IMHO, the real issue with Google isn't the control of the web browser, but the complete vertical integration of the ad space. Divest Google of its position as the ad broker (i.e., unwind its acquisition of DoubleClick), and prohibit any sort of privileged data flow from Google to ex-Google Ads, and you'd probably have a more viable solution than the poking DoJ is trying to do right now.
Why? Google develops ad-supported software, they run their own ad placement service for it, and they allow others to use that service to run ads on their own sites. I think there's a bit of a conflict of interest between running the website ranking service and running an ad service that ranked websites can choose to use, but that's minor compared to also controlling the browsing platform.
If Google started ranking sites that use AdSense higher than other sites, you could probably prove that in court fairly easily — your lawyers would make them hand over their ranking code during discovery, and it would say `if (usesAdSense) score++`, and you'd win.
But if they made (are making) subtle web platform changes via their control of the browsing platform that hurt competitors and help Google, that's extremely difficult to prove. Look at third-party cookies, for example.
This first one is about dominant market position by paying for placement on all surfaces (iPhone, Firefox, etc.) plus chrome. So splitting off chrome and android make sense in the context of the suit.
With the Privacy Sandbox Google already prepared for their sell side ad business to be sold. With the ad auctioning logic and data flow being handled directly in Chrome PS they wouldn't need GAM anymore and would probably easily accept this part to be split. And it could even reinforce their vertical integration.
On the other hand with no direct access to the browser and no 3rd party cookies anymore, they would probably be less relevant for media buyers on the open web, which could open a good chunk of the market for other ad platforms.
You have to wonder if Google didn't somehow maneuver the DOJ into telling them to do something that's going to result in higher costs and user inconvenience, as opposed to something effective like you've proposed here.
On the other hand, Google would argue that Doubleclick is Google, and everything else Google does is just to create channels for ads, and acquire data for ad targeting and pricing.
I think Google should just be split up into baby Google's that each have to cooperate with each other. Like we did with Bell. Also we should do the same thing to Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook. In fact I think we should do it again to AT&T and also Comcast. This should probably be done every so often as maintenance.
The problem with Google, Meta, Amazon, et. al. is that they have a steady stream of income from their main business, and use it to enter new markets with loss leader schemes obviously designed to destroy their pre-existing competition...
I'm not from the US, but it seems to me like the companies you mention stay in their respective market and don't try to destroy competition in other markets, like Walmart is a supermarket chain, UnitedHealth is just health insurance, Exxon just deals with gas, JPMorgan Chase is just a bank, etc...,
meanwhile Google operated YouTube, Chrome, Gmail and other services at significant losses for years up until the point where they basically have monopoly in those areas because the competition couldn't keep up with Google's free products, and now when the competition is destroyed, they are destroying these free services with increased pricing or ads, neither of which were there while they still had competition in those spheres...
The egg cartel, the potato cartel, the corn cartel, almost every food resource silo has its own monopsony or monopoly of some kind in the USA or globally. In the USA at least it seems many of these things are constructed to avoid the letter of the old laws around monopoly.
Yeah but it's also not great when Amazon can undercut their way into every market because AWS is a crazy cash cow, which hurt other US companies. Do you really need Amazon to be a "second government" who can decide what "you" buy, see and to some degree think.
It "works" in China where the government just stomps their feet if companies misbehave too much and everyone complies instantly or get replaced.
Edit: s/Amazon/Jeff Bezos/g?
We have megacorps in EU too, Airbus and Lidl comes to mind, though I don't think Lidl operates anything but their main business outside of Germany, in Sweden we have Lidl grocery stores however.
Breaking monopolies doesn't kneecap US companies. Noncompetitive markets do that. Forcing healthy competition is how we keep competitive advantage, failing to do so is how we lose it. See: Deepseek
Seen this argument a lot recently, it's a really interesting take that I wouldn't have really considered before.
The common argument for breaking up monopolies is to provide more competition in the key area, since monopolies tend to focus efforts on things that don't benefit the consumer (like buying out smaller companies to stop them existing).
From that view, monopolies don't really benefit the US, if anything it stops the US market functioning competitively, and eventually running themselves into the ground.
I guess the other view is that "somebody is going to have a monopoly so why shouldn't it be my country?", but I'd say that ignores the fact that you can just curb other non-competitive behaviour fron foreign countries, like the EU has been trying to do with Apple and Google.
Smaller companies would be more nimble and efficient. Also, Google’s main dominant product (e.g. search & ads) would be forced to compete & innovate vs leveraging Chrome & Android to keep themselves dominant.
I've noticed that the bigger a company gets, the shittier they get. I don't think the answer to the threats posed by countries like Russia and China lies in consolidating our markets under an oligarchy of bloated mega-corps.
