Do it! Then, do every single major conglomerate they've allowed to form over the last 30 years
this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2024
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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.
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Keep going I’m almost there
😂
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
Can I vote for YOU for president?
Buying out companies takes longer than a year usually.
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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?
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.
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.
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Best news I've heard all day! Break up Meta, too, while you're at it!
What about Microsoft and Facebook?
Microsoft already lost an anti-trust suit in 2001. It's in the article if you care to read it.
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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.
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!
Alphabet soup
So they're breaking up Google but giving Intel more free money after it cut 15k jobs?
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