I think we need a better term than monopoly, that separates it from what people usually mean which is 'the best product'. I literally cannot think of any sort of product or service with lower switching costs than internet search. Typing bing.com takes 0.8 seconds and costs $0. Hundreds of orders of magnitude easier than switching to a different railroad if only one goes through your town.
Google is a big ass company and enjoys outsized market share because people choose to use it. Everyone who buys a MacBook or Surface computer or smartphone does one thing immediately and that's to download Chrome. It's literally the first thing people voluntarily choose to do after powering on the device for the first time.
I'm not sure why we need government interference here which in all likelihood would change no customer behaviour but probably just add a few extra clicks in front of the Chrome downloading process.
When Alphabet begins doing something like banning Google Fiber customers from accessing bing.com, that will be interesting. But there honestly very minimal anti-competitive behaviour like that happening at the moment.
I read through some of the documents of the original complaint. This is mainly not about Google being the dominant search engine for consumers. It's more to do with their anti competitive behavior in the ad tech market. As a consumer, switching is easy. As a company that wants to advertise, switching is not easy if Google holds all the users. But also they've bought up all sides of the market, so what used to be competitive is now entirely controlled by one company. And, once they had that control, they started squeezing both sides, advertisers and sites that run advertising.
From a consumer perspective it's not about being able to switch search engine. Google is potentially putting a drag on entire economies, both money wise, and innovation wise. If every service you use has to spend extra because Google has an advertising monopoly then every service is passing a cost to you. If every service needs to do it the one way then there's no advancement, no new models, just "give Google money" forever.
Google doesn't have an advertising monopoly. Facebook all by itself does about half of Google's revenue in ads. Then you have twitter, amazon, snap, all kinds of stuff. Google would be lucky to have 40% of online ads, and then once you include all advertising they are way down, maybe 15-20% or something.
I agree with you on the premise of the complaint but I think the parent's point still holds, the reason why you don't want to switch to another ad company is because all the people are with Google but they're with Google because they like it.
The judgment makes a lot of hay over google paying to be the default search engine and how google has all this data on how valuable default is and how much people don't tend to switch from them. That's all true but I'm not sure what the proposed solution is. Make it illegal to pay to be the default?
There has to be a default and I think the outcome there is that Google is still the default because people prefer it. Google only pays to be the default because, if they don't, someone else will. Google would love to not have to pay Apple to be the default.
I also notice the lack of acknowledgement that people actively do switch away from default browsers regularly, from their OS defaults, to Chrome, which defaults to Google Search. Bing's market share is basically entirely because Edge is the default browser in windows with Bing as the default search engine. "Solving" this default problem will probably crater Bing if it involves forcing a user to make a choice on install (or something similar).
The problem with talks of "splitting up Google" is that Google is an ad company, not a browser company, not a mobile phone company, not a search company, not an email company, etc. All of those other products exist to serve the ad company, they are loss leaders. Splitting up google is bad for consumers who use gmail, chrome, android and search.
The only real split that I think is possible is Google Ads from Google Cloud.
As far as the idea of Google's position being a drag on the economy, I'd like to see a competitor with a better model that Google used their market advantage to intentionally kill.
Google is offering a free browser, while making a good browser costs money. They are subsidising that by their huge ad-business.
And by no surprise, their browser is the only major one that has no privacy protection features and last month decided to abandon the plan to deprecate cookies and tracking.
That browser is competing with someone like Opera (used to be a paid for product) and Mozilla in an unfair way, because Google is killing others by making it free and taking the loss.
There was exactly the same kind of lawsuit in France some years ago: free Google Maps insidiously put paid cartography companies without any special features out of business.
The antitrust legislation protects consumers, not businesses. If Linux provides for free what a proprietary software offered for money, it's a net win, even if that company goes out of business.
The problem with Chrome is not that it's free. The problem is that it develops more and more anti-customer traits, like making it hard to block ads, and uses its market share and compatibility issues to force these on customers.
The problem with google search is that Google integrates it with Chrome and Android, and buys the default search engine slots in other browsers, so that many customers are not even aware of other options. Sadly, Bing and DDG are not clearly superior, and, say, Kagi is paid. (Kagi is a good example of a paid product that's significantly better than the common free alternative.) Ironically the default search engine deals is how Firefox acquires most of its funding.
I don't see an easy way to find Google guilty of hurting customers through monopoly power in search or browsers: free products, a few alternatives, trivial cost of switching, no price gouging possible. Same with dumping: products start and remain free, most of Chrome is open-source and competitors reuse that same code, and customers are free to use these derivates, or adequate independent browsers and search engines.
It's a bit like coca-cola: alternatives abound, downsides are known, but people just seem to weirdly prefer it.
But Opera and Firefox and others are all free browsers as well. I agree with the parent commenter that its not exactly a monopoly in the traditional sense. It's not even the default browser on Mac or Windows.
> last month decided to abandon the plan to deprecate cookies and tracking
Make no mistake, all that original plan was about was about applying pain to everybody else in the advertising world, while their replacement for cookies would have been satisfactory only at Google's scale. The whole thing was Google astroturfing, taking advantage of everyone's ignorance of how the Internet works to further entrench their advertising monopoly.
I don't know why they aborted the plan, but I suspect regulators had caught on that it wasn't altruism but Anti-competitiveness that motivated it.
> And by no surprise, their browser is the only major one that has no privacy protection features and last month decided to abandon the plan to deprecate cookies and tracking.
Oh they didn't abandon the plans, they chose something worse. They are going to make it a user decision.
Advertising companies can still gain some value for people who have third party cookies enabled, applications which aren't well-maintained enough to remove a reliance on third-party cookies will fail (sometimes), and users will be pushed by things like work SaaS apps to re-enable third party cookies (as a global setting) to be able to use required services.
> Google is a big ass company and enjoys outsized market share because people choose to use it.
If this were true, Google could make the immediate and easy decision to increase their annual profits by $26 billion, by simply stopping to pay browser vendors to make Google the default search engine.
https://untested.sonnet.io/Defaults+Matter%2C+Don't+Assume+C...
Google spent ungodly amounts of money to make sure that their search engine was the default in as many places as possible. People didn't "choose" to use it, they use the defaults.
And in some cases, like my Android phone, google is the only option for integrated searches. I cannot use another search engine without opening a browser then opening up the search engine of choice.
Monopoly may not be the right term, but anticompetitive is. They outspent every other search provider to make sure their product was used. They paid off apple to not develop a search engine and instead use theirs as a default. These are things in the court documents which caused the ruling to go against them.
