Good decision. Then do the same thing to AWS and Amazon's media branch, and then go undo the whatsapp acquisition. Then stop platforms from subsidizing competing products while they charge competitors high fees like Spotify vs Apple Music.
The increasing trend of large tech conglomerates to use one money printing product like AWS or search or the Apple Store to tactically snipe competitors to destroy or acquire them is absolutely abysmal in the long run. I don't care if it increases consumer prices by 10 cents or whatever, it's time to look at the long term health of the ecosystem overall. It's really the private analog to a state capitalist country subsidizing its own firms while foreigners have to compete on a one-by-one basis. Everyone considers that to be detrimental when it happens between two nations, I don't see why it's not detrimental when it happens in the tech industry.
>Good decision. Then do the same thing to AWS and Amazon's media branch, and then go undo the whatsapp acquisition
Exactly. My concern is that Google is being uniquely targeted, and that breaking them up and calling it a day just exposes us to further abuses from the rest of the tech industry. At least with Google, evil is divided across five tech giants that can serve as checks against one another, instead of merely four.
Similarly, I feel that the tech industry as a whole, while far from not evil, has emerged with a set of interests distinct from those of other monopolies, and helped protect the internet from being subordinated to the interests of telecoms. Which isn't to say that I enjoy monopolies, far from it. I just want to see similar willpower to break up the giants of other industries.
For that matter, if we really have to go the route of the uniquely targeting a specific tech company, I would at least start with Amazon and then Facebook. Or if we thought more broadly than just tech, I would start with the oil industry giants, finance industry giants, and then telecoms, and then health insurance companies, and then Amazon and Facebook.
Those other industries you mention have each been subjected to relatively large amounts of regulation over their history, some have been targeted for antitrust in the past. By comparison the "tech" industry has been subjected to very little regulation in the US, almost none. We have seen these "concerns" from other commenters in the past -- "it is not fair to keep picking on X" or "everybody else is doing it" -- but it just comes across as being from people working within or dependent on the industry. Why would anyone else be sympathetic to these concerns?
>At least with Google, evil is divided across five tech giants that can serve as checks against one another, instead of merely four.
I find it interesting that we're reasoning in terms of balance of power, pre-eminence, and hegemony, to address issues related to a few companies. Cardinal de Richelieu sure would have found his footing.
No wonder some Google had a "Head of International Relations" whose job is to deal with diplomats, the U.N and the like[^1]. I believe Condoleezza Rice is also on the board of Dropbox.
When you have quarterly profits larger than some small nations entire yearly GDP, it’s as much a question of if you need international relations so much as it’s a question of if you would benefit from having one, and the answer is an obvious yes. They can afford the best, so they can meet with and wine and dine the best.
Perhaps all this familiarity is finally breeding contempt from certain quarters? Perhaps it’s a bit of envy on both sides; nations envious of multinational profits and reach, and multinational firms envious of national self-justifying existence.
I wonder how long til Starlink starts providing extraterritorial/extraterrestrial VPS?
>"The increasing trend of large tech conglomerates to use one money printing product like AWS or search or the Apple Store to tactically snipe competitors to destroy or acquire them is absolutely abysmal in the long run."
That's literally how every company ever in any industry since the dawn of commerce has operated. You use profits to grow and diversify. You can't perform capital expenditure without capital...
Still, it has been part of capitalism since its dawn... not saying its the best for us all - far from it, but no huge multinational corporation grew to its size by playing nice and polite.
The thing is, amoral behavior can be seen left and right, through large part of history of Silicon Valley (remember Gates & Jobs & Xerox).
To me as an end consumer, Facebook has a true monopoly and progressively shittier products compared to Google - ads comprising half of my feed, their core product is still broken and buggy in many places but that's another topic. Recent UI changes made it much worse product. Google looks great compared. But again that's very personal and limited view.
Those competitors are fueled by VC money which let's them price their products below sustainable levels. In other words they're doing predatory pricing just as much as Amazon. Banning it will probably help Amazon more than it hurts them.
my answer to that is, yes that is how every other industry operates, which is why every other industry is painfully slow. Tech was the rare exception of having the advantage of starting from a blank slate a few decades ago, and it was insanely innovative. There's no excuse to let it calcify into the state of every other industry, and I'd take your point and go further, go to every other industry and do the same.
Go to telecommunications and break the big players up and create marketplaces in which small players can innovate. Do it in news media and undo that awful communications act from 96 that led to industry concentration.
We need to take an activist attitude to anti-trust that actively seeks to create rabidly competitive markets which is what fuelled early tech's growth, instead of letting tech slide into the status quo.
And of course all of these companies will still have access to capital. They'll just need to convince investors that their product is better.
The only reason Google can be Google is economy of scale. No matter how friendly you make the marketplace for proto-Google hopefuls, they an never even approach the infrastructure capable of making the same product.
Telecom and the like are the same, competition leads to fragmentation and destruction of opportunity. Monopolies lead to bad platforms, but platforms that hit the scale divided and broken half solutions never will.
I wouldn’t be so sure of that. Their edge in search and email is eroding. The general public wouldn’t see much difference if their default search engine was DDG. Not saying it’s not a monopoly, but I see it more as brand power than impossible to match by competition. Same for email or maps, you can switch on a individual level for nearly the same experience.
I’m way more concerned by Facebook in terms of monopoly, because here I truly don’t have a choice between products, just to opt out with social consequences. That’s not the case with search or email.
That is a theory; not necessarily a decided reality.
Google is an ad company; their product is an audience and an advertising system. There is no reason that advertising should be untouchable except at scale. There are plenty of tiny players who eke out a profitable existence at small scale with ads. It is likely there is a path from there up into a mega-giant if someone really goes to look for it.
If anything, advertising might suffer diseconomies of scale for most products. Small businesses want to advertise locally.
Each search costs 0.0003 kWh of energy in Google infrastructure. That's just energy bill. Now think about massive infrastructure that is out there giving you sub-second results for 40,000 queries each second all over the world. Think about the man power that does on day-in day-out to make sure things are not gamed in constant war of SEO. I highly doubt Google can function in same way without economy of scale.
Google is a search engine company that gives better results because it has more opportunities to improve the product with each request it sees.
Advertising is the same way: The more opportunities you have to try matching a person with a thing they might like, the more you'll learn.
Google is on a scale that are likely two orders of magnitude more than their closest competitor.
Hilariously, Google is by far the best at mapping local people with local businesses, as they've mapped most commercial centers, and run heavy machine learning across them to extract information their competitors can't even hope to try for another decade.
That is a feature, not a bug. Fragmentation leads to protocols instead of products which is why we have the internet instead of whatever monstrosity Bell would have produced had the arpanet never happened.
Yes, that's why the US has the most absurd cell phone network even while I sit in Silicon Valley, but I don't have reception in a half dozen places during my commute, or in my home.
Why I pay absurd amounts more for my healthcare, even when I can choose between several different insurance companies.
That's why my power in a massive center in California is completely unreliable here, I've experienced more power failures in the past year in a major city than I did in 30 years in the middle of fucking nowhere Canada.
Well, seems like your country is broken, maybe you should reconsider your apparently destructive regulations. Fairly free competition does make it work year-round and cheap all around Europe.
Natural monopolies are best run by the government.
That's why Mussolini got the trains to run on time. He also used them to ship all the Jews to concentration camps, but what's a few million lives compared to being slightly inconvenienced?
This is false. Italy did not ship its Jews to concentration camps during WWII.
After Italy switches sides, and joined the Allies, the Germans, who quickly occupied northern Italy immediately started carrying out the Holocaust.
They were not very successful, because of resistance and non-cooperation by Italian civilian authorities. Less than 10% of Italy's jewish population died in the Holocaust. (Compared to 50% of Romania's, 90% of Poland's, 70% of Hungary's, 30% of Austria's, and 90% of Greece's)
Early markets were fueled by capital, not competition. Capital needs to be reigned in with these monopolies or we’ll just sprout more. Let’s not pretend like competitive markets are possible with the kind of capital needed to compete.
Ok, so you have some spare capital from being successful in one market. You want to move into a new market, and that spare capital is your ticket in. There's a difference between building a sustainable, independent business with that capital, and strangling competitors in the new market by moving in and charging well below your cost until those competitors are dead.
The former benefits consumers by giving them more choice. The latter gives consumers lower prices in the short term, but then hurts them overall when the competitors are forced out and prices inevitably rise again, this time without any competitive pressure to keep costs low, margins reasonable, and product/service quality high.
And regardless of whether or not the latter is common, or has always been common, I maintain that it is a huge negative aspect of capitalism that destroys wealth, creates inefficiency, and hurts consumers. Regulation that targets that practice would be welcome.
If you include traders and creators in the various ecosystems and not just "customer" in the retail sense, examples aren't hard to find.
Google and Facebook. The two biggest ad auction oligopolies own virtually all of ad-space between them. Is there real competition? No, there isn't.
Apple. More and more locked down, less and less reliable, more and more expensive. Want to move? Want to repair something out of warranty? That's going to be... difficult.
Ebay + PayPal. If one doesn't screw on fees, the other will screw you on fees. Ideally both will screw you on fees. Now with added Etsy, because also.
Amazon. The giant changes its mind because something something ToS violation and leaves you with n figures of dead inventory and a locked pay out. What are you going to do?
Spotify. You pay us for the music, we don't pay the artists. [1]
YouTube. The record companies get income even if they don't have the rights to it, for the bargain price of a robo copyright claim. Because recognition algos are so very complicated and they make such terrible mistakes, so much of the time.
These aren't just monopolies, they're massive market distortions where money is so dense it warps the Internet into stagnant pools of pseudo-inevitability, with a chilling effect on real innovation and creativity.
And that's not even getting into issues of privacy, political influence, and the market value of personal data.
[1] Not technically true, but considering the pitiful pay outs it might as well be.
It's hard to find an example, because no company is stupid enough to push out all the competitors. Instead they push out most of the competitors, while keeping one or two around (so they don't get into trouble with monopoly laws), and building big barriers to entry for anyone else.
Then they can increase prices a bit, although the main profit source is in reducing unit costs now you have a big business and making all your profit through volume.
It's certainly non-ideal for customers, but at the same time I think customers usually get a better service for a lower price than in a world with hundreds of competing companies (where overheads work out much larger)
What would be the ideal situation? Like you said, having too many competing companies doesn't lead to great services at low cost because of the extra overhead and lack of volume, and having a monopoly gives one company too much power, then isn't duopoly a nice equilibrium?
Intel sold low core count, repackaged CPUs for ridiculous prices for years, because they didn't have any competition.
Now AMD's managed to claw black some of the market for itself, but it is still at a huge disadvantage compared to Intel. And AMD's only lucky that IBM insisted on two independent OEMs for its PC CPU's and that Intel wanted that deal bad enough.
When it comes to the desktop CPU market itself, x86 has an unquestionable monopoly and no new player can attempt to design x86 chips without getting sued. But without x86 there's no point designing desktop chips in the first place.
Apple designs plenty of chips that have better performance than most computers shipping today. No one really cares about the desktop anymore. Apple alone sells more devices using its own chips than all PC sells combined and they are less than 15% of the market.
Even when it comes to the better margin server market there is a move toward both AMD and custom ARM chips.
As for the performance, we don't really know yet. Single core benchmarks of a CPU with low core count may play out differently with tens or hundreds of cores, 5GHz frequencies, active cooling etc. You can't extrapolate benchmarks in a linear fashion.
No doubt the A Series is impressive, however it hasn't really been tested in a "Mac Pro" yet, so we'd have to see.
