Do it! Then, do every single major conglomerate they've allowed to form over the last 30 years
Antitrust comes in waves in the US. First, it's a free for all to let the tech develop freely...then you see the horrors and a time of antitrust kicks in. This would be the 4th wave since the Sherman Act. Let's hope it's a good one.
Interesting! Go ooooonnnn 😍
That's all I had, I'm not an expert, but I hope they go after FB and microsoft too (in case that makes you feel randy like that other guy in the comments) :P
Do you think they’d do Apple?
A human can live their whole life without ever interacting with an Apple product by mistake. I'm not sure about that for android/google/adsense/maps/youtube. It takes a deliberate effort to avoid these guys and I'm still not completely free from it. Slightly easier but still a minefield with Microsoft and FB, especially in niche areas.
My biggest fear about a Google breakup would be what that does to the mobile market, specifically in the US, given the iPhone's popularity here.
You can also read about Lina Khan, the current chair on the FTC side of antitrust.
Keep going I’m almost there
😂
Jesus Christ Fedi
invest in Sherman Antitrust Act memes now
Unless Savannah is some girl he knows, not sure this lands. Savannah, GA wasn't really ever ravaged in the Civil War or anything.
Atlanta's the one that got leveled.
Like that is what you point out, and not the fact they got the wrong Sherman pictured lol. John Sherman ≠ William Tecumseh Sherman
Here you go. Right guy.
Ha, another good point. I didn't recognize the person so I just lazily assumed it was supposed to be "generic Union Soldier"
I knew it was the wrong Sherman, but in the case of Google, I'd want the Total War Scorched Earth type.
Yeah. I just remembered from history class that he had given them a message saying basically "Surrender or I lay unholy seige apon the city and you either die by being blown up or starve to death." and the name sounded good, lol. He did end up with the key to the city! Good old Sherman. Liked to laugh, sing, set fire to homes, sometimes with people in them, good old total war guy.
How about we start restricting how many businesses a company is allowed to buy out in a year. Maybe allow like 1-2 mergers a year. There no reason we should allow one company to buy everyone and then kill their products and services leaving the consumers holding the bag that will no longer function because the server is gone.
I would say even one a year would be too much.
That unless the business has failed and is no longer operating, for a merger and acquisition to occur they would have to petition the courts for permission first.
Imagine the shit that Microsoft and Google and Adobe and Amazon would be doing if they had to start their companies from scratch and compete against the already extant players in the field?
It would create so many jobs, and create an excess of consumer choice opportunity, lowering prices and fighting against inflation far more than a couple of percentage points on the interest rate index ever would.
I'm tired of only being offered incredibly overpriced very shitty low quality options in every single category.
We don't need $100,000 cars. We need $5,000 cars.
We don't need $1,000,000 homes, we need $25,000 homes that anyone in America who works a full-time job regardless of if they're slinging fries at McDonald's or digging ditches can afford.
We don't need $100 a week grocery bills. We need $5 a week grocery bills.
Your arguments are all invalid because capitalism
(I fully agree with your post, I sorry the world is shit)
We don’t need $100,000 cars. We need $5,000 cars
A lot of this cost is in materials, quality control and safety testing, plus requirements by trade agreements for where components are allowed to be manufactured and assembled
We don’t need $1,000,000 homes, we need $25,000 homes
Most of this cost is land. A tiny home can be self built for a few thousand, and starts at ~20k professionally built, and a small, say 800 sq foot house that someone might actually want to live in can generally be built for under 100k.
Most houses aren't worth that much but the land under them is. So more townhouses, duplexes and smaller lots, smaller lawns and a lot more apartments and condos will help
And ponies!
One thing that I've always found interesting is that silicon valley has a common start up strategy that is basically: do well enough to get bought buy your bigger competition. Basically, be a threat so your VCs can cash in when a Google, Facebook, etc buys you.
I'm other words, Silicon Valley has a start up culture that feeds an anticompetitive/anti-trust ecosystem. No one complains because they are all making money. It's the users who slowly suffer and we end up were we are not with 5 companies running the modern web and Internet infrastructure.
Buyouts shouldn't be allowed by default. The only cases where it should be allowed are when the business being bought out is struggling to the point where a buyout is really the only way to prevent bankruptcy. It should never be a good deal for the selling company and only a last resort to stop closing doors completely.
Buying out companies takes longer than a year usually.
Can I vote for YOU for president?
Ah yes, but you see, the US government only cares about faceless corporations, business owners and other rich people, and not about the average citizen, sorry. In fact, I would argue most governments are like this.
I'd go further, restrict the market cap for businesses so they have to spin off if they get too big. Add to that a value limit for the number of boards you can sit on so 30 companies can't be controlled by the same people.
Maybe if all their shadiness hadn't been allowed in the first place they wouldn't have been able to become a monopoly.
But please, I beg of you, do Adobe next.
No, Amazon Nestle next.
How would the US JD break up a Swiss corp?
Any brands protected by American law must be independently-owned, with full transfer of all branding, patents, trade secrets, intellectual assets and physical assets.
So, for example, for even a single bottle of Perrier to be sold in America, it needs to have been made by a company registered with the brand name of Perrier, with exclusive use of that name within the country, independently owned and under zero control by Nestle, being manufactured using the exact same process with the exact same ingredients, and having control of the exact same patents and American-side infrastructure.
America is such a large marketplace that it would be impossible to split a company like this. Patents alone would prevent this, forcing Nestle to divest themselves of each individual subsidiary.
Instead of invading Africa to control people and steal resources, the usa could kick Nestle out of their plantations.
I remember the days of google being a cool startup that had just made news releasing gmail with a whopping 1GB of storage making everyone go crazy for the invites. It's a strange feeling.
Yeah, I thought Google was so cool around 2004. Now I can't wait for them to become irrelevant. I need to stop using "googling" as a verb...
Hell, do all the "to big to fail" megacorps.
I worry what a broken up Adobe would do to workflows. One of the reasons I can do what I do is because Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects and Premiere all work with each other.
Now if we want to save Behance and Frame.io, substance, Mixamo, etc, I am all for that.
I don't know how deeply their different programs integrate with each other (I don't do video or illustration seriously) but one would hope that it might encourage them to adopt more open standards and formats. For example, in my photography workflow I can import and catalogue a RAW image with Shotwell, which passes it through to my RAW developer (Rawtherapee), which in turn passes it through to my raster editor (GIMP). These programs are all developed separately from each other by people with much less resources than Adobe, so I think it's a matter of choice rather than a technical limitation.
It would depend on the actual file formats. For example I can import a live after effects file into premiere and all the updates I make will apear on premiere’s timeline, without needing to render out. The same goes for bringing photoshop or illustrator files into After Effects. I guess we’d just have to rely more on third party plugins that connect these programs like Overlord
Do it do it do it do it do it do it...
Smash them with a hammer. Google should not exist as it is. Not for decades.
Break up AdSense, chrome, search, android, shatter them all into separate companies that can stop selling out literally every waking aspect of life as their sole business model.
and then prosecute them for antitrust if those companies conspire together
Would adsense even be worth it without the search? I really don’t want that popping up in even more places. My thoughts would be
Google Search + ad sense
Chrome
Android
Waze
YouTube
G Suite
FitBit
Nest
And then there’s a ton of other misc stuff I’m unaware of
Best news I've heard all day! Break up Meta, too, while you're at it!
Amazon.
Disney, Bayer, Unilever
Walmart, Kroger, Safeway (the latter two are in the midst of merging as well)
Don't stop with them
Crush corporations, swiftly and without fanfare rebuild capitalism with worker co-ops, seize the means of production without all that stagnation and failure that usually follows.
rebuild capitalism
Replace, yes?
Let's just choose our words carefully for now or the people with the money will get spooked and pay the people with the missiles to start blowing things up.
I'm already on a list.
I'm trying to make things easier for my own FBI agent, we've been through a lot together.
Will cooperatives really be able to offer good services or will they become corrupt sooner or later?
History says corrupt...
Can't predict the future but a system like this could be better than our current state of affairs where we already suffer user-hostile services and corrupt action all concentrated in a few private companies to which we have no alternatives.
If cooperatives were a more prevalent structure, there would likely be more of them since the power incentives to consolidate are lessened, but not eliminated. Because there would be more competition in the marketplace, there would be more incentives to provide good products and services. We can assume that underperforming cooperatives would generally be less successful.
Also, with more participants in the marketplace and greater decision-making by members, less power would be concentrated in the hands of the owners and managers. While that's not a guarantee against corruption, limiting power concentration lessens the impact of any individual's corrupt actions and provides opportunity for others not to have to do business with them. Compare to the current state of Google's leadership directing so much of the company's efforts not toward providing service but toward manipulating people and markets to squeeze more money out of them.
There are, however, things we likely would lose out on with a more cooperative-based economy. For one, while there would be more incentive for co-ops to produce higher quality products and services, they would probably spend less effort on the "high polish" (for lack of a better way to say it) that attracts marginal customer/user growth. In other words, things would work better but probably be less pretty.
Another potential drawback is in economies of scale. Theoretically, market-dominant and tightly integrated companies can produce more for less while every piece of the puzzle just fits together. I don't see this as a very compelling argument since the efficiency gains don't usually benefit anyone but the owners, with excess profit directed not to increased quality but to marketing and manipulation. Since cooperatives would be less able to build up their own "walled gardens," interoperability may be more incentivized and this drawback may be mitigated.
Really, though, anything has got to be better than having so many smart people working toward finding new ways to squeeze money out of us rather than doing something actually productive.
Another potential drawback is in economies of scale. Theoretically, market-dominant and tightly integrated companies can produce more for less while every piece of the puzzle just fits together.
Personally, I have a pet theory that economies of scale fall start working backwards once a company reaches a certain size because so many employees become so disconnected from the actual activity that makes the company money that 1. Various management types try to do good but instead accidentally impede the money making process, 2. Various inefficies emerge just due to the sheer number of people involved and miscommunications are amplified 3. You reach a scale where lots of B2B products (especially SAAS products) start making sense, but B2B generally charges you a premium for the convenience compared to doing it in house, so the cost benefit can quickly get out of whack while lock-in and corporate intertia makes it harder and harder to change
That's a really good point. I'd add to that: instead of performing well in a narrow domain and being able to scale just on that specialty, large orgs tend to diversify in order to expand into other markets and make more money. Those different business goals can be in conflict, like we see with Google's ads vs search vs cloud vs AI.
Don't 'break it up', nationalize it, and do the same with all these other giant corporations.
Profits could support UBI instead of encouraging billionaires.
That's not in anyone's interest. It's the surest way to have a thousand national search engines which are all shitty. National walled internet Gardens etc
Break it up instead
Not sure where you're getting the idea that there would be thousands. But as for the shitty part, it's already shit. Google's search engine utterly fails at it's job, and not just because of the rise in LLM/SEO. They waste billions on fancy new AI searches that nobody wants, they accept bribes to get pages to the top of the search, and even when you're looking at an actual for real result, it often isn't even what you want.
When a critical industry fails to do its job, it is time to nationalize it. With that said, the criticality of search engines is debatable. I'm cool with breaking it up at a bare minimum. The list of corps in need of getting broken up is way to long.