Smaller companies are faster, more agile, and hungry for success. This breeds market competition, spurring innovation and rendering better products for the consumer. The Amazons and Googles and Microsofts of the world have largely outlived their purpose and only exist to hoover up money in their cornered markets rather than innovate.
I think with the current monopolistic trajectory there will not be the next generation of US companies because current companies just buy up everything that shows any kind of potential. There's no benefit to society from trillion-dollar companies - they don't need to innovate and they have the power to stop any would-be competitors.
and how does your worldview work in practice? a protected and empowered US/Western conglomerate is more motivated innovate and outcompete mega corps of Russia/China/latest-boogieman and destroys them because of this? or is the point to just say: well Russia/China have their own mediocre protected conglomerates lets have ours too?
Both of those countries dislike powerful, large corporations because they are a base of power that could compete with the state or party. The Wagner Group comes to mind. But China also did a huge crackdown affecting companies like Alibaba and Tencent.
There's no reason why there can't be international co-operation on this subject.
I'm happy to let China and Russia be the global leaders in panopticons and mass propaganda for their citizens. Google and Meta would be no great loss for Americans.
Browser development doesnt need to go as fast as Google is pushing it. Its OK to slow down and not push new features and standards all the time. It doesnt need to be as expensive as Google is making it.
If Mozilla can make up a significant portion of funding by selling default search engine placement, I'm sure an independent Chrome could get 10x that (based on userbase/usage) and be reasonably self-sufficient for continued browser development.
The owner of Chrome could go to the manufactures of any non Apple phone and tablet and ask them royalties to ship Chrome with their phones. Maintenance releases included. Per unit royalty, flat, whatever they agree upon. The alternative would be Firefox or any other browser, which would have an incentive to follow suit. Or build their own browser. Samsung has one. They might leave the desktop browser free or as Microsoft for money. After all they would be developing the engine used by Edge. Again the alternative would be resuming the development of their own engine, starting with forking Blink.
The owner of Android could do the same. There is a long history of OS licensed to phone manufacturers. The incentive for manufacturers to keep using a common OS is probably much bigger than keep installing Chrome: nobody wants to sell phones without apps and nobody wants to pay developers to develop four or five versions of the same app. Think about home banking or games. Web apps might be enough and I very welcome that, but they are not enough for everything especially on low specs devices.
That’s sort of the point, right? The monopoly laws are designed to go after companies that are using their monopoly position in one market to subsidize other product lines to keep out competition.
Whats weird is that nobody has tried to sell browsers for a very long time. It's not like they gave away Chrome to drive some other browser out of the market.
They developed Chrome because their business was web based and they wanted a solid platform for their apps.
And we all benefited from that stable platform. And it's mostly open source in Chromium. And they are paying Mozilla to stay in the game - an arms length, independent implementation of standards.
I think its wrong to suggest what they should have done is build an entire walled garden like Apple has done.
Update: I think the important part of your statement was "too keep out competition." I don't see how developing and giving away Chrome is stifling the browser market.
I can see how paying other people to make Google search default might stifling the search market, but that has nothing to do with Chrome.
I agree that's what the laws are supposed to go after, but forced sale or divestment seems like the wrong remedy here.
Force Google to charge money for the service, or to pay a portion of imputed stolen revenue to competitors. But Chrome itself is not a viable business without the huge fountain of money that is search ads.
Honest question: who are the potential realistic buyers of Chrome? OS vendors already have their own browsers and Chrome doesn't directly make much (any?) money.
Nobody is going to buy it given the perverse incentives set in the last two decades. However, Chrome does have value to SaaS providers making use of browsers as frontends, and it should be possible to setup a foundation for Chrome maintenance. Funding could also come from the "ad industry" or what's left of it. If however it turns out Google plus very few other actors (Fb) will totally dominate this consortium once again, then obviously there must be additional measures, such as selling YT and/or DoubleClick.
Google pays many companies tens of billions to make sure Google Search is the default engine on a variety of browsers.
Something tells me a product that can garner billions of dollars will do just fine if sliced away. If Google gives firefox $500million to be the default search at 5% user share, they should pay Chrome $20 billion for the same privilege.
The true damage that should be done is to separate Gmail + workspaces, Maps, Youtube, GCP, Android, and Search as their own separate entities then undo the DoubleClick merger.
It doesnt need to be sustained at the level Google is pushing it.
Development could slow down considerably and it wouldnt harm anything, in fact it would do just what the DoJ wants and make it a fairer playing field for other browsers to catch up and compete.
Hadn't though about openai, which does seem like a possible interested party. The problem for them however is that they make money from subscriptions, not ads which presumably makes it much harder to monetize via control of the browser.
I don't mean this because he is topical but Musk makes the most sense. In the same way Brave has Brave Wallet, if Musk really wants to force his X Pay and Wallet on the world, integrating with the most popular browser is a solid move.
