US Considers a Rare Antitrust Move: Breaking Up Google
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-08-13/doj-considers-seeking-google-goog-breakup-after-major-antitrust-winOpen linkView original on lemmy.sdf.org620
Comments97https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-08-13/doj-considers-seeking-google-goog-breakup-after-major-antitrust-winOpen linkView original on lemmy.sdf.org
Yes please. Google has become a monster.
This is yet another reason we need President Harris.
Trump will let Google get away with it.
I'm not sure about that... He doesn't like Google. The precedent would be a problem for his sponsors, though.
What we really need is President Biden. This is all happening thanks to him. There's some hope that Harris would continue his policies if elected, but there are strong rumours that some donors are supporting her with the agreement that if she wins she gets rid of Lina Khan.
This is not going to be over by November. That's why we need Harris.
No on both counts. Don't give him credit for other people's work.
He might have been the final one to sign off on them, but cabinet appointments are decided by committee and I guarantee you that the former Senator of the most corporation-friendly state of them all wasn't the one who suggested Lina Khan OR Lauren McFerran at the NLRB.
Again, it's not HIS policies. Stop giving the old man with 900 years of conservative policies the credit for the stellar work of young women many times as progressive and in touch with the realities of regular people as him.
It's not like she's doing these things behind his back.
The progressive wing of the party might have pushed him into accepting her appointment, but he still appointed her and she's kicking ass.
Nope, but she IS doing it without his help, so he's not due any of the credit.
Yes, SHE is kicking ass based on HER work and HER policy and enforcement choices, not his.
Absent pressure from the progressive wing og the party, he would have chosen someone older and more palatable to his owner donors.
He does NOT deserve credit for her work just because he relented to the pressure from people more pro worker than himself.
He's her boss and he appointed her, he does deserve credit for selecting her and sticking with her.
And he's her boss, so he deserves credit for hiring her and backing her.
Other people selected her in spite of him and he relented and he's refrained from firing someone without cause.
Neither of those are achievements and just because he's the boss doesn't mean that he gets to take credit for HER work.
Nope, see above.
Do you have any source on him actively backing her, beyond just not firing her without cause?
Yes, she's his subordinate
You can make up all the arguments you want.
Biden was a moderate democrat in congress.
As president, he’s been far more progressive than Obama. Probably the most progressive on workers rights since FDR.
Cabinet choices matter, and he chose them.
Atleast read up about his presidency before making stuff up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidency_of_Joe_Biden?wprov=sfti1
I considered blocking you the other day when you were defending the Venezeulan dictator. Given you just told me to fuck off, I think I will now.
Good. Microsoft next.
They already tried, in the late 90's, and a district court ordered a break-up. It was appealed endlessly, and the DOJ reached a disastrous settlement that gave them immunity from anti-trust prosecution in perpetuity. The current Supreme Court would probably use this as a precedent to protect other software monopolies, if it comes down to it.
Don't hold your breath on any of these cases.
The Clinton/Bush DOJ setting precedents for letting corporations get away with financial murder. A match made in hell.
My bet is going to Amazon, sadly that will make Jeffrey even richer.
It would be wonderful
Please.
Stop.
I can only get so erect! (And the headline alone already did a lot)
I am curious how either unit would earn revenue as an independent company.
Will Android get to keep the Play Store? Does that include media? Do they charge Google to distribute the Maps app?
Will Google pay Chrome to stay the default search engine? Maybe Chrome can charge schools and libraries for ChromeOS updates?
The split up should happen, but don't wear the pink glasses. Transitional period will be ripe with scams of all kind.
I disagree. I agree they will make the user experience more locked down, but nobody will buy a phone which is only compatible with 6.73% of apps from whichever, as you correctly say, which means there's no profit motive to lock down app compatibility.
Do you use Android? AI was the last thing on their minds for AOSP until OpenAI got popular. They've been refining the UIs, improving security/permissions, catching up on features, bringing WearOS and Android TV up to par, and making a Google Assistant incompetent. Don't take my word for it; you'll rarely see any AI features before OpenAI's popularity: v15, v14, v13, and v12. As an example of the benefits: Google and Samsung collaborating on WearOS allowed more custom apps and integrations for nearly all users. Still, there was a major drop in battery life and compatibility with non-Android devices compared to Tizen.
There are plenty of other things to complain about with their Android development. Will they continue to change or kill things like they do all their other products? Did WearOS need to require Android OSes and exclude iOS? Do Advertising APIs belong in the base OS? Should vendors be allowed to lock down their devices as much as they do? Should so many features be limited to Pixel devices? Can we get Google Assistant to say "Sorry, something went wrong. When you're ready: give it another try" less often instead of encouraging stupidity? (It's probably not going to work if you try again).
