Good decision. Then do the same thing to AWS and Amazon's media branch, and then go undo the whatsapp acquisition. Then stop platforms from subsidizing competing products while they charge competitors high fees like Spotify vs Apple Music.
The increasing trend of large tech conglomerates to use one money printing product like AWS or search or the Apple Store to tactically snipe competitors to destroy or acquire them is absolutely abysmal in the long run. I don't care if it increases consumer prices by 10 cents or whatever, it's time to look at the long term health of the ecosystem overall. It's really the private analog to a state capitalist country subsidizing its own firms while foreigners have to compete on a one-by-one basis. Everyone considers that to be detrimental when it happens between two nations, I don't see why it's not detrimental when it happens in the tech industry.
>Good decision. Then do the same thing to AWS and Amazon's media branch, and then go undo the whatsapp acquisition
Exactly. My concern is that Google is being uniquely targeted, and that breaking them up and calling it a day just exposes us to further abuses from the rest of the tech industry. At least with Google, evil is divided across five tech giants that can serve as checks against one another, instead of merely four.
Similarly, I feel that the tech industry as a whole, while far from not evil, has emerged with a set of interests distinct from those of other monopolies, and helped protect the internet from being subordinated to the interests of telecoms. Which isn't to say that I enjoy monopolies, far from it. I just want to see similar willpower to break up the giants of other industries.
For that matter, if we really have to go the route of the uniquely targeting a specific tech company, I would at least start with Amazon and then Facebook. Or if we thought more broadly than just tech, I would start with the oil industry giants, finance industry giants, and then telecoms, and then health insurance companies, and then Amazon and Facebook.
Those other industries you mention have each been subjected to relatively large amounts of regulation over their history, some have been targeted for antitrust in the past. By comparison the "tech" industry has been subjected to very little regulation in the US, almost none. We have seen these "concerns" from other commenters in the past -- "it is not fair to keep picking on X" or "everybody else is doing it" -- but it just comes across as being from people working within or dependent on the industry. Why would anyone else be sympathetic to these concerns?
>At least with Google, evil is divided across five tech giants that can serve as checks against one another, instead of merely four.
I find it interesting that we're reasoning in terms of balance of power, pre-eminence, and hegemony, to address issues related to a few companies. Cardinal de Richelieu sure would have found his footing.
No wonder some Google had a "Head of International Relations" whose job is to deal with diplomats, the U.N and the like[^1]. I believe Condoleezza Rice is also on the board of Dropbox.
>"The increasing trend of large tech conglomerates to use one money printing product like AWS or search or the Apple Store to tactically snipe competitors to destroy or acquire them is absolutely abysmal in the long run."
That's literally how every company ever in any industry since the dawn of commerce has operated. You use profits to grow and diversify. You can't perform capital expenditure without capital...
my answer to that is, yes that is how every other industry operates, which is why every other industry is painfully slow. Tech was the rare exception of having the advantage of starting from a blank slate a few decades ago, and it was insanely innovative. There's no excuse to let it calcify into the state of every other industry, and I'd take your point and go further, go to every other industry and do the same.
Go to telecommunications and break the big players up and create marketplaces in which small players can innovate. Do it in news media and undo that awful communications act from 96 that led to industry concentration.
We need to take an activist attitude to anti-trust that actively seeks to create rabidly competitive markets which is what fuelled early tech's growth, instead of letting tech slide into the status quo.
And of course all of these companies will still have access to capital. They'll just need to convince investors that their product is better.
Ok, so you have some spare capital from being successful in one market. You want to move into a new market, and that spare capital is your ticket in. There's a difference between building a sustainable, independent business with that capital, and strangling competitors in the new market by moving in and charging well below your cost until those competitors are dead.
The former benefits consumers by giving them more choice. The latter gives consumers lower prices in the short term, but then hurts them overall when the competitors are forced out and prices inevitably rise again, this time without any competitive pressure to keep costs low, margins reasonable, and product/service quality high.
And regardless of whether or not the latter is common, or has always been common, I maintain that it is a huge negative aspect of capitalism that destroys wealth, creates inefficiency, and hurts consumers. Regulation that targets that practice would be welcome.
> That's literally how every company ever in any industry since the dawn of commerce has operated.
Not even close to true, you're describing how "financial capitalism" works which is relatively modern (in the US, it begin in the early 1900s after the creation of the Federal Reserve). Until you financialize an economy, businesses can't use that kind of strategy to compete. Once you do, only those with access to finance can win.
Read up on industrial capitalism which relies on the quality of products and services—not access to finance, aka money printing—to compete in the marketplace. That's how the US was built originally, and what most Americans mean when they say they support "capitalism."
Yeah, but these are primates and no primate is evolved enough to handle consolidation without turning into a total fuck-off tyrant. You know at one point the British Empire controlled over a quarter of the entire world? They had a real opportunity to usher in a new era of peace and cooperation. Did they do it? NOOOOO!!! NO ONE EVER DOES!
It's incredibly anti-competitive behaviour and it's baffling that governments are allowing it to go unchecked. Even the WhatsApp purchase was greenlit with caveats (not combining FB and WhatsApp user data) ... which were promptly ignored by Facebook. I seriously want to know who they paid off to get that acquisition. There's no way that was above board.