Then there's the issue of compatibility and I fail to see how Apple plans to break the Wintel monopoly on the desktop. Sure, it may be able to transition to ARM with the Mac, but unless its chips are available to everybody, (unlikely), there's hardly a route I see for Apple to end x86 dominance.
There is plenty of software for “creative” work for iPads. Adobe in particular has shown how much better performance is on ARM chips than Intel.
The vast majority of consumers are running Mac Pro level hardware. In fact, most computers that are sold are laptops.
Why would Apple care about “dominance” in the PC market? It cares about going after the most profitable share of the market. It’s not like most PC makers are making money hand over fist selling consumer PCs.
In the server market, both Amazon and Google are creating their own Arm chips for their data centers.
We're talking about x86 being a monopoly. Without Windows & major developer buy in, Apple's ARM platform would not affect x86 desktop dominance in a significant way. It would be a platform with a significant niche of macOS users, but x86 would remain dominant.
Windows' deployed in places Mac never visited, like the majority of world's government institutions, schools, (Chromebooks aren't big outside U.S. & Western Europe).
You may argue that Apple will have the "high-value" market, but in terms of sheer numbers I don't see them competing with x86 anytime soon.
As for the iPad being "pro", once you're able to develop serious software on the device itself, we may have a discussion, (I am aware of rumors that XCode is present in iPad OS 14, really curious about that). The existing "Pro" apps still lag behind desktop in many areas and no serious programmer or video editor uses iPad OS full time.
To be clear, am not doubting Apple's ARM chips being really competent, just doubt it will unseat x86 on the desktop.
As for ARM on the server, probably eventually it will be the majority, but I'd guess another decade. Current efforts are more experiments than anything.
My fear is also that if something does displace x86, it won't be a clearly superior, relatively open platform to develop for, but rather a patchwork of workload specific vendor ARM chips with entirely proprietary ways to interact with them. In that scenario, I'd rather take x86.
Despite the HN bubble, there are a lot bigger markets for pro users than developers. I would venture to say that from a profit motive, it makes little sense to bring development to the iPad. There is no money in development tools.
For places that must have bespoke internal apps, a lot of them are moving toward dumb clients and some type of Citrix solution.
In terms of “sheer numbers”, the desktop market is minuscule, the laptop market could easily go to ARM if MS could ever figure out a good transition strategy, and the server market runs Linux where power is big as important as overall power consumption.
Don’t you think that Intel would rather be in ARMs position than what it is now? I don’t have numbers on the server market, but outside of that Apple ships more chips than Intel.
Edit: this was just submitted to HN showing the performance of Intel chips to Amazon’s custom designed ARM chips.
That conclusion is based on the premise that their software would have been priced the same if they hadn't bundled in "free" software. Not sure we have enough data to make that conclusion.
Ultimately you were charged for the "free" bundled software, you just couldn't get a line item break down of how of the bundle price was made up by that "free" software.
Not saying that Microsoft should break down their OS prices by bundled software, or that it makes sense. But without that breakdown you can't make the assertion that "They never pushed up costs".
> That's literally how every company ever in any industry since the dawn of commerce has operated.
Not even close to true, you're describing how "financial capitalism" works which is relatively modern (in the US, it begin in the early 1900s after the creation of the Federal Reserve). Until you financialize an economy, businesses can't use that kind of strategy to compete. Once you do, only those with access to finance can win.
Read up on industrial capitalism which relies on the quality of products and services—not access to finance, aka money printing—to compete in the marketplace. That's how the US was built originally, and what most Americans mean when they say they support "capitalism."
So where does Standard Oil fall into this classification? It spent the 1880s and 1890s using its vast profits from refining oil to buy up railroads to stifle competing oil refineries by restricting access to rail transport.
That's an early example of the general approach taken by financial capitalism (essentially, the prototype for how to do it), though in the case of Standard Oil (aka Exxon), it wasn't through money printing: Standard Oil just reinvested its profits to buy up the competition (with the hopes of raising prices later).
Prior to its monopolization actions, Standard Oil was a successful industrial capitalism firm: they had better oil refinery tech than the competition which is how they came into having money to re-invest in the first place.
This is materially false. Throughout history capital has been used to stop competitors. Capital is not necessarily money in a practical sense. Regardless, money has decided these things for hundreds of years as well. Whether nation states rose or fell depended on whether they could pay mercenaries to fight for them. The largest brick castle in the world, Malbork fell when the Teutonic order was besieged and could no longer pay the castles defenders. They were then “bought out” by a Polish general. This doesn’t just apply to mercenary armies, or war, by the way. This isn’t just some product of “modern capitalism”.
> Throughout history capital has been used to stop competitors.
Your examples are nations, not businesses. Obviously the economics of warfare are different: money (and resources more generally) are how you defeat your "enemies."
I'm talking about capitalism, both industrial (Wealth of Nations-style) and modern financial capitalism which is the domain of business and markets, not war.
Yeah, but these are primates and no primate is evolved enough to handle consolidation without turning into a total fuck-off tyrant. You know at one point the British Empire controlled over a quarter of the entire world? They had a real opportunity to usher in a new era of peace and cooperation. Did they do it? NOOOOO!!! NO ONE EVER DOES!
It's incredibly anti-competitive behaviour and it's baffling that governments are allowing it to go unchecked. Even the WhatsApp purchase was greenlit with caveats (not combining FB and WhatsApp user data) ... which were promptly ignored by Facebook. I seriously want to know who they paid off to get that acquisition. There's no way that was above board.
All those sound great in theory if the US was an isolated nation.
However all these companies compete on a global stage. You better believe that Huawei, tencent, Alibaba are going to take advantage of weakened US companies.
I think the EU provides a pretty good example of what could happen. They seem much more aggressive with anti-trust and as a result they aren't very competitive on the global tech stage.
There are a handful a tech companies from Europe that operate globally, but they're usually niche (Spotify, Minecraft, Qwant).
Sure, they are no Google or Amazon, but they are or were nothing to sneeze at either
I'm also highly doubtful that this is mainly because of anti-trust laws.
A much more likely reason to me seems that Europe is much more diversified in law and culture, a Paris company has a much harder time expanding to London or Berlin than an San Fransisco one will have for Los Angeles or New York. This naturally leads to more, smaller companies.
I think the combined market cap/revenue of all the companies you mention would still be less than any of the 4 biggest tech companies of the US. Even the Chinese companies are way bigger.
> A much more likely reason to me seems that Europe is much more diversified in law and culture, a Paris company has a much harder time expanding to London or Berlin than an San Fransisco one will have for Los Angeles or New York. This naturally leads to more, smaller companies.
I am not sure that's the case. The EU car companies had overtaken the US car companies, inspite of the above scenarios.
Check the top companies in Europe, it's mostly the same companies founded 100 years ago or something. The increased regulation in Europe just helped existing big companies, not new ones. Compare this with the US where the list changes every 20 years or so. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathanponciano/2019/05/15/eur...
That deserves a challenge. Many significant contributors to US GDP are long-standing (>100yo) firms. Ford (founded 1903), General Motors (1908), Walgreens (1901), McKesson (1833), IBM (1911), Kroger (1883), Boeing (1917), Wells Fargo (1852), General Electric (1890), Johnson & Johnson (1886), Phillips Petroleum (1917).
Or the large companies that are repackaged versions of much older companies, with lineage back to the 19th century. Exxon & Chevron, for example, trace back to Standard Oil (1870); AT&T and Verizon (from Bell, 1877), Dow/DuPont (1897 or 1802, take your pick), Citigroup (from Citicorp, 1812). Banking often goes further back: BofA (Massachusetts Bank, 1784), JPMorgan (Manhattan Company, 1799).
Moving cuts of the pie around is a shell game. For sure the US is less regulated than Europe, so labels change more often, but the old money doesn't.
Half of the companies in your list were bought by a big American tech company. Splitting up American tech companies will allow Chinese giants to buy off the bite-sized chunks.
Companies such as Facebook, Amazon and Google are so large and powerful that they are bad for consumers or society.
Google can, and has, change the web single handedly. Other companies and browser-makers have no choice but to follow due to Chrome's enormous market share and Google's massive market change in services.. I wouldn't call that good for consumers.
AMD has significantly better processors at the moment on a sliver of Intel's R&D budget. Innovation is happening at startups and small companies (which are then bought by the incumbents). I highly contest your statement that Google size is necessary for the best consumer R&D.
Economic competition is generally a good thing. Breaking up monopolies fosters competition within a country, and competition promotes progress. Historically, companies in free societies have generally performed much better than govt granted/allowed monopolies in more centralized countries.
Sure you can get some economies of scale as a monopoly, but it comes with a lot of corruption, incompetence, and anti-competitive behavior.
Level playing field how? What's the US going to do, regulate other companies in foreign countries? Magically convince China to de-integrate its tech companies in the same way?
People used to make this exact argument in the 80s when it came to Japan, and even when it came to the Soviet Union[1]. There were countless of people who had already written off competitive markets in favour of supporting domestic industry.
In the car industry people actually listened and enacted domestic protection, what did that get the US? Two lost decades of shoddy cars. Have Japanese conglomerates overtaken the world? Nope.
I think it's an absolute smokescreen and such a blatant attempt by Facebook to use nationalism to protect their status. In the long run we're better served by trusting in innovation than trying to protect domestic business. It was always the right bet. And if China continues to prop up giants they'll just stagnate. The reason they caught up in the first place is because, for at least a short time, they allowed free-wheeling fierce competition.
> In the car industry people actually listened and enacted domestic protection, what did that get the US? Two lost decades of shoddy cars. Have Japanese conglomerates overtaken the world? Nope.
Toyota, Honda, Nissan - they pretty much dominate global car sales, but that’s because they had a better product.
I think there is a profound difference between car companies, which produce a "dumb" item that's consumed, and "big tech" companies which have shown they can have a major cultural and political impact both domestically and abroad because their business is information itself. It doesn't make sense to discount an argument because of a similar one which applied to something almost completely different.
Why is Facebook included in that? If Facebook disappeared tomorrow, dopamine addicts would switch to a different drug and your 3rd cousin would have to put more effort into bothering you.
Could you elaborate how Google is worse than Facebook? I thought the general (hacker) consensus was that Facebook has much more negative impacts on society.
> The increasing trend of large tech conglomerates to use one money printing product like AWS or search or the Apple Store to tactically snipe competitors to destroy or acquire them is absolutely abysmal in the long run.
You're confusing competitive behavior with anti-competitive. When a company throws money at consumers in order to get their business, that's competitive.
Using a monopoly in one area (and how could it not be effectively a monopoly if it prints money) to gain marketshare in another is textbook anti-competitive practice though, isn't it? I recognize that I'm using the European legal definition, but that doesn't make it incorrect, just inapplicable in American courts.
In my mind, the cause of this sort of conglomeration is that our society is an exponential meritocracy rather than a linear one. In that the more merit (money, power, points, karma etc.) you accumulate, your ability to accumulate even more merit rises, resulting in a stratification of society that starts out slow but rapidly accelerates after a while.
Best expressed as: "To turn 100 dollars into 110 is work. To turn 100 million into 110 million is inevitable." -- Edgar Bronfman, Sr.
The increasing trend of large tech conglomerates to use one money printing product like AWS or search or the Apple Store to tactically snipe competitors to destroy or acquire them is absolutely abysmal in the long run
It doesn't matter what you think..The only thing that matters is whether they have the legal authority and can show the consumers are harmed.
