Google is a monopoly. The fix isn't obvious After more than 15 years of insisting that "competition is only a click away," Google's antitrust mantra is no longer keeping the regulators at bay. Back in 2013, Google escaped unscathed from a US Federal Trade Commission probe when the watchdog agency closed its investigation without bringing charges. Its other run-ins with …
Be careful what you wish for. In the ad-slinging game the profitablity comes from their customers, the advertisers, so a fight for profitability might kick off the race to more privacy-busting profiling and tracking for consumers. I'm not disagreeing that Google has a stranglehold that needs to be broken but as a consumer of Google's products I'd like a lot of thought to be given to the potential outcomes and how consumers are protected before any solutions are jumped at.
Also - I think that this has got a long way to run yet. Google will drag this all the way to the Supreme Court before giving up and use the time to position itself to profit from whatever break-up scenario ensues should they lose the case and be broken up.
> but as a consumer of Google's products I'd like a lot of thought to be given to the potential outcomes and how consumers are protected before any solutions are jumped at.
I'm not sure whether this was your intention, but this translated to me as follows: "as a hostage, I don't want you to annoy the hostage-taker too much, because, when this hostage situation is over, I still want them to occasionally play hostage:hostage-taker with me but with real guns and real beatings"
This by itself demonstrates how much google needs to be broken up. The point is that google is too powerful, too pervasive, and too unavoidable. The solution and point is to make google avoidable!
I don't think that's how it translates. Using your analogy, I'd translate it as this: "as a hostage, I don't want you to annoy the hostage-taker too much because they might split into two smaller hostage-takers each more evil than the original one, both of them holding me hostage". I suppose the analogy doesn't work very well.
The concerns are relevant. If you split Chrome off from the rest of Google, you've now got a lot of people who make a browser and no money. Google only makes a profit from Chrome due to their advertising and data collection. Both of those wouldn't be there anymore. All the Chrome developers want to keep their jobs and get paid. How can this be accomplished? A lot of the possibilities are bad, even worse than what Google does with it. Perhaps the best approach is for Chrome to simply cease to exist with the wreckage picked up by Microsoft's Edge team, whoever makes Brave, and some people can go to Mozilla or Apple to work on a different browser, but there are worse options, like everyone's data collected from Chrome sold to the highest bidder, then again to the next highest bidder, then on down the list. As bad as Google's collection from Chrome is, they're not doing that. Thus, preventing stuff like that should be part of any good breakup process to prevent the parts from causing even more damage. It's not necessary to be nice to Google, after all the whole point is that Google will cease to exist, but to limit the damage to users when it happens.
They have a strangle hold because very few people want to use a different browser!
Microsoft had a strangle hold on the browser market but their browser was shit and MS has never been able to successfully leverage that advantage to build an advertising platform. Hell, they had the default home page for years and couldn't turn a profit on that!
I am no Google fan at all, but this insanity that a company is a monopoly because the vast majority of the people want to use their product, is BS!
The problem is, back when Google started no one else believed that could make money at this with just advertising, the ones that tried all failed! Now they are all crying because they didn't have the foresight or skills to make it work!
As far as the Play Store the issue is the same with Apple. Do you want to turn Android and Apply into the wild west of Windows? Will we be forced to run Anti-Virus on all our phones? The problem with payment processing is if an app publisher wants to use a different payment processor then it has to be vetted as secure and legit. Who is the arbiter of that!
We've become a world full of childish beggars! From the pan handler on the street to corporate beggars! "I've become a failure at life and business, government please take care of me! WHAAAAHH!
Remember, the breakup of Standard Oil only make Rockefeller richer!
The breakup of AT&T was a total cluster fuck!
If you think government will make things better you are a fool!
Govt intervention doesn't always turn out for the best
However The following DID have a positive impact
Pure Food and Drug Act
Federal Meat Inspection Act
Creation of the EPA - "The American conversation about protecting the environment began in the 1960s. Rachel Carson had published her attack on the indiscriminate use of pesticides, Silent Spring, in 1962. Concern about air and water pollution had spread in the wake of disasters. An offshore oil rig in California fouled beaches with millions of gallons of spilled oil. Near Cleveland, Ohio, the Cuyahoga River, choking with chemical contaminants, had spontaneously burst into flames. Astronauts had begun photographing the Earth from space, heightening awareness that the Earth’s resources are finite."