All those sound great in theory if the US was an isolated nation.
However all these companies compete on a global stage. You better believe that Huawei, tencent, Alibaba are going to take advantage of weakened US companies.
I think the EU provides a pretty good example of what could happen. They seem much more aggressive with anti-trust and as a result they aren't very competitive on the global tech stage.
There are a handful a tech companies from Europe that operate globally, but they're usually niche (Spotify, Minecraft, Qwant).
Economic competition is generally a good thing. Breaking up monopolies fosters competition within a country, and competition promotes progress. Historically, companies in free societies have generally performed much better than govt granted/allowed monopolies in more centralized countries.
Sure you can get some economies of scale as a monopoly, but it comes with a lot of corruption, incompetence, and anti-competitive behavior.
People used to make this exact argument in the 80s when it came to Japan, and even when it came to the Soviet Union[1]. There were countless of people who had already written off competitive markets in favour of supporting domestic industry.
In the car industry people actually listened and enacted domestic protection, what did that get the US? Two lost decades of shoddy cars. Have Japanese conglomerates overtaken the world? Nope.
I think it's an absolute smokescreen and such a blatant attempt by Facebook to use nationalism to protect their status. In the long run we're better served by trusting in innovation than trying to protect domestic business. It was always the right bet. And if China continues to prop up giants they'll just stagnate. The reason they caught up in the first place is because, for at least a short time, they allowed free-wheeling fierce competition.
Why is Facebook included in that? If Facebook disappeared tomorrow, dopamine addicts would switch to a different drug and your 3rd cousin would have to put more effort into bothering you.
> The increasing trend of large tech conglomerates to use one money printing product like AWS or search or the Apple Store to tactically snipe competitors to destroy or acquire them is absolutely abysmal in the long run.
You're confusing competitive behavior with anti-competitive. When a company throws money at consumers in order to get their business, that's competitive.
Using a monopoly in one area (and how could it not be effectively a monopoly if it prints money) to gain marketshare in another is textbook anti-competitive practice though, isn't it? I recognize that I'm using the European legal definition, but that doesn't make it incorrect, just inapplicable in American courts.
In my mind, the cause of this sort of conglomeration is that our society is an exponential meritocracy rather than a linear one. In that the more merit (money, power, points, karma etc.) you accumulate, your ability to accumulate even more merit rises, resulting in a stratification of society that starts out slow but rapidly accelerates after a while.
Best expressed as: "To turn 100 dollars into 110 is work. To turn 100 million into 110 million is inevitable." -- Edgar Bronfman, Sr.
The increasing trend of large tech conglomerates to use one money printing product like AWS or search or the Apple Store to tactically snipe competitors to destroy or acquire them is absolutely abysmal in the long run
It doesn't matter what you think..The only thing that matters is whether they have the legal authority and can show the consumers are harmed.
Amazon selling their in-house brand based on their private sales data could meet that threshold. Amazon making money on AWS, OTOH, will probably not meet that threshold.
I agree, and let's not stop there! What business did Apple have getting into the music player business or the cell phone business? They already have a profitable computer business! General Electric makes appliances, lightbulbs, jet engines, nuclear plants, and a dozen other things, split them up!
We can divide up the world into little boxes and carefully decide who is allowed to participate in each box. Hell, we can go back to giving people occupational surnames - if your name is Smith or Barber or Carpenter, your box is already picked out for you. GET BACK IN.
Not sure what this snark gets you, other than obscure what you're trying to communicate.
<It's a slippery slope to do something once?>
<Apples to oranges comparison about Apple, Inc which never had close to a monopoly>
<Something about the justification for breaking up a company that's also apples to oranges>
<Whataboutism>
<Something about central planning that isn't clear and doesn't apply to monopoly power>
When the biggest complaint that people have about these companies is that their services are too good and too amazing, and that customers love them too much, that no one else can possibly provide as amazing of a service as them... Well I think that says something.
Apple's services businesses should be next. Anybody should be able to start an app store on any platform, and services like Apple TV+ shouldn't be bundled with hardware.
How much should Apple charge Spotify to build it's business on top of the infrastructure that Apple designed, developed and deployed so that Spotify didn't have to?
I took a course taught by a former Microsoft exec who worked at the company before and after the DOJ's anti-trust settlement. He said the settlement profoundly changed the internal culture of competitiveness and innovation. Lawyers were embedded on many product teams, review cycles became slower, and execs became complacent. I think the only way Amazon or Google ever start to stagnate is if a similar fate befalls them.
Fun fact, MSFT and AAPL currently have the exact same market cap. The story of Microsoft dying a slow death having missed the boat on internet, cloud and mobile is like 10+ years out of date. If anything, I'd say the antitrust trial was actually beneficial in the long run. It is a much nimbler company now than it used to be.
Yeah, Azure is huge. There are a lot of companies that see themselves as direct competitors to Amazon and refuse to allow any of their applications to use AWS. Walmart is a huge one with this -- if you want to sell IT services to Walmart, your product cannot run on AWS. They're not the only one either.
Azure also kind of just plays better with the whole Active Directory / Office 365 / Sharepoint ecosystem and many Azure products are substantially cheaper than AWS.