The idea stems from the propaganda tool that would be if it were state owned. Other countries would seriously discourage or ban its use, but as it is useful they'd need a replacement. Hence a thousand shitty ones.
The idea stems from the propaganda tool that would be if it were state owned.
How is it not currently a propaganda tool? It's owned by shareholders like blackrock and vanguard. At least with it being nationalized it's possible to control it democratically.
Our options are:
An open source nationalized search engine (which would promptly run into problems with SEO, because anybody could see what would get their site the #1 spot). This option can't honestly be called propaganda, because everyone would know what weights if any are placed on results.
A blackbox search engine that has been nationalized, with limited ability of the people to know/modify the algorithm, which could be called propaganda, especially if this is controlled by a failed democracy.
A blackbox search engine owned by the likes of blackrock and vanguard, with no ability to democratically modify the algorithm
None of these options are good, but the third is clearly the worst. The rich should not dictate what results pop up.
Other countries would seriously discourage or ban its use, but as it is useful they’d need a replacement. Hence a thousand shitty ones.
There is only ~200ish countries out there depending on how you count it. Most of them share search engines across borders, and that is unlikely to change, because if they were to see a nationalized search engine as a security problem, they would have already seen google as a security problem. So even if every third country made their own, there would only be a few dozen search engines.
But even assuming there would be 1000 search engines, 1000 shitty search engines is better than 1 shitty search engine with 85% market share. At least with the 1000 shitty engines there is competition. As of now, google is free to mess around with their black box engine however they like, showing and hiding what they like, all at the behest of blackrock, vanguard & company.
So I don't see how this would be to everyone's disinterest. Killing google and nationalizing it is exactly in everyone's interest. Though like I said, the criticality of search engines and therefore the need for nationalized search engines probably isn't there.
How is it not currently a propaganda tool? It's owned by shareholders like blackrock and vanguard. At least with it being nationalized it's possible to control it democratically
It is somewhat, but it's not as bad as if it was run by Trump and co.
Which is how x would become the whole internet.
Which is why the best option. Which you didn't include, is splitting Google up. Split the advertising from search. This is the surest way to make them cater to us. Especially if we can force them to compete with other search engines.
but it’s not as bad as if it was run by Trump and co.
The U.S. isn't a functioning democracy though, which is why that's a problem. And just because a nationalized service is controlled democratically doesn't mean it is controlled by a president. There are a lot of different ways to have democracy.
And we no longer live in an era of horse and buggy, so democracy can be far more direct than it has in the past.
In addition, there is already a multitude of positions filled/appointed/approved by the president. The administrator of NASA, the administrator of the EPA, etc. There is nearly 500 federal agencies like this.
So this would not be a problem unique to a nationalized search engine. So the solution is an actual democratic control of these agencies/administrators, not a wanna be dictator.
Another thing to keep in mind, what I'm proposing is something that would only ever work in an actual functioning democracy. So therefore I am not proposing this within the U.S.
Which you didn’t include, is splitting Google up
As I said, I think it is debatable if a search engine is even critical enough to warrant nationalization. I don't think the need is there. And as I (admitted retroactively edited my comment to say), I have previously stated that I'm totally cool with breaking up Google at a bare minimum. The rest of this is just about the hypothetical of nationalization.
Split the advertising from search.
Short of publicly funding private companies, this would just result in a subscription model, which nobody wants. It's either ads, subs, or public subsidization.
This is the surest way to make them cater to us.
It's a half measure. The only real way to make them cater to us (aside from previously mentioned nationalization) is regulation, workplace democracy, and so on.
Even if Google got turned into a small company that only ever does search, they'll still be a business running under capitalism, with all of the profit seeking motives that got us to where we are now.
I think what we're running into here, is that you want to talk about removing capitalism. Which I'm all for, in the context of a functional democracy. Which isn't the case in the US or anywhere in the world.
Until we know what that looks like, and its parameters you won't admit how bad nationalising a search engine is without other privately owned alternatives.
is that you want to talk about removing capitalism.
I'm all for removing capitalism, but that's not really my aim in this discussion. I was more interested in the difficulty/value of nationalizing something like a search engine.
and its parameters you won’t admit how bad nationalising a search engine is without other privately owned alternatives.
Given the popularity and successes of NASA, the USPS, NOAA, etc, I think you are being overly pessimistic.
Given the popularity and successes of NASA, the USPS, NOAA, etc, I think you are being overly pessimistic.
None of those things are direct propaganda tools.
The second they start having to put maga posters into you mailbox and nobody else's you'll see it differently.
None of those things are direct propaganda tools.
To you they aren't, but to the right wing they are.
The second they start having to put maga posters into you mailbox and nobody else’s you’ll see it differently.
We are already at risk of that. I don't see what your point is.
To you they aren't, but to the right wing they are.
I'll need some sources on that one.
We are already at risk of that. I don't see what your point is.
Then this conversation is pointless if you won't acknowledge the risk of it
How would there be thousands? There aren't thousands of nations, and everyone would still use Google.
If you break it up, that's how you get thousands of shitty versions.
Maybe some countries might disable Google if it was owned by the US, but I have a feeling those countries already have their own issues with Google as it stands now.
I just think if the monopolistic corporations are too big and too essential to take down, then nationalization is a solution with many more positive traits than negative.
That hasn't been the case if you look into what happened with Microsoft and browsers.
The other thing is
everyone would still use Google.
Is actually wrong, and what they proved with the antitrust case itself. A huge chunk of the anticompetitive activity was Google paying to be the default because people don't change the default.
Why would we support UBISoft? They haven’t released any good games recently
Unfortunately one of the big ideas republicans have conditioned half our population into believing is that government itself is basically a flawed idea and that our government will not ever be able to do anything right. So it would be a tough sell to say the least.
And also as an American, I imagine many people around the world would not be thrilled with the prospect of the US government owning the web browser they use.
There is a kernel of truth in that sentiment though. The government has a tendency to be grossly wasteful of resources, but I feel this is offset by the fact that they aren't profit driven in their goals and less likely to skyrocket prices to line shareholder pockets. Corporation are also "wasteful" in a sense, where they charge insane markups over actual cost and refuse to pay taxes on them, the difference here is that corporations move their profits offshore and out of Americans pockets, where the government always ends up paying private contractors more than they should. In the end corporations do more with less while government controlled services are always WAAAAAY cheaper than their private counterparts for the consumer despite them being inefficient.
This is the part they don't get. Do you want zero waste and ever rising prices for the sake of some worthless rent seeking billionaire cocksucker, or do u want some inefficiency, but you pay less overall. One makes someone else rich at your expense, the other allows you an affordable life while preventing another billionaire from existing.
Not like the CIA doesn't already have full access to your browsing history already
Can’t disagree there. It’s not like Google is trustworthy or resists the govt/CIA. But I do still think the official change in ownership would hit people differently.
"Give me the fruit of some else's labor!!!!" Gross.
Right? Fucking billionaires
Welcome back from your 6 month bad take hiatus.
Ignoring the snark in your comment...
I assume you take issue with UBI?
Would you feel different if we 'required service' for UBI? For example, some countries have mandatory military service. If we nationalize these giant corporations, we could make working there a way to qualify for UBI.
Do you think UBI is just taking money from the average person and giving it to lazy people who do nothing? Or do you enjoy the separation of the rich while the rest of us struggle for scraps? Do you understand that the UBI would apply to you as well?
Or am I missing deeper thoughts given to your comment?
I don't worry much about people who have more than me. I am grateful to enjoy my work and my life. I don't want the government to steal from me and I don't want them to steal from others either. Even in the black and white world of marxists, exploitation of labor just moves from the oppressors to the government. The government becomes the oppressors. It has never worked, it will never work. People are naturally motivated by profit. It's built in. Messing with that or short-circuiting the work-reward system is unsustainable.
I don't agree with that guy but doesn't that apply to the people running these companies. Profit can only be made by exploiting labour. There can't be any other way
Profit can only be made by exploiting labour. There can’t be any other way
This is a bad take and suffers from overly-simplistic thinking. Corporations are force multipliers for labor and the economic value of your labor is increased by joining forces with others.
Why is it a bad take. How can there be any other way. Where exactly is profit created from?
Profit is created from the output of productive labor. The amount of profit varies depending on the efficiency of the market and the company.
Companies are force multipliers for labor. The company's profit comes from that force mulitplication, not by withholding profit from the worker who generated it.
Separate the search engine from anything that stinks of advertising so it can return to what it’s supposed to do: return the most relevant results.
Because even appending udm=14 only gets rid of promoted links and in-page advertising, it does f**k-all to correct manipulated search results.
Can you elaborate on the business model of a search engine that has no ads?
The only business model that really works is charging people to use it, like Kagi is doing.
like Kagi is doing
I haven't seen much to suggest Kagi's results are better than Google's. But that's as much a function of time and horsepower as anything.
I would argue that the private model is what's fundamentally wrong with modern search. Nationalize Google and make it a public utility, like any public library or publicly financed research institution. Open up the front end source code and let people apply their own filters and modifications, rather than locking everything down to force feed you sponsored content.
That's the only real way to fix search.
Nationalize Google and make it a public utility, like any public library or publicly financed research institution.
This would be great. Running a search engine is very expensive though.
The Internet Archive is probably the closest thing we've got to something like this. It's a non-profit but AFAIK they don't get any government funding. They've got the scrapers and could probably work on a search engine project, but I doubt they could afford it in their current state. They're spending a lot of money at the moment due to companies filing lawsuits about Internet Archive archiving their content (and a bunch of content is gone from the archive forever as a result
Running a search engine is very expensive though.
The federal government spends about $1.3B a year on advertising and another $37.5B on data collection, with Google being a major recipient of both budgets. Nationalization would save a small fortune.
And for the economic tailwinds that efficient Internet research provides, I'm willing to bet we'd see significant economic benefits that eclipse the base cost, not unlike with Amtrak or the USPS.
The Internet Archive is probably the closest thing we’ve got to something like this.
Them and Wikipedia, definitely. Both make for excellent models of non-profit free-at-point-of-use information services.
Yeah, let's see how much worse corrupt bureaucrats can make this already rotten turd of a product!
Not trusting the EPA because Exxon has done such an awful job.
I get the feeling a lot of people would complain about Google search doing that too.
Let's not make them a business. Search Engines are fundamental core services for the modern globalized and connected world. It's just like your post-office service. Make it an internationally owned and funded non-profit organization with open-source and the goal of enabling the unrestricted sharing of knowledge over the internet.
What does the creation of a multi-national state owned search engine have to do with Google? I presume nations have the resources to do that all on their own.
What would you suggest the Google search engine be allowed to do to profit as a business?
There's no suggestion. There is currently no way a search engine can be a viable modern business model and a good tool at the same time. It could potentially be a good business model and a decent tool even with ads, but only in a world where we accept that things can't grow forever.
No business in their right mind is going to just disable advertising altogether. There's no other viable way to support a search engine. Google search has been supported by advertising since day 1.
They can fix search without removing advertising. Preventing them from simply paying off others to be the default could be enough.