Funny how those who wax lyrical about the "good old days" and cling to "the market will solve itself" to claim regulation is a bad thing and govt intervention won't help gloss over rivers bursting into flames, horrendous smog etc.....
I don't think anyone, apart from a few fundamentalists and the University of Chicago econ department (I repeat myself), actually believes that the market will solve anything. What they usually mean is "the status quo is working out fine for me and someone else is bearing the consequences, so let's keep my grift going."
I use FF like 95% or more of the time. But there are certain sites that just don't work right on FF.
I switch over to Chrome or Edge just long enough to do what I must, and then return to FF.
Site creators should support FF, but also vendor prefixes need to go away, and all user agents need to be fully on standards.
I end up despising companies whose sites don't work with FF.
Break up Google how, exactly? Split Google Search away from the paid search ads which still functionally pay for Google's search? That still leaves one company with a monopoly on Google Search and one company with a monopoly on those paid search ads.
There is a real and significant risk here of a similar breakup to AT&T's '80s breakup, which only resulted in a number of local monopolies instead of a national monopoly for telecommunication for a long time.
The same risk exists for Google's Banner advertising offering, Google Analytics, Google Search Ads 360, Google Looker Studio/Looker Pro/Looker, Google Drive, Google Chrome etc.
I hate Google with a passion, but if they're going to get got on their BS, they need to be got right.
"That still leaves one company with a monopoly on Google Search and one company with a monopoly on those paid search ads."
I think it's slightly worse then that, let's say you do break search and ads, how does search make money at that point? Right now search is given away to drive the advertising behemoth, and the same can be said for much of Big G.
I can see splitting off Android, Fi, maybe YouTube (I think they are independently profitable on their own ads now), but the rest? I don't see how it works.
how does search make money at that point?
That's easy — by selling space for ads. If Google Search is separated from Google Ads, it is Google Search that will be the most profitable company, by demanding 90% of revenue of whoever they allow to serve ads next to search results (likely Google Ads, but theoretically it could be Bing Ads as well). Because users will flock to Google Search know matter which ads it has.
Far easier to simply ban third party advertising. Whatever changes or breakups the new hydras will simply become just as bad for basically the same reasons. The simple answer is ban third party advertising and everyone except for Google shareholders wins.
there were some positives from the at&t breakup. we got the mickey mouse phone, and we got modems that plugged directly into the phone jack with speeds greater than 300 baud which as i remember was all that was available under at&t. definately some downsides, but some upsides also. SO still around changed its name to ESSO and now exxon.
Not sure regional Googles will work.
If you want to search for a company in California you go to Google.ca.USA and they get all the ad revenue for California domiciled companies.
It would also allow state Googles to be able to customise their search offerings to the local legal requirements
I think your map shop example gives a clue.
I don’t think the problem is the size of Google and its ilk The bigger problem is the laws that are NOT in place to stop the horrendous business practices these companies employ to get where they are.
If (for example) dodgy profiling of customers to provide targeted advertising was outlawed then Google’s advertising business would fall off a cliff. Advertising works go away though - it would just revert back to how it used to be done. And many more (smaller) companies would get on in the act on a level playing field
Other examples include the sneaky use of Captchs (however you spell it) which serves little purpose above tracking people in a way they don’t know is happening. Again, there should be laws in place to stop stuff like this.
The only reason chrome exists is to track users and gather information from them. Again, this should be outlawed. Google would very quickly lose interest in maintaining a loss leader like chrome if all that lovely data wasn’t forthcoming
The problem is not the business size - it’s what it (and others) are allowed to get away with that is the real problem
If (for example) dodgy profiling of customers to provide targeted advertising was outlawed then Google’s advertising business would fall off a cliff.
That's a common misconception, but Google is actually the ad company that needs profiling the least — they have billions of users who keep coming to their website and directly tell them what they are searching for. They can serve contextual ads and could probably mostly ignore profiles. Facebook on the other hand can do nothing without profiling, because people don't search for anything on Facebook — they expect Facebook to know what kind of content they like, i.e. have a profile of them.
