The problem with these types of articles is that it doesn't contain a single actionable step on how one would go about breaking up these monopolies. It's a lot of "well, we did it with the electrical providers and telephone providers so we should do it with google."
Well, you can take a national utility and split it across geographic regions so local calls or electricity bills go into the pockets of the region you are in, and calls between two regions go into the pockets of both according to whatever long distance agreement is in place. That's at least workable. Or you break up an Oil Company that has 500 wells/concessions, into 5 groups of 100 wells/concessions. Or a railroad with a nationwide network, split up into 5 regional networks. That could work, too. That's what we did in the past to break up monopolies.
Now how would that work with google search? Prevent people in region A from loading a website in region B? Is that what we want? crickets
Sure there is low hanging fruit in terms of divesting -- e.g. no reason to keep a video monopoly like youtube with a search monopoly. I'm all for it. But now you just have two monopolies, and have not solved the problem of lack of competition in either video or search, which is ostensibly what you use to justfy these actions.
In fact the consumer pains with long distance in the wake of the ATT breakup is the reason why the law has changed on anti-trust. Now you must show consumer harm to pass constitutional muster and your proposal has to show consumer benefit. A proposal to break off youtube from google is going to have a hard time passing this test.
So yes, we, get it, we solved the problem of anti-trusts in the past, we don't like google, so We Must Do Something. Except those old anti-trust strategies just wont work against monopolies that have no geographic dimension. That no one is willing to touch that explains why we have a deluge of pleas, none of which contain a single workable proposal.
> But now you just have two monopolies, and have not solved the problem of lack of competition in either video or search, which is ostensibly what you use to justfy these actions.
The problem is not really a monopoly (or at least market dominant position) in one business, it's using that dominant position to gain dominance in other businesses.
So, you split out the obvious things: youtube, search, adwords, media ads, g suite stuff, android + chrome OS, payment/wallet, cloud, some sort of bucket for the rest.
Require FRAND terms when baby Gs work with othet baby Gs and restrict the baby Gs from expanding into other lines of business. There's your actionable plan. It leaves you with a handful of mostly viable businesses that are still pretty dominant, but...
If YouTube has the same relationship with its ad network as any other video site could get, other video sites can have a better chance to compete.
Setting up an Android for people new to the internet won't require creating a gmail account and steer your choice of email providers, etc.
Geographic splits don't really make sense for Google. And really, I'm not sure it did for AT&T, except that local vs long distance was a useful split, and I don't know that a nationwide local phone company that can't connect long distance calls would make sense. We certainly didn't get competitive local residential phone service by breaking up AT&T. The telecom act of 1996 came closer to giving us that, until the FCC decided it didn't care.
Yeah, I'm fine splitting youtube and google and even adwords. I don't think any of the rest are viable businesses, TBH.
However I don't think this will solve the issues raised in the original article or the general issues with monopoly.
People used to think that Microsoft had an unfair monopoly with its browser because of bundling. Well, Chrome took over market share pretty easily when it released something better. It turns out it wasn't bundling, but investing more dev resources than the competitor that made the difference. And you can do that if you have surplus profits from a monopoly. It is those profits that allow for more resources that make the difference, not any consumer-facing bundling problems.
So even if you completely eliminate the bundling, you'll still have a situation where off-shoot products by monopolies outcompete other self-funded products. Now, you have to complain not about bundling, but about subsidies -- basically making it illegal for the monopoly to branch out into another business, because all tech investment starts out as subsidies. But now you are really hurting innovation, because a large part -- I would say a large majority -- of innovation happens as subsidized R&D performed by monopolies. From the invention of C at Bell Labs to Android at Google. These are all side projects afforded to monopolies but not to private investors, who would never invest in such things. Thus no standard of consumer harm will result in making this illegal.
So you say, OK, we wont ban a firm from creating other products but we will ban it from purchasing companies. So that takes care of Youtube and Adwords, but not android, office, etc. But now if the monopoly has surplus profits, it has an edge at making competing products and outcompeting smaller incumbents. Yes, it's harder than just buying them, but you have not fundamentally changed the landscape. It's an improvement, yes, but only a marginal improvement.
It's really a tough call, and not at all the same thing as the previous US push on anti-trust, which was conceptually much simpler until you had the ill-advised ATT breakup, which showed the limits of the old approach. Merely longing for the old days of anti-trust in which we were busting up Standard Oil doesn't address any of the reasons why we have moved past that period.
> Well, Chrome took over market share pretty easily when it released something better.
It certainly didn't hurt that they promoted the hell out of it on all of their market dominant properties. (As well as the, then common, practice of paying to have it included it in freeware downloads of all kinds; which to your point is more subsidy than anything else)
I can see your point about R&D. When a company is more profitable/less competitive, there is an ability to do more of the open ended research that can lead to great things that aren't closely related to the company business. But does that justify the lack of competition that results? The consumer harm is difficult to quantify, of course, because consumers are generally not paying in dollars for these services; but maybe search competition would result in fewer ads and a more clear separation between ads and found content, which may be more useful. You could also consider that to some degree, advertising costs drive up the price of goods sold through those ads, and therefore the lack of competition in ads may cause consumer harm in that way (but, of course that's a tenuous argument, a lot of companies will spend their ad budget regardless)
Well, you can take a national utility and split it across geographic regions so local calls or electricity bills go into the pockets of the region you are in, and calls between two regions go into the pockets of both according to whatever long distance agreement is in place. That's at least workable. Or you break up an Oil Company that has 500 wells/concessions, into 5 groups of 100 wells/concessions. Or a railroad with a nationwide network, split up into 5 regional networks. That could work, too. That's what we did in the past to break up monopolies.
Now how would that work with google search? Prevent people in region A from loading a website in region B? Is that what we want? crickets
Sure there is low hanging fruit in terms of divesting -- e.g. no reason to keep a video monopoly like youtube with a search monopoly. I'm all for it. But now you just have two monopolies, and have not solved the problem of lack of competition in either video or search, which is ostensibly what you use to justfy these actions.
In fact the consumer pains with long distance in the wake of the ATT breakup is the reason why the law has changed on anti-trust. Now you must show consumer harm to pass constitutional muster and your proposal has to show consumer benefit. A proposal to break off youtube from google is going to have a hard time passing this test.
So yes, we, get it, we solved the problem of anti-trusts in the past, we don't like google, so We Must Do Something. Except those old anti-trust strategies just wont work against monopolies that have no geographic dimension. That no one is willing to touch that explains why we have a deluge of pleas, none of which contain a single workable proposal.