I used DDG for a long time, it's crap, I switched back to Google, I suspect a lot of people would do the same. There isn't a lot of competition.
I tired Kagi, it's good too, but I didn't feel like the cost was justified when Google is free. I will probably try Kagi again someday though, I did like it and I think their mission is pretty cool.
You are literally agreeing with the parent commenter. It's anticompetitive but not a monopoly. The parent is also talking about Chrome, not Google Search.
Just have to say this again even if everyone already knows it: If the US Government / EU hadn't threatened Microsoft they would have embedded their browser in Windows and tied it to the OS to the extent where normal people would only use their browser. I don't know if Google could exist in that alternate world, but I suspect Microsoft would have "deprived them of Oxygen" and they would be bought or crushed.
You probably can't stop Google from being the most popular search (or don't want to) but you should be able to stop Google from using the popularity of their product to crush alternative ad tech. Or crush some new tech we don't realize will be important.
Google is so critically important to the infrastructure of the internet itself that I really struggle to understand why a for profit entity with incentives that are not aligned to the public should be in charge of the most important search engine.
Google can be more easily understood as a bunch of businesses that funnel traffic into an ad marketplace. Search, Android, GMail, Maps, Chrome, everything is just about having enough traffic and enough behavioral data to make them the biggest ad seller ever. But they are also the broker and price-setter. That's how they make money, not on the quality of their services --which OK, they have to maintain to a competitive standard: easy to do when you are printing money.
So, the solution is relatively simple: break off their ad marketplace business. Break off their ad display business. Let the funnels fend for themselves.
Monopoly is when they use that market share to compete in _an entire different market_ without actually earning the "best" spot. Or using their dominance to prevent competition entirely from succeeding.
For example: Blocking all ad-tracking on its own browser, except ads purchased through its own ad network.
Remember, _you_ are not the customer of Google. You are the product. The ad companies are the customer. The market is not search: the market is ad sales.
The issue isn't having a monopoly, it's exploiting vertical integration in digital platforms.
- Hardware (Google Pixel, Chromecast, Chromebook)
- OS (Android, ChromeOS)
- Distribution (Google Play Store)
- Browser (Chrome)
- Search (Google)
- Products (YouTube, Drive, Gmail, ...)
- Business (GCP, Workspace)
The only other companies that are similar are Microsoft and Apple... both arguably less extensive.
The issue with this also isn't entirely clear until it's "exploited": Google (and the others) can force certain products on their customers due to controlling the "underlying" product. Ad targeting also becomes incredibly precise and valuable... everyone else has to go through the scraps while Google can "just" read your emails (Gmail), get your location (Hardware/OS), go through your files and photos (Drive) and use your search history (Google).
> I think we need a better term than monopoly, that separates it from what people usually mean which is 'the best product'.
I think the problem is that people don't know what the word means. We don't need to redefine it, people will either respect the importance of definitions of we'll just lose the next term for a monopoly as well.
For anyone following along, Google is a monopoly because they are the market leader in multiple overlapping industries and product lines. They choose to leverage those products together to fain a competitive advantage that no one competing with a single product can reasonably compete with.
It's a fine thesis, google the humble search engine, easy to compete against. Sure. That argument stands. But.. ... google is not a search engine. There's the google duopoly with facebook (ads, user data). There's the google duopoly with apple (phone operating system), there's the gmail system not exactly the same as search. There's google the web browser, duopoly(ish) with firefox. There's the youtube (duopoly with netflix? monopoly?). Probably a bunch of other various duopolies.
Then there's all these other giga-sized "side projects" which seem small proportional to those mega-businesses - google home type stuff, google nest, waze, consumer electronics etc. Arguably the google nest and assistant is duopolistic with amazon alexa.
Which is the state of tech, there's like 5 big companies that share some portion of pies of 20 major duopolies and 100 minor duopolies. And they're all like "SEE! SEE! We're NOT a monopoly". And there's two of them saying that, pointing each at the other one as evidence of their non-monopoly status. To me that's monopoly by another name, and that other name is duopoly, and as such it has many of the same problems as the monopoly. And duopolies all every damn place, not just tech - NYSE and NASDAQ stock markets. Sony and xbox (sorry nintendo). Boeing and Airbus. Visa and Mastercard. Pepsi and Coke. Intel and AMD, AMD and NVIDIA. Windows and Mac. How many "gentleman's agreements" must exist in those duopolies, too many methinks
And so if you ask me it would be quite natural to shatter all these companies according to their duopolistic silos, with the hope being that the duopolies exist in part from the synergy and deep pockets of the whole organization, and so by breaking apart the duopolistic strings to the rest of the org, perhaps there can be a third and fourth phone operating system, home consumer electronic, web browser, youtube, and so on. Because the point of capitalism is an efficient market to serve the public, not to serve the megacorp coffers
I think you're right. It hides a lot. We do need a better
understanding of the problems. But be careful what you wish
for. Google being a monopoly is not a cause, but a symptom. Do a
little 5Y analysis. Even rolling it back one step;
Q. Why is Google/Microsoft etc a monopoly?
A. Because they bought up all the competitors.
So, a deeper problem is the very ability to buy and sell companies.
Is it "the market"? Yet it is possible to create articles of a company
as non LLC/Ltd so that it it can never be bought or sold. People don't
do this because they don't intend to "build a great product/company",
they intend to cash-out and sell a great company. These subtle
incentive structures really matter.
Dig deeper and ask things like "why do people only build companies to
sell?" There's more upsetting answers behind that one too.
In the end, if you want to say BigTech is not to blame and could not
do anything else but agglomerate into problematically large blocs then
we have to concede the environment and incentives of modern business
are harmful to the public/national good. The place to intervene is
then at the level of those values.
>I think we need a better term than monopoly, that separates it from what people usually mean which is 'the best product'.
I wouldn't go so far as to say that literally nobody means that when they say 'monopoly' but I doubt it is common enough for that claim to be made in good faith.
In terms of the control they have over people's livelihoods when it comes to the play store and admob, and their incredible lack of care/customer service, yeah they're getting away with murder and totally a monopoly and acting like one.
I'm very curious to see what a breakup looks like. Past breakups involved "uniform" businesses:
- American Tobacco: Commodity
- Standard Oil: Commodity
- AT&T: Utility
- Northern Securities: Railroads
- Swift & Co: Meatpacking
- Kodak: Film
- Paramount: Movie Theaters
Google is more of a synergistic conglomerate. How would spinning off an individual business like Chrome, Android, or AdWords reduce their respective dominance?