A point that is often overlooked in discussions of this, which seems huge: they would also be banned from buying search engine dominance (as in, the primary source of Mozilla's revenue).
"Similarly, Google would be prevented from pressuring its partners to use Google search or AI services over the competition."
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If Google started ranking sites that use AdSense higher than other sites, you could probably prove that in court fairly easily — your lawyers would make them hand over their ranking code during discovery, and it would say `if (usesAdSense) score++`, and you'd win.
But if they made (are making) subtle web platform changes via their control of the browsing platform that hurt competitors and help Google, that's extremely difficult to prove. Look at third-party cookies, for example.
This first one is about dominant market position by paying for placement on all surfaces (iPhone, Firefox, etc.) plus chrome. So splitting off chrome and android make sense in the context of the suit.
On the other hand, Google would argue that Doubleclick is Google, and everything else Google does is just to create channels for ads, and acquire data for ad targeting and pricing.
I believe that this will happen though, at some point in the next few years.
I'm not from the US, but it seems to me like the companies you mention stay in their respective market and don't try to destroy competition in other markets, like Walmart is a supermarket chain, UnitedHealth is just health insurance, Exxon just deals with gas, JPMorgan Chase is just a bank, etc...,
meanwhile Google operated YouTube, Chrome, Gmail and other services at significant losses for years up until the point where they basically have monopoly in those areas because the competition couldn't keep up with Google's free products, and now when the competition is destroyed, they are destroying these free services with increased pricing or ads, neither of which were there while they still had competition in those spheres...
If the feds kneecap US companies, it's not going to make the next generation of US companies stronger, just cede influence to worse jurisdictions.
It "works" in China where the government just stomps their feet if companies misbehave too much and everyone complies instantly or get replaced.
Edit: s/Amazon/Jeff Bezos/g?
We have megacorps in EU too, Airbus and Lidl comes to mind, though I don't think Lidl operates anything but their main business outside of Germany, in Sweden we have Lidl grocery stores however.
The common argument for breaking up monopolies is to provide more competition in the key area, since monopolies tend to focus efforts on things that don't benefit the consumer (like buying out smaller companies to stop them existing).
From that view, monopolies don't really benefit the US, if anything it stops the US market functioning competitively, and eventually running themselves into the ground.
I guess the other view is that "somebody is going to have a monopoly so why shouldn't it be my country?", but I'd say that ignores the fact that you can just curb other non-competitive behaviour fron foreign countries, like the EU has been trying to do with Apple and Google.
If other countries are doing something to advantage themselves relative to that, there’s tariffs or other ways to relevel the playing field.
Worked pretty well when they broke AT&T and not only got an extremely innovative lab full of small projects, but also kickstarted the internet era.
Smaller companies are faster, more agile, and hungry for success. This breeds market competition, spurring innovation and rendering better products for the consumer. The Amazons and Googles and Microsofts of the world have largely outlived their purpose and only exist to hoover up money in their cornered markets rather than innovate.
There's no reason why there can't be international co-operation on this subject.
Dead Comment
Amazon (the retailer portion) and AWS, and probably their logistics wing
Google will make their own proposal, I think. Then the judge will decide.
Then 50 years of appeals.
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How does Chrome make income? Isn't it basically developed at a loss, but it makes money for Google's other business units?
The owner of Android could do the same. There is a long history of OS licensed to phone manufacturers. The incentive for manufacturers to keep using a common OS is probably much bigger than keep installing Chrome: nobody wants to sell phones without apps and nobody wants to pay developers to develop four or five versions of the same app. Think about home banking or games. Web apps might be enough and I very welcome that, but they are not enough for everything especially on low specs devices.
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They developed Chrome because their business was web based and they wanted a solid platform for their apps.
And we all benefited from that stable platform. And it's mostly open source in Chromium. And they are paying Mozilla to stay in the game - an arms length, independent implementation of standards.
I think its wrong to suggest what they should have done is build an entire walled garden like Apple has done.
Update: I think the important part of your statement was "too keep out competition." I don't see how developing and giving away Chrome is stifling the browser market.
I can see how paying other people to make Google search default might stifling the search market, but that has nothing to do with Chrome.
Force Google to charge money for the service, or to pay a portion of imputed stolen revenue to competitors. But Chrome itself is not a viable business without the huge fountain of money that is search ads.
Something tells me a product that can garner billions of dollars will do just fine if sliced away. If Google gives firefox $500million to be the default search at 5% user share, they should pay Chrome $20 billion for the same privilege.
The true damage that should be done is to separate Gmail + workspaces, Maps, Youtube, GCP, Android, and Search as their own separate entities then undo the DoubleClick merger.
That would be true justice.
- ecom (amazon?)
- AI (openai?)
"Similarly, Google would be prevented from pressuring its partners to use Google search or AI services over the competition."