by wining and dining DoJ lawyers Source? (They settled with Multiven.) > isn't it a bit naive to think it doesn't No, it's naïve to think that level of influence can be bought. Not an uncommon mistake. Bankman-Fried made it, and it's increasingly looking like Bytedance did too. But D.C. is a town obsessed with power over money. People regularly toss aside lobbyists and t…

Well, you don't simply walk into a Patek Phillipe store and ask to see the watches. Enzo Ferrari refused to sell ferraris for people he didn't think were deserving of having a ferrari. Corruption on the highest levels is very similar. Not everyone is on the buyers club.

Customer selection is not corruption.

Ferrari still curates their customers. If you buy a Ferrari and paint it pink, you get on their "nope" list. You also cannot buy a new Ferrari today unless you have a previous relationship with them, or are very very rich.

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

#622

Post by WalterBright »

tandr wrote: post #563
elzbardico wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you don't simply walk into a Patek Phillipe store and ask to see the watches. Enzo Ferrari refused to sell ferraris for people he didn't think were deserving of having a ferrari. Corruption on the highest levels is very similar. Not everyone is on the buyers club.

...and here I went for hour and half rabbit hole of what/who is Patek Phillipe, and why you cannot get to their store...

Tell us your findings!

BTW, if you're not dressed properly, some high end stores have a security guard who won't let you in. This can get tricky these days, as many wealthy people dress like slobs.

I once wandered into Cartier's in NYC, dressed in my trademark slob clothes. The security guard tailed me about a foot behind me, obviously trying to intimidate me into leaving. I just kept me hands in me pocketses, took a look around, then left.

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

#623

Post by WalterBright »

PlattypusRex wrote: post #484
WalterBright wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would you do without a search engine? Who do you think is going to pay for it?

Pay for Kagi or any other good, paid search engine, which is already superior to Google today?

Right, you get ads, or you pay. Businesses aren't charities.

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

#624

Post by Barrin92 »

shiroiushi wrote: post #506
hluska wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you actually believe that the United States should permit a monopoly because it “enables the US to suffocate the tech efforts of other countries”? You would rather ruin everyone else than have a functional economy? That says a lot about you.

I think his idea is that if other competing countries (namely China) won't break up their big tech companies, so with US companies broken up, they won't be able to compete against the foreign behemoths. The US already can't compete at all with China in electronic hardware and manufacturing.

>I think his idea is that if other competing countries (namely China) won't break up their big tech companies,

I think there's two big things wrong with this. For one China is actually breaking up its tech companies or even culling entire sectors, like education tech, as they do in AI, this kind of argument is basically just American oligopolists inventing a red scare to stave off regulation.

Secondly American companies have a lot of trouble abroad, in gigantic markets like the EU and increasingly India and Japan with stricter privacy regulation on the way because they're so large. So if anything, American anti trust would send a good signal to most markets that the US is in line with global trends.

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

#625

Post by mikelward »

sadeshmukh wrote: post #509
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious as to why you included Apple. All of the other companies bought up a bunch of potential competitors so they wouldn't get outcompeted, e.g: Facebook: Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus Google: DoubleClick, YouTube, Android, Waze, Deep mind Amazon: Whole Foods, Audible, Zappos, Ring, One Medical Arguably, I think things would be better if a bunch of these acquisitions were never allowed in the first place. But mos…

What completed or competes with YouTube?

TikTok, Vimeo, DailyMotion, various social networks.

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

#626

Post by creato »

kelnos wrote: post #594
creato wrote: post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that behavior was just determined to be illegal, at least when the bidder is Google. It seems ridiculous if the sequence of events that happens here is: 1. Google is fined/broken up due (in part) to paying for the default search engine position. 2. In the newly broken off chrome company, they auction the default search engine position. 3. Google cannot bid on it. So I guess Microsoft is going to win that position…

Perhaps that behavior wouldn't be illegal in a scenario where Google has been broken up, and Chrome and Google Search are separate legal entities.

Why would that matter though? Google owning chrome doesn't really have anything to do with them paying Apple for the safari default.

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

#627

Post by realusername »

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.

> think most people do not understand that Google funnels a lot of their profits to make Chrome and Android into OSS.

Chrome maybe but for Android, it's debatable at best to state it as OSS. AOSP doesn't run on a single phone on earth, not even the emulator and the freedom of users to modify it is very limited in practice.

I'd put it as "mostly source available" instead of open source.

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

#628

Post by nosianu »

someluccc wrote: post #390
nosianu wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that does not mean that 5 minutes of your eyesight is now worth something The advertisers paying to get their ads placed in front of those eyes disagree. And ye, since another comment questions this, data or "eye-time are similar - they can be broken down to the individual. The advertisers pay some price expecting a certain number of people to see the ad, and even if data about people is sold in bulk (too) there is…

You can literally use Chrome, Workspace, Drive, Android and Maps without seeing a single ad, without an ad blocker, without EVER using google search, for free.

Uhmm.... I have to admit that I fail to see any connection whatsoever between your original comment that I replied to (included in the reply) and your reply...

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

#629

Post by hot_gril »

gaiagraphia wrote: post #181

The free market's great IF there's competition. If the market's dead, it's time to reinject some life and keep the cogs turning. Scale's great, but it often comes with a societal cost. For every efficiency made, there's less agency and decent jobs to go round. Seems unfair to make such decisions ad-hoc though, and string it out through years of court cases and m/billions of lawyer fees. Why not establish rules of the…

If the tech market is dead, most markets are even more dead

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

#630

Post by diffeomorphism »

brendoelfrendo wrote: post #562
agent281 wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google funds Chrome. Other browsers use Chrome as a base. The majority of Firefox's funding is from Google. They will suffer as well. MS would need to step back up with browsers and you would also have Safari left over. I think it would be a major shock to the browser ecosystem.

Other browsers use the open source Chromium project as their base, not Chrome. If Google killed off Chrome tomorrow, those other browsers could continue using the Chromium codebase, and new maintainers could step up to manage the Chromium project. Nothing needs to change.

Wishful thinking. It is much too large of a project for "new maintainers could step up" once google jumps off both chrome and chromium. Chromium would either slowly wither away or the new maintainers would be MS Edge or Amazon or some other large company.
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