A decentralized search engine, running on something like what Locutus (neo-Freenet) is intended to be, can work without a business.
Okay but no non-business is going to buy Google Search...
even appending udm=14
FYI all this is doing is going to the "Web" tab of the results. You can just click it instead of modifying the URL.
I guess where it'd be useful is modifying the search URL in your browser so that searches always add udm=14 by default.
And chrome from everything else too
Chrome doesn't make any money. How is it supposed to support itself as a separate company?
It doesn't have to be free. People used to pay for licensed software with money instead of their private data. We can do that again, or there's still open source options like Firefox and it's derivatives.
It does have to be free. It's open source software. If they tried to charge money for Chrome, people would just use Chromium or one of the other browsers based on it.
Chromium is open source. Chrome is not. Open source also doesn't mean that you can't charge for the compiled binaries. But that isn't my point. My point is that the reason it's free is that you're actually paying for it through the value of Google tracking and storing everything you do, but as a society have don't have to structure services this way.
Chrome and Chromium are 99.9% the same. Source: I used to be a Chrome developer at Google.
Chrome doesn’t make any money.
It defaults you to the Google web suite, where Google makes money on ads. And it harvests your data, which it can then sell to ad agencies as a tool to optimize targeted ad sales.
Not sure how that would work...
I'm old enough to remember the breakup of Ma Bell and the way that worked was the creation of a bunch of regional telecom services, that's not going to work on the Internet.
I guess they could mandate spinning off Android, but that's not really the problem addressed in the antitrust case, is it?
Maybe split the AdWords side from the Search Engine side?
I'd guess it would be a vertical breakup rather than horizontal: separate android, cloud, youtube, search, chrome, ads...depending on how aggressive they want to be.
But if they've only been found to monopolize search, how does that remedy the search monopoly? Presumably the new separate Google Search company would still have a search monopoly.
without search and their abuse of that monopoly, google wouldn't have dominant positions or massive market shares that many of their other properties (products, services, software, etc) have.
Because that search monopoly allows them to boost their other products above all others. It’s not an impartial search result anymore. There is a financial incentive to favor their own products.
I'm speculating, but perhaps the thought would be that separating Google Search from the rest of the company would deprive them of the alternative revenue streams they used to maintain their market position? If I remember the ruling against them correctly, one of the key pieces of evidence cited by the judge was that Google spent like 30 billion dollars a year to have 3rd parties use their engine by default.
But the ads on search are the big revenue driver for Google overall. Presumably those stay with the Google Search subunit, and they would have plenty of cash to do whatever?
Yes, I believe the figure they cited was that Google earns 73% of their revenue through ads. I imagine what they would have to do is bust up the ad services in addition to the various departments of Google. Each new entity formed gets to keep revenue from ads shown on their platform maybe? E.g. YouTube gets spun off into its own thing separate from Google proper. They get to keep ad revenue from what is shown on their platform, but they don't get to touch any revenue from sponsored search listings, or from banner ads on other websites, etc.
That's an approach that makes surface level sense to me, but I am neither a lawyer nor a business bro nor a tech bro. So, I don't actually have the faintest idea if my idea bears any resemblance to reality.
Google search has some features that alternative search engines don’t. I use DuckDuckGo for 99% of everything, but I occasionally use Google to see local busy hours, or sometimes any hours, reviews, phone numbers without navigating a shitty website, etc.
I think there are ways to break up Google search on its own, and make some of those features separate and accessible on other search engines.
Then there’s the matter of advertising, data collection, SEO, exclusivity with corporations like Reddit, etc.
Google is doing things with its search that seem to intentionally reduce the ability of other search engines to compete with them, and that’s really all that the antitrust laws are meant to prevent.
I think you go about it the other way: break data analytics and advertising off from everything else. If every unit has to be self-sufficient without reliance on data collection and first-party advertising I think you fix most of the major issues.
They removed something that I used to use: using "-word" to exclude a keyword. Apparently it is because advertisers don't want you doing that, so they turned it into a weighting. So there are features and antifeatures too. I've seen ddg do that too before, but right now it works :)
I think each of these needs to be handled in separate ways. For example, search could continue to be a conglomeration that includes maps, mail and possibly cloud. Android can just be split very easily into a separate company and same for Youtube, since that would basically be another Netflix or whatever.
Ads, in my opinion, is the most important one though. That absolutely has to be shattered into thousands of tiny pieces, all of which need to be forced to compete with each other, for the benefit of all internet companies anywhere. It would be a massive boon to companies everywhere and would provide an opportunity for lots of innovation in the advertising space, ie. trying ads that are less intrusive or ones that are cheaper because they don't rely on tracking information.
And another thing I think people need to understand about search is that building the search engine is not the hard part - the hard part is figuring out how to pay for it. Search is really expensive - crawling websites, indexing, fighting spam abuse. That's what really makes Google successful - the fact that they coupled it with advertising so that they could cover all the expenses that come with managing a search engine. That's much more important than the quality of the results, in my opinion.
And as for Chrome: well, personally I think that monopoly has been the most damaging to the internet as a whole. I would love to see it managed as part of a non-profit consortium. There should not be any profit motive whatsoever in building a web browser. If you want a profit motive, build a website - the browser should just be the tool to get to your profit model, not the profit model itself. And therefore it should be developed by multiple interest groups, not just one advertising company.
Anyway, I know this is all an impossible fantasy. Nothing in the world is done because it's right or wrong, it's done because it serves whoever holds the most power. But if there were a just world, this is what I think it would look like.
There's no reason Gmail should be included in search of it's broken up. Otherwise agree though.
If you seperate Youtube from Google, I cannot see youtube surviving. It's probably a loss leader for them.
I really don't understand why people have that believe. They've heard over a decade ago that Youtube wasn't making a profit (which was mostly because they reinvested everything to grow and become the monopoly they are now), but by how much money it's raking in every quarter and with how monumental Google's infrastucture is, I find it extremely hard to believe Youtube isn't a big money machine by now. They're really squeezing everything out of it not because they have to, but because they have a monopoly as a user generated video platform that has more to offer than just shorts.
I think it's a combination of the old news, how expensive hosting video is compared to anything else, and how Twitch is basically a boat - a hole in the water that you throw money into.
People lose the connection that burning money like it's going out of fashion is only step one in the game. Step two is capitalizing on the market share that you acquired in step one. And, as every social media company has shown, ad revenue and data harvesting are very profitable. Otherwise, every tech giant wouldn't have pivoted to that years ago.
Pretty sure youtube is revenue generating on its own now. Youtube doesn't work as a loss leader because it's so different from all other products.
So YouTube shall fail.
I think the problem with Google is that none of their side projects actually make any money. I don't have a solution here
I'm drooling at the thought.
Not breaking up Google because the effects would be inconvenient would literally be letting a monopoly regin because they're a monopoly.
Shut down services if needed. We can adapt.
Never forget that the baby bells slowly reassembled themselves. They’re not a single company but they’re down to 3 or 4 now
Which is exactly where it should be... having regional phone companies sucked. Having 1 phone company sucked. Having 3-4 is the least sucky, but we have real competition.
Before tearing apart Google and Amazon, I'df much prefer we have 3-4 choices for internet providers (unless we can turn them into utilities, then we should do that).
Fuck that. Any Canadian will tell you, you don't want an oligarchy
Making YouTube its own thing again wouldn’t be that hard.
Neither you nor almost anyone who upvoted you or replied to you read the article, huh
FTA:
"DOJ attorneys could ask Judge Amit Mehta to order Google to sell portions of its business"
That's the author of the article speculating, they don't know what it would actually look like any more than you or I do.
Bonus, as I noted, it doesn't address the primary issue of a search monopoly. Even if they sell off those business unit, the search monopoly remains.
There was more discussion of potential remedies in the article than that.
I so want this to happen, but at the same time I'm scared that Samsung or whoever will buy AOSP and enshittify it completely
Isn't it already licensed under permissive Apache v2? Anyone can fork and carry on the project without the permission of Google, every manufacturer already does as a result of the license.
The OS is but the Google Play backend isn't. Google has a monopoly over Android by keeping a monopoly on the appstore which dictates that you must allow google spyware to run on your OEM fork to be able to qualify as a "Secure Device".
Several Chinese OEMs have China only variants that don't use GPlay and also ship with some some other cool apps, but they can't sell it globally because Google says "screw you" since no one publishes apps outside Gplay, and because several major apps refuse to run on Googless android which GrapheneOS has threatened to sue
This is still just the tip of the iceberg though. Google already got sued for GPlay monoply last year and reached a $700 settlement just for developers.
On top of that, several of Android's underlying features are considered archaic and dated. They always have huge kernel patching issues because no OEM (especially Qualcomm) releases the source code for proprietary binaries, meaning no one easily upgrade kernels (practically impossible for FOSS android, expensive for OEMs). The android runtime is imo a piece of crap compared to some low power optimized linux distros. ADB is still needed to delete system apps. Settings lies about permissions, which themselves are poorly sorted. Oh and Google hired the dev behind Android rooting (magisk) so they could kill magisk hide which circumvents system app abilities to tell if you are rooted and therefore not worthy of running proprietary apps.
There's so much more the deeper you go, it's just really hard for any contender to step up because of the sheer might Google has over the market. They have so much power that they coerced Samsung into dropping RCS support which makes Google Messages the only app on android that supports RCS, even though RCS is an open OEM standard from 2008
A dog that barks doesn't bite.
"Considering" means they want to get something from Google in exchange for not breaking it up.
"you kids break it up or I'm gonna do it for ya"
your mom probably, also the justice department
My mom would punish me regardless of which side I were in the event, because I "should have been smarter".
That's off topic, what I meant is there's no mechanism in Google which would make it voluntarily stop being a monopoly/oligopoly in good faith. It's not a person making that decision even, it's the whole organization. Every single person making decisions there may be good and willing for peace on Earth and goodwill toward men, but that's not how the mechanism as a whole will work.
Google might not, but it's shareholders want to minimise losses. A voluntary breakup will be better for them.
Will this work out for consumers if other tech giants like Apple, Microsoft, or Amazon, etc. aren't also broken up simultaneously? Won't Google's assets just get sucked up into another existing monopoly and we'll be right back where we were but with one less choice than before?
I'm genuinely curious.
It won't. It simply benefits Apple and Amazon who should have been broken up a decade ago
Amazon literally has had a mostly worldwide monopoly
Don't forget that the right wing has a hard-on for Google. People like them are Apple's target market (I guarantee their families were the first to get iPads) and don't forget their really warped questions during the congressional hearings which demonstrated that they had done absolutely no research and had a huge inherent bias. Stupid questions like "if I walk 3m to the right, can you guys see that". Or, why does president Trump come up as the first hit on Google for loser
I support this, but only if it happens to all 3 companies simultaneously . Otherwise, we're just transferring more power to Apple (who honestly have followed some Trump style tactics over the last 25 years)
I get the idea behind a duopoly, but from an economics and game theory point of view, but, if applied unequally, another monopoly will simply take advantage.
Fully support the action, don't know how the timing works...