If ad profiling is forbidden for everybody, Google is the company who will profit.
An issue is the fact that after a break-up of a monopolist, you get a plethora of smaller companies serving the same market segments the monopolist used to. That is all well and good, but what inevitably happens is an oligopoly arises from the ashes of the monopolist that do everything they can to maximize their profits as a group. You saw it with AT&T, and you'll see it again after the breakup of Google.
What will be interesting to see is which parts of Google's technology empire are bound to which sub-companies after the breakup. You certainly won't see a "G-Software Technology" business, because Google doesn't make its money from its software. I'd like to see all that technology open sourced under Apache2, which would allow all the potential new competitors to leverage the same tools Google was prior to the breakup.
But you are definitely right about one thing: consumer protection laws in both Canada and the US are heavily stacked in favour of corporate profiteering, not fair markets and behaviour.
See also the half baked attempts (and yes plural) to stop bt using openreach as a weapon. What's happened is that they have had to grudgingly stop the worst of the antics, but their attitude towards the general public still stinks (purposely done "oh you aren't our customer, the ISP is our customer, you are theirs" - funny how Transco and the electrical DNOs don't tell you to phone your gas supplier or electricity supplier....no they just come out and sort the fault, not kludge solutions to kinda make it work and then smear the end user with malicious and false allegations - yes been on the receiving end of this BS from openreach), their staff have a terrible attitude and still act like it's the bad old days of the 1970s where they were the only telecoms supplier and an arm of the GPO, generally combative and hostile attitude towards both isps and end users, acting like they aren't subject to ofcom oversight and worse.
Openreach need not only turned into a network rail style non profit but also a purge of their "culture" by cutting out ALL of the deadwood both engineering staff and managerial staff as those elements are beyond redemption
"Imagine a Meta operating Google Play, and what the privacy disclosures would look like then."
They do operate an app store, with an expectedly long and incomprehensible privacy policy. It's just for VR apps, which are technically Android apps, since their OS is forked from it. They don't have a monopoly, so they behave, mostly. Icon because it's what we all are these days.
Perhaps the buying and selling of businesses should be outlawed. This was supposedly done with slavery in the USA. It could be done with businesses too.
There are lots of stories out there of competition getting bought up just to close them down so there's less competition, etc...
I'm sure there would be complected issues in implementing this. Like, What to do about businesses that already have done, or only doing this? In some cases it maybe better for customers to have a few companies rather than several smaller companies. What about companies that also operate in other countries? What about existing agreements that maybe counter to this idea? ...
A lot can be learned from 1861 America and slavery. Back then enough churches brainwashed people into accepting the evil practice of slavery, when the obvious cruelty and inhumanity was visible in front of their very eyes. Today we have a new form of brainwashing and at the core of that structure is the modern advertising megacorps like Google. If you really want to make the world a better place, ban third party slavery, then people will start to standup for themselves and change the evil greed of corporations eroding their human rights and stopt hem from selling their intellectual property and mass surveilance.
It won't work. There are lots of situations where a company can buy another company that don't result in monopolies. The restrictions are usually placed just on buying the competition, and even then there are times where that is necessary. Many of the situations you describe probably wouldn't work out differently if buying the competition was banned. Instead of driving a company into a tricky situation, then buying them, a powerful competitor could just drive them further into the situation until they couldn't operate, then set up shop wherever they pulled out.
Regulation is needed, but it won't be something that can be easily stated in a paragraph. There is no quick fix that will work on Google, let alone all companies everywhere.
If regulation pre-emptively bans a product or practice because it might be harmful, then that kills innovation stone dead. Almost every food, drug, product, behaviour has some downsides, they will create some harms, often along with many benefits. It is rarely possible to predict that balance in advance, even after the event it all seems so obvious. As a result, in the US and most of the Anglophone world anything is permitted unless explicitly banned or limited. Regulators then try and sweep after things have gone wrong, and anything that requires new laws takes years to grind through the legislative process. Maybe you'd like regulation to be more powerful, faster, forward thinking and proactive, but that's a dangerous place to go, since in democracies the model is that power sits with the politicians excepting specifically delegated narrow exceptions.