Amazon selling their in-house brand based on their private sales data could meet that threshold. Amazon making money on AWS, OTOH, will probably not meet that threshold.
I agree, and let's not stop there! What business did Apple have getting into the music player business or the cell phone business? They already have a profitable computer business! General Electric makes appliances, lightbulbs, jet engines, nuclear plants, and a dozen other things, split them up!
We can divide up the world into little boxes and carefully decide who is allowed to participate in each box. Hell, we can go back to giving people occupational surnames - if your name is Smith or Barber or Carpenter, your box is already picked out for you. GET BACK IN.
Not sure what this snark gets you, other than obscure what you're trying to communicate.
<It's a slippery slope to do something once?>
<Apples to oranges comparison about Apple, Inc which never had close to a monopoly>
<Something about the justification for breaking up a company that's also apples to oranges>
<Whataboutism>
<Something about central planning that isn't clear and doesn't apply to monopoly power>
When the biggest complaint that people have about these companies is that their services are too good and too amazing, and that customers love them too much, that no one else can possibly provide as amazing of a service as them... Well I think that says something.
Apple's services businesses should be next. Anybody should be able to start an app store on any platform, and services like Apple TV+ shouldn't be bundled with hardware.
How much should Apple charge Spotify to build it's business on top of the infrastructure that Apple designed, developed and deployed so that Spotify didn't have to?
I took a course taught by a former Microsoft exec who worked at the company before and after the DOJ's anti-trust settlement. He said the settlement profoundly changed the internal culture of competitiveness and innovation. Lawyers were embedded on many product teams, review cycles became slower, and execs became complacent. I think the only way Amazon or Google ever start to stagnate is if a similar fate befalls them.
Fun fact, MSFT and AAPL currently have the exact same market cap. The story of Microsoft dying a slow death having missed the boat on internet, cloud and mobile is like 10+ years out of date. If anything, I'd say the antitrust trial was actually beneficial in the long run. It is a much nimbler company now than it used to be.
You know you _say_ that, but during that timespan their annual net income rose from $5B to $22B, and global revenue for the same timespan from $28B to $86B. Eighty-six billion dollars. Can you really call them an also-ran, or Ballmer an unqualified failure?
Yes, they missed the mobile boat and were late to IaaS/PaaS, but to dismiss them for nearly two decades is perhaps unfair.
IMO their biggest failure was losing their developer base. DevDiv really seems to have fallen asleep at the wheel - or to have been neutralized by the OS group.
Innovation is a different skillset from maximizing profits of an existing product portfolio. Ballmer was pretty good at the latter and sucked at the former. With the exception of Azure (which was a little late to the party), the business lines that Ballmer milked were all initially developed under Gates.
The biggest years of profitability for most tech companies come after their innovation heyday (when they've already established their market position and no longer reinvest large amounts of cash into new product development), but without continued innovation a tech business eventually fades away into irrelevance.
Yeah, Azure is huge. There are a lot of companies that see themselves as direct competitors to Amazon and refuse to allow any of their applications to use AWS. Walmart is a huge one with this -- if you want to sell IT services to Walmart, your product cannot run on AWS. They're not the only one either.
Azure also kind of just plays better with the whole Active Directory / Office 365 / Sharepoint ecosystem and many Azure products are substantially cheaper than AWS.
No. Microsoft didn't IPO until 1986. So after the mid 80s to the early 90s.
> when they were both microscopic compared to anything today?
Well, both apple and microsoft were "microscopic" in the 90s compared to what they are now. But still apple was the star tech company of the 80s and microsoft was the star tech company of the 90s.
> Not really a valid comparison.
It actually is if we are being honest. But that wasn't my point. Was just pointing out that once Apple was the big success compared to microsoft because microsoft became the big success. But you can cherrypick dates to fit whatever narrative you wish.
In my impression of Google products (Gmail is a notable example), the company has been more on the "stagnation" side and less on the "innovation" side already.
If anyone from Google is reading: Please disregard this comment. We like our Gmail exactly how it is. If you want to substantially "innovate" on email, please consider a new, independent product -- one that you can safely shutter after 12 months. Thanks.
On the off chance anyone from Google is reading and cares, I'm a strong vote for some regression in Gmail. The new-ish version doesn't straight up break as often as it used to, but it's still a slow ugly mess compared to the previous one.
Maybe I'm just old and grumpy, but every time I see praise for Gmail I just think there is some serious Stockholm syndrome going on. There is a reason "inbox zero" became a thing and people started complaining about mail piling up after Gmail. And I think it has everything to do with Gmail's tools of organization. Or shall I say, lack of organization. Gmail's interface is also slow and terrible compared to a quality desktop client.
Gmail is basically synonymous with email today, and no one wants to use email now. What does that really say about Gmail, then? Never mind the fact that they pretty much killed off non-Google mail servers.
This is a very reddit-culture comment. First time I've seen it here.
In my opinion, HN is better off. You have a good underlying point (that Inbox was exactly what GP wanted), but why write it that way?
It's certainly not still funny after the 1000th (or even 2nd) time reading it, and it's harder to understand for people who aren't in on the joke or speak English as a second language.
I worked at Intel for a brief 3 month summer internship in finance (2010). One thing that struck me was that I was not allowed to put certain words in presentations because they didn't want those words used against them in court. Its been a long time so I don't remember what words, but that was a long time after the first set of anti-trust actions.
Maybe someone that has been there more recently can attest or counter my point, but it seemed to at least leave a surface wound on the culture.
There has been official training at multiple, large tech companies other than Intel specifically geared towards preventing even accidental use of language that can be taken out-of-context. The practice is alive and well.
Uber had training that said you could never call a driver an employee or anything related to that, they were 'driver partners' or some such with words that imply a platform user
Thats slightly diferent - there is a lot of law about employees status - mainly because the IRS doesn't want to lose out any $ not for any liberal concern for employees
Perhaps because the natural organizational tendency was to conspire to create user lock-in and other nefarious practices? 95% of software companies (I am guessing here) don't need to consult their lawyers during software development.
> review cycles became slower
"Q: But why can't I force the users to also install Internet Explorer?
A: You just can't Johnny, you'll have to rewrite this component."
That’s not exactly an unbiased opinion if he was an executive at the company that was subject to anti-trust action.
I’m not suggesting that he’s lying, but it’s important to remember that the anti-trust action likely had a financial impact on him, particularly if he had a lot of comp tied up in company stock.
Here we are 20 something years later and Microsoft looks to be just doing just fine to me.
His complaint wasn't that Microsoft (or himself) didn't make money, it's that Microsoft became complacent and lost the will to innovate.
Microsoft made plenty of money between 1998 and 2014. They also basically ceased innovating. I was a child and teenager during Microsoft's glory days from 1985-2000. They were basically unstoppable: if you thought you had a good software-related idea, Microsoft was already doing it, doing it better, and bringing some nasty market-power tricks to bear (much like Google in their glory days from ~2000-2015). I started my career soon after the DoJ consent decree, and Microsoft became a joke. They were the 800 lb. gorilla that sat in the corner milking their Windows/IE/Office monopolies (and eventually losing them) while the web became a bigger platform than Windows ever was.
> milking their Windows/IE/Office monopolies (and eventually losing them)
Losing them? Nearly all the business workspace I know is Windows-only. Maybe not in Silicon Valley or top tech schools, but Windows is the norm for most businesses. It's not a competitive marketplace.
This may be true, but it doesn’t change the fact that a powerful executive clearly could have a bias when criticizing legal/regulatory action.
Quite often, I see wealthy, influential members of the tech community speak out against regulatory function citing things like lost innovation, when the reality is that they were pretty financially motivated to disparage government action in the first place. Again, that’s not to say that this executive was lying, but he clearly makes negative statements around the antitrust case and had a clear financial reason for doing so. He’s not a neutral party making an objective observation here.
Is your argument that the consent decree preventing Microsoft from innovating wrt to the web, or that they were afraid to because of the recent anti-trust action? The former I have a hard time believing (though I probably haven't read enough history on it to make an informed decision), but the latter seems very plausible.
More the latter. Same thing happened with IBM: they were willing to let Microsoft retain the rights to MS-DOS because they were under antitrust scrutiny throughout all of the 70s.
Wow! Can you see what you’re arguing for here? A tech company under tight scrutiny has to give an opportunity for a smaller competitor to unlock incredible wealth beyond what the big tech firm could have done on its own.
I'm not arguing for anything here. I'm explaining that the original commenter has it right: the result of this will be less innovation within a company under intense antitrust scrutiny (whether it be IBM, Microsoft, Google, or any other).
Whether innovation happens elsewhere is a separate question. Personally I think it's pretty likely - it worked out for Microsoft and Google, after all - and probably would be a good thing over the long term, but there was also an "innovation desert" for ~4-5 years while the big incumbents were too scared to innovate or compete and yet the new startups were not big or wealthy enough to field an effective challenge.
He (Ballmer rather than Gates) was in that position largely BECAUSE of the consent decree. I think Ballmer gets a bad rap- for all the complaints about relevance Microsoft grew its business from $23B in 2000 to $86B in 2014 and greatly increased its presence across a bunch of enterprise segments.
I think you and the executive may agree. It did have an impact, because the moribund culture at Microsoft hurt the stock for about a dozen years after the anti-trust. All the growth has been recent, and has required a massive strategic and organizational refocusing of Microsoft away from Windows to cloud, where Microsoft does not have to worry about anti-trust.
That is not to say it is not worth sending Google through a similar period of moribundity until they find new leadership and markets to pursue.
Plus a lot more diversified. Not sure if it's all a good thing as the huge companies are making land grabs everywhere. Github, Skype, Linkedin Xbox, Nokia phones unit, VSCode, basically all my favorite medium-sized game companies (inxile, double fine, obsidian). Feels like their presence is a lot more oppressive than the Windows 95 and IE days we were all freaked out about.
The industry as a whole has grown enormously. Microsoft is as big as it was, but relatively speaking it's not even remotely as strong. Microsoft used to have the power of FAANG together, it was so ahead of everyone else in terms of (pricing) power. Nobody was a threat to them before the antitrust suit.
That only came about because a lot of the old guard, like Sinofsky, Myerson, Turner, etc., left the company or were pushed out in the early '10s. I don't foresee a similar revitalization of leadership happening at Google anytime soon.
Antitrusts haven't been good in 10-20 year timeline but on more longer term may be overall good for society. In short term it stifles and extinguishes the innovation contrary to belief. Classic case is Ma Bell which ended Bell Labs. Big giants like these make huge amount of money but they also fund things like Bell Labs (in Google's case DeepMind/Google Brain/Google X etc). Once this collapse, usually it takes decade or two before these massive innovation pipelines gets built up again.
As they should be at a large corporation that was known for abusing its market power. It's not like engineers are experts in whether a feature breaks the law or not -- nor are they supposed to be.
> review cycles became slower
Oh come on, legal approval is just one more checkbox along with 20 others. And if it's slowing down reviews for a few important features or products, that's the point -- that legal considerations actually get considered rather than ignored or steamrolled over. The same way there are approvals for privacy, security, accessibility, and so on that are "slower" -- again, that's the point.
> execs became complacent
I don't believe this for a second. Execs at every company want to meet/beat metrics, get promoted, and make more salary. Nobody's complacent ever. The idea that execs become "complacent" because of a single highly targeted regulation is baloney. It's a total fiction invented for political lobbying purposes. Remember: removing monopoly abuse means a company has to work harder to to compete, instead of resting complacently on lazy market dominance. If anything, these execs were forced to be less complacent. But it's a nice lie they're trying to tell.