Google does a lot of wrong, even in Android. AI on Android isn't one of them yet. Most other commercially developed operating systems are proprietary, rather than open to users and OEMs. The collaboration leaves much to be desired, but Android is unfortunately one of the best examples of large-scale development of more open and libre/free systems. A better solution than trying to break Android up, is taking/forking Android and making it better than Google seems capable of.
What if Jetbrains bought Android?
Break them up. and then don't let them slowly re-consolidate in the following 20 years.
ISPs/Telecom too!
I wish I could get ripped off by someone other than Comcast.
“Too big to fail” banks are much more important to split up.
I too remember how AT&T was broken up only for most of its Baby Bells to remerge back into Ma Bell.
To prevent this for future breakups, I say the content and services sold by big tech should be made competitively compatible and interoperable via nullification of DRM laws; people buy music and movies and cloud storage; let them legally move their purchases to any competitor and big tech companies will break up naturally as local competitors emerge from people who dislike big tech for their own reasons. Monopolies cannot be trusted to lower prices for content and services. Legally nullifying DRM is like the FCC telling customers in 1968 that it was finally okay to ignore the “Bell equipment only” legal warning that had kept them locked into leasing their telephone sets for usurious amounts from AT&T for decades. A few years later, in 1982, AT&T was broken up. AT&T is almost a total monopoly again, but phones remain interoperable.
This was a great comment. You argue this so effectively that it will influence how I argue about monopolies in future — I don't think it's reasonable to expect people who critique aspects of the world to know how to fix them, but it certainly does help if one has specific points for how things should be different.
If this goes through, every big tech company could be in the crosshairs.
I'm all for it.
I like how at the same time apple decided to fuck Patreon users (not even the first victims), and no one can or is willing to do anything, except maybe for eu in some cases. I say if we go for monopolies, let's go for all of them!
“Too big to fail” finance companies should have been sliced and diced.
Kroger next 👏👏
Next up:
I'm all for capitalism, but not the current near limitless capitalism
That's just capitalism. Capital is power and if you allow people to be more powerful than others, they will use that power to amass more power. There never was and never will be limitless capitalism because we live in a finite world but there will be limitless suffering for the sake of profit.
Idk, I think the original guy has a point. Small and medium businesses generally work really well in western economies, it’s the megacorps and monopolies that fuck all the shit up. When he says limitless capitalism he probably means unregulated late stage capitalism and if that’s the interpretation then basically like, break up all companies with over 1000 employees or whatever. Mom and pop businesses are a great feature of our economic model, but they can’t thrive while walmarts are around.
Exactly that. Hier taxes the more you earn up to 100%. Limit company sizes in net worth and employee count. Its better to have 100 medium sized companies with 100 employees than 10 large companies with 1000 or (shiver) 1 mega company with 10.000 employees.
Basically all megacorps and monopolies started as small and medium businesses. And I'm not against small and medium businesses but that whoever has money owns said businesses. Capitalism is the idea that the workers don't own the business they work at but someone who's never worked there does. Capitalism is the driving force that makes small and medium businesses into megacorps.
That is a way too simplistic take.
I mean capitalism is good as long as you have strong laws against monopolies, oligopolies, higher taxes the richer you get up to 100% at a certain income point. Don't allow ownership of 100 houses for anyone (or any company), limit the maximum size of companies in value and employees, that sort of thing...
Yeah, then it can just export all of the problems to other countries and abuse the hell out of those with no power to fight back.
Oh yeah, and communism famously was never abusive to other countries. The USSR never never ever abused anyone inside and outside, same as China, they would neeeeever!
This is some peak capitalist realism. Never once did I say that communism was the solution, I provided no solutions at all actually, and I simply pointed out the flaws in capitalism but you know so little about economic systems to go to communism.
Can't do any more mental gymnastics to defend capitalism so you go to fear of another system not even discussed. You and I are not immune to propaganda and if you believe in democracy then why would your workplace not be democratic? The manufacturers never would have voted to move their jobs to China during the late 20th century. The capitalists did it. Walmart was a small family business and now it's the largest employer in the US and half of it is owned by people born into a specific family like a monarchy.
I get that you support Keynesian economics but this was before globalism and you can't rely on a government to fight capitalism in places it doesn't govern.
They just raised prices for you for saying that.
Imagine living in a post Google internet.
I remember when Gmail was new and invite only.
Somehow, I doubt it'll be the same
My first foray on the internet was AltaVista, at a friends' pc with dialup connection. Still gives me a nostalgic feeling to think about that moment when the realization of all the opportunities kicked in.