Then there's the problem of lobbying. Many secretaries of state spend more time being lobbied by corporations than they spend talking with and listening to their own officials (voters? they're much further down the pecking order, after travelling salesmen and door to door evangelists). And it's not just the time, there's the party or campaign donations, the offer of jobs when the politco leaves office (or a nice internship for the kid). Also to be noted is the calibre and resource corporations put into lobbying - there's an entire dark industry of for-hire lobbyists, the top players are paid millions, the people sent to meet the secretary will be picked for either or both brains and beauty. A major improvement could be made by simply banning all form of direct or indirect corporate lobbying, sadly this won't happen.
>A major improvement could be made by simply banning all form of direct or indirect corporate lobbying, sadly this won't happen.
Leaving only churches, pressure groups, unions and politically motivated individuals to lobby for their desired outcome?
An example of this is the FDA. I very much appreciate the FDA's work in cleaning up the medicine market; now if you go to buy medicine of any kind in the US, you can be assured that it's been tested for safety and effectiveness. (Except for the "homeopathic" stuff often sitting ON THE SAME SHELF which is just water and sometimes flavoring. Medicine "not tested by the FDA" should mean medicine "not sellable". But I digress.)
But look at a number of our foods. Cheese, bread, sauerkraut, kumis, beer, anything fermented would have been prohibited for sale if the FDA had existed when they were created. "What do you mean, you want to INTENTIONALLY put microorganisms into the food and let them grow, then sell the result? No!"
The appropriate balance is a very delicate thing. Too much restriction, and innovation disappears. Too little, and people are harmed, whether financially or physically. The sweet spot is hard to hit.
Exactly ban third party advertising and suddenly so many problems disappear.
No more FB, X, Google, no more Ms and ads...
No More fake medicine, vitamins, no more tv evangelists etc
Its such a simple solution and has so many positive benefits,e verything else is dumb.
Do you people EVER think about the ramifications of your ideas and the destruction they can cause?
If your idea existed 20 years ago I would not have the job I have today. Working for great company! The only reason my employer has a presence in the United States is by acquiring faltering US companies and building them up here in the US. Were all the acquisitions successful? No. The ones that are, are doing very well here now, providing quality jobs for over 6000 employees!
cliff: Do you people EVER think about the ramifications of your ideas and the destruction they can cause?
cow: yes i do, i always give examples of the positive benefits and how they help the masses.
cliff:If your idea existed 20 years ago I would not have the job I have today. Working for great company
cow: Like all aresholes you fail to appreciate the greater good for the masses, all you think about is yourself. You would have a job somewhere else, no big deal.
cliff: The ones that are, are doing very well here now, providing quality jobs for over 6000 employees!
cow: What next you want to complain that cigarette advertising should be allowed because it provides jobs and who gives a shite about the millions who die miserable deaths from lung cancer ?
You obviously havent actually thought everything thru of the consequences of advertising. As an random individual the world would be a far better place without advertising.
The problem as illustrated in the article is that you can't fix capitalism with capitalism.
I don't know if G needs to be a fully regulated industry, onto itself, but stronger regulations are needed for sure, and maybe a novel "private public partnership" approach say where there is a government compliance officer at the board level .
Will you give it a rest or at least look up what the world was like before regulation was imposed despite industry screaming
- child labour (oh look what's happening in your red / free market states)
- adulterated food
- medicinal "tonics" that either did nothing or contained poisons
- rivers bursting into flames (and in Canada Lake Ontario)
- heavy toxic smogs
- poisoning of the air with lead due to the addition of tetraethyl lead to gasoline leading to lifelong ntellectual impairment in children
"That might encourage the iBiz to compete with Google – by building its own search engine"
Like MS tried to do with Bing, you mean? Good luck with that. Bing is a joke compared to Big G.
"or acquiring one."
Which one? Microsoft won't sell Bing to Apple. Number three on the list is Yahoo! Which! Is! So! Marginal! It's! Not! An! Option! And the rest is even worse: Ask.com, DuckDuckGo... Take your pick.
So... No.