Best case, you only start to basically outline what this looks like before the election. Worst case, you enliven the complacent, left-centrist billionaires to vigorously join in with the perpetually batshit right wing billionaires to get trump in to "live to fight another day" with the reasoning of, "we need to save ourselves first, then we'll deal with trump when he goes full fascist" and then they either won't be able to or won't care to because they won't want to upset their share price.
Yea, I'm afraid of that, tbh, if more corpos go full elon.
PS: actually, they should be the ones afraid of the organized citizenry anyway, but we're too fragmented ideologically, spatially, communicationally, see if voting can make up for it.
Well, something, but that action is only temporary because those companies that were the result of the division are reunited to form or are acquired by other large companies.
Obviously they will no longer be what they were in the original company. But something is something.
Will the old method of breaking up a company work enough on modern tech companies? Will the 2nd best map software ever catch up in market share?
If you switched most people from google into DDG without telling, most would hardly notice, I venture. Mapping is different.
Just apple maps and bing under the hood though.
What we really need is some non-super monopoly competition like osm
Yea! OSM is the Wikipedia of maps.
Perhaps, though I am dubious (when it comes to things like searching for business open hours or street view).
However it's not like choosing which restaurant to go to. They just type their search in the Google browser textbox and use the same search engine they've always used, the default. They'd need to encounter a failed search and think to try another.
If they forced them to split Waze off and make it independent again it probably could, it's probably the only non default app I see people use regularly
Oh, did they actually keep Waze? I assumed they bought it to kill it.
Still using it, so still going right now.
Shockingly they kept Waze around. It sounds like they believe the Waze brand is too strong to be worth killing off in favor of maps, but they have been implementing new features into each and cross pollinating between the two
I think they might be using it as a beta testing ground for their back end features, the brand is also pretty valuable in and of itself. The traffic avoidance is much more aggressive than Google maps
Just spinning off Android would shake up map software. It's how they get traffic and other data.
Many apps for Android rely on Google Play Services which I don't know exactly what it's doing but collecting data is a good bet.
Do we end up with worse maps then?
In the short term? Possibly.
In the long term, it opens up space for competition, which is better for end users, advertisers, small business, and more.
By my understanding google play services is basically just shared libraries and APIs for doing stuff and not as tied into Google specifically as its name might suggest
Wikipedia suggests it gives access to certain information which all look like data Google would want to track. I don't think I'm crazy to assume Google is doing something fucky while it gets values when requested on by an app, or whenever the heck they want.
Disable it and it will bitch notifications every often, every day, and that can't be disabled. It claims it need to be on for your phone to work but not so in my case when I only use apps from F-Droid (like a dialer, text message, calculator, Lemmy client).
I think Apple could catch up.
PBMs/healthcare conglomerating needs to be looked at as a top priority
And this Kroger Albertsons thing needs to be stopped for good
So they're breaking up Google but giving Intel more free money after it cut 15k jobs?
Google also cut 12000 jobs in Jan 2023, but it does not have an AMD or Nvidia to kick its ass in search when it fucks up.
Intel is a near monopoly and it controls the physical hardware that runs the entire universe with the exception of mobile devices and embedded.
If you're going to break anyone up that's who I would go for first but because of the pipe dream of making computer chips in 'Murica these idiot politicians keep propping up Intel's Wall Street investors while its employees get fucked over.
At the very least the x86 duopoly has to end. It's not only legal but kept the way it is because of legal contracts. The courts need to declare them void because their enforcement leads to the violation of antitrust laws.
IFS is struggling to compete against TSMC, Datacenter is bleeding and loosing Customers to AMD, Ampere. Microsoft, NVIDIA and Google are also working on ARM server CPUs. Client Computing Group is loosing marketshare to Apple and AMD, with Qualcomm also recently entering the ring.
They had to kill Optane, sell their NAND business, they're not really relevant in GPU, have to IPO Altera again to get some cash and Mobileye already had to be IPOd again.
Clearly the CPU market didn't need intervention to get competitive again, Intel didn't have the power to prevent others from competing in the market and as soon as they got complacent others got ready.
Relying on TSMC as the exclusive manufacturer for bleeding edge semiconductors would be insane. We need Intel and Samsung to remain competitive.
At the very least the x86 duopoly has to end.
AMD, Intel and Centaur/VIA have x86 licensees. ARM exists, RISC-V is gaining traction - No need to implement all the legacy baggage of x86 when you can start with something a little bit more current.
Kagi is kicking their ass.
really? Is it growing that fast? I expected it would remain more niche than Linux, particularly if you need a subscription.
Oh I just mean in terms of product quality. It’s gonna take forever to even teach people they can change search engines.
Almost as hard as picking a lemmy server :D
Who?
How is this related?
It would probably do Google a world of good, depending on what gets split or spun off. A lot of Google products have unrealized potential that’s hamstrung by poor leadership and privacy issues. Maybe at least some of their products will be able to thrive on their own.
The people here who 1) think a breakup of Google will actually happen, and 2) think that a paid subscription model for a search engine have all been spending too much time in their Linux bubble.
If Google did this, everyone would just switch to Bing, or open AI's new thing they are making. The general public will not be on board with that.
A tiny bandaid on the capitalism that's literally destroying the planet.
Justice Department officials are considering what remedies to ask a federal judge to order against the search giant, said three people with knowledge of the deliberations involving the agency and state attorneys general who helped to bring the case. They are discussing various proposals, including breaking off parts of Google, such as its Chrome browser or Android smartphone operating system, two of the people said.
...
Last week’s ruling that Google was a monopolist was a landmark antitrust decision, raising serious questions about the power of tech giants in the modern internet era. Apple, Amazon and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, also face antitrust cases. Google is scheduled to go to trial in another antitrust case — this one over ad technology — next month. Any remedies in Google’s search case are likely to reverberate and influence that broader landscape.
TIL, the ruling might actually carry some consequences. I guess we'll see where this takes us.
May I recommended watching "The YouTube Effect" if you don't see the problem with big tech companies.
I'm guessing it can be found on YouTube?
lol, no :) I tried
the place is there, but it looks blocked to me, maybe it's a region thing.
Its on YouTube in the US, but you have to buy or rent it to watch there.
Okay now do Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia, Blackrock, etc etc
Good luck, I'm all for it, but good luck
Cool. Take their search stuff, open source all the software, spin out an account service and 6 baby search engine companies.
Do the same with each of their massive properties.
This.... Isn't how large scale technologies work. Not even close, not even "same planet" close. That's also not how antitrust breakups work, why open source private technologies? How do you think that's supposed to work? How does that precedent work?
You could open source all ~15,000+ repos from my company, and be entirely incapable of actually operating the grand majority of it. And we're, maybe, 1/10,000th the size of Google on the tech side.
You also can't just "split" a single technology apart, that's gloriously, ignorantly, simplistic. You're talking potentially years of dedicated work by hundreds, thousands, of individuals to achieve something like that. How do you expect that to operate?
It's going to be a nightmare to just rip seemingly unrelated, but interdependent, verticals of Google apart. Your request here is wholely unrealistic.
Woah woah woah hold on.
These are judges and lawyers, not software engineers.
Personally it sounds like the lawyers and whatnot can do the whole splitting up the business. It will simultaneously create a HUGE demand in software engineers as all this stuff just sort of stops working.
I think it's a brilliant way to handle this.
Plus the effect it would have on software engineer salaries in general. Not that I have any potential conflict of interest in stating this opinion, not at all.
That’s what I like to hear!
Great, now do the rest of them.
Alphabet soup
Do it.
"Kagi Search" looks cool. The examples of searches look far superior to even that of google.
But it's $5 per month. (No ads) Or $8 for couples. Even so I think I will try it. The search results look really good.
Has anyone here used Kagi Search?
I've been using it for the last few months, and while it doesn't offer as many "nice to have" features as Google (like automatically finding mask results need in where you are), the core functionality works great, and the lack of ads is refreshing.
But it's $5 per month. (No adds)
The price seems reasonable IMO. Search engines are expensive to run, and I'm not sure they'd even be breaking even at the moment.
They have a "small web" search that searches through small sites like blogs, which I really like. Sometimes there's small sites that have great info but aren't ranked very high in Google due to all the SEO spam and Google's preference for major sites.
I wanted to like Kagi, but their Brave fiasco turned me off of them for good
Brendan Eich should be blacklisted in the tech world. It's really too bad that they partnered with a bigot and his shitty company.
When I was younger, I thought Brendan Eich was a god for creating JavaScript and his contributions to web development. Then he started to speak about his personal views, and he instantly went from a god to an evil villain to me.
How can somebody so smart be so dumb and evil at the same time?
Brendan Eich worked really hard to turn himself into just another tech bro incel but Brave is a really good browser and the engineers deserve to not have their accomplishments overshadowed by a weird adult obsessed with other people's genitals.
They created a novel and interesting approach to ads with their BAT token and Brave is probably the most private browser you can get if you're stuck with Chromium browsers.
As often as I've tried to switch to Firefox I always end up encountering issues and going back to Brave. I wish he'd step down so Brave can shine without his bullshit whining hanging over them.
That's fair and I can agree. I don't use Brave, but for everything I've heard about it, it sounds pretty competent. The team behind Brave doesn't deserve to suffer, and the hatred should be to Eich, himself, not Brave as a whole.
I tried kagi for a month and the results were probably as good or slightly better than Google for 90% of searches but it completely falls apart any time you want something local or hyper-specific. It made me realize that the personalization that people hate with Google's results actually saves a ton of time because I had to retry a lot of kagi searches with additional context.
Blocking ads and trackers in your browser and then using Google without an account will get you most of the way to what kagi is doing.
I've been paying for it for a few months now, I like it. You do have to be a more deliberate in search results, especially if you're looking for location specific info, but that's how old Google was too anyway. The summerize site and fastGPT features can be pretty useful too.
Just a silly example, I was playing skyrim and wanted a duplicate item so I could display it, put in "skyrim console command to spawn item" and it spit out the console command perfectly
I use it now, and like it. Do you have any questions about it?
Big tech needs far stricter regulations but I don't think people would like the internet very much if Google was forced to sell off services like YouTube. Nobody else is offering unlimited free hosting, discoverability, promotion, and bandwidth for video content and nobody ever will again. If the chromium project was sold off to some other shitty tech company, do you really think they'd keep the open source 'ungoogled' version readily available for everyone? A Google breakup would just mean that other tech companies like Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, etc get more powerful.
If there's an appetite for breakups why not start with the companies that control our food and news
It's not 2010, video streaming isn't unprofitable anymore and Youtube doesn't have a monopoly on it. Chromium is open source, and as far as I'm concerned, Google has been actively making it worse with their efforts to fill it with ads.
More breakups do sound good, though.
How does this affect or concern me?
did somebody specifically ask you to look at this and comment? just wondering why are you asking such a weird question
Didn't know there were stipulations to me commenting here. My, my. What an extremely hospitable user you are to this new, welcoming website. User since last year.
well howdy and welcome, stranger! i was just wondering why anyone would leave such a comment. i didn't intend too imply that you couldn't comment, of course.
I'm hazarding a guess that since you immediately went and looked up statistics about my user account and included them in your reply, you've come here with a lot of habits from... the other place.
i don’t run this place or anything, and this is just my observation, so don’t take it as gospel. i would say that the tone here is generally a bit friendlier, so (imho) there is no need to assume hostility on the part of other commenters. i was just curious!