> It's not like engineers are experts in whether a feature breaks the law or not, nor should they be.
"Full stack engineer" gets ever more all-encompassing.
> If anything, these execs were forced to be less complacent.
An alternative explanation would be that the hypercompetitive win-at-all-costs types left for less regulated pastures, leaving the more complacent ones.
> I think the only way Amazon or Google ever start to stagnate is if a similar fate befalls them.
Google has been stagnating for more than one decade. What have they created since 2010 that is even remotely interesting, let alone in the interest of society?
And Amazon is Rube Goldberg machine of human suffering. Who cares?
Please don't post denunciatory rhetoric to HN. It's tedious. Worse, it acidifies the thread. Those two things are a double dose of poison for curiosity, which is the entire point of this site.
You can make your substantive points thoughtfully without damaging this place in the process. Please do it that way instead.
I think one thing that makes them stagnate is the sheer magnitude of their advertising business. Google is not interested in expanding to other things unless it is either furthering the amount of data they are collecting for advertising, or it has some massive run rate. That is why they are infamous for canning projects that are actually working, they just are not working big enough for google to care past its many billions advertising.
It's hard to remember exactly what result quality was like in 2010, but I'm very satisfied with the utility I get form Google search. I can throw a dozen different oddball questions at it and either get the answer directly (without even needing to click through to an often slow and cluttered page), or get what I was looking for as the top result. They do all this in an extremely adversarial environment where "SEO" people spend the majority of their effort trying to boost their pages for specific words.
Google is manipulating search results in bad faith: It has admitted engaging in political censorship of results to divert traffic away from undesirable sites.
Also, it seems to have a bias in favor of the larger websites generally, but this is an anecdotal observation of mine, there may or may not be evidence to support it.
A little off topic: I had the worst experience with Chromebooks, I used one a short time ago and couldn't install essentially anything outside of "approved" google apps. No package manager, 3d modelling software, my whole dev workflow just didn't work. I eventually bit the bullet and bought a 2019 macbook pro to get back to some semblance of sanity. My 2015 had passed :/. Does anyone do dev work on chromebooks?
The difference between a camera phone and a professional camera is one of hardware. The difference between a Chromebook and a useful computer is one of software. Installing Debian on my Chromebook Pixel turned a pointless toy into a reasonable tool. It doesn't matter what software you install on your camera phone, the sensor and glass will still be shit.
Oh yes Photos Tensorflow Spanner ...not even remotely interesting. Waymo. I'll wait for you to cherry pick another time frame. 99% of people here would work at Google in a heart beat but love to write snarky comments here. Many admittedly jealous of the fact that they couldn't get in. Have fun peddling the hate.
Please don't respond in the flamewar style regardless of how wrong or provocative another comment was. It just makes the thread even worse, and it's against the site guidelines too: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
99% of people here are sitting around jealous of Google?
Sounds doubtful. I would guess there are more people here who have already been there done that at one of the big tech companies then there are people sitting around jealous.
I don't understand how a google breakup would work. Would it just split off the ad business from ad-supported businesses like gmail and youtube?
Some google products could stand on their own (Google Cloud) but most would have a lot of trouble. The worst case is open-source offerings like Android and Chrome which only make sense as part of a wider corporate strategy.
> Some google products could stand on their own (Google Cloud) but most would have a lot of trouble.
Maybe I'm busting out my tinfoil hat, but I think that's the point. YouTube and other businesses wouldn't be able to survive without Google's ad money.
In my experience traditional media companies are the ones most heavily pushing for Google's breakup. Is this due to genuine fear of monopoly, or due to the desire to eliminate a competitor encroaching on their revenue sources?
I'm still confused at what exactly they're trying to accomplish.
So youtube and google drive basically die, some of the most useful free services available right now. I think this does more bad than good and I don't think any American citizen would support this given the effects.
..and you still tracked and your data is mined like anyone else.
There is just no incentive to pay money to big corporations now. I was paying $14.99 for play music and youtube red (ad free). At this time, I don't want my data to be collected and profiled against. But that is not possible. Same thing goes for Washington Post and NY times.
I canceled my subscriptions and enabled ad block via Pi hole.
I think it's time for tech to flex it's political muscle a bit. We're talking about humongous corporations with billions of dollars in cash silently giving to both Republican and Democratic super PACs since forever and the only political drama we had is Msft vs Amzn for the defence cloud contract. Media companies are puny by comparison.
The tech stance so far has been don't bother us and we'll continue to innovate, grow earnings and help users do cool things and investors make some money in the market. That has worked tremendously well for both the companies and their customers. I don't think changing that is in the users' interests at all.
I don't trust big media to provide accurate reporting here because they don't have the best of the relationships with G / FB.
Let's have privacy laws or platform regulation laws regarding censorship / free speech. Breaking big tech up is pointless.
I think you’re missing the bigger picture here, google customers are marketers not gmail users.
The worst thing that google does imho is to subsidize YouTube, Gmail and other products using advertising money. They’re effectively selling your data to marketers while killing competitors.
Why couldn't Youtube just keep selling ads to the Google ad network? Existing websites make money off of advertising revenue that they get from Google, how would this be different?
It would be really cool for people to be able to make money in those markets. It's really lame right now to face competing with free offerings. We're in a post chat client scarcity world.
Nobody has made serious money by selling browser because nobody is willing to pay for browsers. Without Chrome the web would just stagnate.
Nobody is willing to pay for mobile operating systems either. Maybe hardware manufacturers would pay to move Android forward as an open-source project but most likely outcome is a stagnant fragmented mess.
Some people would pay for a better browser. For example I pay for Intellij because for what I do is better then the free alternatives and honestly I am afraid if Microsoft would put them out of business with their free stuff we will get stagnation.
But if it was profitable then it is enough, you don't have to kill the competition. The problem is when a corporation puts a lot of money and copies you then surpasses you and on top of the ton of developers Chrome had they used shitty tactics like promoting their browser on the google home page and bundling it with other programs.
Opera is a good example. they did a lot of innovation a Google like tyrant is not needed.
I actually think that that Chrome ad on the Google homepage was the most anti-competitive thing Google have ever done.
Like, no-one else in the world could possibly have gained access to that ad-space (possibly the most impactful ad-space in the world), and yet no-one even covers this in the anti-trust/competition investigations.
I got really sick of ignoring the constant prompts to install Chrome over the years (and I still use Firefox).
Mind you, at least the EU took them to task for Android service bundling, should be interesting to see what comes of that.
Google Ads will run on Google's infrastructure and pay a lot enough to subsidize all the other products. Basically, there will be some financial impacts but I don't expect any kinds of significant impacts on their business, which proves this attack to be pointless.
Android would probably be spin-offable via the same strategy that technically makes Mozilla independent: pay for search engine placement. And then pay for all the services it connects to like Maps, Gmail, etc.
It'd def be messy to untangle backends though. One imagines that the play store relies heavily on CDNs by Google, as one random small example from the haystack of papercuts.
Both Android and Chrome could be wildly successful independent companies. Android could charge a license fee to OEMs in addition to the app store business and Chrome could sell search default rights like Firefox does.
The answer to this question will be endlessly fascinating.
To start somewhere, everything that was an acquisition 'should' stand on its own, because it began as a complete company. Of course things aren't that simple.
>To start somewhere, everything that was an acquisition 'should' stand on its own, because it began as a complete company. Of course things aren't that simple.
In many/most cases, "complete" companies that are losing money hand over fist or--in the better cases--have a business model but not great long-term prospects.
I will say both of the eCommerce businesses I worked at were 100% in thrall to google's decisions. Unless you are a brand the size of amazon that can get attention directly, everyone just does a google search. Which mean's if google decides to do something that impacts your ranking or ads you might just be completely out of business with in a matter of days, or slowly bleed out. They might even decide to compete with you or partner with one of your competitors. It's like if the owner of the streets could make a deal with walmart to build more lanes there and always have construction in front of your building. Or even not have a turn off. It controls online commerce basically.
That makes no sense. Search is more like a map or address book or perhaps a pamphlet station. What they choose to prioritize/display is inherently editorial. Why should that powe be given to the government?
They exist but it's been a long time since mapping were an exclusive privilege - which is to say a government search engine might make some sense but favouring it with funding to the extent of roads likely doesn't.
I definitely do not trust the government to give better results than google.
In fact, I would expect them to actively censor and promote their interests. Also, would other people just not be allowed to make search engines? Wouldn't google v2 just take over again?
That’s close to my theory as well, Googlebot is almost universally allowed, building the index happened at the right time to become to big to block. Trying to deep crawl to Google’s level may be impossible now, and maybe one way to encourage innovation in search/discovery is to force the raw crawl results for others to parse & rank.
In a very idealistic case, I would even go further and say it should be under the umbrella of the UN to accommodate other cultures, and be politics-agnostic.
I do believe that we are at the time when decent internet access should be pushed by the UN (or any other entity, hopefully in a non-commercial non-political way like food, shelter, and education.
I guess I would put food, shelter, health care in a bucket, and education with internet in another. And an unbiased search engine is quite essential for a functional internet experience.
I feel like Google would have been better off if they had stayed out of the newspaper aggregation business and stuck with Search and long tail media content, GCP, GSuite and did R&D in AI (Waymo, Verily) and AR/VR. There is just too much baggage when wading into politics.
I think there are too many well connected, well funded media companies that are lobbying and retaliating behind the scenes as they see their news publishing business models get disrupted by the Google News aggregator. Couple that with politicians frustrated by the Google News opaque aggregation algorithm and that leads to anti-trust rulings.
My general sense is that fewer power brokers in DC would complain if they had stuck with the bottom part and complemented that with GCP.
Its one thing to serve ads on the bottom (i.e. ads for pentalope screw drivers against articles about pentalope screw drivers). Its another thing to encroach on establish media outlets turf, AMP up their content and sell ads to Auto, CPG and Airline companies based on that content.
It is fairly amazing that this action would come against a player with a minority and shrinking share of a market where prices are rapidly falling. Antitrust actions under US doctrine are supposed to benefit consumers, but how can this action do anything other than increase profits for Facebook and Amazon?
> Antitrust actions under US doctrine are supposed to benefit consumers
Note that the viewpoint that antitrust is SOLELY about benefit to consumers, and not also about restricting corporate power, is relatively new in US antitrust jurisprudence (around the 80s I think), and there are currently many scholars reassessing this viewpoint.
Chicago School antitrust doctrine has been the direction of US jurisprudence throughout the existence of the online advertising industry and predates all of the market participants. Even if we throw it out, what's _any_ ethical, moral, or legal reason to break up Google's business? Surely it can't be that the government has an interest in boosting Verizon's market share.
There used to be a pretty strong belief in the separation of media production and distribution, originating in the break up of the studio system. I'm not a historian or legal expert here by any stretch, but at some of the arguments supporting this were about ensuring the limited platforms (movie studios and broadcasters at the time) would have to allow competitive access for distribution of content.
Google is in a position similar to being a major broadcaster- it is a gatekeeper of content, whether through search, YouTube, or ads. While Google started off with a pretty radical view of free speech that resulted on a pretty content, that has waned in the last 5-10 years.
The most obvious of this is the de-monetization of YouTube channels. While I hardly disagree with their choice to distance themselves from many vitriolic personalities, I've also seen them demonetize science channels for doing experiments involving explosives and smaller channels they just didn't want to bother monitoring. The theoretical reason for this- their ad partners don't want their ads accidently running on offensive content.*
There isn't any real alternative to YouTube. Searching for how to videos on google often results in a page of only YouTube videos. Content producers cannot directly negotiate interstitial ad content. The old-time concerns about a single broadcaster dominating the marketplace of ideas is absolutely applicable here. Breaking up Content, Search, and Ads would go a long way to ensure access to the platform.