In my impression of Google products (Gmail is a notable example), the company has been more on the "stagnation" side and less on the "innovation" side already.
If anyone from Google is reading: Please disregard this comment. We like our Gmail exactly how it is. If you want to substantially "innovate" on email, please consider a new, independent product -- one that you can safely shutter after 12 months. Thanks.
I worked at Intel for a brief 3 month summer internship in finance (2010). One thing that struck me was that I was not allowed to put certain words in presentations because they didn't want those words used against them in court. Its been a long time so I don't remember what words, but that was a long time after the first set of anti-trust actions.
Maybe someone that has been there more recently can attest or counter my point, but it seemed to at least leave a surface wound on the culture.
There has been official training at multiple, large tech companies other than Intel specifically geared towards preventing even accidental use of language that can be taken out-of-context. The practice is alive and well.
Perhaps because the natural organizational tendency was to conspire to create user lock-in and other nefarious practices? 95% of software companies (I am guessing here) don't need to consult their lawyers during software development.
> review cycles became slower
"Q: But why can't I force the users to also install Internet Explorer?
A: You just can't Johnny, you'll have to rewrite this component."
That’s not exactly an unbiased opinion if he was an executive at the company that was subject to anti-trust action.
I’m not suggesting that he’s lying, but it’s important to remember that the anti-trust action likely had a financial impact on him, particularly if he had a lot of comp tied up in company stock.
Here we are 20 something years later and Microsoft looks to be just doing just fine to me.
His complaint wasn't that Microsoft (or himself) didn't make money, it's that Microsoft became complacent and lost the will to innovate.
Microsoft made plenty of money between 1998 and 2014. They also basically ceased innovating. I was a child and teenager during Microsoft's glory days from 1985-2000. They were basically unstoppable: if you thought you had a good software-related idea, Microsoft was already doing it, doing it better, and bringing some nasty market-power tricks to bear (much like Google in their glory days from ~2000-2015). I started my career soon after the DoJ consent decree, and Microsoft became a joke. They were the 800 lb. gorilla that sat in the corner milking their Windows/IE/Office monopolies (and eventually losing them) while the web became a bigger platform than Windows ever was.
I think you and the executive may agree. It did have an impact, because the moribund culture at Microsoft hurt the stock for about a dozen years after the anti-trust. All the growth has been recent, and has required a massive strategic and organizational refocusing of Microsoft away from Windows to cloud, where Microsoft does not have to worry about anti-trust.
That is not to say it is not worth sending Google through a similar period of moribundity until they find new leadership and markets to pursue.
Plus a lot more diversified. Not sure if it's all a good thing as the huge companies are making land grabs everywhere. Github, Skype, Linkedin Xbox, Nokia phones unit, VSCode, basically all my favorite medium-sized game companies (inxile, double fine, obsidian). Feels like their presence is a lot more oppressive than the Windows 95 and IE days we were all freaked out about.
The industry as a whole has grown enormously. Microsoft is as big as it was, but relatively speaking it's not even remotely as strong. Microsoft used to have the power of FAANG together, it was so ahead of everyone else in terms of (pricing) power. Nobody was a threat to them before the antitrust suit.
That only came about because a lot of the old guard, like Sinofsky, Myerson, Turner, etc., left the company or were pushed out in the early '10s. I don't foresee a similar revitalization of leadership happening at Google anytime soon.
Antitrusts haven't been good in 10-20 year timeline but on more longer term may be overall good for society. In short term it stifles and extinguishes the innovation contrary to belief. Classic case is Ma Bell which ended Bell Labs. Big giants like these make huge amount of money but they also fund things like Bell Labs (in Google's case DeepMind/Google Brain/Google X etc). Once this collapse, usually it takes decade or two before these massive innovation pipelines gets built up again.
As they should be at a large corporation that was known for abusing its market power. It's not like engineers are experts in whether a feature breaks the law or not -- nor are they supposed to be.
> review cycles became slower
Oh come on, legal approval is just one more checkbox along with 20 others. And if it's slowing down reviews for a few important features or products, that's the point -- that legal considerations actually get considered rather than ignored or steamrolled over. The same way there are approvals for privacy, security, accessibility, and so on that are "slower" -- again, that's the point.
> execs became complacent
I don't believe this for a second. Execs at every company want to meet/beat metrics, get promoted, and make more salary. Nobody's complacent ever. The idea that execs become "complacent" because of a single highly targeted regulation is baloney. It's a total fiction invented for political lobbying purposes. Remember: removing monopoly abuse means a company has to work harder to to compete, instead of resting complacently on lazy market dominance. If anything, these execs were forced to be less complacent. But it's a nice lie they're trying to tell.
> It's not like engineers are experts in whether a feature breaks the law or not, nor should they be.
"Full stack engineer" gets ever more all-encompassing.
> If anything, these execs were forced to be less complacent.
An alternative explanation would be that the hypercompetitive win-at-all-costs types left for less regulated pastures, leaving the more complacent ones.
> I think the only way Amazon or Google ever start to stagnate is if a similar fate befalls them.
Google has been stagnating for more than one decade. What have they created since 2010 that is even remotely interesting, let alone in the interest of society?
And Amazon is Rube Goldberg machine of human suffering. Who cares?