This could affect you in several ways:
Search Experience: If Google is broken up or forced to share data, you might notice changes in how search engines operate. Competitors like DuckDuckGo or Bing could become more competitive, offering better privacy, search results, or features, potentially giving you more choices.
Privacy and Data: If Google is required to share data, there might be concerns about how your data is handled across different platforms. On the flip side, increased competition could lead to better privacy practices as companies vie for users.
Technology and Services: Google’s services are deeply integrated into many products and platforms. A breakup could impact the availability, integration, or performance of these services, which might affect how you use technology in your daily life.
Economic Impact: Google’s size and influence mean that any major changes could have broader economic impacts, potentially affecting industries related to technology, advertising, and beyond. This could indirectly influence job markets, investment trends, or even consumer prices.
Overall, these changes could alter how you interact with the internet, your privacy, and the services you rely on daily.
Do it! Then, do every single major conglomerate they've allowed to form over the last 30 years
Antitrust comes in waves in the US. First, it's a free for all to let the tech develop freely...then you see the horrors and a time of antitrust kicks in. This would be the 4th wave since the Sherman Act. Let's hope it's a good one.
Interesting! Go ooooonnnn 😍
That's all I had, I'm not an expert, but I hope they go after FB and microsoft too (in case that makes you feel randy like that other guy in the comments) :P
Do you think they’d do Apple?
A human can live their whole life without ever interacting with an Apple product by mistake. I'm not sure about that for android/google/adsense/maps/youtube. It takes a deliberate effort to avoid these guys and I'm still not completely free from it. Slightly easier but still a minefield with Microsoft and FB, especially in niche areas.
My biggest fear about a Google breakup would be what that does to the mobile market, specifically in the US, given the iPhone's popularity here.
You can also read about Lina Khan, the current chair on the FTC side of antitrust.
Keep going I’m almost there
😂
Jesus Christ Fedi
invest in Sherman Antitrust Act memes now
Unless Savannah is some girl he knows, not sure this lands. Savannah, GA wasn't really ever ravaged in the Civil War or anything.
Atlanta's the one that got leveled.
Like that is what you point out, and not the fact they got the wrong Sherman pictured lol. John Sherman ≠ William Tecumseh Sherman
Here you go. Right guy.
Ha, another good point. I didn't recognize the person so I just lazily assumed it was supposed to be "generic Union Soldier"
I knew it was the wrong Sherman, but in the case of Google, I'd want the Total War Scorched Earth type.
Yeah. I just remembered from history class that he had given them a message saying basically "Surrender or I lay unholy seige apon the city and you either die by being blown up or starve to death." and the name sounded good, lol. He did end up with the key to the city! Good old Sherman. Liked to laugh, sing, set fire to homes, sometimes with people in them, good old total war guy.
How about we start restricting how many businesses a company is allowed to buy out in a year. Maybe allow like 1-2 mergers a year. There no reason we should allow one company to buy everyone and then kill their products and services leaving the consumers holding the bag that will no longer function because the server is gone.
I would say even one a year would be too much.
That unless the business has failed and is no longer operating, for a merger and acquisition to occur they would have to petition the courts for permission first.
Imagine the shit that Microsoft and Google and Adobe and Amazon would be doing if they had to start their companies from scratch and compete against the already extant players in the field?
It would create so many jobs, and create an excess of consumer choice opportunity, lowering prices and fighting against inflation far more than a couple of percentage points on the interest rate index ever would.
I'm tired of only being offered incredibly overpriced very shitty low quality options in every single category.
We don't need $100,000 cars. We need $5,000 cars.
We don't need $1,000,000 homes, we need $25,000 homes that anyone in America who works a full-time job regardless of if they're slinging fries at McDonald's or digging ditches can afford.
We don't need $100 a week grocery bills. We need $5 a week grocery bills.
Your arguments are all invalid because capitalism
(I fully agree with your post, I sorry the world is shit)
A lot of this cost is in materials, quality control and safety testing, plus requirements by trade agreements for where components are allowed to be manufactured and assembled
Most of this cost is land. A tiny home can be self built for a few thousand, and starts at ~20k professionally built, and a small, say 800 sq foot house that someone might actually want to live in can generally be built for under 100k.
Most houses aren't worth that much but the land under them is. So more townhouses, duplexes and smaller lots, smaller lawns and a lot more apartments and condos will help
And ponies!
One thing that I've always found interesting is that silicon valley has a common start up strategy that is basically: do well enough to get bought buy your bigger competition. Basically, be a threat so your VCs can cash in when a Google, Facebook, etc buys you.
I'm other words, Silicon Valley has a start up culture that feeds an anticompetitive/anti-trust ecosystem. No one complains because they are all making money. It's the users who slowly suffer and we end up were we are not with 5 companies running the modern web and Internet infrastructure.
Buyouts shouldn't be allowed by default. The only cases where it should be allowed are when the business being bought out is struggling to the point where a buyout is really the only way to prevent bankruptcy. It should never be a good deal for the selling company and only a last resort to stop closing doors completely.
Buying out companies takes longer than a year usually.
Can I vote for YOU for president?
Ah yes, but you see, the US government only cares about faceless corporations, business owners and other rich people, and not about the average citizen, sorry. In fact, I would argue most governments are like this.
I'd go further, restrict the market cap for businesses so they have to spin off if they get too big. Add to that a value limit for the number of boards you can sit on so 30 companies can't be controlled by the same people.
Maybe if all their shadiness hadn't been allowed in the first place they wouldn't have been able to become a monopoly.
But please, I beg of you, do Adobe next.
No,
AmazonNestle next.How would the US JD break up a Swiss corp?
Any brands protected by American law must be independently-owned, with full transfer of all branding, patents, trade secrets, intellectual assets and physical assets.
So, for example, for even a single bottle of Perrier to be sold in America, it needs to have been made by a company registered with the brand name of Perrier, with exclusive use of that name within the country, independently owned and under zero control by Nestle, being manufactured using the exact same process with the exact same ingredients, and having control of the exact same patents and American-side infrastructure.
America is such a large marketplace that it would be impossible to split a company like this. Patents alone would prevent this, forcing Nestle to divest themselves of each individual subsidiary.
Instead of invading Africa to control people and steal resources, the usa could kick Nestle out of their plantations.
I remember the days of google being a cool startup that had just made news releasing gmail with a whopping 1GB of storage making everyone go crazy for the invites. It's a strange feeling.
Yeah, I thought Google was so cool around 2004. Now I can't wait for them to become irrelevant. I need to stop using "googling" as a verb...
Hell, do all the "to big to fail" megacorps.
I worry what a broken up Adobe would do to workflows. One of the reasons I can do what I do is because Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects and Premiere all work with each other.
Now if we want to save Behance and Frame.io, substance, Mixamo, etc, I am all for that.
I don't know how deeply their different programs integrate with each other (I don't do video or illustration seriously) but one would hope that it might encourage them to adopt more open standards and formats. For example, in my photography workflow I can import and catalogue a RAW image with Shotwell, which passes it through to my RAW developer (Rawtherapee), which in turn passes it through to my raster editor (GIMP). These programs are all developed separately from each other by people with much less resources than Adobe, so I think it's a matter of choice rather than a technical limitation.
It would depend on the actual file formats. For example I can import a live after effects file into premiere and all the updates I make will apear on premiere’s timeline, without needing to render out. The same goes for bringing photoshop or illustrator files into After Effects. I guess we’d just have to rely more on third party plugins that connect these programs like Overlord
Do it do it do it do it do it do it...
Smash them with a hammer. Google should not exist as it is. Not for decades.
Break up AdSense, chrome, search, android, shatter them all into separate companies that can stop selling out literally every waking aspect of life as their sole business model.
and then prosecute them for antitrust if those companies conspire together
Would adsense even be worth it without the search? I really don’t want that popping up in even more places. My thoughts would be
Google Search + ad sense Chrome Android Waze YouTube G Suite FitBit Nest
And then there’s a ton of other misc stuff I’m unaware of
Best news I've heard all day! Break up Meta, too, while you're at it!
Amazon.
Disney, Bayer, Unilever
Walmart, Kroger, Safeway (the latter two are in the midst of merging as well)
Don't stop with them
Crush corporations, swiftly and without fanfare rebuild capitalism with worker co-ops, seize the means of production without all that stagnation and failure that usually follows.
Replace, yes?
Let's just choose our words carefully for now or the people with the money will get spooked and pay the people with the missiles to start blowing things up.
I'm already on a list.
I'm trying to make things easier for my own FBI agent, we've been through a lot together.
Will cooperatives really be able to offer good services or will they become corrupt sooner or later?
History says corrupt...
Can't predict the future but a system like this could be better than our current state of affairs where we already suffer user-hostile services and corrupt action all concentrated in a few private companies to which we have no alternatives.
If cooperatives were a more prevalent structure, there would likely be more of them since the power incentives to consolidate are lessened, but not eliminated. Because there would be more competition in the marketplace, there would be more incentives to provide good products and services. We can assume that underperforming cooperatives would generally be less successful.
Also, with more participants in the marketplace and greater decision-making by members, less power would be concentrated in the hands of the owners and managers. While that's not a guarantee against corruption, limiting power concentration lessens the impact of any individual's corrupt actions and provides opportunity for others not to have to do business with them. Compare to the current state of Google's leadership directing so much of the company's efforts not toward providing service but toward manipulating people and markets to squeeze more money out of them.
There are, however, things we likely would lose out on with a more cooperative-based economy. For one, while there would be more incentive for co-ops to produce higher quality products and services, they would probably spend less effort on the "high polish" (for lack of a better way to say it) that attracts marginal customer/user growth. In other words, things would work better but probably be less pretty.
Another potential drawback is in economies of scale. Theoretically, market-dominant and tightly integrated companies can produce more for less while every piece of the puzzle just fits together. I don't see this as a very compelling argument since the efficiency gains don't usually benefit anyone but the owners, with excess profit directed not to increased quality but to marketing and manipulation. Since cooperatives would be less able to build up their own "walled gardens," interoperability may be more incentivized and this drawback may be mitigated.
Really, though, anything has got to be better than having so many smart people working toward finding new ways to squeeze money out of us rather than doing something actually productive.
Personally, I have a pet theory that economies of scale fall start working backwards once a company reaches a certain size because so many employees become so disconnected from the actual activity that makes the company money that 1. Various management types try to do good but instead accidentally impede the money making process, 2. Various inefficies emerge just due to the sheer number of people involved and miscommunications are amplified 3. You reach a scale where lots of B2B products (especially SAAS products) start making sense, but B2B generally charges you a premium for the convenience compared to doing it in house, so the cost benefit can quickly get out of whack while lock-in and corporate intertia makes it harder and harder to change
That's a really good point. I'd add to that: instead of performing well in a narrow domain and being able to scale just on that specialty, large orgs tend to diversify in order to expand into other markets and make more money. Those different business goals can be in conflict, like we see with Google's ads vs search vs cloud vs AI.