I support this ruling and more across all industries, but I'm trying to square how a breakup should work that actually drives competition.
Breaking up their individual businesses can cause each business to have incentives that line up better with their customers / users. Example: if Chrome was separated from Google, they won't have as much of an incentive to push back against adblockers with things like Manifest V3. Or include APIs that are only available to google websites (Which it has! https://x.com/lcasdev/status/1810696257137959018)
Users are not Chrome's customers. Even if Chrome is separated into a separate company that would still be true. Users are unlikely to pay for a browser when every OS comes with a free one.
Some companies that want to be the default search (unless the gov bans that) or, some companies that want to be the default new tab page, would likely be the actual customers
An exception might be Chromebook users. It's not clear how that would break out. Especially in light of ChromeOS being cancelled for Android
It's an interesting hypothesis, but it's entirely possible that separated from Google, Chrome is either not a viable business model (browsers don't make money on their own) or is incentivized to get into bed with some other ad company to make money, to effectively the same result.
I agree with your premise, but you're example is unfortunate. The manifest v3 thing was due to an API change to improve performance by pulling the renderer out of the critical path for network requests. Adblockers can still block ads (as in not show them), but they can't throttle or block requests.
It would be better to point out that Chrome is the only browser not getting rid of third party cookies. Chrome promised to, but then has reneged on that promise in favor of "user choice". I don't for a second think Chrome would have kept then around if they weren't tied to an advertising company.
> Example: if Chrome was separated from Google, they won't have as much of an incentive to push back against adblockers
I think your example is completely wrong. Chrome has no source of funding. If separated from Google, they will have a massively magnified incentive to cater to the whims of advertisers because they would be completely subservient to them for funding.
My understanding is that Chrome provides value to Google through intangible means like brand association and thus Chrome does not have to 100% justify its existence by enabling ads for Google, meaning that it has some funding to just be a good browser for consumers.
Manifest v3 exists to increase security and privacy, not to break ad blockers. I suspect that an independent Chrome would implement it even faster because they don't have to worry about the perception that they're doing it for ads.
Ads and search are the two businesses that most directly collude and which could both survive and thrive independently.
If the search business worked with other ad networks to maximize their revenue, while the ad business worked with other search engines, we’d likely see higher quality search results, less confusion about what’s an ad versus a result, and better as rates for buyers.
That said I don’t support that remedy at all. Maybe ten or fifteen years ago, but now it’s too late and the market is evolving around Google. IMO a consent decree that they won’t pay anyone for exclusive search placement is sufficient.
> Ads and search are the two businesses that most directly collude and which could both survive and thrive independently.
I'm skeptical that search is viable as an independent business at scale. I know DDG is making a go of it, but the business only has to pay a single salary.
Splitting ads and search is a nonstarter. Ads on the search page are very different from ads on other pages since search ads can leverage information retrieved during the search. Ads on other pages have to use contextual or remarketing signals, with much poorer results.
At the very least, spinning off individual businesses prevents self-preferencing. Google can right now leverage its dominance in one area to increase market share in another. For example, if I load my GMail account in a browser other than Chrome, Google will "helpfully" suggest that I change my default browser to the "recommended" Chrome. This behavior makes it harder for upstarts to get a foot in the door across a wide range of products — by removing these synergies we reduce the grip Google has across all its lines of business.
I suspect the AT&T example may be more similar to the current situation than you're thinking. AT&T wasn't just the network, they also manufactured the phones themselves through subsidiary Western Electric. They leveraged their monopoly in phone service to drive customers toward leasing their phones, similarly (if more aggressively) to how Google drives customers from one product to another. Whether this remedy will be so far-reaching beyond search I don't know, but in the abstract there would be benefits to splitting up the conglomerate.
People don't realize, you couldn't just buy a phone - you had to use the one provided by your monopoly phone company.
It was only after breakup that there could exist an ecosystem of phone peripherals like answerphones, direct-attach modems (this is why acoustic couplers were a thing), cordless phones, etc.
I’m frankly shocked that Google continues to think the juice on that annoying, constant Chrome-in-Gmail popup is worth even a marginal additional anti-trust attention squeeze.
There are probably only a small number of services that could successfully spin off on their own, but a lot of the value is in integration, which as others point out is also how some things seem 'free'.
An easier example would be Microsoft and Office; you could spin off an application like that quite successfully, the same might apply to their ERP. But those examples only stem from the fact that they used to be isolated 'offline' products, and Microsoft is working hard to undo that.
Trying to draw parallels between that and Google Workspace, that is a technical nightmare considering the entire distributed nature means that half of workspace can't exist outside of Google. You'd have to copy Google to host it outside of it, and I'm not talking about GCP or Borg or anything like that, it's everything, from the GSLB to Zanzibar, from monorail to the custom hardware everything runs on. Perhaps a double-digit years long refactor could change that, but nobody wants to pay for that.
Microsoft for a good long while made money on two things: Office and Windows. You could break them up into "Office", "Windows", and any combination of "everything else", and for the most part what would happen is that the Office and Windows parts would make more money proportionally, and most if not all of the "everything else" would die. Even products that could nominally have survived on their own if they had grown up on their own would die because by the time the corporate culture adapted to the new realities they'd mostly already be dead.
Given that monopoly-breakups are supposed to be in the public interest, it is a complicated argument to make in court that the public is advantaged by all those ancillary services getting killed. Now, I'm happy to declare that; I think the "culture of free" is corrosive, to probably an even greater degree than most other HN users. I'm outright willing to call it morally corrosive, for both the companies and the consumers. You, dear $READER, may not be inclined to go that far, especially perhaps on the consumer side. I'm just putting down my cards so that you can see that when I point out that in court that's going to be a difficult argument, it's an admission against my interests and biases.
Google is similar. They make money on ads and everything else is a distant second. Even search might have trouble standing on its own because it is funded on ad revenue; split them up that way and how is search getting funded? Google Cloud could certainly survive on its own for a time, but if it had to reduce investment it could go into an uncompetitive death spiral of having to match investment resources to profits over the years. Gmail could in principle make radically more money if they charged $5/month or something, but how many customers will do that?
And how on Earth would you even break up Android? You can't just hack it out as its own thing; it integrates with a lot of Google things and there's no way they'd all end up in the same entity.
I'm willing to just hack them to pieces and let the market figure it out. I think in the long term we'd come out stronger. But I'm arguing here in a relatively friendly forum for that and probably a lot of you still disagree with me. I'd hate to be arguing this in court.