Please don't post denunciatory rhetoric to HN. It's tedious. Worse, it acidifies the thread. Those two things are a double dose of poison for curiosity, which is the entire point of this site.
You can make your substantive points thoughtfully without damaging this place in the process. Please do it that way instead.
I think one thing that makes them stagnate is the sheer magnitude of their advertising business. Google is not interested in expanding to other things unless it is either furthering the amount of data they are collecting for advertising, or it has some massive run rate. That is why they are infamous for canning projects that are actually working, they just are not working big enough for google to care past its many billions advertising.
Oh yes Photos Tensorflow Spanner ...not even remotely interesting. Waymo. I'll wait for you to cherry pick another time frame. 99% of people here would work at Google in a heart beat but love to write snarky comments here. Many admittedly jealous of the fact that they couldn't get in. Have fun peddling the hate.
I don't understand how a google breakup would work. Would it just split off the ad business from ad-supported businesses like gmail and youtube?
Some google products could stand on their own (Google Cloud) but most would have a lot of trouble. The worst case is open-source offerings like Android and Chrome which only make sense as part of a wider corporate strategy.
> Some google products could stand on their own (Google Cloud) but most would have a lot of trouble.
Maybe I'm busting out my tinfoil hat, but I think that's the point. YouTube and other businesses wouldn't be able to survive without Google's ad money.
In my experience traditional media companies are the ones most heavily pushing for Google's breakup. Is this due to genuine fear of monopoly, or due to the desire to eliminate a competitor encroaching on their revenue sources?
I'm still confused at what exactly they're trying to accomplish.
So youtube and google drive basically die, some of the most useful free services available right now. I think this does more bad than good and I don't think any American citizen would support this given the effects.
I think it's time for tech to flex it's political muscle a bit. We're talking about humongous corporations with billions of dollars in cash silently giving to both Republican and Democratic super PACs since forever and the only political drama we had is Msft vs Amzn for the defence cloud contract. Media companies are puny by comparison.
The tech stance so far has been don't bother us and we'll continue to innovate, grow earnings and help users do cool things and investors make some money in the market. That has worked tremendously well for both the companies and their customers. I don't think changing that is in the users' interests at all.
I don't trust big media to provide accurate reporting here because they don't have the best of the relationships with G / FB.
Let's have privacy laws or platform regulation laws regarding censorship / free speech. Breaking big tech up is pointless.
Why couldn't Youtube just keep selling ads to the Google ad network? Existing websites make money off of advertising revenue that they get from Google, how would this be different?
It would be really cool for people to be able to make money in those markets. It's really lame right now to face competing with free offerings. We're in a post chat client scarcity world.
Nobody has made serious money by selling browser because nobody is willing to pay for browsers. Without Chrome the web would just stagnate.
Nobody is willing to pay for mobile operating systems either. Maybe hardware manufacturers would pay to move Android forward as an open-source project but most likely outcome is a stagnant fragmented mess.
Google Ads will run on Google's infrastructure and pay a lot enough to subsidize all the other products. Basically, there will be some financial impacts but I don't expect any kinds of significant impacts on their business, which proves this attack to be pointless.
Android would probably be spin-offable via the same strategy that technically makes Mozilla independent: pay for search engine placement. And then pay for all the services it connects to like Maps, Gmail, etc.
It'd def be messy to untangle backends though. One imagines that the play store relies heavily on CDNs by Google, as one random small example from the haystack of papercuts.
Both Android and Chrome could be wildly successful independent companies. Android could charge a license fee to OEMs in addition to the app store business and Chrome could sell search default rights like Firefox does.
The answer to this question will be endlessly fascinating.
To start somewhere, everything that was an acquisition 'should' stand on its own, because it began as a complete company. Of course things aren't that simple.
>To start somewhere, everything that was an acquisition 'should' stand on its own, because it began as a complete company. Of course things aren't that simple.
In many/most cases, "complete" companies that are losing money hand over fist or--in the better cases--have a business model but not great long-term prospects.
I will say both of the eCommerce businesses I worked at were 100% in thrall to google's decisions. Unless you are a brand the size of amazon that can get attention directly, everyone just does a google search. Which mean's if google decides to do something that impacts your ranking or ads you might just be completely out of business with in a matter of days, or slowly bleed out. They might even decide to compete with you or partner with one of your competitors. It's like if the owner of the streets could make a deal with walmart to build more lanes there and always have construction in front of your building. Or even not have a turn off. It controls online commerce basically.
That makes no sense. Search is more like a map or address book or perhaps a pamphlet station. What they choose to prioritize/display is inherently editorial. Why should that powe be given to the government?
I definitely do not trust the government to give better results than google.
In fact, I would expect them to actively censor and promote their interests. Also, would other people just not be allowed to make search engines? Wouldn't google v2 just take over again?
That’s close to my theory as well, Googlebot is almost universally allowed, building the index happened at the right time to become to big to block. Trying to deep crawl to Google’s level may be impossible now, and maybe one way to encourage innovation in search/discovery is to force the raw crawl results for others to parse & rank.
In a very idealistic case, I would even go further and say it should be under the umbrella of the UN to accommodate other cultures, and be politics-agnostic.
I do believe that we are at the time when decent internet access should be pushed by the UN (or any other entity, hopefully in a non-commercial non-political way like food, shelter, and education.
