Google is a monopoly. Breakup may be coming; what comes after may not be better

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'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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

Okay ... that is some serious wishcasting.

The breakup that needs to happen is ads and search/youtube/etc, everything else would work itself out after that.

I think forcing google to break the buy side from the sell side of advertising is the most obvious and probably beneficial way to break it apart. This should have never happened in the first place , and similar things should be happening to other bigTech. Advertising money is the lifeblood of this industry

With search, there are actually 2 different products. The index itself is a textbook natural monopoly. There's no upside in having more than 1 web crawler as long as it can be trusted to just crawl the web but there's plenty of downside in the form of increased bandwidth costs for web sites. The actual search rankings are where competition makes sense. So spin the Google search index off as a non-profit that makes its product available at a reasonable cost to anybody who wants to run a search engine.

Then you spin off the rest of Google as separate companies. Android/Pixel, Google Ads/Analytics, Youtube, Chrome, Gmail/Docs/Drive and Maps/Cloud would all be separate businesses. Chrome would likely be best spunoff as a non-profit as well, operating an open source web browser project.

Of course, if you're going to break up Google you also have to break up the rest of FAANG too or they're just going to step right into the space vacated by Google and probably buy up the Baby Googles[0]. Apple would probably need to be broken up into a hardware company, a software company and a services company. Amazon would need to be broken up into AWS, Amazon Shopping and Prime Video. You could arguably even break Amazon Shopping up into the online store and the logistics company. Microsoft would need to be broken up into Windows, Office, Xbox, Bing and Azure. Xbox would then itself need to be broken up to unwind all of its purchases of independent video game companies. If you're breaking up Xbox, you also have to do the same with Playstation (spinning them loose from Sony and unwinding their own acquisitions). It might also be a great idea to then do the same with major 3rd party video game companies like EA, basically unwinding all of their acquisitions. Meta would need to be broken up into Facebook, Oculus, Instagram, WhatsApp and Meta Ads.

Once you start breaking up Google, you open up Pandora's box and basically have to keep going until you break up the entire tech sector. That's why it is so tricky to do it. Once you're done with tech, it'd be a good idea to look at other sectors such as health care, Hollywood and the news media where consolidation has been rampant over the past few decades.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_Bell_Operating_Compan...

Amusing to me that we have a $3.5T company, and the solution is to break up it's only competitor to make it weaker and that company an even bigger monopoly.

What about "de-DoubleClicking" Google, iow, separating the ad business from the rest of Google/Alphabet? I'm not sure how that would work, but IMO what reduces the quality of Google products and noticeably makes them worse for consumers is that the products either improve ad dollars or they get cut/receive no funding.

What comes after will be better. Maybe not as integrated, but better as far as options go.

I don't see how a Google breakup can be operationalized. There's just no way the company's stack can support it without decades of work. It'd be like dismembering a person and expecting all the pieces to go off and thrive.

They could take the search team, flip a coin for each employee, and split it, maintaining rank. The team that's forced to leave to start their own search company will be able to leave with the full Google search codebase and dependencies (yes I know they have a monorepo, but figure it out).

That team will from that day forward be able to create a forked version of the product. Every gripe they had about it will be able to be fixed. They'll also be given half of Google's cash to hire the best people.

If search & ads are the main money makers, then force the existing company to compete with itself in those fields.

Also, instead, they could just unmerge doubleclick from Google. Let them make money by having ads on search and other places without BEING the advertising company.

The root of all the “evil” here is ads. I have no particular solutions to suggest — though banning paid ads altogether sounds like a worthwhile idea, apart from the definitional difficulties — but I believe that’s the aspect that needs to be tackled one way or the other.

The challenge is ensuring that any changes foster genuine competition and innovation rather than just shifting the monopoly around.

It’s true. If you look at the history, breaking up companies often results in each division doing well and maybe not an improvement as Youtube/Android/Search/Gmail/Adwords/Chrome all need to earn a profit independently.

At a minimum, not having Google paying Firefox/Apple to promote them as the default is a good thing. It’s super annoying that Safari doesn’t allow me to switch to Kagi easily.