The problem here is the expectation that net profits of 25% - 35% are the norm, not the exception. Vey few companies outside of the likes of Google, Apple, Meta make these sort of margins year after year. Even without Google's money, Apple would still be making margins that most companies can only dream of, and they don't rely it - it's not a survival issue, they're just used to it. There needs to be a reset to the expectation that minimum net returns are over 20% or you're a lame duck. The bubble needs to burst
Not Yahoo, no. Take a quick look at this map - the icon sizes don't represent anything in particular, but you can see that the other independent sources (not front ends) for search are Yandex, Mojeek and Yep. Brave is semi-independent. https://www.searchenginemap.com
Microsoft is much more a strangulating monopoly than Google.
MS has no commercial rivals, Apple and RedHat are niche markets, the middleware, office and Azure offerings make them extremely powerful.
Then fact the DOJ attempts a Mar el Lago on Google now, shows either Google is not bribing, in the shape of election contributions, enough politicians in the USA or the three letter agencies are unhappy with the amount of privacy sensitive user data, named telemetry by MS, Google is willing to share on voluntary basis.
The juicy data that can be extracted from a 90% monopoly is far too tempting to start rocking the MS boat on this, those who do not fully fit in the US NeoCon worldview get either shot, a Mar el Lago show or both.
Trump is blaming Google for everything so at least they (Google) are doing something right (on this point at least)
Just stop using any of their services.
The same goes for the other monopolies.... Amazon and Microsoft.
They can all [see this]
There is a rival for Azure, it's called AWS and it's 1000% better!
What we need is a rival for Microsoft 365 and Exchange Online! There isn't one! Just like there isn't a decent rival for Outlook! Is that MS's fault? No!*
* No, there isn't. All the offerings like those from Google are shit!
Google has long ago learned to indirectly control products. Android is a lot of Linux and open source. Google's iron grip comes from Play Store and pressure on phone manufacturers. It's how Google destroyed numerous features that were making cellphones powerful general computing devices rather than the Google-tethered dumb terminals they dreamed of. Chrome uses the Microsoft playbook of embrace, extend, extinguish.
I'm not convinced Google has a strong monopoly. I think they could lose Search, Android, Maps, Play Store, and Chrome in the blink of an eye. They shit they dump on customers has reached saturation.
Split off Android and the Play store and each phone maker will have their own play store with a subset of apps being available for Samsung on the Samsung store etc.
Most cheap phones will only have no apps, or will point you at an un-monitored off-brand Chinese app store.
And Apple's market share will double
There's Chrome, there's Search, and there's the ads.
Chrome is easy to solve. Make them cut it loose as a non profit open source project like Mozilla, and as a parting gift Google tops up its bank account with enough money to operate for three years. After that, its on its own. Google is barred from offering a browser for 10 years.
Search is probably not that hard to solve either. Break up search between data collection and results provision. That is, Google spins off the crawler that goes and collects the data into a separate for-profit business, which would use Google's cloud for the crawling for the first year or two (because that infrastructure is integrated into their cloud now so it would take time to split out) but eventually that for-profit crawler business could bid with other clouds if they got a better rate. They'd charge Google for access to that database, and it would be open to third parties to similarly access it. Those third parties would offer search alternatives that used different algorithms than Google's, and that would make life harder for SEOs (which makes life better for everyone else) Google is barred from doing its own data collection for Search for 10 years.
The ads business might be solved by taking care of Search (and also by divesting Chrome so they can't hamstring ad blockers) It would take a few years to see the effect of splitting Search up along the data collection and results provision lines, and how many competitors sprung up and what their share was. The better the share they get the less of the overall ad revenue there is going to Google, so I'd hold off on doing anything about ads right away if I could get the first two through.
I wouldn't worry about Android - China has proved it is possible to take the AOSP Android and create your own Android market without Google. If Google gets too big for its britches in the Android world maybe someone like Samsung will think about doing the same.
That's my main concern, that somehow Chrome gets decoupled and taken closed source. Cue 10 more years of open source being set behind and rejected by enterprise for not being able to access required "Chrome-only" web services. Or, worse, everything going openwashed where the closed source browser is happily slurping but people think they're safe because the rest of the OS is open source.
I for one am not keen for a return to the Windows and IE6 days.