I feel like Google would have been better off if they had stayed out of the newspaper aggregation business and stuck with Search and long tail media content, GCP, GSuite and did R&D in AI (Waymo, Verily) and AR/VR. There is just too much baggage when wading into politics.
I think there are too many well connected, well funded media companies that are lobbying and retaliating behind the scenes as they see their news publishing business models get disrupted by the Google News aggregator. Couple that with politicians frustrated by the Google News opaque aggregation algorithm and that leads to anti-trust rulings.
My general sense is that fewer power brokers in DC would complain if they had stuck with the bottom part and complemented that with GCP.
Its one thing to serve ads on the bottom (i.e. ads for pentalope screw drivers against articles about pentalope screw drivers). Its another thing to encroach on establish media outlets turf, AMP up their content and sell ads to Auto, CPG and Airline companies based on that content.
It is fairly amazing that this action would come against a player with a minority and shrinking share of a market where prices are rapidly falling. Antitrust actions under US doctrine are supposed to benefit consumers, but how can this action do anything other than increase profits for Facebook and Amazon?
> Antitrust actions under US doctrine are supposed to benefit consumers
Note that the viewpoint that antitrust is SOLELY about benefit to consumers, and not also about restricting corporate power, is relatively new in US antitrust jurisprudence (around the 80s I think), and there are currently many scholars reassessing this viewpoint.
Chicago School antitrust doctrine has been the direction of US jurisprudence throughout the existence of the online advertising industry and predates all of the market participants. Even if we throw it out, what's _any_ ethical, moral, or legal reason to break up Google's business? Surely it can't be that the government has an interest in boosting Verizon's market share.
It’s a very complicated issue but I thought one of the justifications behind that doctrine was that consumer benefits/prices was a very objective way to measure corporate power (because with lots of power they would be able to raise prices freely to hurt consumers and benefit themselves)
This is pointing to the crux of the issue. Anti-trust action against software companies is a sticky issue especially when the market exists entirely because of their innovation in the first place. I have no love for Google but I also don't see how customers' perception of the ad market won't change over time.
Commodity monopolies on the other hand seem to have much more obvious detrimental effects longterm.
What does Google have a shrinking share of? This article is specifically referencing ad tech, of which DFP has near 100% market share, while AdX is greatly outperforming it's rival (Facebook audience network pulled support for mobile web in April while Amazon's much-ballyhooed A9 platform turned into a big Whataburger).
"Facebook, Google Digital Ad Market Share Drops as Amazon Climbs" - June 2019 [1]
"Amazon is eating into Google's most important business: Search advertising" - October 2019 [2]
There are dozens and dozens of articles about this. The market as a whole is growing, and Google's market share is large, but shrinking as a percentage of the pie.
More like lean toward a future where Bing (giving MSFT a monopoly on search, OS, Office Suites, browsers and whatnot), or worse, giving Chinese companies the lead in the rest of the world, and maybe even the US (if the US doesn't regulate them out). I don't see how a lot of Google products survive without the ad revenue.
1. Android -> Difficult to compete against a well financed Chinese competitor here for whatever new subpart of Google takes over android.
2. Chrome -> Again, either MSFT or a chinese fork.
3. Gmail -> Outlook, or maybe some chinese/russian mail service
4. Google Cloud -> This might be gone fully. I don't see them having any advantages if they can't piggyback on the world class google Infra.
Even if the US regulates out Huwaei and Alibaba, almost all of Asia and Africa will surely be dominated by big Chinese tech, rather than small US tech if the US big tech get broken up. Not to mention they might dominate Europe too.
Remember that AT&T was split up successfully, despite people insisting it was impossible due to there only being one set of phone lines. They just forced the split up parts to follow rules for sharing the infrastructure. It took a lot of work, but it happened.
Gmail or google cloud's dependencies on the rest of Google are comparibly much easier to solve.
> smaller US/EU firms will take place of larger firms.
Why do you think smaller EU/US firms are more likely to take their place than Big Chinese firms. The Big Chinese firms will have economies of scale and more capital.
> This will result in decreasing inequality and help the general society as well.
I don't know how is that going to decrease inequality. Even if big tech is replaced by 5 small tech, there is no way on earth it will decrease inequality. Do you have any basis for such an extraordinary claim?
> There is a good reason why anti-trust laws exist people. Billionaires are already a policy failure, we don’t need trillionaires in future as well.
Sure. In the totally globalised world, you can decide you don't want big companies. This will just ensure a Chinese company dominates the market.
Yes, breaking up a tech giant like Google will potentially have short-term negative (or maybe even positive) implications for their products. But doing this will open the door for more competition, and in the long run will lead to new innovations and technologies, and a stronger economy.
Chinese tech giants might take market share from Google, but other American companies will pop up with new and better technology that will ultimately come out on top, like it always does. The Chinese tech giants of today are giants largely because of government funding and government-sponsored corporate espionage/stolen tech, not because they're leading the world in producing new technologies.
As for Microsoft? If a behemoth like Google gets broken up for anti-competitive practices, regulators will likely not want to stop there.
More competition is always a good thing, even if it sounds scary.