Don't 'break it up', nationalize it, and do the same with all these other giant corporations.
Profits could support UBI instead of encouraging billionaires.
That's not in anyone's interest. It's the surest way to have a thousand national search engines which are all shitty. National walled internet Gardens etc
Break it up instead
Not sure where you're getting the idea that there would be thousands. But as for the shitty part, it's already shit. Google's search engine utterly fails at it's job, and not just because of the rise in LLM/SEO. They waste billions on fancy new AI searches that nobody wants, they accept bribes to get pages to the top of the search, and even when you're looking at an actual for real result, it often isn't even what you want.
When a critical industry fails to do its job, it is time to nationalize it. With that said, the criticality of search engines is debatable. I'm cool with breaking it up at a bare minimum. The list of corps in need of getting broken up is way to long.
The idea stems from the propaganda tool that would be if it were state owned. Other countries would seriously discourage or ban its use, but as it is useful they'd need a replacement. Hence a thousand shitty ones.
How is it not currently a propaganda tool? It's owned by shareholders like blackrock and vanguard. At least with it being nationalized it's possible to control it democratically.
Our options are:
None of these options are good, but the third is clearly the worst. The rich should not dictate what results pop up.
There is only ~200ish countries out there depending on how you count it. Most of them share search engines across borders, and that is unlikely to change, because if they were to see a nationalized search engine as a security problem, they would have already seen google as a security problem. So even if every third country made their own, there would only be a few dozen search engines.
But even assuming there would be 1000 search engines, 1000 shitty search engines is better than 1 shitty search engine with 85% market share. At least with the 1000 shitty engines there is competition. As of now, google is free to mess around with their black box engine however they like, showing and hiding what they like, all at the behest of blackrock, vanguard & company.
So I don't see how this would be to everyone's disinterest. Killing google and nationalizing it is exactly in everyone's interest. Though like I said, the criticality of search engines and therefore the need for nationalized search engines probably isn't there.
It is somewhat, but it's not as bad as if it was run by Trump and co.
Which is how x would become the whole internet.
Which is why the best option. Which you didn't include, is splitting Google up. Split the advertising from search. This is the surest way to make them cater to us. Especially if we can force them to compete with other search engines.
The U.S. isn't a functioning democracy though, which is why that's a problem. And just because a nationalized service is controlled democratically doesn't mean it is controlled by a president. There are a lot of different ways to have democracy.
And we no longer live in an era of horse and buggy, so democracy can be far more direct than it has in the past.
In addition, there is already a multitude of positions filled/appointed/approved by the president. The administrator of NASA, the administrator of the EPA, etc. There is nearly 500 federal agencies like this.
So this would not be a problem unique to a nationalized search engine. So the solution is an actual democratic control of these agencies/administrators, not a wanna be dictator.
Another thing to keep in mind, what I'm proposing is something that would only ever work in an actual functioning democracy. So therefore I am not proposing this within the U.S.
As I said, I think it is debatable if a search engine is even critical enough to warrant nationalization. I don't think the need is there. And as I (admitted retroactively edited my comment to say), I have previously stated that I'm totally cool with breaking up Google at a bare minimum. The rest of this is just about the hypothetical of nationalization.
Short of publicly funding private companies, this would just result in a subscription model, which nobody wants. It's either ads, subs, or public subsidization.
It's a half measure. The only real way to make them cater to us (aside from previously mentioned nationalization) is regulation, workplace democracy, and so on.
Even if Google got turned into a small company that only ever does search, they'll still be a business running under capitalism, with all of the profit seeking motives that got us to where we are now.
I think what we're running into here, is that you want to talk about removing capitalism. Which I'm all for, in the context of a functional democracy. Which isn't the case in the US or anywhere in the world.
Until we know what that looks like, and its parameters you won't admit how bad nationalising a search engine is without other privately owned alternatives.
I'm all for removing capitalism, but that's not really my aim in this discussion. I was more interested in the difficulty/value of nationalizing something like a search engine.
Given the popularity and successes of NASA, the USPS, NOAA, etc, I think you are being overly pessimistic.
None of those things are direct propaganda tools.
The second they start having to put maga posters into you mailbox and nobody else's you'll see it differently.
To you they aren't, but to the right wing they are.
We are already at risk of that. I don't see what your point is.
I'll need some sources on that one.
Then this conversation is pointless if you won't acknowledge the risk of it
Lol.. Democratically.
Just because the U.S. is a joke of a democracy doesn't mean democracy as a whole is a joke.
*Constitutional Republic.
A constitutional republic is not mutually exclusive with democracy.
This is like saying "it isn't a car, it's a vehicle". No shit it is a vehicle, but the type of vehicle is "car".
How would there be thousands? There aren't thousands of nations, and everyone would still use Google.
If you break it up, that's how you get thousands of shitty versions.
Maybe some countries might disable Google if it was owned by the US, but I have a feeling those countries already have their own issues with Google as it stands now.
I just think if the monopolistic corporations are too big and too essential to take down, then nationalization is a solution with many more positive traits than negative.
That hasn't been the case if you look into what happened with Microsoft and browsers.
The other thing is
Is actually wrong, and what they proved with the antitrust case itself. A huge chunk of the anticompetitive activity was Google paying to be the default because people don't change the default.
Why would we support UBISoft? They haven’t released any good games recently
Unfortunately one of the big ideas republicans have conditioned half our population into believing is that government itself is basically a flawed idea and that our government will not ever be able to do anything right. So it would be a tough sell to say the least.
And also as an American, I imagine many people around the world would not be thrilled with the prospect of the US government owning the web browser they use.
There is a kernel of truth in that sentiment though. The government has a tendency to be grossly wasteful of resources, but I feel this is offset by the fact that they aren't profit driven in their goals and less likely to skyrocket prices to line shareholder pockets. Corporation are also "wasteful" in a sense, where they charge insane markups over actual cost and refuse to pay taxes on them, the difference here is that corporations move their profits offshore and out of Americans pockets, where the government always ends up paying private contractors more than they should. In the end corporations do more with less while government controlled services are always WAAAAAY cheaper than their private counterparts for the consumer despite them being inefficient.
This is the part they don't get. Do you want zero waste and ever rising prices for the sake of some worthless rent seeking billionaire cocksucker, or do u want some inefficiency, but you pay less overall. One makes someone else rich at your expense, the other allows you an affordable life while preventing another billionaire from existing.
Not like the CIA doesn't already have full access to your browsing history already
Can’t disagree there. It’s not like Google is trustworthy or resists the govt/CIA. But I do still think the official change in ownership would hit people differently.
"Give me the fruit of some else's labor!!!!" Gross.
Right? Fucking billionaires
Welcome back from your 6 month bad take hiatus.
Ignoring the snark in your comment...
I assume you take issue with UBI?
Would you feel different if we 'required service' for UBI? For example, some countries have mandatory military service. If we nationalize these giant corporations, we could make working there a way to qualify for UBI.
Do you think UBI is just taking money from the average person and giving it to lazy people who do nothing? Or do you enjoy the separation of the rich while the rest of us struggle for scraps? Do you understand that the UBI would apply to you as well?
Or am I missing deeper thoughts given to your comment?
I don't worry much about people who have more than me. I am grateful to enjoy my work and my life. I don't want the government to steal from me and I don't want them to steal from others either. Even in the black and white world of marxists, exploitation of labor just moves from the oppressors to the government. The government becomes the oppressors. It has never worked, it will never work. People are naturally motivated by profit. It's built in. Messing with that or short-circuiting the work-reward system is unsustainable.
I don't agree with that guy but doesn't that apply to the people running these companies. Profit can only be made by exploiting labour. There can't be any other way
This is a bad take and suffers from overly-simplistic thinking. Corporations are force multipliers for labor and the economic value of your labor is increased by joining forces with others.
Why is it a bad take. How can there be any other way. Where exactly is profit created from?
Profit is created from the output of productive labor. The amount of profit varies depending on the efficiency of the market and the company.
Companies are force multipliers for labor. The company's profit comes from that force mulitplication, not by withholding profit from the worker who generated it.
Who's labor?
Who is labor?
Separate the search engine from anything that stinks of advertising so it can return to what it’s supposed to do: return the most relevant results.
Because even appending
udm=14only gets rid of promoted links and in-page advertising, it does f**k-all to correct manipulated search results.Can you elaborate on the business model of a search engine that has no ads?
The only business model that really works is charging people to use it, like Kagi is doing.
I haven't seen much to suggest Kagi's results are better than Google's. But that's as much a function of time and horsepower as anything.
I would argue that the private model is what's fundamentally wrong with modern search. Nationalize Google and make it a public utility, like any public library or publicly financed research institution. Open up the front end source code and let people apply their own filters and modifications, rather than locking everything down to force feed you sponsored content.
That's the only real way to fix search.
This would be great. Running a search engine is very expensive though.
The Internet Archive is probably the closest thing we've got to something like this. It's a non-profit but AFAIK they don't get any government funding. They've got the scrapers and could probably work on a search engine project, but I doubt they could afford it in their current state. They're spending a lot of money at the moment due to companies filing lawsuits about Internet Archive archiving their content (and a bunch of content is gone from the archive forever as a result
The federal government spends about $1.3B a year on advertising and another $37.5B on data collection, with Google being a major recipient of both budgets. Nationalization would save a small fortune.
And for the economic tailwinds that efficient Internet research provides, I'm willing to bet we'd see significant economic benefits that eclipse the base cost, not unlike with Amtrak or the USPS.
Them and Wikipedia, definitely. Both make for excellent models of non-profit free-at-point-of-use information services.
Yeah, let's see how much worse corrupt bureaucrats can make this already rotten turd of a product!
Not trusting the EPA because Exxon has done such an awful job.
I get the feeling a lot of people would complain about Google search doing that too.
Let's not make them a business. Search Engines are fundamental core services for the modern globalized and connected world. It's just like your post-office service. Make it an internationally owned and funded non-profit organization with open-source and the goal of enabling the unrestricted sharing of knowledge over the internet.
What does the creation of a multi-national state owned search engine have to do with Google? I presume nations have the resources to do that all on their own.
What would you suggest the Google search engine be allowed to do to profit as a business?
There's no suggestion. There is currently no way a search engine can be a viable modern business model and a good tool at the same time. It could potentially be a good business model and a decent tool even with ads, but only in a world where we accept that things can't grow forever.
No business in their right mind is going to just disable advertising altogether. There's no other viable way to support a search engine. Google search has been supported by advertising since day 1.
They can fix search without removing advertising. Preventing them from simply paying off others to be the default could be enough.
A decentralized search engine, running on something like what Locutus (neo-Freenet) is intended to be, can work without a business.
Okay but no non-business is going to buy Google Search...
FYI all this is doing is going to the "Web" tab of the results. You can just click it instead of modifying the URL.
I guess where it'd be useful is modifying the search URL in your browser so that searches always add
udm=14by default.And chrome from everything else too
Chrome doesn't make any money. How is it supposed to support itself as a separate company?
It doesn't have to be free. People used to pay for licensed software with money instead of their private data. We can do that again, or there's still open source options like Firefox and it's derivatives.