*As well they should, and I actually kind of LIKE that its become harder for offensive crazies to make money, but I'm providing the argument for breaking up the content, search, and ads.
Wouldn’t an independent YouTube have the same problem? They would still be beholden to the companies purchasing the ad space and demonetize channels that risk upsetting those advertisers.
Not if they were required to allow content creators to utilize alternate ad platforms to inject ads before or after the run. Sure they'd still have the option to kick the creators out of search or off the platform entirely, but that potentially enables alternative hosting platforms.
There used to be (and might still be) limits on how much national advertising national networks could require local stations to carry, on the theory this made local stations more independent (and in tune with local needs). This is my 21st century version of that regulation.
Like I said, I'm not even sure I'm in favor of such a break up, but I can see the historical parallels.
It’s a very complicated issue but I thought one of the justifications behind that doctrine was that consumer benefits/prices was a very objective way to measure corporate power (because with lots of power they would be able to raise prices freely to hurt consumers and benefit themselves)
This is pointing to the crux of the issue. Anti-trust action against software companies is a sticky issue especially when the market exists entirely because of their innovation in the first place. I have no love for Google but I also don't see how customers' perception of the ad market won't change over time.
Commodity monopolies on the other hand seem to have much more obvious detrimental effects longterm.
What does Google have a shrinking share of? This article is specifically referencing ad tech, of which DFP has near 100% market share, while AdX is greatly outperforming it's rival (Facebook audience network pulled support for mobile web in April while Amazon's much-ballyhooed A9 platform turned into a big Whataburger).
"Facebook, Google Digital Ad Market Share Drops as Amazon Climbs" - June 2019 [1]
"Amazon is eating into Google's most important business: Search advertising" - October 2019 [2]
There are dozens and dozens of articles about this. The market as a whole is growing, and Google's market share is large, but shrinking as a percentage of the pie.
I think it's a huge mistake to group Google, Facebook and Amazon all in the same bucket and say "look, they don't have a monopoly because they each only have X% of 'total digital ad spend'".
If I want to advertise my vacation house for rent, I sure as hell am not going to do it on Amazon, and FB would hardly make any sense (maybe if I had a whole network of houses for rent to do brand marketing, but not if I just had one). Google is pretty much the only option that makes sense here.
I mean, just ask a digital marketer. While there are some potential areas of overlap they all view Adwords, FB ads and Amazon ads very differently and not much in 'competition'.
Weird example because I am sure Facebook is a major outlet for vacation rental marketing. Here's the Vacation Rental Management Association's advice on using Facebook: https://www.vrma.org/p/bl/et/blogaid=1253
I imagine other large players in vacation rental marketing are VRBO, TripAdvisor, and AirBnB.
Anyway if you redefine the online advertising market to include only the things that Google dominates, such as search ads on Google itself, then sure you can make it look anyway you want.
I'm not "redefining" the online advertising market. If anything, practically every single digital marketer in existence considers, for example, FB ads to be very different from Google ads and serve very different purposes. It's you who have (oddly, IMO) redefined the the market by lumping everything together.
And look at your "other large players in the vacation rental market". Perhaps unsurprisingly some of those travel brands are among the largest spenders on AdWords. See Expedia (parent co of VRBO) Chairman Barry Diller's comments on this
exact topic: https://skift.com/2018/10/16/expedias-barry-diller-calls-on-...
If you look at search marketing, which is unique in its ability to target users at the moment of intent, let's look at the players. Google is at over 90% and everyone else is peanuts. I would agree with you that there is overlap with Amazon here, but only in a subset of products (i.e. primarily physical, deliverable products, not services).
More like lean toward a future where Bing (giving MSFT a monopoly on search, OS, Office Suites, browsers and whatnot), or worse, giving Chinese companies the lead in the rest of the world, and maybe even the US (if the US doesn't regulate them out). I don't see how a lot of Google products survive without the ad revenue.
1. Android -> Difficult to compete against a well financed Chinese competitor here for whatever new subpart of Google takes over android.
2. Chrome -> Again, either MSFT or a chinese fork.
3. Gmail -> Outlook, or maybe some chinese/russian mail service
4. Google Cloud -> This might be gone fully. I don't see them having any advantages if they can't piggyback on the world class google Infra.
Even if the US regulates out Huwaei and Alibaba, almost all of Asia and Africa will surely be dominated by big Chinese tech, rather than small US tech if the US big tech get broken up. Not to mention they might dominate Europe too.
Remember that AT&T was split up successfully, despite people insisting it was impossible due to there only being one set of phone lines. They just forced the split up parts to follow rules for sharing the infrastructure. It took a lot of work, but it happened.
Gmail or google cloud's dependencies on the rest of Google are comparibly much easier to solve.
> smaller US/EU firms will take place of larger firms.
Why do you think smaller EU/US firms are more likely to take their place than Big Chinese firms. The Big Chinese firms will have economies of scale and more capital.
> This will result in decreasing inequality and help the general society as well.
I don't know how is that going to decrease inequality. Even if big tech is replaced by 5 small tech, there is no way on earth it will decrease inequality. Do you have any basis for such an extraordinary claim?
> There is a good reason why anti-trust laws exist people. Billionaires are already a policy failure, we don’t need trillionaires in future as well.
Sure. In the totally globalised world, you can decide you don't want big companies. This will just ensure a Chinese company dominates the market.
I’ve been using software products past 25 years, and been developing them for quite a while, in my opinion scale of a company has a minor relevancy to software quality after a certain size.
I never worked at google but I’m willing to bet giant firms like Google have bunch of problems with their organization size which limits their code quality, product delivery times, and their agileness. A smaller, more agile company can definitely produce better products than Google (case in point: protonmail).
It will decrease income inequality because profits will go to different shareholders / employees.
> , in my opinion scale of a company has a minor relevancy to software quality after a certain size.
Possible, but I didn't talk about software quality, I talked about number of users.
> (case in point: protonmail).
I think your case undermines your argument. Protonmail is not a very successful product. It is behind even many paid mail services. If that is your idea of success then sure, many small companies will become like protonmail, while tencent mail might become the new gmail.
Yes, breaking up a tech giant like Google will potentially have short-term negative (or maybe even positive) implications for their products. But doing this will open the door for more competition, and in the long run will lead to new innovations and technologies, and a stronger economy.
Chinese tech giants might take market share from Google, but other American companies will pop up with new and better technology that will ultimately come out on top, like it always does. The Chinese tech giants of today are giants largely because of government funding and government-sponsored corporate espionage/stolen tech, not because they're leading the world in producing new technologies.
As for Microsoft? If a behemoth like Google gets broken up for anti-competitive practices, regulators will likely not want to stop there.
More competition is always a good thing, even if it sounds scary.
I am really worried about Chinese cyberwarfare while we keep shooting ourselves in the foot. Just look at how easy it is to spy on millions of americans with things like TikTok and Huawei. Google could be a lot worse at the size it currently is. I view Google as almost a kind of university that tries to enhance technology by "poaching" good people and in some sense, allowing them to work on whatever they want while guaranteeing them a very good wage. Aside from the standard Chrome, Android-tier projects, let's think about all the stuff that they've done that has been pretty radically useful. I'm not talking about products, they do a terrible job with maintenance and shutting down products is very infuriating to any user. But it is almost like research projects. So let's just focus on technical contributions to the software engineering field.
Golang, gRPC, Protobuf, Kubernetes, Tensorflow, WebRTC, QUIC protocol, very interesting innovations in camera technology such as NightSight, Google Maps which has changed my life completely. Furthermore, millions of contributions to open source projects and protocols, so many security improvements by the Security & Cryptography teams that I have on occasion worked with.
Personally I wouldn't work for Google because I don't enjoy the kind of atmosphere where there's no real "mission". But doing this much innovation is impossible unless you are funded by the government, or have a money printing business.
The submitted article was https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-google/u-s-states-lea.... There's nothing in there beyond "CNBC reported on Friday, citing sources". That broke the site guidelines, which ask: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter."
We've switched to the CNBC article now, but it clearly should have been the one submitted in the first place.
Google, Amazon, FB are not the monopolies that you should be worried about. They are fun to talk about and tech is sexy, but there are bigger problems - ISPs / telecoms, for example.
Remember the baby bells? In 1982, AT&T (ma bell) lost an anti-trust lawsuit and was broken up into 8 companies (the baby bells).
Guess what happened since? If you guessed they merged back together, you would be correct. The baby bells merged back together and became 3 companies - AT&T, Verizon, and CenturyLink.
For those who are customers of AT&T - how do you like your service? Is it as good as Google?
Oligopoly is the new monopoly. Financial services, airlines, oil majors, media, pharma, auto, etc. Those are the industries that need breaking up. You pay for their services / products and they price fix (airline baggage fees, overdraft fees, etc), you don't even pay for Google. You can easily use duckduckgo and delete your FB / Insta with no consequence.
Edit - to address the comments saying that the tech companies should be broken up: sure, but how exactly? Google and Facebook in particular. You don't even pay for their services, so you (the citizens) can't claim consumer protection from their business. Only the companies / individuals that pay for Google and Facebook ads can.
Again, I get the frustration of the times and misinformation sucks, but Google and Facebook are not the cause. They are the means of distributing info (including ads that are sometimes just fake new), not the root source of all evil.
> For those who are customers of AT&T - how do you like your service? Is it as good as Google?
Since you asked... AT&T is way better, here in Oakland and also in Austin (fiber). It's always up and there's actually decent customer support you can call. Their cellular service has been great too. Meanwhile, Google's search has turned into a content marketing delivery machine, and Google Drive web UI still cannot catch up to Windows 95 File Explorer features&performance.
But if you asked me which company can ruin my life or my company's future due to a glitch in an algorithm, the answer will be Google, not AT&T. I worry that Google is allowed to control both the search and the web browser everyone uses. I also worry that as Youtube is becoming increasingly more important for video, they'll control the "future of TV" as well. I am less worried about "dumb pipes" which is what AT&T is to me, especially with the latest migration to encryption for everything, even DNS.
I can also call AT&T and, eventually, reach someone. If I'm angry enough, I can ask to be routed to cancellation. (They fix things quicker.) If things go awry, I can threaten, and act on the threat, to escalate matters to my state regulator.
I pay for G-Suite for a side-project I inherited (I use Office 365 as my daily-driver) and while there is human support available, they don’t make it easy to get to. With Office 365 the phone support contact details are 2 clicks away from any screen.
Based on purely anecdotal data points, it seems to me that YouTube is the lagging incumbent in online streaming these days. The creators that make their platform valuable are slowly either leaving the service, or diversifying their content streams to other services.
Twitch, Patreon, Curiosity Stream, etc are all taking the parts of the pie that YouTube could have had if they invested in understanding the communities that built themselves on top of their platform. But instead, smaller, more agile (the verb not the noun) companies are responding to the demand while YouTube's advertising revenue streams are starting to dry up.
Agreed, that's why I said that game_the0ry is making some good points, monopoly for content delivery is not good (it leads to control, not just delivery).
I am just not comfortable with seeing Google as a lesser threat.
If you mistype a hostname in the browser and DNS lookup fails, they return a valid IP for a landing page with an ad. AT&T doesn't do it for my service, but at some point I had it with Time Warner cable, IIRC. You fix it by setting your DNS to (haha) Google's.