If things are broken up, we will get open standards for integration. The value of open standard would be much higher than today. Think how XMPP might have evolved if everyone had an interest in keeping it open.
Email needs to at least have an option that is a utility.
Arguably operating systems need to be a utility.
Adtech needs to either go back to what it was when Google started out (simple contextual ads, no targeting, no data collection, no flashing or popups or video or or or or...), or just die.[0]
The reason these things have all been operated entirely by for-profit entities up to this point is because they're too new for government to have caught up. All the parts of Google that I've named above as needing to be utilities are fundamental, necessary parts of the modern internet, and are basic requirements for the average person to operate in Western society.
> How would spinning off an individual business like Chrome, Android, or AdWords reduce their respective dominance?
As for this question, Google uses the profit from its dominance in adtech to fund its dominance in other businesses. That's the textbook definition of an abusive monopoly. Take away the ad money from the other parts of Google, and they'll no longer have an unfair advantage over potential competitors.
[0] Yes, this would mean that large parts of the internet that have been free-at-the-point-of-service will have to find new business models or dry up and blow away. No, I don't have a silver bullet solution to this. No, I'm not advocating for nuking adtech from orbit overnight with no replacement.
Chrome and Android are particularly interesting to me. What would splitting those projects off from Google possibly look like?
Both are open source projects with "ungoogled" options available, but those options are nowhere near as successful as the Google flavors. Would they just forbid Google from offering their own flavor of Chromium?
Even though Android itself is open source, Google Play services really are what allow Google to have so much influence on the Android platform. So what happens to Google Play? Would they be forced to split that off with Android? Would they be forced to continue offering their services for free, but with no strings attached? Would Android have to offer a middleware that lets you choose which services to use a la carte? Would Android device manufacturers have to ship their devices with an open source alternative to Google Play like microG?
How do you separate Google from Android without driving everyone to the other side of the smartphone duopoly, iOS?
If a breakup does happen, it's going to be wild. I wish I had more faith in our government to come up with the best solution. But something has to be done.
An interesting read on the matter comes from Cory Doctorow (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-shat...). The uniform business here is ads.
Google controls the supply, the demand and the marketplace, effectively setting whatever price they want and whatever quality of service they want.
Smaller business cannot enter the market as competitors, while customers (here the people wanting to put ads on the internet) are chocked out.
Then if you add that Chrome enforces how browser experiences are designed and how tracking is done, you see the problem emerging.
One of the potential remedies is to require Google to open source their crawling data. This should make it easier for others who want to build a competing search engine.
If they break up the ad business it could be helpful. Otherwise search and youtube are like you say synergistic and there is no obvious way to break them up.
Keep in mind that without the Ad business, most of Google's products cannot exist. Search gets paid by Ads, same with YouTube. Most of the free product are just Ad delivery platforms, and they are all pretty much on the verge of losing money as-is. The Ad business itself has margin enough to cover that, and without a set of outlets like those services, it wouldn't be able to exist.
Vimeo has tried a different approach, but it's hardly in the same league as YouTube.
For instances if Android phones were allowed to not make Google the default search engine, for Apple to ask each user which engine they want instead of there being a default, for query and click through data needing to be shared at cost with other search engine companies, Chrome not being allowed to default to Google but require user input, and so on. Lots of options and more than one remedy can be applied simultaneously.
And, indeed, there's a case to be made that there's net consumer harm to breaking up the synergy.
Maybe we do want to make everything a little worse for the average customer so that more businesses can compete in the marketplace. But I, for one, will miss being able to attach Drive content smoothly to my emails, or being able to use my voice to trigger map navigation on my phone.
While we're at it, we need to break Microsoft and Amazon asap. I don't know how Microsoft is not up for discussion when it's a behemoth (GitHub, LinkedIn, Azure, Windows, Office, etc.). The same applies for Amazon.
But Microsoft has misused their market power plenty of times, such as when they bundled Microsoft Teams with their enterprise contract at zero cost, destroying Slack's market value overnight.
Let’s be real: Windows is practically a monopoly. They use it to push their online services in ridiculous ways. I doubt >10% of the current Edge userbase is through conscious decision. Teams obviously cannot compete on its own terms with any competitors, its prevalence only comes from being part of Microsoft’s all in one office suite package that no individual company can compete with.
It is so easy to switch away from Google I just can't take any break up attempt seriously.
ATT WAS phone service in the U.S. 90% of the U.S used ATT when it was broken up, and much of that 90% had no alternative.
With Google if another better search engine did appear you could switch in minutes.
And if you consider Android a monopoly then you'd have to consider iOS one too, and that's one much more obvious in it's user impact with a 30% cut being taken on the only app store you can install apps from.
If you don't like default X being purchased, pass a law. Otherwise we'll just be back here in a few years later if some other company becomes unpopular.
ATTs customers were phone users, hence it was difficult for them. Google's customers are ad companies, and for them, switching away from Google is impossible. By thinking of how easy it is for you to switch, you are not considering the correct customers. And this shows in your statement about better search engine, better search engine cannot come without customers (not you) having option to switch.
> Google's customers are ad companies, and for them, switching away from Google is impossible.
Billions (probably trillions) of dollars are spent every year on advertising through other channels than Google, including online. Let's stick to reality.
Easy to switch away from Google? We're techies, so we don't see a lot of what is going on. Turn off your blockers for ads and trackers. Look at the number of websites that have Google trackers. Look at where the ads come from. That doesn't even count search, and Google search has also become a platform for Google-driven ads. Add in YouTube and other Google properties, and "monopoly" is an understatement.
A breakup would separate the major services: Google search, YouTube, the ad business (DoubleClick et al), etc.. However, even then, the ad business probably needs to be broken up further.
This should all have been done much earlier, at least 5 and maybe even 10 years ago. Now Google is so entrenched that it will be difficult. One assumes that the government is more powerful than a corporation, but once you look into just how members of Congress so quicly become millionaires, well...
Part of the problem is that tech products tend to be natural monopolies. If you split android off Google, it will probably just lose out against iOS in the West and some Chinese Android version elsewhere. As the article says, that's not necessarily better.
People say this but there's nothing "natural" about Google's monopoly, to get to where they are today, they had to make a dozen major acquisitions, and if the last few administrations hadn't been bought and paid for, the FTC could have said no to any of them. In particular they should have looked very very hard at Doubleclick. I mean who are we kidding, they should have said no to Doubleclick.