It does have to be free. It's open source software. If they tried to charge money for Chrome, people would just use Chromium or one of the other browsers based on it.
Chromium is open source. Chrome is not. Open source also doesn't mean that you can't charge for the compiled binaries. But that isn't my point. My point is that the reason it's free is that you're actually paying for it through the value of Google tracking and storing everything you do, but as a society have don't have to structure services this way.
Chrome and Chromium are 99.9% the same. Source: I used to be a Chrome developer at Google.
It defaults you to the Google web suite, where Google makes money on ads. And it harvests your data, which it can then sell to ad agencies as a tool to optimize targeted ad sales.
Not sure how that would work...
I'm old enough to remember the breakup of Ma Bell and the way that worked was the creation of a bunch of regional telecom services, that's not going to work on the Internet.
I guess they could mandate spinning off Android, but that's not really the problem addressed in the antitrust case, is it?
Maybe split the AdWords side from the Search Engine side?
I'd guess it would be a vertical breakup rather than horizontal: separate android, cloud, youtube, search, chrome, ads...depending on how aggressive they want to be.
But if they've only been found to monopolize search, how does that remedy the search monopoly? Presumably the new separate Google Search company would still have a search monopoly.
without search and their abuse of that monopoly, google wouldn't have dominant positions or massive market shares that many of their other properties (products, services, software, etc) have.
Because that search monopoly allows them to boost their other products above all others. It’s not an impartial search result anymore. There is a financial incentive to favor their own products.
I'm speculating, but perhaps the thought would be that separating Google Search from the rest of the company would deprive them of the alternative revenue streams they used to maintain their market position? If I remember the ruling against them correctly, one of the key pieces of evidence cited by the judge was that Google spent like 30 billion dollars a year to have 3rd parties use their engine by default.
But the ads on search are the big revenue driver for Google overall. Presumably those stay with the Google Search subunit, and they would have plenty of cash to do whatever?
Yes, I believe the figure they cited was that Google earns 73% of their revenue through ads. I imagine what they would have to do is bust up the ad services in addition to the various departments of Google. Each new entity formed gets to keep revenue from ads shown on their platform maybe? E.g. YouTube gets spun off into its own thing separate from Google proper. They get to keep ad revenue from what is shown on their platform, but they don't get to touch any revenue from sponsored search listings, or from banner ads on other websites, etc.
That's an approach that makes surface level sense to me, but I am neither a lawyer nor a business bro nor a tech bro. So, I don't actually have the faintest idea if my idea bears any resemblance to reality.
Google search has some features that alternative search engines don’t. I use DuckDuckGo for 99% of everything, but I occasionally use Google to see local busy hours, or sometimes any hours, reviews, phone numbers without navigating a shitty website, etc.
I think there are ways to break up Google search on its own, and make some of those features separate and accessible on other search engines.
Then there’s the matter of advertising, data collection, SEO, exclusivity with corporations like Reddit, etc.
Google is doing things with its search that seem to intentionally reduce the ability of other search engines to compete with them, and that’s really all that the antitrust laws are meant to prevent.
I think you go about it the other way: break data analytics and advertising off from everything else. If every unit has to be self-sufficient without reliance on data collection and first-party advertising I think you fix most of the major issues.
They removed something that I used to use: using "-word" to exclude a keyword. Apparently it is because advertisers don't want you doing that, so they turned it into a weighting. So there are features and antifeatures too. I've seen ddg do that too before, but right now it works :)
I think each of these needs to be handled in separate ways. For example, search could continue to be a conglomeration that includes maps, mail and possibly cloud. Android can just be split very easily into a separate company and same for Youtube, since that would basically be another Netflix or whatever.
Ads, in my opinion, is the most important one though. That absolutely has to be shattered into thousands of tiny pieces, all of which need to be forced to compete with each other, for the benefit of all internet companies anywhere. It would be a massive boon to companies everywhere and would provide an opportunity for lots of innovation in the advertising space, ie. trying ads that are less intrusive or ones that are cheaper because they don't rely on tracking information.
And another thing I think people need to understand about search is that building the search engine is not the hard part - the hard part is figuring out how to pay for it. Search is really expensive - crawling websites, indexing, fighting spam abuse. That's what really makes Google successful - the fact that they coupled it with advertising so that they could cover all the expenses that come with managing a search engine. That's much more important than the quality of the results, in my opinion.
And as for Chrome: well, personally I think that monopoly has been the most damaging to the internet as a whole. I would love to see it managed as part of a non-profit consortium. There should not be any profit motive whatsoever in building a web browser. If you want a profit motive, build a website - the browser should just be the tool to get to your profit model, not the profit model itself. And therefore it should be developed by multiple interest groups, not just one advertising company.
Anyway, I know this is all an impossible fantasy. Nothing in the world is done because it's right or wrong, it's done because it serves whoever holds the most power. But if there were a just world, this is what I think it would look like.
There's no reason Gmail should be included in search of it's broken up. Otherwise agree though.
If you seperate Youtube from Google, I cannot see youtube surviving. It's probably a loss leader for them.
I really don't understand why people have that believe. They've heard over a decade ago that Youtube wasn't making a profit (which was mostly because they reinvested everything to grow and become the monopoly they are now), but by how much money it's raking in every quarter and with how monumental Google's infrastucture is, I find it extremely hard to believe Youtube isn't a big money machine by now. They're really squeezing everything out of it not because they have to, but because they have a monopoly as a user generated video platform that has more to offer than just shorts.
I think it's a combination of the old news, how expensive hosting video is compared to anything else, and how Twitch is basically a boat - a hole in the water that you throw money into.
People lose the connection that burning money like it's going out of fashion is only step one in the game. Step two is capitalizing on the market share that you acquired in step one. And, as every social media company has shown, ad revenue and data harvesting are very profitable. Otherwise, every tech giant wouldn't have pivoted to that years ago.
Pretty sure youtube is revenue generating on its own now. Youtube doesn't work as a loss leader because it's so different from all other products.
So YouTube shall fail.
I think the problem with Google is that none of their side projects actually make any money. I don't have a solution here
I'm drooling at the thought.
Not breaking up Google because the effects would be inconvenient would literally be letting a monopoly regin because they're a monopoly.
Shut down services if needed. We can adapt.
Never forget that the baby bells slowly reassembled themselves. They’re not a single company but they’re down to 3 or 4 now
Which is exactly where it should be... having regional phone companies sucked. Having 1 phone company sucked. Having 3-4 is the least sucky, but we have real competition.
Before tearing apart Google and Amazon, I'df much prefer we have 3-4 choices for internet providers (unless we can turn them into utilities, then we should do that).
Fuck that. Any Canadian will tell you, you don't want an oligarchy
Making YouTube its own thing again wouldn’t be that hard.
Neither you nor almost anyone who upvoted you or replied to you read the article, huh
FTA:
"DOJ attorneys could ask Judge Amit Mehta to order Google to sell portions of its business"
That's the author of the article speculating, they don't know what it would actually look like any more than you or I do.
Bonus, as I noted, it doesn't address the primary issue of a search monopoly. Even if they sell off those business unit, the search monopoly remains.
There was more discussion of potential remedies in the article than that.
I so want this to happen, but at the same time I'm scared that Samsung or whoever will buy AOSP and enshittify it completely
Isn't it already licensed under permissive Apache v2? Anyone can fork and carry on the project without the permission of Google, every manufacturer already does as a result of the license.
The OS is but the Google Play backend isn't. Google has a monopoly over Android by keeping a monopoly on the appstore which dictates that you must allow google spyware to run on your OEM fork to be able to qualify as a "Secure Device".
Several Chinese OEMs have China only variants that don't use GPlay and also ship with some some other cool apps, but they can't sell it globally because Google says "screw you" since no one publishes apps outside Gplay, and because several major apps refuse to run on Googless android which GrapheneOS has threatened to sue
This is still just the tip of the iceberg though. Google already got sued for GPlay monoply last year and reached a $700 settlement just for developers.
On top of that, several of Android's underlying features are considered archaic and dated. They always have huge kernel patching issues because no OEM (especially Qualcomm) releases the source code for proprietary binaries, meaning no one easily upgrade kernels (practically impossible for FOSS android, expensive for OEMs). The android runtime is imo a piece of crap compared to some low power optimized linux distros. ADB is still needed to delete system apps. Settings lies about permissions, which themselves are poorly sorted. Oh and Google hired the dev behind Android rooting (magisk) so they could kill magisk hide which circumvents system app abilities to tell if you are rooted and therefore not worthy of running proprietary apps.
There's so much more the deeper you go, it's just really hard for any contender to step up because of the sheer might Google has over the market. They have so much power that they coerced Samsung into dropping RCS support which makes Google Messages the only app on android that supports RCS, even though RCS is an open OEM standard from 2008
A dog that barks doesn't bite.
"Considering" means they want to get something from Google in exchange for not breaking it up.
"you kids break it up or I'm gonna do it for ya"
My mom would punish me regardless of which side I were in the event, because I "should have been smarter".
That's off topic, what I meant is there's no mechanism in Google which would make it voluntarily stop being a monopoly/oligopoly in good faith. It's not a person making that decision even, it's the whole organization. Every single person making decisions there may be good and willing for peace on Earth and goodwill toward men, but that's not how the mechanism as a whole will work.
Google might not, but it's shareholders want to minimise losses. A voluntary breakup will be better for them.
Will this work out for consumers if other tech giants like Apple, Microsoft, or Amazon, etc. aren't also broken up simultaneously? Won't Google's assets just get sucked up into another existing monopoly and we'll be right back where we were but with one less choice than before?
I'm genuinely curious.
It won't. It simply benefits Apple and Amazon who should have been broken up a decade ago
Amazon literally has had a mostly worldwide monopoly
Don't forget that the right wing has a hard-on for Google. People like them are Apple's target market (I guarantee their families were the first to get iPads) and don't forget their really warped questions during the congressional hearings which demonstrated that they had done absolutely no research and had a huge inherent bias. Stupid questions like "if I walk 3m to the right, can you guys see that". Or, why does president Trump come up as the first hit on Google for loser
I support this, but only if it happens to all 3 companies simultaneously . Otherwise, we're just transferring more power to Apple (who honestly have followed some Trump style tactics over the last 25 years)
I get the idea behind a duopoly, but from an economics and game theory point of view, but, if applied unequally, another monopoly will simply take advantage.
Capitalism finds a way.
Now break up Coca-Cola, those tax dodging fucks.
coca-cola, apple, windows, amazon...
Let's include the airlines in that too. Fuck em!
Fully support the action, don't know how the timing works...
Best case, you only start to basically outline what this looks like before the election. Worst case, you enliven the complacent, left-centrist billionaires to vigorously join in with the perpetually batshit right wing billionaires to get trump in to "live to fight another day" with the reasoning of, "we need to save ourselves first, then we'll deal with trump when he goes full fascist" and then they either won't be able to or won't care to because they won't want to upset their share price.
Yea, I'm afraid of that, tbh, if more corpos go full elon.
PS: actually, they should be the ones afraid of the organized citizenry anyway, but we're too fragmented ideologically, spatially, communicationally, see if voting can make up for it.