Try 9.9.9.9 and 1.1.1.1. There are many other external DNS services that don't break AD and eDirectory. You can also run your own but I'll grant you that isn't for everyone.
Probably an obnoxious https mitm certificate that adds banners to your web browsing, along with a complete recording of your browsing history to sell to advertisers, like comcast does.
AT&T was just an example. How about the cost of insulin?
If Google's algorithm can ruin your life or your business, then I would suggest you figure out how to decouple Google's influence on your life and business. I am sure it wont be easy, but I am also sure it can be done.
Yes, Google is the new TV. And when we are old, we will be telling our children that Youtube "rots your brain," just like our parents did.
Adapting your habits is easier to control than breaking up Google and Youtube.
I mean, what industry is not consolidating at this point? It feels like just about every conceivable area is served by a handful of gigantic players, with the rest competing for scraps.
It's now at the point where new entrants don't even attempt to start small. They explicitly dump massive sums in a bid to break in. It seems that this is happening even in areas where it's not warranted (local food delivery???).
It's as if the culture of every business has become captivated by the idea of becoming an oligopoly. My guess is because it's extremely attractive -- once you "make it" you don't have to compete any more.
It works, right up until it doesn't. I hope at some point, we make a big change in the level of corporate consolidation we allow.
> It's as if the culture of every business has become captivated by the idea of becoming an oligopoly. My guess is because it's extremely attractive -- once you "make it" you don't have to compete any more.
I've seen the theory that this is the result of QE's massive inflation of asset prices; it is now harder and harder and harder to beat the market, but institutions have ever larger sums of money that they need to park and invest somewhere. Like, Softbank actively managing $100B in startups was never really going to work, at least not without these startups being required to get to ludicrous amounts of scale.
Maybe, maybe not, but it would be a very painful way to do it (particularly since the average person has debt, owns some assets, but doesn't park huge sums in savings accounts or cash under the mattress like prior generations did).
The general proposal to alleviate this problem is to increase the supply of assets. This means investing in the common good. Basic research to create whole new types of things to build, infrastructure to enable businesses to reach new markets, and workforce development so businesses have more effective employees.
This is also often coupled with renewed enforcement of antitrust legislation, to give new players some oxygen and to discourage business models that rely on unprofitable scaling in order to reap monopolistic rewards. Then there is the side benefit that smaller companies have a harder time creating the conditions for regulatory capture.
The largest economic expansions tend to be preceded by really painful destruction of wealth and savings (Great Depression and WWII preceding postwar booms, the largest US economic expansion in history preceded by a decades-long oil crisis)
> It's as if the culture of every business has become captivated by the idea of becoming an oligopoly. My guess is because it's extremely attractive -- once you "make it" you don't have to compete any more.
You say this like it's new. US anti-trust law started in the late 1800s because of a slew of consolidation in the railroad industry.
Well, yes, the concept is not new. What seems new to me is an increased focus on massive expansion in sectors that traditionally didn't operate that way.
Of course railroads, oil, and steel were the first groups who naturally thought, "wouldn't it be great if we were the only people doing this, and we didn't have to deal with other people competing?" Since those businesses are big by their nature (capital intensive, worldwide market, often working directly with national governments).
But now this attitude is everywhere. Dog walking, taxicabs, office space. Not to mention the traditional areas like insurance, healthcare, telecom, etc. It seems like everyone, across every sector, is trying to merge and congeal into a single blob that extracts a reliable stream of money each month. Those who aren't already around are trying to skip the "make a good/valuable business" part and skip straight to the money extraction step. And I think in many places, businesses are way more focused on this than on actually doing or providing valuable services/things for people.
I'm speaking in really broad terms here. The cultural focus seems to have shifted from "how can we make the best product" to "how can we guarantee payment every month by consolidating/merging."
My business, despite being quite critical (we sell parts for maintenance of machinery, today one of my clients for example was a medical equipment factory) relies heavily on ads, people come, buy what they want, and if I solves the problem, it is over, they don't recommend or talk about us, and often aren't return costumers either unless another machine break...
So our clients often are people googling desperately trying to make their suddenly stopped factory resume work, then they see our ads and buy from us.
It became obvious to us that Google is a threat, they changed rules multiple times in the past to encourage fraud (instead of stopping fraud), our revenue is directly proportional to the Google ads spend, and whenever we find a better ad provider, Google buys it.
Only possible competitor for Google is TV, but TV ads are way beyond our budget and we have no idea of they would work, considering our niche.
So... Google is not only a monopoly, it is an obvious one, and they abuse their power freely.
Yours is a real grievance, though most of the people on this thread are complaining from the perspective of a search consumer, not from a commercial advertiser.
Lots of businesses use Google ads to great success, and I get that it's frustrating when your one source of new business changes terms on you, but this is the game. Google now has a lot of power over you, that's the market working.
But your relationship with Google is not necessarily adversarial. After all, they still bring you new business. As long as the cost for ads does not exceed the revenue from new business, the relationship you have with Google is mutually beneficial, though it might hurt when they change terms on you.
That's how business works. It frustrating, but that's the game.
ISPs and telecoms are dangerous due to their level of control, but are significantly worse at using their data to influence the way you think. I strongly believe that the current political climate would be significantly more tepid if not for Facebook and YouTube alone... the scale is so hard to comprehend.
On the surface social media looks completely benign, but they have these far reaching insidious impacts. Our elected representatives don't even have a basic understanding of how these sites operate... yet you have the majority of the population being fed content by these algorithms that determine what you see when, and they're completely opaque.
They've got scores of analysts and psychologists shaping this stuff full-time... no single entity in human history has had this level of data and reach into human behavior, and it's all proprietary.
Small intentional changes over time to such wide-reaching algorithms can literally shape humanity in ways that may be entirely impossible for an outsider to detect.
That's not true at all! We have little idea how or why it influences us outside of the basics (sell ads, make money).
People are looking at these feeds, often daily, for a significant amount of time. We don't know if it's intentionally showing us more of our racist uncle's posts because we buy things when we're angry, for example... and that's just one small example in a vast sea.
We can't adapt because there are far too many unseen factors to be aware of. And I'll say it again... most people do not understand that every post on these networks is being fed through a biased algorithm. I've seen large numbers of developers on this site agree that Facebook should remain neutral when it comes to certain ads/posts, without acknowledging that neutrality has been gone from every post on Facebook for years and years at this point.
They know who you are, where you are, who you're with, and what you do. Data that spans billions of people. For people with Facebook on their phones they can essentially track your behavior 24/7 and have been doing so for years. This type of unseen influence could be dangerous even in benevolent hands.
I have not adapted because I don't know what to adapt to. I've just removed myself from the environment as completely as I can.
Yes, lobbying is the root defect in the operating system of governance. This is what happens when business can buy legislative outcomes - Americans can't afford medicine when the rest of the world gets it cheaply.
I don't actually think the lack of choices is the real problem though. The issue I see is that things like AdSense or AWS are able to financially prop up Google and Amazon's ventures into a myriad of other markets that make them immune to the actual market forces in those domains. It ends up having a really bad distorting effect on any of the other players trying to run a normal business.
Many places have decent telecoms competition with a similar number of carriers.
As far as I understand the problem in the US is that many locations have just one wired service provider. Meaningful competitions would require that most buildings have multiple sets of fiber.
Splitting telecoms by geography seems pointless: California and Texas ISPs can't compete with each other without huge capital spending.
Which is why other countries have gone full in on local loop unbundling
In the UK the last mile is either OpenReach, Virgin Media or KCOM. Because OpenReach has a virtual monopoly in last-mile infra across the country they are regulated and must provide access to other ISPs, in the old days through colocated DSLAMs in local exchanges (LLU) and now by having a set maximum price they can sell wholesale VDSL, FTTP and voice lines.
As a result, you have the gamut of ISPs from niche who focus on having amazing backhaul and customer service (AAISP) to "pile them high" ISPs like Vodafone, TalkTalk and then people like Sky who bundle talk, tv and broadband into relatively affordable packages.
As a result - there is a lot of competition almost everywhere in the country, and I can get a 384Mbps down 37Mbps up connection with unlimited usage and no traffic shaping for £50 a month.
>I can get a 384Mbps down 37Mbps up connection with unlimited usage and no traffic shaping for £50 a month.
After all of the rest of the comment, that's a pretty disappointing result. Fifty quid is currently $63. I can get symmetric gigabit FTTH for $65, or docsis 200 mbit for $40. This is not uncommon in urban areas in the states.
Asymmetric plans are really disappointing. Back at my family’s residence we have Verizon Fios which only offers [near] symmetric plans (200/200, 400/400c 940/880) which is fantastic. They’re looking to upgrade from our legacy bundle package of 30/30 to gigabit, which is exciting for them.
Where I am, in an urban apartment complex I had two provider choices: Frontier and Optimum. Frontier wired the building, but their plans were ridiculously underwhelming. My Optimum plan is ~$55/m including modem/router for 300/35. Their highest offering for upload seemed to be 45Mbps (or 35, plan descriptions between the site and sales were not consistent).
I’m not in telecom nor a networking expert, but what difficulties are there in offering symmetric plans?
Someone else more knowledgeable will have to expand on this, but I know that on Docsis the lower bands are used for upload and those can carry less signal. Something about those lower bands makes them more advantageous for node > hub communications but exactly what I don’t know.
One challenge is that in many places (especially the most profitable areas), the last mile is already built out. So by saying "municipally owned fiber" you mean laying new pipes to replace existing pipes (significant material cost) or trying to wrestle control of the existing pipes away from large ISPs (significant political cost). A small to medium sized city cannot just tell AT&T "give me your fiber", and it often lacks the capital to put down new fiber. Even if a small project could be completed, the dominant ISP in the area would simply lower their prices enough to make the project uneconomical, thus preventing the project from recouping its costs and staining the idea of publicly owned internet infrastructure.
Then maybe more thought should be given to how the dominant ISP's as well as other anti-competitive business practices have put the local municipalities into a position where they 1) don't have the cash to lay down their own pipes 2)are put in a position where blatant anti-competitive behavior like strangling newly laid pipes would not be adjudicated fairly. A two prong approach of subsidizing local pipes and pressuring existing fiber to behavior fairly.
I'm not sure that's required, at least for urban areas cables are not that expensive. The problem might be deliberate anti-competitive collusion between the major ISPs.
I switched from 3 years of bad Comcast cable to AT&T 1G fiber recently. They were professional and ran the fiber from the pole to my house in a few hours.
I ran a speedtest on fast.com and got 985Mbps. The service uptime and quality has been utterly stellar. AT&T has been really good to me, but not everyone has access to 1G fiber.
Sounds like you had a choice of service providers where you live. That might explain why the service was so good. Unfortunately, most americans don't have a choice of service providers, or only have one fast provider (eg. cable that goes to 100mbit, but DSL that only goes to 10mbit).
What if the government breaks up both. The ad tech businesses and the telecoms.
The question is whether this type of comment "[Google/Facebook] is not the problem..." is a not-so-clever attempt to defend a FAANG company or whether it is legitimiate. I have seen this type of response many times on HN. It is like someone saying "Don't look there, look here." Of course, we can look both here and there, one step at a time.
What is a legitimate argument why breaking up Google/Facebook prevents the government from later breaking up telecoms, or solving any other problem.
Whereas if the telecoms were broken up, how does that improve the situation with the ad tech oligarchy. Even if you say "Don't look there, look here" eventually we may look "there".
The harmful effects of Google/Facebook cannot be easily overhsadowed by other problems.