So we are in a world today where things like Android, Chrome, and the default search experience on an iPhone are all what they are because of Google's need to build moats around the GooDubClick cash cow. More importantly it's really hard to compete with these things unless you have a GooDubClick cash cow of your own, which guess what basically nobody does. Decouple them and that will start to change, there will be many businesses that will take all sorts of novel approaches, and that is what we refer to as "innovation" when we are being pragmatic and un-cynical about what innovation is, it's a dozen or a thousand companies throwing new stuff out there and sooner or later some of it sticks and the world changes.
NOTHING is natural about what Google is today unless you consider the FTC not doing its job for 15-20 years "natural."
If the marginal cost of delivering your product is close to zero, markets will tend to monopoly. A search/ads company that has 10% of the market share that Google does (and no one gets even to that), has roughly the same costs but only 10% of the income (and only that if they are as good as Google is in making on money off search). On top of that, having access to the query stream is really important keeping search quality up.
> Part of the problem is that tech products tend to be natural monopolies.
Middleman platforms often become natural monopolies due to network effects, but how does this expand to tech products in general?
I don't see any structural incentives that lead to natural monopolies in search, email, or a wide variety of other products that Google is dominant in.
and other markets where network effects tend to create monopolies tend to be very highly regulated or state owned: telecoms and financial markets, for example.
Network effects are just so strong. Once a particular option has ingrained itself for a particular use-case they can make it extremely difficult for any alternative to become viable even if it's technologically superior. Just look at Windows vs Linux.
Google has collected multiple businesses in its conglomerate structure that gives it far too much power and control over society beyond the simple monopoly charge.
YouTube, Search, Email, advertising, are all controlled by the same people and that is a problem for freedom and the economy.
I feel like the US should have serious conversations about it's regulation of monopolies, especially on internet giants. The current system seems to be woefully ineffective. On the one hand, it's not clear it's necessarily, Google isn't a particularly old company it hasn't had a strangle hold for long and it doesn't look like it's business is unassailable. So why go after it at all. On the other hand, the anti-monopoly moves have been slow and ineffective. When Microsoft finally got hit their crimes were pretty egregious and they actually never faced any consequences, the law suit they lost eventaully got turned over on appeal and by the time it was all resolved the market looked markedly different.
Isn't it time to think about either (a) just accepting that you give them a much wider birth or (b) be much faster and tactical in your enforcement. Not every monopoly case needs to result in a break up. If you could point at one bad thing Google did - maybe the Apple deal for example, get that in court quickly with fast penalties that don't require massive corporate interference maybe we would be better off.
> Google isn't a particularly old company it hasn't had a strangle hold for long and it doesn't look like it's business is unassailable. So why go after it at all. On the other hand, the anti-monopoly moves have been slow and ineffective. When Microsoft finally got hit...
Google was incorporated 26 years ago, in 1998. Microsoft was founded in 1975, 26 years before US v. Microsoft was decided. Google is exactly as old as Microsoft was at the time, and while it's harder to measure my sense is that their stranglehold on search is at least as long and at least as unassailable as Microsoft's was in OSes.
You can't have it be both too early to go after Google and yet too late to have gone after Microsoft.
Well to push the point a little - Imagine that Microsofts anti-trust case was in 2008, not 1997 and the iPhone was out and clearly gaining traction. Suddenly Microsoft doesn't look like some perpetual juggernaut. That's where we are with Google today - we can see the product that's likely to displace it. Windows is still big today, but it's not anywhere near the strategic force it was in the early 2000s. In the same way, I don't think Google is likely to be in the same place in a few years time.
I kind of am asking to have it both ways - they should be able to move against these companies earlier by levying smaller sanctions. That way they don't need 1 big killer case to get a judge to order the entire company broken up or spun off.
We ruined antitrust enforcement in the 70s and 80s by switching from “we know companies having too much of a market is bad, so that’s enough” to “we must show specific harm of specific kinds before we can do anything”.
This is like requiring overwhelming evidence that a radiation source caused a particular case of cancer—not other problems, like birth defects, just cancer, and we’re gonna assume the cancer wasn’t caused by the radiation source until you can convince us otherwise—before being able to move against an actor exposing the public to radiation.
The Apple deal had two sides engaged in monopolistic behavior. One was Google buying out that default provider option. The other was Apple, having that default option.
> The other was Apple, having that default option.
What UI are you imagining? Perhaps no search engine at all in the browser but the first time a user goes to "search" you present them with a list of random-sorted search engines?
Maybe the problem was that Apple has "that default option for sale."
The lawsuit started under Trump DOJ as a political stunt because Google resembled wokeness and the party of freedom and family values (Republicans) wanted to show how tough they are to their constituents.
A few republican states also filed similar lawsuits in tandem which all got lumped together into this lawsuit.
Then the Biden came to power and kept at it because, well, he did keep a lot of Trump initiatives and now the DOJ people think they're some kind of a hero for working on this case.
Should suing Google really the highest priority for the administration? I don't think so but here we are.
> A fitting though unlikely outcome would be for Google to be forced to turn Chrome and the open source Chromium project over to Mozilla. That would probably involve the creation of an independent non-profit foundation that didn't reduce browser diversity – so Chrome and Firefox could continue to lead independent lives.
Mozilla is a bit of a stretch for sure, but I could see Chromium and maybe Android moved off onto their own independent organizations so they are not beholden to Google/Alphabet's whims. I am imagining something like the Linux Foundation.
Chromium especially is so core to being a building block for applications and the modern Internet nowadays, it does seem like this core infrastructure piece should be more collectively owned.
Not Mozilla, no way! If Chrome gets split off, give it to anyone but Mozilla. They already ran one browser into the ground, they don't need to destroy a second one.
Chrome being made by the same company running the websites (search/docs/etc.) is still going to provide bad incentives even if with ads & youtube seperated out the worst ones would be gone.
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Google is a big ass company and enjoys outsized market share because people choose to use it. Everyone who buys a MacBook or Surface computer or smartphone does one thing immediately and that's to download Chrome. It's literally the first thing people voluntarily choose to do after powering on the device for the first time.
I'm not sure why we need government interference here which in all likelihood would change no customer behaviour but probably just add a few extra clicks in front of the Chrome downloading process.
When Alphabet begins doing something like banning Google Fiber customers from accessing bing.com, that will be interesting. But there honestly very minimal anti-competitive behaviour like that happening at the moment.
From a consumer perspective it's not about being able to switch search engine. Google is potentially putting a drag on entire economies, both money wise, and innovation wise. If every service you use has to spend extra because Google has an advertising monopoly then every service is passing a cost to you. If every service needs to do it the one way then there's no advancement, no new models, just "give Google money" forever.