Firefox is obviously very very very badly run. They have a revenue of $400 million a year and somehow that's not enough?
1) drop all the other stupid crap IMMEDIATELY and do Firefox and Thunderbird only
2) stop trying to make it a clone of Chrome thinking that'll make people like it more, they should embrace their "power user" base instead of trying to dumb it down
DS999: Firefox is obviously very very very badly run. They have a revenue of $400 million a year and somehow that's not enough?
cow: Where have you been ?
G, F and MS each make close enough to $100B a year and they never stop trying to grab another dollar. The America corpoate board makes crack whores look restrained. F is only doing what America expects no demands of all its boards.
Mozilla (I incorrectly referred to its corporate entity as "Firefox") is a non profit, its board and management don't have any incentive to increase revenue as there are no shareholders to profit. If it has been set up with some dumb system where either the board or executives are compensated based on some percentage of revenue, creating an incentive to increase revenue (and therefore find a way to spend/waste that excess) then I think that falls under "very very very badly run".
A properly run non profit only seeks enough revenue to perform its mission, and doesn't seek additional missions unrelated the reason it was created as justification for looking for more revenue.
Properly run non-profit organisations are very rare in the US or UK. Usually what happens if that lack of strong governance and transparency create entrenched management who pay themselves exorbitant salaries, and sometimes indulge in very dodgy practices and behaviours.
That's not true at all. You hear about the ones where there are abuses, but just about every town has a few non profits that do their mission and pay the people running them modest salaries (or in some cases no salary at all, if they are already of reasonable means) The overwhelming majority of non profits are "well run" by my above definition, they just operate in the background and you don't notice them even if you sometimes rely on some service they provide.
WOw you are blind, so you really believe because they are a non profit they arent going to do the corporate america thing ?
You can be sure that M will simply give away all their profits as bonuses to their board, in the near future which will of course mean they will try and whore their users for more advertising dollars.
That's against federal and most/all state laws. You can't just pay excess profit as "bonuses", doing so will not only be a problem for the non profit, but can lead to criminal sanctions for whoever benefited from or signed off on those bonuses.
Sure there are people like Trump who have abused non profit status and those cases make the headlines, but they made the headlines because he was caught.
DS999: You can't just pay excess profit as "bonuses",
cow : says who ?
Billy Grahams son heads a few charities and those charities have multiple business jets.
THeres something seriously wrong when a charity is allowed to beg for money on tv to send to projects in Africa, and they have multuiple business jets...and yet it happens.
Your statement is utter bullshit.
Splitting out the crawling part of search is an interesting idea. A vast amount of bandwidth and data centre resource must surely be consumed by every search provider doing their own crawling, and is there really any secret sauce in it? They're probably all doing basically the same thing.
But doesn't that risk creating a potentially monopolistic crawling service, which would have a lot of power over the sites being crawled?
No-one has suggested nationalization.
Nationalize Google and turn it into a US national asset. The US and friends largely runs the important bits of the internet anyway and with a light touch too. Divest Google of the requirement to make quite so much money out of us proles and concentrate on quality of results and the entire world would benefit massively.
Why not pop in a department that looks for result quality, that filters out all those crappy blogs?
The entire world would profit.
Oh dear god no - political appointees - trump would demand anything non flattering stripped away, that whatever took his fancy was front and foremost - "coal found to be beautiful and cleanest burning " etc
TLAs would use it to cover up malfeasance by heavily suppressing anything they deemed inconvenient
Android is one of the easiest ones to imagine. They already get funding from device manufacturers. The new Android Corporation would probably still have important things like Google Play Services, whatever they renamed it as, so they could continue to sell licenses to hardware OEMs and use that to fund the OS. I'm sure Google chipped in some extra funding which they won't get anymore, but Android Corp doesn't need to do any of the data collection things that Google asked for, so their workload will decrease as well. If it was failing, some manufacturers might fund the continued development so they still had software for their phones. That depends on manufacturers having gone through enough variants to know that making their own OS with their wonderful new features but without compatibility with phones made by other companies is a bad idea. It's not a guarantee, but compared to many other branches of Google, Android is one that could probably work if it was split off tomorrow.
