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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

#641

Post by iepathos »

asdff wrote: post #150
mensetmanusman wrote: post #139

DeepMind wouldn’t have happened to the level it did had google been broken up prior.

What might deep mind have looked like today if it were given the same resources in an academic or national lab setting and no ultimate profit motive?

For some perspective here, The US spends ~$90b on all higher education institution research combined each year with over half of that funding coming from the government. The 42 federally funded national research labs only had something like $29.3b spent on R&D in 2023 and only a portion of that is allowed to be spent on non-weapons research. Google alone is spending over $100b on just deep mind R&D this year. So, all academia and all the federally funded research labs would have to have agreed to stop working on anything else to pool enough resources together to provide equivalent support for deep mind. This would've required many government officials and entities to have the foresight to see the potential impact of deep mind and be willing to sacrifice all the other interests they have asking for funding. imo if federal government were funding deep mind this significantly in this alternate timeline it would be focused towards weapons research and wartime applications cause over half of the national labs funding is spent on weapons R&D.

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

#642

Post by stephenr »

diffeomorphism wrote: post #630
brendoelfrendo wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Before the current Chromtastrophe, multiple companies maintained their own, fully independent rendering engines, according to web standards.

Microsoft didn't stop developing EdgeHTML because it's too hard, they stopped because Google kept giving them the fuck around on sites like YouTube.

The whole point of web standards is that you can have multiple implementations for the same thing - there's zero reason that post-Google, Blink needs to be maintained by a single entity.

Microsoft can maintain their own fork of Blink, or bring back Edge, or adopt WebKit, or whatever works for them.

Opera and have the same options, sans EdgeHTML.

The whole reason these companies are using Chromium/Blink is that Google has a stranglehold on web standards, and by being a me-too Chrome-alike they get support for Google's half baked ideas for free, to prevent the ever-fickle user base from switching browser because their browser doesn't support the latest half-written web standards draft.

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

#643

Post by rjmunro »

zo1 wrote: post #434
AlienRobot wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not my experience. I'd like to see you prove this.

Not OP. I switched to DuckDuckGO about 1.5/2 years back, and it was awesome at the time. But it has gradually gotten worse to the point where I @google search pretty much 70% of the time. Now that could be me being in a bit in the honeymoon phase with DDG at the time and it wore off, or maybe it's actually been getting worse. My pet, unproven, theory. Is that DDG has been "improving" but that's been making the search…

I suspect it's because DuckDuckGO is Bing, and Bing is getting worse. Why is Bing getting worse? Because Bing has grown enough market share to be worth SEO people optimising for it.

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

#644

Post by jedberg »

robertlagrant wrote: post #436
makeitdouble wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's hard to see how a smaller, more focused company would be able to justify that type of R&D. Typically that's solved with R&D happening in academia or semi-public space. How much this happens depends on the opportunities to do it in private companies, so entities like Google paying big salaries for R&D probably means we don't see what alternatives they would be if they stopped doing so.

> Typically that's solved with R&D happening in academia or semi-public space. It was, but not any more. The crazy capital investments often come from private companies as well. And that's not a problem. They're spending their money rather than your money.

They could still spend the money in academia if they didn't the option to spend it themselves. When I was in college we had labs named after different companies, and those companies sponsored the research in those labs and had first dibs on commercialization.

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

#645

Post by robertlagrant »

rafaelmn wrote: post #463
robertlagrant wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. Google is far less locked in than Microsoft. Gaming across Windows and Xbox vs Sony/Nintendo. Office is used by almost every org in the world. Azure locked in via clickops IT staff always wanting to pick it; you have to make a big case to use GCP or AWS in a lot of companies vs "just" using Azure. Google's search advantage could be taken away with another website that's better. There's no installed base or corp…

Is Microsoft gaming relevant that much these days ? Admittedly I'm not gaming that much but I own PS5 and Mac and I don't really feel I'm missing out on any titles I'd want to play. Big stuff comes out on PS5 and Steam - I did see Microsoft buying a bunch of studios but the impact of that feels irrelevant in grand scheme of things. Office/GCloud does feel like the two big players but I'm sure competition would creep…

> Is Microsoft gaming relevant that much these days ?

Hyper relevant I'd say, although the Microsoft corporate touch seems to kill every studio they buy.

> Office/GCloud does feel like the two big players but I'm sure competition would creep up here if GSuite went away (and I doubt it would, even as a standalone company).

Office is orders of magnitude bigger than GSuite. It is gigantic. Governments release documents in Word format instead of OpenOffice. It's so big. GSuite is still a minnow in comparison.

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

#646

Post by robertlagrant »

jmb99 wrote: post #604
robertlagrant wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Typically that's solved with R&D happening in academia or semi-public space. It was, but not any more. The crazy capital investments often come from private companies as well. And that's not a problem. They're spending their money rather than your money.

> They're spending their money rather than your money. Ok, and from whom did their money come? They didn’t magic it into existence. Google spending money that came from advertisers who got it from people buying their products isn’t much different than a research team spending public money, just with fewer middle men and a (generally) lower negative impact on society.

The money came from people selling (or trying to sell) products that other people want to buy for the price that includes the ads, as it's valuable. This is far better than the old school ad industry, which made advertising much more expensive and products more expensive.

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

#647

Post by davedx »

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.

Most people do not understand this because Alphabet's financial filings are chronically opaque and break out very little of how the financials of the different parts of the group interact.

How do you know how much Google funnels of its profits (are you sure you mean this?) into Chrome and Android's open source projects? Do you work at Google and have access to this information? Are you sure you know what you're talking about here?

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

#648

Post by black_puppydog »

akira2501 wrote: post #249
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…

> Scale's great Is it? As consumers you may be noticing the impact now but as a developer I've felt the impact of Google's "scale" for years and it has not been pleasant.

I think that's exactly because too much of a good thing became bad. Scale was good for consumers when it increased efficiency, and decreased cost. But once the lower hanging scale effects were taken, the drawbacks (regulatory capture, monopoly,...) became more noticeable.

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

#649

Post by davedx »

agent281 wrote: post #517
krackers wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if Google dies then we'll have more diverse browser and mobile ecosystem? Where exactly is the downside?

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.

"Won't somebody please think of the browsers!"

This is not a good reason to break up anti-competitive monopolies: that it would harm the technology their monopoly depends on

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

#650

Post by davedx »

gerash wrote: post #455
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…

No, Epic vs Apple and Epic vs Google ruling shows how inconsistent the ruling are on such a common sense situation. So I don't want Google to be broken up and lose business only for MS, Apple, Amazon and Facebook to gobble up its business

What's common sense about the App Store rulings?
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