The judgment makes a lot of hay over google paying to be the default search engine and how google has all this data on how valuable default is and how much people don't tend to switch from them. That's all true but I'm not sure what the proposed solution is. Make it illegal to pay to be the default?
There has to be a default and I think the outcome there is that Google is still the default because people prefer it. Google only pays to be the default because, if they don't, someone else will. Google would love to not have to pay Apple to be the default.
I also notice the lack of acknowledgement that people actively do switch away from default browsers regularly, from their OS defaults, to Chrome, which defaults to Google Search. Bing's market share is basically entirely because Edge is the default browser in windows with Bing as the default search engine. "Solving" this default problem will probably crater Bing if it involves forcing a user to make a choice on install (or something similar).
The problem with talks of "splitting up Google" is that Google is an ad company, not a browser company, not a mobile phone company, not a search company, not an email company, etc. All of those other products exist to serve the ad company, they are loss leaders. Splitting up google is bad for consumers who use gmail, chrome, android and search.
The only real split that I think is possible is Google Ads from Google Cloud.
As far as the idea of Google's position being a drag on the economy, I'd like to see a competitor with a better model that Google used their market advantage to intentionally kill.
And by no surprise, their browser is the only major one that has no privacy protection features and last month decided to abandon the plan to deprecate cookies and tracking.
That browser is competing with someone like Opera (used to be a paid for product) and Mozilla in an unfair way, because Google is killing others by making it free and taking the loss.
The antitrust legislation protects consumers, not businesses. If Linux provides for free what a proprietary software offered for money, it's a net win, even if that company goes out of business.
The problem with Chrome is not that it's free. The problem is that it develops more and more anti-customer traits, like making it hard to block ads, and uses its market share and compatibility issues to force these on customers.
The problem with google search is that Google integrates it with Chrome and Android, and buys the default search engine slots in other browsers, so that many customers are not even aware of other options. Sadly, Bing and DDG are not clearly superior, and, say, Kagi is paid. (Kagi is a good example of a paid product that's significantly better than the common free alternative.) Ironically the default search engine deals is how Firefox acquires most of its funding.
I don't see an easy way to find Google guilty of hurting customers through monopoly power in search or browsers: free products, a few alternatives, trivial cost of switching, no price gouging possible. Same with dumping: products start and remain free, most of Chrome is open-source and competitors reuse that same code, and customers are free to use these derivates, or adequate independent browsers and search engines.
It's a bit like coca-cola: alternatives abound, downsides are known, but people just seem to weirdly prefer it.
Make no mistake, all that original plan was about was about applying pain to everybody else in the advertising world, while their replacement for cookies would have been satisfactory only at Google's scale. The whole thing was Google astroturfing, taking advantage of everyone's ignorance of how the Internet works to further entrench their advertising monopoly.
I don't know why they aborted the plan, but I suspect regulators had caught on that it wasn't altruism but Anti-competitiveness that motivated it.
Oh they didn't abandon the plans, they chose something worse. They are going to make it a user decision.
Advertising companies can still gain some value for people who have third party cookies enabled, applications which aren't well-maintained enough to remove a reliance on third-party cookies will fail (sometimes), and users will be pushed by things like work SaaS apps to re-enable third party cookies (as a global setting) to be able to use required services.
If this were true, Google could make the immediate and easy decision to increase their annual profits by $26 billion, by simply stopping to pay browser vendors to make Google the default search engine. https://untested.sonnet.io/Defaults+Matter%2C+Don't+Assume+C...
The statement is true as written.
Incorrect.
Google spent ungodly amounts of money to make sure that their search engine was the default in as many places as possible. People didn't "choose" to use it, they use the defaults.
And in some cases, like my Android phone, google is the only option for integrated searches. I cannot use another search engine without opening a browser then opening up the search engine of choice.
Monopoly may not be the right term, but anticompetitive is. They outspent every other search provider to make sure their product was used. They paid off apple to not develop a search engine and instead use theirs as a default. These are things in the court documents which caused the ruling to go against them.
I tired Kagi, it's good too, but I didn't feel like the cost was justified when Google is free. I will probably try Kagi again someday though, I did like it and I think their mission is pretty cool.
You probably can't stop Google from being the most popular search (or don't want to) but you should be able to stop Google from using the popularity of their product to crush alternative ad tech. Or crush some new tech we don't realize will be important.
but not really. the situation is similar to auto-voting the incumbent in every goverment election each november.
that is not ok.
So, the solution is relatively simple: break off their ad marketplace business. Break off their ad display business. Let the funnels fend for themselves.
Monopoly is when they use that market share to compete in _an entire different market_ without actually earning the "best" spot. Or using their dominance to prevent competition entirely from succeeding. For example: Blocking all ad-tracking on its own browser, except ads purchased through its own ad network. Remember, _you_ are not the customer of Google. You are the product. The ad companies are the customer. The market is not search: the market is ad sales.
- Hardware (Google Pixel, Chromecast, Chromebook)
- OS (Android, ChromeOS)
- Distribution (Google Play Store)
- Browser (Chrome)
- Search (Google)
- Products (YouTube, Drive, Gmail, ...)
- Business (GCP, Workspace)
The only other companies that are similar are Microsoft and Apple... both arguably less extensive.
The issue with this also isn't entirely clear until it's "exploited": Google (and the others) can force certain products on their customers due to controlling the "underlying" product. Ad targeting also becomes incredibly precise and valuable... everyone else has to go through the scraps while Google can "just" read your emails (Gmail), get your location (Hardware/OS), go through your files and photos (Drive) and use your search history (Google).
I think the problem is that people don't know what the word means. We don't need to redefine it, people will either respect the importance of definitions of we'll just lose the next term for a monopoly as well.
For anyone following along, Google is a monopoly because they are the market leader in multiple overlapping industries and product lines. They choose to leverage those products together to fain a competitive advantage that no one competing with a single product can reasonably compete with.
Then there's all these other giga-sized "side projects" which seem small proportional to those mega-businesses - google home type stuff, google nest, waze, consumer electronics etc. Arguably the google nest and assistant is duopolistic with amazon alexa.
