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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

#811

Post by adamc »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #800
adamc wrote: post #795

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are lots of competing alternatives for most cases -- not search, but I doubt search would die. If gmail disappears, people could move to another provider. Etc.

You're missing the point. We're talking about the government potentially burning a 2 trillion dollar private company to the ground, and your response is to just shrug and say "oh well, the world will survive"? Yes, of course people will find alternatives. But you still just lit 2 trillion dollars of other people's private property on fire for no discernible benefit!

Your attribution of cause is wrong. We're talking about the government enforcing anti-trust provisions, and if the company is so broken that it cannot succeed without holding a monopoly, letting it fail.

Letting dysfunctional companies fail is supposedly a core tenet of capitalism.

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

#812

Post by KoolKat23 »

consteval wrote: post #808
KoolKat23 wrote: post #807

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless it's egregious, it's likely to be hypocritical. Are those same people buying mobile phones (cobalt is being used, guess where and who mines that) or using Amazon (poorer working conditions relatively speaking)? Or communicating via post, and buying from the local guy who imports their products (and has a big carbon footprint)? The real world is grey.

It doesn't really matter, because perfect shouldn't be the enemy of good. You're correct the world is gray, but if you're able to make a product switch without too much effort then go for it. I mean, if I reduce my plastic use because I stop buying product X then that's still better (in my eyes) than if I did nothing. Or if Company Y has some egregious political ties, I cut them off, but Company Z is a huge conglomer…

But you can cut them off, you choose not to. You don't have to buy from Amazon, its just more convenient. You could buy a Fairphone but you don't.

And compare Google and Kagi? Monopoly bad or Employee bad, which do you choose?

As I say unless its egregious. It's a nice idea but doesn't work in practice there's always trade offs.

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

#813

Post by homebrewer »

gizmo wrote: post #704
ThunderSizzle wrote: post #672

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a naive take. Companies want their book-profit to be as close to zero, because they make their income tax to the IRS close to 0. Most companies intentionally waste money on expenses to help drive future growth, or atleast avoid taxes. This is why you hear constantly Amazon pays almost no taxes compared to their revenue.

Amazon was the exception actually. That's why it's the poster child for being perpetually break-even. The surge in AI capex spending of the last couple of years is partially because big tech has finally found something to shovel their billions into. Before that big tech just sat on their billions with no plan of what to do with it. But even AI spending doesn't really put a dent in the money pile because big tech is s…

So they effectively burn money, and yet OSS funding is an unsolved problem, and large parts of our foundation rely on unpaid volunteers "in Nebraska". Fantastic. I love the industry more and more with every passing day.

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

#814

Post by verdverm »

stego-tech wrote: post #810
verdverm wrote: post #750

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might be time more of us think about the browser/chromium like Linux/kernel There are lots of distos out there, but we all use the same core and make it better & safer together.

> It might be time more of us think about the browser/chromium like Linux/kernel Coming from Enterprise Architecture world, if you're not already treating browsers as full-fledged operating systems to manage and secure, then you're operating dangerously. In fact, that's actually why I'm resistant to further "webification" of software and applications, as it's the same drawbacks as nested virtualization: now we have t…

I agree with your statements

What I was trying to say is that we only have a single kernel in the linux world without complaint, so having a single browser "kernel" (chromium) can be seen as a good thing. We have multiple distros (chrome, edge, brave, etc) for the browser as well

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

#815

Post by ThunderSizzle »

triceratops wrote: post #762
ThunderSizzle wrote: post #672

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a naive take. Companies want their book-profit to be as close to zero, because they make their income tax to the IRS close to 0. Most companies intentionally waste money on expenses to help drive future growth, or atleast avoid taxes. This is why you hear constantly Amazon pays almost no taxes compared to their revenue.

Some real "they just write it off Jerry" energy in this comment.

No. Your confusing different accounting methodologies. For tax accounting purposes, the goal is to show the IRS near-zero profit.

Their internal books will track expenses in a different way so as to produce a non-tax profit, buy that's all internal non-tax accounting, and tends ro be private compared to SEC filings.

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

#816

Post by CatWChainsaw »

eric-hu wrote: post #673
CatWChainsaw wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thiel himself said competition is for losers. He also said he thinks democracy and freedom are incompatible. His cohort doesn't want a free market, it wants godlike technofeudalism.

> godlike technofeudalism Interesting term. On a geopolitical scale, how is the US/NATO’s position any different? There are export controls around advanced semiconductors and encryption algorithms. Is it okay to do this between countries but not within societies? (Genuine question. I really don’t know where I stand on this, for either side.)

Every entity with any weight to throw around in a geopolitical sense wants an omniscient and omnipotent surveillance state, which necessarily becomes a fusion of government and corporate power, even if it was not done intentionally. They've always wanted it, it's just that now it doesn't seem like a fantasy, but rather a reality a decade away.