Yeah I member.
The power vacuum would be insane, realistically speaking, Meta, Xitter, Amazon and Microsoft would race to fill it. It could be a good thing to split Google but it could also go sideways very quickly.
Those then as well shall be broken up :)
One can dream about that indeed!
All of those need some antitrust attention, too.
The best part of the trust busting hammer is it's re-useable.
I'll believe it when I see it but it was nice to have a court case actually convicting them.
Edit:
That would be so nice, there was already a huge thread about how much Google screws over Android too.
Break em up! Break em up!
Would be the most based thing the FTC ever did.
The interesting thing about a possible Google break-up is that there's only one part of the company that generates revenues.
YouTube, Google Search, Google Maps, Gmail, Android, Chrome, Google Drive, etc. are all money losers. Many of them don't even offer an option to pay for the service. And, those that do generate tiny revenues compared to the ads machine.
Android is a huge money loser, but it's worth it because all the things Android's required to have end up showing people Google ads. If Android were split off, what would happen? Would Samsung etc. have to pay a fee to license the OS? Since it's an open source project, isn't it more likely they'd fork the code and just roll their own distribution? Maybe Samsung just buys Android? If so, what happens to Huawei, Lenovo, Xiaomi, etc? Maybe all the Chinese firms band together and support a fork of Android?
With Chrome, Google can afford to spend hundreds of millions a year developing it and then give it away for free because it not only sends people to Google Search, but it also collects all kinds of data on people's browsing habits that can be used to tailor the ads they're shown. If it's spun off then what, do they think that for the first time ever people are going to be willing go spend $79.99 and actually buy a browser? Or a $19.99 monthly browser subscription? Almost certainly not. Which means people would use a free browser. On non-Apple OSes every browser other than Firefox uses the Blink codebase, which is basically Chrome, and developed by engineers working for Google. If Chrome is split off into its own company, what will happen to Blink? The existing codebase is open, but what's the business model for coders at the new Chrome Inc. to keep working on it? So... does Microsoft now start paying Chrome Inc. to keep working on Blink? Or do they bring the browser back in-house again and we see the return of Internet Explorer? As for Firefox, it spends hundreds of millions per year on developing software, mostly Firefox. But, 90% of that money comes from Google, and that's almost certain to stop. So, they'll need to find a new business model too.
This is so different from previous break-ups. When AT&T was broken up, all that really happened was that instead of paying AT&T for their phone service, people now started paying NYNEX or Bell Atlantic or US West. But, now you're dealing with a company where virtually every service they offer is free, subsidized by the ads they show, which can only exist when that service harvests personal data to feed the ad machine.
My personal suspicion is that this is such new territory that the Justice Department is probably not going to try to break Google up. They're probably going to forbid things like paying off Apple and Firefox. They may force Google to license key search engine data. They may put restrictions on the ad machine. Breaking it up would be like knocking over a domino without knowing what the chain reaction would be. Also, I personally hope that if they take the win and choose a simple remedy, it will allow them to set a precedent and move on to all the other monopolies.
Only if you view them in isolation. In fact, they are what enables Google's advertising dominance, by providing detailed insight into people's lives, thereby powering the targeted advertising of AdWords and making it as valuable as it is.
Have you forgotten about the Play Store?
We used web browsers just fine before Chrome existed, before even Google existed, and nobody was paying $79.99 for them. (In fact, Chrome was originally built upon one of the free engines.)
I would personally be glad to see Chrome disappear, since it is now starting to cause the same problems that Internet Explorer caused more than 20 years ago. Monoculture is bad in this realm. Yes, Google does seem to pour a lot of resources into their browser, but most of that is self-interest; very little of the results are actually needed for a useful, healthy web.
The same fear could have applied to the Bell System. I'm not worried. :)
Consumers spent about $47b in revenue on the Play Store, of that Google keeps about 30% so that's $14b. Google's total revenue is $306 billion, so the Play Store generates only 5% of Google's total revenue.
https://www.businessofapps.com/data/google-play-statistics/
We don't know how much Android costs Google. They have to develop the OS and maintain it, they have to develop all the android apps. They have to run the servers that handle the traffic from the apps, and so-on.
Between 1999 when Netscape was acquired by AOL and when Chrome was launched in 2008, Internet Explorer absolutely dominated browser user share.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars
No, but Netscape had planned to start charging for their browser, until Microsoft drove them out of business by bundling IE for free with Windows, illegally leveraging their monopoly to drive the company out of business. Microsoft was willing to give away IE for free because they thought it was strategically important to control the Internet, and were willing to take a huge loss on the browser business to do that. They used the money from Office / Windows to subsidize their free browser, which was illegal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp.