Which is the state of tech, there's like 5 big companies that share some portion of pies of 20 major duopolies and 100 minor duopolies. And they're all like "SEE! SEE! We're NOT a monopoly". And there's two of them saying that, pointing each at the other one as evidence of their non-monopoly status. To me that's monopoly by another name, and that other name is duopoly, and as such it has many of the same problems as the monopoly. And duopolies all every damn place, not just tech - NYSE and NASDAQ stock markets. Sony and xbox (sorry nintendo). Boeing and Airbus. Visa and Mastercard. Pepsi and Coke. Intel and AMD, AMD and NVIDIA. Windows and Mac. How many "gentleman's agreements" must exist in those duopolies, too many methinks
And so if you ask me it would be quite natural to shatter all these companies according to their duopolistic silos, with the hope being that the duopolies exist in part from the synergy and deep pockets of the whole organization, and so by breaking apart the duopolistic strings to the rest of the org, perhaps there can be a third and fourth phone operating system, home consumer electronic, web browser, youtube, and so on. Because the point of capitalism is an efficient market to serve the public, not to serve the megacorp coffers
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I think you're right. It hides a lot. We do need a better understanding of the problems. But be careful what you wish for. Google being a monopoly is not a cause, but a symptom. Do a little 5Y analysis. Even rolling it back one step;
Q. Why is Google/Microsoft etc a monopoly?
A. Because they bought up all the competitors.
So, a deeper problem is the very ability to buy and sell companies. Is it "the market"? Yet it is possible to create articles of a company as non LLC/Ltd so that it it can never be bought or sold. People don't do this because they don't intend to "build a great product/company", they intend to cash-out and sell a great company. These subtle incentive structures really matter.
Dig deeper and ask things like "why do people only build companies to sell?" There's more upsetting answers behind that one too.
In the end, if you want to say BigTech is not to blame and could not do anything else but agglomerate into problematically large blocs then we have to concede the environment and incentives of modern business are harmful to the public/national good. The place to intervene is then at the level of those values.
I wouldn't go so far as to say that literally nobody means that when they say 'monopoly' but I doubt it is common enough for that claim to be made in good faith.
But then you're not the customer, you're the product, as they say. What is the cost to the actual customer to transition to an alternative?
- American Tobacco: Commodity
- Standard Oil: Commodity
- AT&T: Utility
- Northern Securities: Railroads
- Swift & Co: Meatpacking
- Kodak: Film
- Paramount: Movie Theaters
Google is more of a synergistic conglomerate. How would spinning off an individual business like Chrome, Android, or AdWords reduce their respective dominance?
I support this ruling and more across all industries, but I'm trying to square how a breakup should work that actually drives competition.
Some companies that want to be the default search (unless the gov bans that) or, some companies that want to be the default new tab page, would likely be the actual customers
An exception might be Chromebook users. It's not clear how that would break out. Especially in light of ChromeOS being cancelled for Android
It would be better to point out that Chrome is the only browser not getting rid of third party cookies. Chrome promised to, but then has reneged on that promise in favor of "user choice". I don't for a second think Chrome would have kept then around if they weren't tied to an advertising company.
I think your example is completely wrong. Chrome has no source of funding. If separated from Google, they will have a massively magnified incentive to cater to the whims of advertisers because they would be completely subservient to them for funding.
My understanding is that Chrome provides value to Google through intangible means like brand association and thus Chrome does not have to 100% justify its existence by enabling ads for Google, meaning that it has some funding to just be a good browser for consumers.
If the search business worked with other ad networks to maximize their revenue, while the ad business worked with other search engines, we’d likely see higher quality search results, less confusion about what’s an ad versus a result, and better as rates for buyers.
That said I don’t support that remedy at all. Maybe ten or fifteen years ago, but now it’s too late and the market is evolving around Google. IMO a consent decree that they won’t pay anyone for exclusive search placement is sufficient.
I'm skeptical that search is viable as an independent business at scale. I know DDG is making a go of it, but the business only has to pay a single salary.
I suspect the AT&T example may be more similar to the current situation than you're thinking. AT&T wasn't just the network, they also manufactured the phones themselves through subsidiary Western Electric. They leveraged their monopoly in phone service to drive customers toward leasing their phones, similarly (if more aggressively) to how Google drives customers from one product to another. Whether this remedy will be so far-reaching beyond search I don't know, but in the abstract there would be benefits to splitting up the conglomerate.
An easier example would be Microsoft and Office; you could spin off an application like that quite successfully, the same might apply to their ERP. But those examples only stem from the fact that they used to be isolated 'offline' products, and Microsoft is working hard to undo that.
Trying to draw parallels between that and Google Workspace, that is a technical nightmare considering the entire distributed nature means that half of workspace can't exist outside of Google. You'd have to copy Google to host it outside of it, and I'm not talking about GCP or Borg or anything like that, it's everything, from the GSLB to Zanzibar, from monorail to the custom hardware everything runs on. Perhaps a double-digit years long refactor could change that, but nobody wants to pay for that.
Given that monopoly-breakups are supposed to be in the public interest, it is a complicated argument to make in court that the public is advantaged by all those ancillary services getting killed. Now, I'm happy to declare that; I think the "culture of free" is corrosive, to probably an even greater degree than most other HN users. I'm outright willing to call it morally corrosive, for both the companies and the consumers. You, dear $READER, may not be inclined to go that far, especially perhaps on the consumer side. I'm just putting down my cards so that you can see that when I point out that in court that's going to be a difficult argument, it's an admission against my interests and biases.
Google is similar. They make money on ads and everything else is a distant second. Even search might have trouble standing on its own because it is funded on ad revenue; split them up that way and how is search getting funded? Google Cloud could certainly survive on its own for a time, but if it had to reduce investment it could go into an uncompetitive death spiral of having to match investment resources to profits over the years. Gmail could in principle make radically more money if they charged $5/month or something, but how many customers will do that?
And how on Earth would you even break up Android? You can't just hack it out as its own thing; it integrates with a lot of Google things and there's no way they'd all end up in the same entity.
I'm willing to just hack them to pieces and let the market figure it out. I think in the long term we'd come out stronger. But I'm arguing here in a relatively friendly forum for that and probably a lot of you still disagree with me. I'd hate to be arguing this in court.
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Browsers need to be a utility.
Email needs to at least have an option that is a utility.
Arguably operating systems need to be a utility.
Adtech needs to either go back to what it was when Google started out (simple contextual ads, no targeting, no data collection, no flashing or popups or video or or or or...), or just die.[0]
The reason these things have all been operated entirely by for-profit entities up to this point is because they're too new for government to have caught up. All the parts of Google that I've named above as needing to be utilities are fundamental, necessary parts of the modern internet, and are basic requirements for the average person to operate in Western society.
> How would spinning off an individual business like Chrome, Android, or AdWords reduce their respective dominance?