All the big techs are stifling competition in many markets by offering their product in those markets at or below cost and supporting those losses with money that comes from elsewhere in the company.
Look at music streaming: Spotify is the only big service that is only in that market.
Look at consumer storage: Dropbox is the only big service that is only in that market.
If tech behemoths didn’t exist, there would be much more active competition and thus technological advancement in those markets.
They also buy start-ups in emerging markets at a breakneck pace.
Right now in my house I have the choice of 3 different cell networks, 2 broadband providers and coming some extra things like satellites. All of them can be swapped in or out without much trouble. I can move houses or even countries to get different options
My email and search though is just a few options and realistically most of my family and friends just one option. Even if I move to the other side of the world that option is still the same.
This is a straight up failure of governments of preventing mergers. If you let all these companies merge or acquire each other without restriction, this is in the inevitable result which ultimately harms the consumer and new entrants to the market.
> Google, Amazon, FB are not the monopolies that you should be worried about. They are fun to talk about and tech is sexy, but there are bigger problems - ISPs / telecoms, for example.
That is a very misleading comparison. For almost all of the industries you've listed a) there are spatial limitations of monopolistic outreach (they have to exist in real world and can't exist all around the world at once) b) their products and services don't grow upon themselves exponentially c) the nature of their products and services is rather common knowledge. I'll go one by one;
a) Tech doesn't suffer from the spatial dynamics of competition and in that has virtually infinite economies of scale. A cable company has to fight for the right of physically laying cables, which creates a barrier of entry for the next competitor, but they have to do this work repeatedly in every other location. As long as bandwidth and compute is paid for, tech can be instantaneously omni-present around the world. This means the monopoly having a planet wide breadth, but also that margins required to sustain the monopoly can be much smaller.
b) Econ 101 has this classic output function: labor x capital x productivity = output. Tech is both an output and input in the form of increased productivity onto itself. This means exponential growth. When we talk about cable companies merging, it is a merger of homogeneous entities, and in that only a merger of capital and labor. The argument here is tech companies "merging" with their own, heterogeneous technologies to yield even greater exponential growth. They are talking about ads and search and chrome "merging". Therefore the monopolistic consequences of tech is very different than that of commodities and utilities.
c) Tech is constantly innovating on new products and new variations of their products, which we can't grasp the effects of. It is easier to guess what happens to competition or how the end user suffers when other industries have bad actors. Can we tell with confidence what the effect of Youtube's, Twitter's, Reddit's recommendation algorithms is on our collective sense-making capabilities and functioning of the democracy? Can we tell if the thousands of A/B experiments being run on us is revealing how the products can deliver more value or how to exploit the users better? Are users aware that they are participating in the largest scale applied-psychology lab ever existed? This information asymmetry is again a part of the unique dynamics of the monopolistic machinery of tech.
When these three come together, the resulting monopolistic dynamics is unprecedented and incomparable to that of commodities, utilities and other old-school services, and we would be fools to make light of it.
> Are users aware that they are participating in the largest scale applied-psychology lab ever existed?
You are. I am. Everyone on this thread is. Soon, most people will be aware.
> Econ 101 has this classic output function: labor x capital x productivity = output.
BS. This is not economic theory, and you are not an economist, friend. If so, please quantify with numbers so we can compare (don't wast your time).
> When these three come together, the resulting monopolistic dynamics is unprecedented and incomparable to that of commodities, utilities and other old-school services, and we would be fools to make light of it.
Lofty claims here. I'll raise you - people die because they can't afford medicine but nobody died because of big tech.
> BS. This is not economic theory, and you are not an economist, friend. If so, please quantify with numbers so we can compare (don't wast your time).
As it happens I actually am an economist, but that credential shouldn't have mattered either way. This function is called the Cobb–Douglas production function, it has statistical evidence as tested in the beginning of 20th century, and if someone has a qualified rebuttal they should go ahead because it could get them some academic award.
> Lofty claims here. I'll raise you - people die because they can't afford medicine but nobody died because of big tech.
Death is not the most useful standard by which we measure the health of a 21st century, developed nation economy. In fact, "this business doesn't kill people" is such a low standard to the degree of being virtually useless in this analysis. Sophistication of the tools we use for economic analysis should match the sophistication of the economic activity going on.
I'm actually an AT&T fiber user through Sonic and have a perfect experience with my service. Installation took some time originally because they had to route a line into my house but it has been great since.
> Google, Amazon, FB are not the monopolies that you should be worried about. They are fun to talk about and tech is sexy, but there are bigger problems - ISPs / telecoms, for example
There are more major automakers who sell products in the US alone than there ever were baby bells. And there are a ton of regional competitors outside of the US.
I have never understood American politician's obsession with killing their Golden goose. They did the same with many manufacturing jobs in past and most of those jobs ended up moving to other countries over time. Hurting Google or Facebook is not going to make anything better but will lead to job less, loss of economic opportunity and competitive advantage to other nations.
You are absolutely right that ATT, Comcast etc. are the real monopolies that have been established with the help of government and they need to be broken.
I guess in 10 years they will do the same to Tesla, SpaceX.
It's not as much America's Golden goose as the auto industry. That isn't a complete comparison, the destruction of the auto industry broke large swathes of the physical economy (by that I mean the many many industries that go into an automobile, factories for cables, factories for putting the plastic on cables, doors, glass, etc. These are physical locations that require many people involved, not to mention the job creature surrounding these manufacturing plants.
The tech companies, yes make a lot of money, but the wealth is much more concentrated and a lot lot less jobs are required to make it work.
These companies need to be broken up to foster competitiveness, which leads to more jobs, innovation in different sectors. The unified Google vs. China is such a tired argument from a company that trying to slowly spread their control and negatively leach internet users data. If they aren't broken up before they start causing even more material harm then who knows, maybe in 10 years when the only available GoogSurance denies your claim for medicine because they scraped your Ancenstry.com you'll see what I was talking about.
FAANG are different a kind of monopoly - an unprecedented one for which no legislation exists. They have a monopoly on data, as brokers they control not only what companies may purchase for commercial services, but through curation of search results and news/social media feeds they control what information reaches the eyes of millions of people.
This is an unprecedented amount of power over society wielded by corporations and, in effect, the handful of private citizens who own them.
I tend to lean libertarian but I've questioned for a while if it's appropriate and/or possible to limit this power in an equitable manner...but unchecked Google alone can probably sway elections with algorithmic manipulation of search results and even selective autocompletion.
That's probably the entire reason that the administration is targeting these orgs, and while I don't agree with the administration I believe this particular endeavor may be for the greater good. When Twitter can delete videos retweeted by the president, or add "fact check warnings" which effectively (though maybe not truthfully) discredit his statements, Jack Dorsey and his board are wielding a more direct, more immediate, and possibly more effective power than any of other branches of government.
You're being hit hard wherever you go, but I think you've got a fair mindset. Small amounts of people have a disproportionate amount of final say in how millions of people get to group and share information. That has to have negative externalizations, it doesn't track that it would have absolutely no ill effects. If you have a legitimate argument that defends there will be no problems, please share, I'm open minded.
If Trump is attacking them cynically out of some tantrum relating to how they beat on him and his supporters. Then yeah, I disagree he's doing it for the right reasons. But I think he has the right directional thrust.
True. That does not make google/amazon/fb immune though.
Another data point that people stuck overseas because of Covid-19: Airlines banded in their oligopoly and divided up the world.
AA cancelled all flights but Europe, United in americas, Delta in Asia, etc.
Now if you want to fly from one of those places, you must get a mile voucher for your return flight, and re-purchase the exorbitant one way ticket from the one company from the oligopoly that got your current location to explore.
First - airlines, pharma, and financial services are nowhere near 'oligarchy' and don't come close to meeting the definition, just the opposite, they are very competitive.
With Telcos - the issue is real, but the drawback is mostly competitive innovation and price. Stagnant deployments and high prices would be the result. FYI - the US has decent broadband pricing. See: Canada!
Oil is a special one, but the industry is global and very competitive, especially in certain layers of that industry. Prices are widely known and understood. There is zero concern that 'some big entity' will control all of the oil, certainly not in America.
FB, Amazon, Google represent far more existentially problematic kinds of 'monopolies' because it bleeds into other aspects of life (social, media, information) and into other, adjacent industries. These are the real problem.
Search and social also have 'natural monopoly' kind of conditions which exacerbates the problems.
The other industry you didn't mention, wherein there is an existential problem with competition is 'health insurance'.
Canadaian broadband pricing is actually quite reasonable, especially as you have smaller players that are able to buy last mile lines wholesale at/near cost to compete.
Wholesale metro fiber is also considerably less than in the US, as public and utilities infrastructure is much more open. And there is already municipal fiber in Montreal, Calgary, and some suburban parts of Vancouver to name a few.
You also don't have to play games, like with Comcast that periodically raises your pricing arbitrarily and can really rack up if you're not paying attention. A few years back when I kept an apartment in Seattle, I went from $50/mo on promotional offer, to $80/mo regular, and ended up at almost $120/mo by the time I cancelled less than 2 years later. Such practices would never fly in Canada.
"especially as you have smaller players that are able to buy last mile lines wholesale at/near cost to compete."
The US has just as much as this.
US rates are lower for the more common bandwidth options [1][2], and as soon as you consider Purchasing Parity - Canadian rates are very high. 'Equipment' / CAPEX is a tiny part of the cost of said networks, so it really should cost a lot less to manage networks in Canada if salaries are lower. Once that factor is taken into consideration Canadian prices are very materially higher.
That US companies are cheezy with their 'increasing rates' is kind of a different story.
Which smaller ISP in the US is able to resell lines from Comcast, TW, AT&T, and Verizon with nationwide coverage?
I'm not aware of the US mandating lines be resold at controlled costs dictated by the FCC, but I don't deal with consumer/eyeball networks so perhaps I'm missing something? From the frequent complaints I see about duopolies in most US networks, I'm quite skeptical of this.
In metro Vancouver, I'm able to purchase 1G VPLS fiber links for around $800/mo, and dark fiber in the $1000-$2000/mo range for the most part, with similar pricing in Calgary and Toronto. Quotes I've seen in Seattle and Los Angeles have been typically 3-6x that range.
I can purchase municipal dark fiber in Coquitlam or New Westminster (suburbs of Vancouver) for $400/mo, and I believe Montreal is $500/mo. I'm not aware of being able to buy metro dark fiber for anywhere near that anywhere in the US.
Teksavvy which has pretty good national presence using lines from any of Shaw, Telus, Bell, and Rogers charges $45/mo for 30Mb, $55/mo for 75Mb, and $70/mo for 100Mb. Just in nominal dollars without adjusting for currency, this is better than most pricing I've seen in the US.
Comcast is showing a $65/mo promotional offer for 1 year, with no details showing on what speed that is. If it's anything like the $50/mo offer I used to have, it will most likely increase significantly at the end of the year, and will continue going up in price periodically unless you call and complain.
Which ISP with nationwide coverage in the US offers significantly better pricing than Teksavvy on comparable plans?
South Korea has a dense population and just came out of a centrally planned economy wherein they had to create a modern network and just rolled out fiber almost everywhere. That's a very special case. At the 'start' of such central/social reforms, leaps of progress can often be made no doubt, the issue is what happens in the long run.
I've managed some local networks (remotely) in this region for some high traffic sites: quite a handful of Asian countries have high bandwidth dense fiber inside the country, but it tends to go to crap as soon you exit the country/bottleneck heavily.