The article you linked actually says, "Consumers spent $47 billion on Google Play apps and games in 2023." Google's 30% of that every year can easily fund something like Android. And that doesn't even count the advertising revenue from free apps on the Play Store, nor the additional reach into people's lives that it provides, which translates to even more income from their highly targeted advertising platform.
And yet you insist that Android is a huge money loser.
And?
Sigh... I don't know what point you're trying to make with all these tangential comments. If it's to support your notion of a hypothetical "domino effect" making a Google breakup dangerous, I don't think you've succeeded.
The Play Store makes a bit of money, but it's peanuts compared to the ads revenue that the rest of Google generates.
People have forked Android, but those forks have approximately 0% of the userbase.
We do know, it's ads.
Oh, please. Stop being hyperbolic.
But if you break apart Google, how will they afford to keep killing off their own services!?!
Google NEEDS to be broken up badly. They are essentially a monopoly in the online space, from chrome to search to maps to youtube.
Every service is abusing the power of the others to grow their market share and kill competition.
I used to love Google. They pushed the web and tech in the right direction.
But somewhere along the way they've been taken over by marketing cunts that only looked at the bottom line and didn't care how evil or anti consumer they became.
Too good to be true! There's a lot of monopolies. Please do Amazon too.
Way too rare, if you ask me.
Good, but why now? For years, Google has been way more dominant both practically and culturally until very recently, and only now after they stumbled hard with their AI venture, Bing catching up, and their public opinion dropping do they decide to break the company up.
Does this mean that a monopoly is good as long as it's successful, but once it starts stumbling and outlives its use that's when the government is gonna do something about it?
More people dislike Google now than before.
I love that the Judge's last name is Mehta
I'll believe it if I ever live to see it.
I'm worried about YouTube, but the rest of it can go. I don't think anyone has the storage space for YouTube except Google. I wouldn't be surprised if YouTube's data was in the exabyte range.
I love YouTube. But if YouTube died I would t be too upset. Something else would come along and take it's place.
It's not the platform I care about it's the backlog of existing videos that could never be replaced. Many would get archived but definitely not all.
Yeah, the only thing that's ACTUALLY good about YouTube anymore is the creators who can only be found there.
If YouTube was closed down, creators would quickly migrate to another platform, one that would probably be much better for end users in every way.
That's not the part I'm concerned about; I'm concerned about the fact that there are almost 2 decades of videos on YouTube. Like, I don't know how many videos are on YouTube, but it's gotta be in the billions at this point. Where is that all gonna go? Who's gonna archive it? You think YouTube will spend the money to archive it all if they're going bankrupt?
It's less the storage than the bandwidth. Both are huge though
Break em up!
Do they need to split off different departments? Since most of the stuff that Google dabbles in is digital, can't they just start a few new companies with the exact same IP and split up the work force instead?
"Sharing" the IP wouldn't really work. The point is to have multiple companies that are either not overlapping, or are competing with each other. If they're all working on the same IP but with different work forces, then you either have single products that diverge as multiple teams independently develop them (No longer the same product) or you just have a single large company with extra steps.
That's what I mean if you split chrome out of alphabet you've still got chrome at 90ish market share
If you split it up then you're forcing them to adapt and change
I'm not sure I'm making sense
It would start at 90%, but drop for reasons the other reply said
Also: no longer would it be advertised as a browser to everyone who visits the Google search page. No longer will a conglomerate of what should be like 20 different companies in 14 different sectors be able to easily manipulate every website into optimizing for their products, so the average user will feel far less inclined to stay with them if there's an alternative that works better for them
But if you split Chrome and the browser team, from the Search Engine team, and from the Advertising team, then all of a sudden they're not all just one stacked product anymore, and so while Chrome may currently have the lions share of the market, it's now competing on the same footing as Firefox and the rest.
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Good bot. Fuck the haters.
Do you even know who Bloomberg is?
Yep. I guess if some bias exists, the MBFC should completely discredit the source entirely.
That’s not what I’m saying. The whole point is that they are just supposed to identify the kind of bias. Bloomberg is decidedly not left of center by any definition. He literally got physically laughed out of the Democratic Party last time he tried to weasel his way in with unprecedented spending.
As many have pointed out, they have a publicly available method for determining bias. The method is not "look at who owns it and make a snap judgement"
Yup and that same public methodology calls the Associated Press and Reuters lefty. They clearly just want to propagandize by shifting the Overton Window to the right with a thin veneer of “science” and a side of “y wont u debate me bro”.
Or... shocking idea, the united states is far more conservative than most people on lemmy want it to be.