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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
How do you achieve this technically? Monorepo would be a pain to break.
Or just break up Google into two but let both of them keep the access to the same repo? Then what would this achieve?
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.
This effort seems fundamentally out of touch, misdirected, and politically motivated.
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.
A clean Google breakup seems to look like :
1 - Search,
2 - Youtube,
3 - Gmail
The rest can go anywhere, as they don't seem to be powerful enough to control a market (although that may change in the future).
For Amazon, it seems clean to do it like this:
1 - AWS,
2 - Amazon (shopping website + logistics)
Audible & IMDB are nice, but to me not big enough to be trouble. Audible might be, but I don't know enough about that market.
Facebook seems straightforward:
1 - Facebook,
2 - Instagram,
3 - Whatsapp
Apple would be hard to break up, but allowing other stores on their devices might be all that's needed.
Microsoft seems to be under the radar compared to 20 years ago. Splitting Office and Windows seems less important to me now than it did back then.
The problem when you break up a domestic giant is that opens the door for foreign giants to enter the market.
What would you rather have, Amazon and Google, or Alibaba and Baidu?
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.
What happens to shareholders when a company is broken up? Do they end up with shares in both companies?
> Google, Amazon, FB are not the monopolies that you should be worried about.
Not at all?
> For those who are customers of AT&T - how do you like your service? Is it as good as Google?
Google's "support" for their products has one of the worst reputations.
"companies like Google censor conservative content"
Certainly, isn't all their censoring.. in fact, I am less concerned about it than other things.
Can they do this with all sectors? Instead of targeting the last sector they haven’t completely brought to heel.
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?
Would this benefit China or Chinese companies in any way that would be detrimental to U.S. interests?
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.
Anyone good with investments here? How worried should I be if I own alphabet stocks?
if you comment on a post like this and work at the company it’s talking about you really should disclose it
Does Facebook not bundle their products?
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.
Amen! E.U should do the same...
Seems like it just refers to (but doesn't link to) https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/05/states-lean-toward-pushing-t...
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.
Good WSJ article: https://wiki.fuckoffgoogle.de/index.php?title=Google_Agonize...
Very interesting!!
I wonder if through the course of the investigation we finally get a definitive reason why Alphabet was created.
My gut tells me that it is to hide data sharing between entities.
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.