Your citizens/consumers/users are utterly dependent on your services and your goodwill, and you have an absolute, unquestionable, non-negotiable lifetime monopoly on the means necessary to exist in a modern, always-connected society. You can provide as little, terrible service as you want, because if anyone complains, you shadowban them from being able to exist in society, and they die, which is much easier than actually making good changes. And you don't even have to go to the effort of legal kabuki theater now, because you are the law.

If this sounds absurd, remember that power increases sociopathy and that bunker bros contemplate bomb-collars to ensure the compliance of their security forces after the apocalyptic "event" they're engineering, even if it truly is inadvertent, and in the meantime we have Epstein and child miners in the Congo and social media companies running world-scale psychological experiments and sometimes they pay a little fine for it to show how sorry they are for enabling one genocide or another.

The two most likely outcomes are a 1984-like state of the world, with a contrived stalemate because no one bloc can gain an edge, or, more worryingly, a 1984-like world state, because one of these blocs managed to either destroy or devour the others.

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

#817

Post by idle_zealot »

tick_tock_tick wrote: post #806
idle_zealot wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you truly believe that tech monopolists are critical to national security then the only safe option would be to nationalize them. Incidentally, that would also remove the profit motive for bad behavior, solving one of the largest problems with allowing a monopoly to exist. But apparently that would be anti-free. Because nothing says Free Country like letting a handful of the most rich and powerful people on the pl…

> If you truly believe that tech monopolists are critical to national security then the only safe option would be to nationalize them. They are critical to national security because of their ability to perform. Nationalizing them would complete distort their incentives and destroy the company so thoroughly we might as well have just broken them up.

What are their incentives currently causing them to do? Lobby the government, spy on private citizens, sell influence, make products increasingly user-hostile... why do we pretend that a profit motive results in good behavior even in the face of evidence that it does not, at least in this one case we're talking about taking action on?

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

#818

Post by shiroiushi »

Ntrails wrote: post #667
shiroiushi wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're forgetting Apple. What happens if breaking Google up ends up destroying Android?

How would that even work? (I'm not being difficult here, I just don't understand). Assume Google is split up, Android is not maintained because doing so is not profitable. Each handset manufacture still needs an OS, and will just make custom forks or whole OS. They're not going to wind down operations because Android stops being a thing I don't think it meaningfully increases IOS market share?

If Android splinters into a bunch of separate incompatible forks, then no one's going to bother writing apps for these phones (because they'd have to separately maintain a dozen different versions of them), and will just concentrate on iOS. No one will want a phone that doesn't have the most popular apps, unless they're just really cheap. The only reason Android survives is because you can get an Android version of just about any app, and if that goes away, most of the value of having an Android phone disappears. I know a lot of HN old-timers just don't understand this at all because they don't use apps and only use a phone for calling the phone numbers of people they already know, but apps are the real reason smartphones became popular in the first place. So this will turn Apple into a true monopoly vendor, owning virtually all the smartphone market.

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

#819

Post by shiroiushi »

briandear wrote: post #716
shiroiushi wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>android has a huge market share on mobile. Not in the US they don't; it's a minority share, split across many different manufacturers who all have their own flavor of Android, their own (crappy) app stores and pre-loaded crapware apps, etc. Apple has a clear majority of the US smartphone market (and it's a vertical monopoly, with Apple controlling the phone hardware and the app store and not allowing any alternative…

Windows isn’t open source. Perhaps Office and Windows should be broken up? They have far more market share comparatively speaking. The fact that most of the enterprise run on Microsoft could be more concerning than an consumer App Store.

That would have been nice 20+ years ago, back when the US tried it, but the government shut it down just as soon as Bush took office.

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

#820

Post by andriesm »

lupusreal wrote: post #757
IX-103 wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People keep bringing up Manifest v3 like it's some evil plot to show people ads. Nevermind that Chrome already ships with its own adblocker which blocks bad ads. The fact is that with the Spectre mitigations added to Chrome, the performance of networking with manifest v2 was bad. Having to keep sending every network request through 3 different processes just in case there is a plugin (uses by the minority of users) t…

All ads are psychological warfare being waged by corporations against the public. They ruthlessly exploit human psychology to sell product.

People are mindless pawns? People are not free to say no thanks, ignore or tune out? That's what I do my entire life. And I actually appreciate and value highly targeted marketing messages that show me things I'm interested in and WANT to buy. Really good targeted marketing is a win-win, it helps consumers find stuff they want and it helps the companies generate profits. (which in turns pays salaries to employees) I don't have a solution for weakminded and vulnerable people, but perhaps such people should be under parental supervision.
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