I would put search, ads, and possibly YouTube and GSuite in that category. I would not put Chrome, Maps, Gmail (the individual one), or many of their more popular products in there. Of course, there are many more services that we could put into one category or another.
Android Corp doesn't need to do any of the data collection things that Google asked for
Plain AOSP is not a great experience now thanks to years of Google-only apps and Google binary blobs. If Android Corp wanted to continue to offer Google services, Google could make data collection part of the deal.
In this scenario, Google wouldn't exist anymore. Various pieces of Google's software would now be Android Corp property. For instance, Google Play Services would not be a Google product because it's part of Android. It would now be Anddroid Corp Play Services or something else. Many of the things you're thinking about that are missing in AOSP would still be closed-source but Google would no longer control them.
That wouldn't necessarily be true of all the preinstalled Google apps. The GMail app, the search app, the Maps app, those might have gone with other parts of Google. The ones that are foundational to Googly Android, though, would be part of the Android company that was spun off.
I'm not sure I understand your argument. In the situation described, most of the Google employees that are driving Android somewhere are still there, still working on Android, and still being paid to do it. Their employee records just don't say Google on them.
I don't think a consortium of manufacturers alone could manage to run Android successfully. While I think there are enough of them that would understand why they can't go off on their own, a slow process would gradually cause one manufacturer after another to try doing it all themselves in order to have software that their competitors haven't got. However, a consortium of manufacturers funding a separate company might be harder to disassemble because the manufacturer that splits off would no longer get the work funded by the others. I base this assumption on the fact that it's basically what Google already does; while I don't know how profitable the Android unit might be, they do get revenue from OEMs and they have prevented more companies from pulling an Amazon and trying a fork. Most forks of Android are one of the following:
1. Ones for China where most Google services don't work, forks I don't want to be running.
2. Custom, made by the community, not really a competitor to any manufacturer, such as Lineage or Graphene.
3. AOSP builds that only exist for unusual hardware, posing no competitive threat.
4. Something like Amazon Fire OS, which could theoretically be a competitor, but it's not being developed as quickly, so if it was truly forked, it wouldn't go very far, and since it hasn't, it has to keep coming back to get the changes to AOSP to keep itself from getting obsolete.
Or, a radical comment here for those worrying about advertising revenue when companies split- why not charge for the service? - gmail without ads a penny a message, however many searches without ads the same, or if that is too hard, pay to 'belong' for a month at a time, When the web was young E-payment was hard - its not any more.
Far more honest about who is serving who.
The hardware of the internet and the services running upon it are not free, in many ways they are more expensive in terms of lost time and effort than if they were paid for in the normal way of a gas bill or whatever, - one could have a system that was more honest about that.
M.
PS I know it wont happen. free internet that exploits you is a right for some reason.
The trouble as always is that Google is often the best choice for searching. I used DuckDuckGo for a while, and at the moment mostly use Bing (for no reason other than getting MS Reward points to pay for Xbox Game Pass), and still often have to resort to Google to find what I'm looking for.
If they lost their market dominance then we, as consumers, would end up with a more fractured market and it would be harder to find things. It would be lovely if search could be handled as a core part of the internet like DNS, but I can't see any way that is possible or could be funded without advertising, never mind all the countries that have strict controls over their internet and what their citizens can see.
No, it's more network effects. People use Google Search because people use Google Search. Just as people used the monopolistic MySpace because people used MySpace.... until they didn't.
Why would you chose to use a phone directory that covered 20% of your city instead of one that covered 95% of your city?
Google *is* the advertising. The services are what they are - tools to get you to view the adverts. Nowhere more obvious than YouTube. That the adverts are shit is reflective of the lack of imagination of advertisers and focus on the 1-in-10000 hit rate.... Content sponsorship being vastly more effective. Watch a programme about board games? Maybe, just maybe, the ads should be linked to that content.
A breakup will never work because the power and muscle memory of going to www.google.com is so thoroughly ingrained. Add into that, the fact that other search engines routinely do not produce the same standard of results. It is the reason Google won the search engine wars of the late 90's, and still largely valid today. I won't touch Bing, because that's just another monopoly.