As for this question, Google uses the profit from its dominance in adtech to fund its dominance in other businesses. That's the textbook definition of an abusive monopoly. Take away the ad money from the other parts of Google, and they'll no longer have an unfair advantage over potential competitors.
[0] Yes, this would mean that large parts of the internet that have been free-at-the-point-of-service will have to find new business models or dry up and blow away. No, I don't have a silver bullet solution to this. No, I'm not advocating for nuking adtech from orbit overnight with no replacement.
Both are open source projects with "ungoogled" options available, but those options are nowhere near as successful as the Google flavors. Would they just forbid Google from offering their own flavor of Chromium?
Even though Android itself is open source, Google Play services really are what allow Google to have so much influence on the Android platform. So what happens to Google Play? Would they be forced to split that off with Android? Would they be forced to continue offering their services for free, but with no strings attached? Would Android have to offer a middleware that lets you choose which services to use a la carte? Would Android device manufacturers have to ship their devices with an open source alternative to Google Play like microG?
How do you separate Google from Android without driving everyone to the other side of the smartphone duopoly, iOS?
If a breakup does happen, it's going to be wild. I wish I had more faith in our government to come up with the best solution. But something has to be done.
Then if you add that Chrome enforces how browser experiences are designed and how tracking is done, you see the problem emerging.
The hard part is turning that staggering amount of unstructured data into a useful search engine, and in particular fighting off black-hat SEO.
Vimeo has tried a different approach, but it's hardly in the same league as YouTube.
For instances if Android phones were allowed to not make Google the default search engine, for Apple to ask each user which engine they want instead of there being a default, for query and click through data needing to be shared at cost with other search engine companies, Chrome not being allowed to default to Google but require user input, and so on. Lots of options and more than one remedy can be applied simultaneously.
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Maybe we do want to make everything a little worse for the average customer so that more businesses can compete in the marketplace. But I, for one, will miss being able to attach Drive content smoothly to my emails, or being able to use my voice to trigger map navigation on my phone.
Because we think interfering with the free market is necessary when a company misuses market power, not solely when it is a behemoth.
The Gilded Age Trusts were brought down regardless as to whether they misused their power. It wasn’t just oil.
Monopolies are like a positive feedback loop which causes the market to diverge into a barely functional state
It doesn’t matter if they abused their market position, monopolies are to be corrected, mens rea present or not
See the point here? All of Google pieces are a giant machine to collude in the same direction: their ad engine.
It's not particularly bundled to the ad engine.
ATT WAS phone service in the U.S. 90% of the U.S used ATT when it was broken up, and much of that 90% had no alternative.
With Google if another better search engine did appear you could switch in minutes.
And if you consider Android a monopoly then you'd have to consider iOS one too, and that's one much more obvious in it's user impact with a 30% cut being taken on the only app store you can install apps from.
If you don't like default X being purchased, pass a law. Otherwise we'll just be back here in a few years later if some other company becomes unpopular.
Billions (probably trillions) of dollars are spent every year on advertising through other channels than Google, including online. Let's stick to reality.
A breakup would separate the major services: Google search, YouTube, the ad business (DoubleClick et al), etc.. However, even then, the ad business probably needs to be broken up further.
This should all have been done much earlier, at least 5 and maybe even 10 years ago. Now Google is so entrenched that it will be difficult. One assumes that the government is more powerful than a corporation, but once you look into just how members of Congress so quicly become millionaires, well...
So we are in a world today where things like Android, Chrome, and the default search experience on an iPhone are all what they are because of Google's need to build moats around the GooDubClick cash cow. More importantly it's really hard to compete with these things unless you have a GooDubClick cash cow of your own, which guess what basically nobody does. Decouple them and that will start to change, there will be many businesses that will take all sorts of novel approaches, and that is what we refer to as "innovation" when we are being pragmatic and un-cynical about what innovation is, it's a dozen or a thousand companies throwing new stuff out there and sooner or later some of it sticks and the world changes.
NOTHING is natural about what Google is today unless you consider the FTC not doing its job for 15-20 years "natural."
Middleman platforms often become natural monopolies due to network effects, but how does this expand to tech products in general?
I don't see any structural incentives that lead to natural monopolies in search, email, or a wide variety of other products that Google is dominant in.
Maybe even demanded that certain too effective components were separated like adds. Or with Amazon retail from AWS.
Based on what evidence? Isn't the simpler explanation "VC wants big return; VC funds tech; therefore VC encourages monopolies"?
YouTube, Search, Email, advertising, are all controlled by the same people and that is a problem for freedom and the economy.
There are giant incentives to keep the ecosystem as it is.
Isn't it time to think about either (a) just accepting that you give them a much wider birth or (b) be much faster and tactical in your enforcement. Not every monopoly case needs to result in a break up. If you could point at one bad thing Google did - maybe the Apple deal for example, get that in court quickly with fast penalties that don't require massive corporate interference maybe we would be better off.
Google was incorporated 26 years ago, in 1998. Microsoft was founded in 1975, 26 years before US v. Microsoft was decided. Google is exactly as old as Microsoft was at the time, and while it's harder to measure my sense is that their stranglehold on search is at least as long and at least as unassailable as Microsoft's was in OSes.
You can't have it be both too early to go after Google and yet too late to have gone after Microsoft.
I kind of am asking to have it both ways - they should be able to move against these companies earlier by levying smaller sanctions. That way they don't need 1 big killer case to get a judge to order the entire company broken up or spun off.
This is like requiring overwhelming evidence that a radiation source caused a particular case of cancer—not other problems, like birth defects, just cancer, and we’re gonna assume the cancer wasn’t caused by the radiation source until you can convince us otherwise—before being able to move against an actor exposing the public to radiation.
> If you could point at one bad thing Google did...
Agree. But then there are the more nebulous ones — like Google's ad/search entanglement.
What UI are you imagining? Perhaps no search engine at all in the browser but the first time a user goes to "search" you present them with a list of random-sorted search engines?
Maybe the problem was that Apple has "that default option for sale."
The lawsuit started under Trump DOJ as a political stunt because Google resembled wokeness and the party of freedom and family values (Republicans) wanted to show how tough they are to their constituents.
A few republican states also filed similar lawsuits in tandem which all got lumped together into this lawsuit.
Then the Biden came to power and kept at it because, well, he did keep a lot of Trump initiatives and now the DOJ people think they're some kind of a hero for working on this case.
Should suing Google really the highest priority for the administration? I don't think so but here we are.
Okay ... that is some serious wishcasting.
Chromium especially is so core to being a building block for applications and the modern Internet nowadays, it does seem like this core infrastructure piece should be more collectively owned.