For example, Japan has 1G being common, SK has 1G being common, Taiwan has 500-1G common. They all bottleneck quite a bit exiting the country (except for TW, but to some destination countries only); and as a side effect, many "local" websites are extremely popular as opposed to being subject to other countries' laws and media.
SK has side effect of also having an extensive DNS and RST/hijacking-based national "great firewall" censorship system that is officially deployed for pornography and pro-NK articles, but has also been used for anti-LGBT rights websites and other purposes in the past, in addition to threats of forcing foreign companies to comply with heavy surveillance requirements like requiring national ID to comment on a blog post. Honestly, SK is not a great role model for internet or censorship. On top of that, while your "home" connectivity is fine, content providers trying to set up even CDN/caching nodes in SK are subject to serious annoyances, like the KRNIC/KINX crap where they really dislike it if your ASN isn't allocated by KRNIC - you're literally on the internet exchange already but all Korean ASs will not talk to you or give you time of day because you're not one of them, and are not present on the route server, and you're forced to route traffic that originates and terminates in Seoul through the US or Hurricane Electric or some other insane route.
I think government should not be breaking up big successful companies only because they control >50% market share. What Microsoft did with IE was nasty but Google acquiring DoubleClick, AdMob, YouTube etc. is not nasty at all. If Google for example made the same exact product like YouTube and then leveraged its massive resources and distribution channel to destroy YouTube and claim the market share that would be problematic but otherwise I don't see a problem.
Punishing the best student in class only because he or she is the best is not cool at all.
Allowing that was probably a mistake. IDK if it's possible to undo, but letting the two biggest advertisers merge was is like almost definitionally anticompetitive.
Why they didn't block the merger when it happened? they could've but now it is too late. The same thing would be splitting up Facebook and Instagram when they all already so interconnected.
At the time of the breakup AlphabetCereal gets a copy and AlphabetSoup gets a copy. If they care, make Soup and Cereal pledge to purge the Soup specific or the Cereal specific parts. Either way, ban the soup company from selling cereal by consent decree and vice versa.
Splitting the datacenters might be trickier, but worst case, operate them jointly for 12-18 months, and at the end, each datacenter and the contents thereof are the exclusive property of one or the other. Or enact a third company to own and operate the datacenter under FRAND terms.
The big question would be how you deal with shared infrastructure -- compute, data storage, logging, etc. Google has a significant amount of highly proprietary code in those areas which they're undoubtedly using within their ads product; it'd be tricky to figure out how to deal with that in a split.
They should have spun off DoubleClick for Publishers and other server/ad mediation into separate companies and is likely what will happen if the government is successful in their case.
The core issue here is that this regulation doesn't directly introduce any new competition while it only tries to weaken Google's network effect. Network effect is a new corporate tool to fight against antitrust regulation; it's not that straightforward to handle it within the scope defined by the US antitrust jurisprudence especially when it actually benefits the consumers (in this case, advertisers).
I personally believe that we need to deal with those aggregators but not sure if this kind of breaking up will result anything other than lost opportunity costs from several years wasted from a lawsuit. I hope DoJ to develop a new effective framework to regulate aggregators but it's very unlikely since William Barr seems to be mostly driven by political motivation.
What a bunch of nonsense. You can advertise anywhere and no one has a monopoly over it. This is just scared media companies running their propaganda so they can protect their failing cable advertising markets.
I'm pleasantly suprised to find relatively little knee-jerk in the comments. For the record, even as an ex-Googler and as a business-friendly conservative, I support the move and not just for Google but for all of the FANGs. It's verifiably impossible for anyone to compete with these companies in the markets they dominate, so they'll sort of have to compete with themselves after the breakup, and perhaps allow more competition to emerge (or enter the market from abroad).
Disclosure: I do not own any stock in Google. I do own stock in Facebook and Amazon however.
US antitrust law uses the test of whether consumers are worse off as a measure of anti-competitive practices. This assumed that consumers and customers were one and the same.
Does this doctrine still hold given that many online business models put consumers and customers in different buckets? Most of Google's services are free for consumers, but customers are less fortunate.
Regulators have said this is going to be challenging to do in court because laws currently are focused on the consumer in a very dollars and cents kind of way.
As many have mentioned below, this will increase cost to consumers because there is an inherent connection between price and economies of scale. This is why so many startups (and their backers) are willing to lose money on every sale for the first decade to build dominance.
Now, if politicians are going to fight to raise prices for their constituents, they need a strong argument that will convince Joe Sixpack it needs to be done.
I challenge anyone here to describe the benefit for the average American in a politically feasible way (many of whom are struggling to pay bills, struggling to affordhealth care for their children, or dealing with drug addiction and racism, etc.)
I wonder if any of the tech workers here cheering on the breaking up of Google or Facebook realize that the obscene FAANG compensation packages are only made possible by their massive profit margins, which are in turn enabled by their pseudo-monopoly status.
Monopolies are "bad" because they have the pricing power gouge their customers at the expense of boosting profits. But Google's and Facebook's customers are advertisers! When you support "breaking up tech monopolies" you are basically saying programmers should get paid less money so advertising companies can buy cheaper ads. What an utterly ridiculous and self-destructive thing for tech workers to advocate.
I don't know enough about antitrust law, but it's my (possibly wrong) assumption that it is legal to use the profits from Product A to subsidize lower prices for Product B, a sort of "sell stuff to Peter in order to give Paul a discount."
I imagine it would be difficult to determine if this is happening, but it would seem logical to say that if this subsidization leads to an unfair advantage over competitors (who otherwise couldn't match the low price), it should be regulated, at least according to antitrust theory. The problem for Google is that this describes a solid chunk of their product portfolio.
Other commenters are suggesting that this would mean the end for YouTube and Gmail.
My understanding is that a hypothetical breakup here wouldn't mean that YouTube and Gmail would have no ads. They would become clients of an independent "Google Adtech" company.
That certainly changes the economics of the business, but ad-supported Google services would be here to stay.
What would likely change is Alphabet would no longer profit from "Google Adtech's" ads on third party services.
If you carve off the ad-tech business, what revenue-generating activities are left at Google? I don’t understand what kind of break-up would make economic sense.
I have started using DuckDuckGo more and more but the biggest issue I have with it is that DuckDuckGo is such an incredibly poor choice for the naming of a search engine brand.
The results almost seem better in many instances for what I am actually looking for. We are never going to say "Just DuckDuckGo go it" though. It sounds just so stupid.
Which is preferable, politically “neutral” search results, or search results that prioritize truth and accuracy? I prefer the latter, which is what google provides now, but I’d be interested to hear from those who would prefer the former.
If one party says that little green aliens are going to raise ATM fees and another party doesn’t, should google be obligated to return search results supporting both perspectives?
politically neutral search results? you've got to be kidding. guess you don't remember the multiple "auto-complete fiascos" involving hillary, obama, trump, etc.
I do not trust Google to give me accurate and truthful results. Not the engineers, not the executives, not the company. They are my political opponents.
They are people and Google is still a corporation: they can all be bought, infiltrated, deceived, manipulated and threatened. I would not allow such a centralized point of failure for all information and knowledge to be controlled.
Given that not even soft sciences academics, who are supposed to be erudites, can separate themselves from their biases and look at things objectively, and their whole job is supposed to be that, I do not trust that the engineers at Google are able to do that.
And finally, simply giving an incredibly small elite what the rest of the population can see and know, is a bad idea.
These are the reasons why I oppose prioritizing "truth and accuracy". It would not be such thing.
I, personally, would add that just the two American political parties deciding what is politically neutral is pretty bad. Even if the Republicans are nominally on my side, I do not trust such people to treat fairly all other politics than the ones chosen by the leaders of each party. And all the other points I have raised wholly apply even to those on my side of politics.
It would still, however, be better than letting my political enemies controlling the internet. If the roles were reversed, you would think the same.
I’ll probably get hounded for saying this here but:
I genuinely believe that one of the biggest things harming American society right now is adtech. From social media to traditional media they have become obsessed with clicks and view time. This leads to negativity and extremism getting promoted and sensationalism overtaking authentic journalistic approaches. Not only that but it means a population that is getting constantly bombarded with terrible, often overinflated stories. Why? Because all this sells because the human brain is wired to focus on danger before all else.
China doesn’t have this same problem because it controls the media and censors social media. From a purely psychological standpoint this is a positive but there are obviously deep implications for what that censorship does to a society as well.
To answer your direct question, any losses by Google due to this will be dwarfed by the positive implications for the American society. I’m not saying this will fix the above problems but the amount of good it will do (in conjunction with other legislation especially, ie link tax and repealing section 230) is greater than the amount of bad by a mile.
About damn time regulators start paying attention to the blatant anti-competitive practices all the tech giants have been engaging in for years.
And if you're one of those people who are worried that doing this would hurt innovation, don't be. The free market was what got us here, and regulators will ensure the market stays free so we keep moving forward.
If they even decide to go through with it it would be years before anything actually happens. But, assuming they do and it does, I suspect it would go down like this:
Google is split into Google Ads and Google Data Collection. Search, Youtube, and all the other things they use to collect data on you will go to DC, and GA will just do ads.
DC will need to find a source of revenue, and will start bundling up selling the data they collect on you. One of their customers will be GA. But maybe some upstart company or Amazon or Microsoft will be their customers too.
GA will lose value because they will have to increase payouts/lower prices to compete with their new competitors. DC will go up in value because of all their new sources of revenue.
You'll be a shareholder in both and probably see your total value go up because Data Collection will probably make more money than Google Ads loses.
Standard oil may have a different name now, but it still very much exists and those children companies are still amongst the wealthiest companies in the world.
Biggest issue with Alphabet is that it is run like a govt bureaucracy. You have one business that is very valuable, and to own that you have to pay the tax of owning all the other stuff that does nothing but burn cash for the benefit of employees.
I'd say not worried at all in the long term and maybe slightly worried in the short term. Microsoft is doing fine after a few years of bad returns. The successor companies to AT&T and Standard Oil did fine.
How much of a connection of this with Trump's pledge to bring on antitrust after the videos of Google leaders in distraught got leaked> I understand Trump can't decide to bring on antitrust just like that but Republican machinery can activate all red states to rally for it. Unfortunately, many blue states would join as well. I suspect if Trump gets 2nd term, big tech would look very different in coming years given they consider them as powerful machines for progressive movement. Very likely Amazon and FB might also get targetted on similar grounds.
PS: I'd like to remain this discussion remain apolitical and have more rational discussions than folks leaning on either side.
As for EU breaking up into separate countries, that would be great too. As opposed to a big entity that passes laws and handles monetary policy in favor of 1-2 top dog countries and big coporations.
The whole reason the EU was founded (as ECC and before) was to contain Germany [it was a stated goal of the politicians and diplomats involved]. Some irony, huh?
I feel strongly that ads are a net-negative to society in their current form. They provide some value (a way for people offering products to reach an audience) but the current implementation doesn't work.
Ads make sense in certain scenarios: for example, if I'm explicitly searching for a product I want. But in most cases it's just noise and it incentivizes the wrong behaviours.
The increasing trend of large tech conglomerates to use one money printing product like AWS or search or the Apple Store to tactically snipe competitors to destroy or acquire them is absolutely abysmal in the long run. I don't care if it increases consumer prices by 10 cents or whatever, it's time to look at the long term health of the ecosystem overall. It's really the private analog to a state capitalist country subsidizing its own firms while foreigners have to compete on a one-by-one basis. Everyone considers that to be detrimental when it happens between two nations, I don't see why it's not detrimental when it happens in the tech industry.