I am really worried about Chinese cyberwarfare while we keep shooting ourselves in the foot. Just look at how easy it is to spy on millions of americans with things like TikTok and Huawei. Google could be a lot worse at the size it currently is. I view Google as almost a kind of university that tries to enhance technology by "poaching" good people and in some sense, allowing them to work on whatever they want while guaranteeing them a very good wage. Aside from the standard Chrome, Android-tier projects, let's think about all the stuff that they've done that has been pretty radically useful. I'm not talking about products, they do a terrible job with maintenance and shutting down products is very infuriating to any user. But it is almost like research projects. So let's just focus on technical contributions to the software engineering field.
Golang, gRPC, Protobuf, Kubernetes, Tensorflow, WebRTC, QUIC protocol, very interesting innovations in camera technology such as NightSight, Google Maps which has changed my life completely. Furthermore, millions of contributions to open source projects and protocols, so many security improvements by the Security & Cryptography teams that I have on occasion worked with.
Personally I wouldn't work for Google because I don't enjoy the kind of atmosphere where there's no real "mission". But doing this much innovation is impossible unless you are funded by the government, or have a money printing business.
Readit News
The increasing trend of large tech conglomerates to use one money printing product like AWS or search or the Apple Store to tactically snipe competitors to destroy or acquire them is absolutely abysmal in the long run. I don't care if it increases consumer prices by 10 cents or whatever, it's time to look at the long term health of the ecosystem overall. It's really the private analog to a state capitalist country subsidizing its own firms while foreigners have to compete on a one-by-one basis. Everyone considers that to be detrimental when it happens between two nations, I don't see why it's not detrimental when it happens in the tech industry.
Exactly. My concern is that Google is being uniquely targeted, and that breaking them up and calling it a day just exposes us to further abuses from the rest of the tech industry. At least with Google, evil is divided across five tech giants that can serve as checks against one another, instead of merely four.
Similarly, I feel that the tech industry as a whole, while far from not evil, has emerged with a set of interests distinct from those of other monopolies, and helped protect the internet from being subordinated to the interests of telecoms. Which isn't to say that I enjoy monopolies, far from it. I just want to see similar willpower to break up the giants of other industries.
For that matter, if we really have to go the route of the uniquely targeting a specific tech company, I would at least start with Amazon and then Facebook. Or if we thought more broadly than just tech, I would start with the oil industry giants, finance industry giants, and then telecoms, and then health insurance companies, and then Amazon and Facebook.
I find it interesting that we're reasoning in terms of balance of power, pre-eminence, and hegemony, to address issues related to a few companies. Cardinal de Richelieu sure would have found his footing.
No wonder some Google had a "Head of International Relations" whose job is to deal with diplomats, the U.N and the like[^1]. I believe Condoleezza Rice is also on the board of Dropbox.
[^1]: https://medium.com/@rossformaine/i-was-googles-head-of-inter...
That's literally how every company ever in any industry since the dawn of commerce has operated. You use profits to grow and diversify. You can't perform capital expenditure without capital...
[0] https://www.aei.org/technology-and-innovation/who-should-ant...
Go to telecommunications and break the big players up and create marketplaces in which small players can innovate. Do it in news media and undo that awful communications act from 96 that led to industry concentration.
We need to take an activist attitude to anti-trust that actively seeks to create rabidly competitive markets which is what fuelled early tech's growth, instead of letting tech slide into the status quo.
And of course all of these companies will still have access to capital. They'll just need to convince investors that their product is better.
The former benefits consumers by giving them more choice. The latter gives consumers lower prices in the short term, but then hurts them overall when the competitors are forced out and prices inevitably rise again, this time without any competitive pressure to keep costs low, margins reasonable, and product/service quality high.
And regardless of whether or not the latter is common, or has always been common, I maintain that it is a huge negative aspect of capitalism that destroys wealth, creates inefficiency, and hurts consumers. Regulation that targets that practice would be welcome.
Not even close to true, you're describing how "financial capitalism" works which is relatively modern (in the US, it begin in the early 1900s after the creation of the Federal Reserve). Until you financialize an economy, businesses can't use that kind of strategy to compete. Once you do, only those with access to finance can win.
Read up on industrial capitalism which relies on the quality of products and services—not access to finance, aka money printing—to compete in the marketplace. That's how the US was built originally, and what most Americans mean when they say they support "capitalism."
However all these companies compete on a global stage. You better believe that Huawei, tencent, Alibaba are going to take advantage of weakened US companies.
There are a handful a tech companies from Europe that operate globally, but they're usually niche (Spotify, Minecraft, Qwant).
Sure you can get some economies of scale as a monopoly, but it comes with a lot of corruption, incompetence, and anti-competitive behavior.
In the car industry people actually listened and enacted domestic protection, what did that get the US? Two lost decades of shoddy cars. Have Japanese conglomerates overtaken the world? Nope.
I think it's an absolute smokescreen and such a blatant attempt by Facebook to use nationalism to protect their status. In the long run we're better served by trusting in innovation than trying to protect domestic business. It was always the right bet. And if China continues to prop up giants they'll just stagnate. The reason they caught up in the first place is because, for at least a short time, they allowed free-wheeling fierce competition.
[1]https://www.econlib.org/archives/2009/12/why_were_americ.htm...