Well, something, but that action is only temporary because those companies that were the result of the division are reunited to form or are acquired by other large companies.
Obviously they will no longer be what they were in the original company. But something is something.
Will the old method of breaking up a company work enough on modern tech companies? Will the 2nd best map software ever catch up in market share?
If you switched most people from google into DDG without telling, most would hardly notice, I venture. Mapping is different.
Just apple maps and bing under the hood though.
What we really need is some non-super monopoly competition like osm
Yea! OSM is the Wikipedia of maps.
Perhaps, though I am dubious (when it comes to things like searching for business open hours or street view).
However it's not like choosing which restaurant to go to. They just type their search in the Google browser textbox and use the same search engine they've always used, the default. They'd need to encounter a failed search and think to try another.
If they forced them to split Waze off and make it independent again it probably could, it's probably the only non default app I see people use regularly
Oh, did they actually keep Waze? I assumed they bought it to kill it.
Still using it, so still going right now.
Shockingly they kept Waze around. It sounds like they believe the Waze brand is too strong to be worth killing off in favor of maps, but they have been implementing new features into each and cross pollinating between the two
I think they might be using it as a beta testing ground for their back end features, the brand is also pretty valuable in and of itself. The traffic avoidance is much more aggressive than Google maps
Just spinning off Android would shake up map software. It's how they get traffic and other data.
Many apps for Android rely on Google Play Services which I don't know exactly what it's doing but collecting data is a good bet.
Do we end up with worse maps then?
In the short term? Possibly.
In the long term, it opens up space for competition, which is better for end users, advertisers, small business, and more.
By my understanding google play services is basically just shared libraries and APIs for doing stuff and not as tied into Google specifically as its name might suggest
Wikipedia suggests it gives access to certain information which all look like data Google would want to track. I don't think I'm crazy to assume Google is doing something fucky while it gets values when requested on by an app, or whenever the heck they want.
Disable it and it will bitch notifications every often, every day, and that can't be disabled. It claims it need to be on for your phone to work but not so in my case when I only use apps from F-Droid (like a dialer, text message, calculator, Lemmy client).
I think Apple could catch up.
PBMs/healthcare conglomerating needs to be looked at as a top priority
And this Kroger Albertsons thing needs to be stopped for good
So they're breaking up Google but giving Intel more free money after it cut 15k jobs?
Google also cut 12000 jobs in Jan 2023, but it does not have an AMD or Nvidia to kick its ass in search when it fucks up.
Intel is a near monopoly and it controls the physical hardware that runs the entire universe with the exception of mobile devices and embedded.
If you're going to break anyone up that's who I would go for first but because of the pipe dream of making computer chips in 'Murica these idiot politicians keep propping up Intel's Wall Street investors while its employees get fucked over.
At the very least the x86 duopoly has to end. It's not only legal but kept the way it is because of legal contracts. The courts need to declare them void because their enforcement leads to the violation of antitrust laws.
IFS is struggling to compete against TSMC, Datacenter is bleeding and loosing Customers to AMD, Ampere. Microsoft, NVIDIA and Google are also working on ARM server CPUs. Client Computing Group is loosing marketshare to Apple and AMD, with Qualcomm also recently entering the ring. They had to kill Optane, sell their NAND business, they're not really relevant in GPU, have to IPO Altera again to get some cash and Mobileye already had to be IPOd again.
Clearly the CPU market didn't need intervention to get competitive again, Intel didn't have the power to prevent others from competing in the market and as soon as they got complacent others got ready.
Relying on TSMC as the exclusive manufacturer for bleeding edge semiconductors would be insane. We need Intel and Samsung to remain competitive.
AMD, Intel and Centaur/VIA have x86 licensees. ARM exists, RISC-V is gaining traction - No need to implement all the legacy baggage of x86 when you can start with something a little bit more current.
Kagi is kicking their ass.
really? Is it growing that fast? I expected it would remain more niche than Linux, particularly if you need a subscription.
Oh I just mean in terms of product quality. It’s gonna take forever to even teach people they can change search engines.
Almost as hard as picking a lemmy server :D
Who?
How is this related?
It would probably do Google a world of good, depending on what gets split or spun off. A lot of Google products have unrealized potential that’s hamstrung by poor leadership and privacy issues. Maybe at least some of their products will be able to thrive on their own.
The people here who 1) think a breakup of Google will actually happen, and 2) think that a paid subscription model for a search engine have all been spending too much time in their Linux bubble.
If Google did this, everyone would just switch to Bing, or open AI's new thing they are making. The general public will not be on board with that.
A tiny bandaid on the capitalism that's literally destroying the planet.
What about Microsoft and Facebook?
How do the people who make this comment every single time something like this happens, expect change when no one's allowed to be first?
Microsoft already lost an anti-trust suit in 2001. It's in the article if you care to read it.
We already had first Microsoft anti-trust suit, but what about second Microsoft anti-trust suit?
No one reads the articles man. I won't lie, I'm guilty of it, but it's mainly cuz Im lazy and go to the comments hoping someone will give a synopsis.
Thanks
"They said smugly without an ounce of depth in their argument."
I don't hold my breath until they really do it.
keep the administration blue and watch the dominoes fall over the next 5 years.
Lina Khan and Letitia James are going after scalps.
Going to need a much better source than this.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/13/technology/google-monopoly-antitrust-justice-department.html
Thanks.
...
TIL, the ruling might actually carry some consequences. I guess we'll see where this takes us.
May I recommended watching "The YouTube Effect" if you don't see the problem with big tech companies.
I'm guessing it can be found on YouTube?
lol, no :) I tried
the place is there, but it looks blocked to me, maybe it's a region thing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2Lle0vMBoM
if that don work, there are places to stream from e.g. https://pw1.unblockit.download/movie/1467291-the-youtube-effect
Its on YouTube in the US, but you have to buy or rent it to watch there.
Okay now do Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia, Blackrock, etc etc
Good luck, I'm all for it, but good luck
Cool. Take their search stuff, open source all the software, spin out an account service and 6 baby search engine companies.
Do the same with each of their massive properties.
This.... Isn't how large scale technologies work. Not even close, not even "same planet" close. That's also not how antitrust breakups work, why open source private technologies? How do you think that's supposed to work? How does that precedent work?
You could open source all ~15,000+ repos from my company, and be entirely incapable of actually operating the grand majority of it. And we're, maybe, 1/10,000th the size of Google on the tech side.
You also can't just "split" a single technology apart, that's gloriously, ignorantly, simplistic. You're talking potentially years of dedicated work by hundreds, thousands, of individuals to achieve something like that. How do you expect that to operate?
It's going to be a nightmare to just rip seemingly unrelated, but interdependent, verticals of Google apart. Your request here is wholely unrealistic.
Woah woah woah hold on.
These are judges and lawyers, not software engineers.
Personally it sounds like the lawyers and whatnot can do the whole splitting up the business. It will simultaneously create a HUGE demand in software engineers as all this stuff just sort of stops working.
I think it's a brilliant way to handle this.
Plus the effect it would have on software engineer salaries in general. Not that I have any potential conflict of interest in stating this opinion, not at all.
That’s what I like to hear!
Great, now do the rest of them.
Alphabet soup
Do it.
"Kagi Search" looks cool. The examples of searches look far superior to even that of google.
But it's $5 per month. (No ads) Or $8 for couples. Even so I think I will try it. The search results look really good.
Has anyone here used Kagi Search?
I've been using it for the last few months, and while it doesn't offer as many "nice to have" features as Google (like automatically finding mask results need in where you are), the core functionality works great, and the lack of ads is refreshing.
The price seems reasonable IMO. Search engines are expensive to run, and I'm not sure they'd even be breaking even at the moment.
They have a "small web" search that searches through small sites like blogs, which I really like. Sometimes there's small sites that have great info but aren't ranked very high in Google due to all the SEO spam and Google's preference for major sites.
I wanted to like Kagi, but their Brave fiasco turned me off of them for good
Brendan Eich should be blacklisted in the tech world. It's really too bad that they partnered with a bigot and his shitty company.
When I was younger, I thought Brendan Eich was a god for creating JavaScript and his contributions to web development. Then he started to speak about his personal views, and he instantly went from a god to an evil villain to me.
How can somebody so smart be so dumb and evil at the same time?
Brendan Eich worked really hard to turn himself into just another tech bro incel but Brave is a really good browser and the engineers deserve to not have their accomplishments overshadowed by a weird adult obsessed with other people's genitals.
They created a novel and interesting approach to ads with their BAT token and Brave is probably the most private browser you can get if you're stuck with Chromium browsers.
As often as I've tried to switch to Firefox I always end up encountering issues and going back to Brave. I wish he'd step down so Brave can shine without his bullshit whining hanging over them.
That's fair and I can agree. I don't use Brave, but for everything I've heard about it, it sounds pretty competent. The team behind Brave doesn't deserve to suffer, and the hatred should be to Eich, himself, not Brave as a whole.
I tried kagi for a month and the results were probably as good or slightly better than Google for 90% of searches but it completely falls apart any time you want something local or hyper-specific. It made me realize that the personalization that people hate with Google's results actually saves a ton of time because I had to retry a lot of kagi searches with additional context.
Blocking ads and trackers in your browser and then using Google without an account will get you most of the way to what kagi is doing.
I've been paying for it for a few months now, I like it. You do have to be a more deliberate in search results, especially if you're looking for location specific info, but that's how old Google was too anyway. The summerize site and fastGPT features can be pretty useful too.
Just a silly example, I was playing skyrim and wanted a duplicate item so I could display it, put in "skyrim console command to spawn item" and it spit out the console command perfectly
I use it now, and like it. Do you have any questions about it?
Big tech needs far stricter regulations but I don't think people would like the internet very much if Google was forced to sell off services like YouTube. Nobody else is offering unlimited free hosting, discoverability, promotion, and bandwidth for video content and nobody ever will again. If the chromium project was sold off to some other shitty tech company, do you really think they'd keep the open source 'ungoogled' version readily available for everyone? A Google breakup would just mean that other tech companies like Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, etc get more powerful.
If there's an appetite for breakups why not start with the companies that control our food and news
It's not 2010, video streaming isn't unprofitable anymore and Youtube doesn't have a monopoly on it. Chromium is open source, and as far as I'm concerned, Google has been actively making it worse with their efforts to fill it with ads.
More breakups do sound good, though.
How does this affect or concern me?
did somebody specifically ask you to look at this and comment? just wondering why are you asking such a weird question
Didn't know there were stipulations to me commenting here. My, my. What an extremely hospitable user you are to this new, welcoming website. User since last year.
well howdy and welcome, stranger! i was just wondering why anyone would leave such a comment. i didn't intend too imply that you couldn't comment, of course.
I'm hazarding a guess that since you immediately went and looked up statistics about my user account and included them in your reply, you've come here with a lot of habits from... the other place.
i don’t run this place or anything, and this is just my observation, so don’t take it as gospel. i would say that the tone here is generally a bit friendlier, so (imho) there is no need to assume hostility on the part of other commenters. i was just curious!
This could affect you in several ways:
Overall, these changes could alter how you interact with the internet, your privacy, and the services you rely on daily.
No one really knows yet.