Android is also another obvious issue. Very large percentage of the worlds dumbphones run it. If it's an essential public service (which it is) perhaps it should not be owned by any one organisation? And hardware and applications not tied into particular software? There are some competing non-tied in phone/tablet techs out there, but things like banking apps are up-front called out as "probably won't work" as they are "security" dependent on the very software tie ins that it tries to avoid.
Set some definitions for what is acceptable levels of intrusion and advertising and run with those. Forcing fragmentation will just set a dozen others off doing more of the same.
I'd love to see Android divested so that the Android AOSP project could escape and thrive, offering a fuller set of features (rather than functionality being siphoned off into Google Play Services). That would create a more level playing field for competing ROMs (e.g. LineageOS or GrapheneOS) and hopefully promote alternative app stores like F-Droid. I've been getting tired of reading about Google Play Store apps only working with Google Play Services (instead of - as I think they should - also working on Android AOSP) or refusing to work if a strict hardware attestation fails (which is actually a software attestation). That stifles competition through Google's control of dependencies, e.g. the latest casualty is Authy. There ought to simply be an open certification process for ROMs as well as apps.
Chrome, I'm not so fussed with providing the Chromium open-source project is freed from Google's clutches. After that, Google can do what it likes with Chrome. Seeing as Chromium is the foundation for the vast majority of browsers (by user count, that is), and has thus become central to most people's access to essential online services, then running it under a foundation that's funded by multiple companies is the solution that seems obvious to me.
Thinking about that shopping mall, there are two states.
Firstly, the owner of the mall can do some things to make money… charge more for prime locations, advertise its location, etc. This seems OK. They are in shop lease business.
Secondly, the owner of the mall could see what shops do well, then decide to get into that action too. They are now in competition with their leases. That does not seem OK. They could do things like increase rates for their competitors stores, or not charge themselves the same rates as those stores. This seems even less OK.
The problem is when to discourage or stop the second thing happening. I’m sure there are those who will say the second thing is perfectly acceptable because capitalism.
All the proposals for breakup variations or other remedies to the monopoly known as Google(Alphabet?) seem to lack a good root cause analysis.
Google(Alphabet?), having been declared a monopoly, should be first required to fully reveal everything to the court. The court should then identify what is the internal root cause of Google(Alphabet?).
Has Google(Alphabet?) already prepared for a government action by restructuring with Alphabet as the top? What other preparations have they done? Are they positioned to eventually thrive after a government action?
Follow the money is a very good method, but not the only method of revealing answers. There may be false answers planted to throw regulators off the real trail.
I suspect ads, specifically targeted ads, and the requisite data collection is a very large factor. I do not assume that is the only cause.
I do not propose a remedy at this time without more information. We are not necessarily entitled to that information, but the courts are.
"Platform owners should be forbidden from favoring their own services and competing unfairly with platform tenants."
See also: net neutrality
The above is a well generalized formulation of a principle that needs to be enshrined in law -- and unlike the EU's DMA (as I understand it), the rule needs to apply generally, not just to specifically targeted "gatekeeper" corporations.
"Whatever fine may be imposed against them, when it comes time to pay after all the ensuing appeals and challenges are over, the corporation being punished will have grown large enough during that time to comfortably file the original fine under its business expenses."
How about this, then:
"The fine is set at X% of the total annual revenue of $CORP or any successor entity. The actual dollar amount to be paid shall be determined in the year in which the final appeal is concluded and the requirement to actually pay the fine is locked in."
Obviously that's just pseudocode; much refinement would be needed for the final wording.
Split:
Google: Search, Browser, Productivity (inc email), Cloud, OS Client, Mobile, Ads and "other", Social, Apps
MS : As per Google plus Database and OS Client and OS Server, Social, Apps
Oracle : Legal and DB and Java
Fecalbook : Ads and Social
Apple : Mobile, Ads, Cloud (in this case, iCloud), Apps
Did I miss anybody?
The author should really read a few commercial mall leases to understand the boundaries of what's commercially acceptable.
They will be shocked and disappointed about how intrusive and expensive renting a shop in a mall really is.
It may also explain why you don't find too many "great deals" in the mall and have to go find an outlet mall full of company stores to do a bit better.
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