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You're confusing competitive behavior with anti-competitive. When a company throws money at consumers in order to get their business, that's competitive.
Best expressed as: "To turn 100 dollars into 110 is work. To turn 100 million into 110 million is inevitable." -- Edgar Bronfman, Sr.
It doesn't matter what you think..The only thing that matters is whether they have the legal authority and can show the consumers are harmed.
Amazon selling their in-house brand based on their private sales data could meet that threshold. Amazon making money on AWS, OTOH, will probably not meet that threshold.
We can divide up the world into little boxes and carefully decide who is allowed to participate in each box. Hell, we can go back to giving people occupational surnames - if your name is Smith or Barber or Carpenter, your box is already picked out for you. GET BACK IN.
<It's a slippery slope to do something once?> <Apples to oranges comparison about Apple, Inc which never had close to a monopoly> <Something about the justification for breaking up a company that's also apples to oranges> <Whataboutism>
<Something about central planning that isn't clear and doesn't apply to monopoly power>
When the biggest complaint that people have about these companies is that their services are too good and too amazing, and that customers love them too much, that no one else can possibly provide as amazing of a service as them... Well I think that says something.
Azure also kind of just plays better with the whole Active Directory / Office 365 / Sharepoint ecosystem and many Azure products are substantially cheaper than AWS.
Maybe someone that has been there more recently can attest or counter my point, but it seemed to at least leave a surface wound on the culture.
Perhaps because the natural organizational tendency was to conspire to create user lock-in and other nefarious practices? 95% of software companies (I am guessing here) don't need to consult their lawyers during software development.
> review cycles became slower
"Q: But why can't I force the users to also install Internet Explorer?
A: You just can't Johnny, you'll have to rewrite this component."
> and execs became complacent
... after being really sharp and on-it before.
Bottom line: Cry me a river.
I’m not suggesting that he’s lying, but it’s important to remember that the anti-trust action likely had a financial impact on him, particularly if he had a lot of comp tied up in company stock.
Here we are 20 something years later and Microsoft looks to be just doing just fine to me.
Microsoft made plenty of money between 1998 and 2014. They also basically ceased innovating. I was a child and teenager during Microsoft's glory days from 1985-2000. They were basically unstoppable: if you thought you had a good software-related idea, Microsoft was already doing it, doing it better, and bringing some nasty market-power tricks to bear (much like Google in their glory days from ~2000-2015). I started my career soon after the DoJ consent decree, and Microsoft became a joke. They were the 800 lb. gorilla that sat in the corner milking their Windows/IE/Office monopolies (and eventually losing them) while the web became a bigger platform than Windows ever was.
That is not to say it is not worth sending Google through a similar period of moribundity until they find new leadership and markets to pursue.
As they should be at a large corporation that was known for abusing its market power. It's not like engineers are experts in whether a feature breaks the law or not -- nor are they supposed to be.
> review cycles became slower
Oh come on, legal approval is just one more checkbox along with 20 others. And if it's slowing down reviews for a few important features or products, that's the point -- that legal considerations actually get considered rather than ignored or steamrolled over. The same way there are approvals for privacy, security, accessibility, and so on that are "slower" -- again, that's the point.
> execs became complacent
I don't believe this for a second. Execs at every company want to meet/beat metrics, get promoted, and make more salary. Nobody's complacent ever. The idea that execs become "complacent" because of a single highly targeted regulation is baloney. It's a total fiction invented for political lobbying purposes. Remember: removing monopoly abuse means a company has to work harder to to compete, instead of resting complacently on lazy market dominance. If anything, these execs were forced to be less complacent. But it's a nice lie they're trying to tell.
"Full stack engineer" gets ever more all-encompassing.
> If anything, these execs were forced to be less complacent.
An alternative explanation would be that the hypercompetitive win-at-all-costs types left for less regulated pastures, leaving the more complacent ones.
Google has been stagnating for more than one decade. What have they created since 2010 that is even remotely interesting, let alone in the interest of society?
And Amazon is Rube Goldberg machine of human suffering. Who cares?
You can make your substantive points thoughtfully without damaging this place in the process. Please do it that way instead.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Translate has gotten a hell of a lot better and it's been helpful for humanity, for one thing.
- Google Assistant is advanced magic. Much better than Apple's Siri or Amazon's Alexa, IMO.
- Google Photos is great.
- TensorFlow is close to its industry's standard.
- Chromebooks and Chrome OS are a hit.
- The Pixel line of phones is great, especially their industry leading camera innovations.
Some google products could stand on their own (Google Cloud) but most would have a lot of trouble. The worst case is open-source offerings like Android and Chrome which only make sense as part of a wider corporate strategy.
Maybe I'm busting out my tinfoil hat, but I think that's the point. YouTube and other businesses wouldn't be able to survive without Google's ad money.
In my experience traditional media companies are the ones most heavily pushing for Google's breakup. Is this due to genuine fear of monopoly, or due to the desire to eliminate a competitor encroaching on their revenue sources?
So youtube and google drive basically die, some of the most useful free services available right now. I think this does more bad than good and I don't think any American citizen would support this given the effects.
The tech stance so far has been don't bother us and we'll continue to innovate, grow earnings and help users do cool things and investors make some money in the market. That has worked tremendously well for both the companies and their customers. I don't think changing that is in the users' interests at all.
