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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

#651

Post by davedx »

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.

But that's false - China broke up Ant/AliBaba. The CCP doesn't want a single company controlling their entire economy any more than the US does - granted not for exactly the same reasons

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

#652

Post by black_puppydog »

I recently read a proposal in a book that comes down to a new tax that is specifically aimed to integrate these breakup decisions into the market mechanics.

Basically, a company would pay a very progressive tax on its revenue (not profit) which reaches 100% at some high threshold value. This tax would be flat zero for the vast majority of enterprises, but would approach 100% as the company's revenue approaches something that is big enough to be relevant on a countrywide GDP scale. Since it would be applied to individual companies only, splitting a company up wod reduce the tax or more even eliminate it entirely.

The exact point at which it makes sense for a company to split itself up the depends on the industry and other circumstances, but thst ppind exists and as society we can control in which type of scale it lies.

Just thought it was a neat proposal, although it would of course require careful legislation to avoid loopholes and edge cases. It surely ald be quite difficult to implement, given the opaque ownership structure of many companies and the companies they in turn own. But maybe the fact that this is so complicated should already give us pause...

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

#653

Post by justinclift »

kelnos wrote: post #597
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.

I really do question how much of Mozilla's financial backing would really be needed to keep Firefox development going. There are plenty of open source projects that are independent and run by foundations, but are funded by various corporations. A browser is certainly a complex piece of software, but I don't see why it couldn't be run the same way.

The current salary of Mozilla's CEO could certainly fund several full time developers instead. :)

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

#654

Post by fifticon »

black_puppydog wrote: post #652

I recently read a proposal in a book that comes down to a new tax that is specifically aimed to integrate these breakup decisions into the market mechanics. Basically, a company would pay a very progressive tax on its revenue (not profit) which reaches 100% at some high threshold value. This tax would be flat zero for the vast majority of enterprises, but would approach 100% as the company's revenue approaches someth…

I suspect loopholes will be the big problem here. There will be an incentive to form a sort of cartel of entities that semble being small, but in reality act in unison/coordinated. Sort of like the current scandal with price-fixing for apartment rentals in the US.

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

#655

Post by akoboldfrying »

zen928 wrote: post #552
akoboldfrying wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 com…

I'm starting to notice that a popular rhetorical tactic for attacking an argument is to claim that it is in bad faith.

Interestingly, making such an accusation when it is unwarranted, as is the case here, is itself a bad-faith argument.

But I suppose this is just another cute soliloquy that I am "musing onto" you.

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

#656

Post by johnnyanmac »

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…

to be blunt: screw the GDP. things get worse for the middle class even when the country does well. Why should I be concerned that money not going to benefit me is dwindling because a company that exploited me can't exploit me anymore? Reap what you sow.

More on topic: It was a neat idea, but given how consistently every single walled garden has ended up hindering progress and exploiting users in the long term, I'd rather go back to that 90's geocities era where users had to be mindful of their content instead of letting an algorithm scroll for them showing what maximizes engagement. The experiment has failed with aplomb.

Break up Google, break up Microsoft (again, kind of), open up Apple, shake down Steam. Make this new money show why old money was historically regulated into being a proper public service instead of a winner take all conglomerate.

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

#657

Post by account42 »

stephenr wrote: post #642
diffeomorphism wrote: post #630

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-…

Right, making a browser is "too expensive" largely because Google can make it too expensive by dumping tons of money into Chrome.

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

#658

Post by 0xEF »

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.

Do you have any sources showing how Google spends its profits? Honest question, you got me curious. From my likely ignorant perspective, the devs I know build open-source products with a barely perceptible fraction of the money Google makes, and they seem fine, so I'm wondering just how much Google dumps into that.

My initial search produces a lot of speculative numbers, but nothing verifiable. Admittedly, this is a realm I have little experience with, so perhaps I am looking for the wrong terms. It was also my understanding that the books of large companies like this are typically closed unless demanded by legal entities.

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

#659

Post by akoboldfrying »

DinoDad13 wrote: post #78
akoboldfrying wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't tell if you're serious. Not only did Google not "force" anyone to use the LLM tech that they largely developed, most people think they're silly for inventing it and then sitting on their hands until another company (OpenAI) ate their lunch.

The anti-trust case isn't about Google's LLM business.

I agree, and am trying to make that exact point to the person I replied to.

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

#660

Post by account42 »

bloppe wrote: post #406
hightrix wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> nicely provide us with everything digitally that we could need... Advertising Sorry for the snark, but no one anywhere needs advertising. Advertising in it's current form is a plague on humanity.

I started a small business selling candles during the pandemic. It's crazy how quickly you change your opinion about advertisements once you start needing to advertise your own business. All of the sudden, they're this amazing benefit for society. Advertisements can be good (when the business is good and genuinely wants you to know about good new product), and they can be bad (when the business if bad / misleading /…

It's also crazy how quickly you change your opionon on theft once you start using it to fill your pantry. Same for most other antisocial behaviors.
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