I don't trust big media to provide accurate reporting here because they don't have the best of the relationships with G / FB.
Let's have privacy laws or platform regulation laws regarding censorship / free speech. Breaking big tech up is pointless.
Nobody is willing to pay for mobile operating systems either. Maybe hardware manufacturers would pay to move Android forward as an open-source project but most likely outcome is a stagnant fragmented mess.
It'd def be messy to untangle backends though. One imagines that the play store relies heavily on CDNs by Google, as one random small example from the haystack of papercuts.
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Yes. They can still sell ads, just not inhouse.
To start somewhere, everything that was an acquisition 'should' stand on its own, because it began as a complete company. Of course things aren't that simple.
In many/most cases, "complete" companies that are losing money hand over fist or--in the better cases--have a business model but not great long-term prospects.
In fact, I would expect them to actively censor and promote their interests. Also, would other people just not be allowed to make search engines? Wouldn't google v2 just take over again?
In a very idealistic case, I would even go further and say it should be under the umbrella of the UN to accommodate other cultures, and be politics-agnostic.
I do believe that we are at the time when decent internet access should be pushed by the UN (or any other entity, hopefully in a non-commercial non-political way like food, shelter, and education.
Maybe I'm not seeing it right, but IMO Google seems less predatory than they could be... they aren't anywhere near Amazon level.
I think there are too many well connected, well funded media companies that are lobbying and retaliating behind the scenes as they see their news publishing business models get disrupted by the Google News aggregator. Couple that with politicians frustrated by the Google News opaque aggregation algorithm and that leads to anti-trust rulings.
https://www.investopedia.com/news/facebook-google-digital-ad...
Its one thing to serve ads on the bottom (i.e. ads for pentalope screw drivers against articles about pentalope screw drivers). Its another thing to encroach on establish media outlets turf, AMP up their content and sell ads to Auto, CPG and Airline companies based on that content.
Note that the viewpoint that antitrust is SOLELY about benefit to consumers, and not also about restricting corporate power, is relatively new in US antitrust jurisprudence (around the 80s I think), and there are currently many scholars reassessing this viewpoint.
Edit: Some more info about current reassessment of the Chicago School of Antitrust: https://www.law.uchicago.edu/news/reassessing-chicago-school...
Commodity monopolies on the other hand seem to have much more obvious detrimental effects longterm.
"Amazon is eating into Google's most important business: Search advertising" - October 2019 [2]
There are dozens and dozens of articles about this. The market as a whole is growing, and Google's market share is large, but shrinking as a percentage of the pie.
[1] - https://www.investopedia.com/news/facebook-google-digital-ad...
[2] - https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/15/amazon-is-eating-into-google...
If you were to impair the ad business of Google, Facebook, and Amazon, wouldn't that simply shift profits to Verizon, Microsoft, Snap, ByteDance, etc?
1. Android -> Difficult to compete against a well financed Chinese competitor here for whatever new subpart of Google takes over android.
2. Chrome -> Again, either MSFT or a chinese fork.
3. Gmail -> Outlook, or maybe some chinese/russian mail service
4. Google Cloud -> This might be gone fully. I don't see them having any advantages if they can't piggyback on the world class google Infra.
Even if the US regulates out Huwaei and Alibaba, almost all of Asia and Africa will surely be dominated by big Chinese tech, rather than small US tech if the US big tech get broken up. Not to mention they might dominate Europe too.
Gmail or google cloud's dependencies on the rest of Google are comparibly much easier to solve.
This will result in decreasing inequality and help the general society as well.
There is a good reason why anti-trust laws exist people. Billionaires are already a policy failure, we don’t need trillionaires in future as well.
Why do you think smaller EU/US firms are more likely to take their place than Big Chinese firms. The Big Chinese firms will have economies of scale and more capital.
> This will result in decreasing inequality and help the general society as well.
I don't know how is that going to decrease inequality. Even if big tech is replaced by 5 small tech, there is no way on earth it will decrease inequality. Do you have any basis for such an extraordinary claim?
> There is a good reason why anti-trust laws exist people. Billionaires are already a policy failure, we don’t need trillionaires in future as well.
Sure. In the totally globalised world, you can decide you don't want big companies. This will just ensure a Chinese company dominates the market.
What are we waiting on?
Chinese tech giants might take market share from Google, but other American companies will pop up with new and better technology that will ultimately come out on top, like it always does. The Chinese tech giants of today are giants largely because of government funding and government-sponsored corporate espionage/stolen tech, not because they're leading the world in producing new technologies.
As for Microsoft? If a behemoth like Google gets broken up for anti-competitive practices, regulators will likely not want to stop there.
More competition is always a good thing, even if it sounds scary.
Golang, gRPC, Protobuf, Kubernetes, Tensorflow, WebRTC, QUIC protocol, very interesting innovations in camera technology such as NightSight, Google Maps which has changed my life completely. Furthermore, millions of contributions to open source projects and protocols, so many security improvements by the Security & Cryptography teams that I have on occasion worked with.
Personally I wouldn't work for Google because I don't enjoy the kind of atmosphere where there's no real "mission". But doing this much innovation is impossible unless you are funded by the government, or have a money printing business.