I understand a reason they do this is to protect users like my father from adware/spyware companies putting in fake search engines, but I’m sure not getting money from Google to force a default has something to do with it as well.

The obvious and least painful change for Google is to make the top 3 most popular browsers on any platform have to allow any search engines supplied by the user. The user has to paste a custom url into a text box supplied by their favorite search engine’s website. That way people can use meaningful search engines like Marginalia, Kagi, or others. It’s such a simple change that would have a massive impact in forcing meaningful competition in the search sphere.

Google funds Apple for search dominance and Firefox for reasons I don’t know of. Neither Safari (on mobile nor desktop) nor Firefox allow custom user supplied search engines. The presets they supply appear to be controlled opposition.

I want to be able to use Marginalia, Kagi, Yandex, MWMBl and SearXNG by default after a few settings changes.

I agree that Google has an inordinate amount of power in the market and that it has to be restrained. That said, I do not like the 'better' qualifier here. It depends too much on who is reading it. Hell, it is not impossible average user will dislike the change ( but they always do).

I really hope that some portions are turned into public institutions (either directly or in the weird way organizations like USPS is) in some way. They've made themselves so deeply ingrained and essential to using the internet as loss leaders in some areas that it's impossible to imagine those services standing on their own and still making sense. That's what's responsible for their monopolization, and natural monopolies should be tightly state regulated. I hope we get case law on how network effects can kinda be natural monopolies when in the right technological context.

Can we break up Microsoft too?

My major complaint is when cities/states/governments only use a Google product for hosting allegedly-public data — which is otherwise inaccessible (unless you allow access to e.g. Google Drive).

Even worse is when these "public forums" are hosted entirely within walled gardens, e.g. Facebook; then you need an account (and not just DNS whitelisting) to participate in this public forum.

All government entities should be required to post public documents on their own servers/equipment/hostname.

I have no love for Google but, in light of the Google Graveyard, I am at a loss to see how to cut it up in a way where almost anything can remain profitable on its own.

Imagine chopping Search and Ads out to be their own things.

GoogAds turns into just another advertising company. Perhaps viable but uninteresting. GoogSearch, well, almost nobody wants to pay for search, so they seek some kind of way to get money, and the start up with the integrated ads, soon to result in what we have now. I used to run various Google Search Appliances, but they bailed out of that market.

Peel off GMail? More than zero people want to pay for email, so you might see something like a clunky Fastmail with a free tier and a pay tier. The free tier means ads again and you're evolving to a Yahoo model. Ummm, nobody really wanted that.

How about hardware? I dunno, are Pixels a loss leader for Google? I'll bow to someone else's insight on this, and I'm not really hip to the phone scene: are there a lot of "smartphones, we only make smartphones" companies?

Google Docs and various officeware might stand on its own as a distant second to Microsoft. I know some people pay for that.

Google Books, maaaaaaaaaaybe. It might stand on its own but here we just see people having to pay for what was once free.

I just don't see anything interesting or stimulating coming out of carving up Google. Almost everything they did (it has been a while since I was "into" them) seemed focused on making things that were almost byproducts, wherein their real utility was feeding the search <-> advertising cycle.

If Gmail isn't 5 dollars a month by 2030 I'll be shocked.

Yeah I don’t know how this will go, but I’m not too optimistic.

It feels like one of those situations where we “get exactly what we asked for”. Like those movies with an Evil Genie who delivers on their wishes in the sneakiest way possible. “You wished for $1M, so I burned your house down - but look at all the insurance money you got!”

Or maybe a bit like how everyone wanted their cable bills to be cheaper (“just let me pay for the few channels I watch!”) and what we got was 15 different streaming services at $12/month.

> The Chocolate Factory has appealed the Epic verdict and also plans to challenge the DoJ's victory.

Is "Chocolate Factory" a typo?

1. Forbid Google from paying Apple and Android OEM’s to be the default search engine. Also, detach Google search from Android and forbid Google from forcing it to be included on every Android phone.

2. Give Google search competitors access to Google’s search data so these new AI search engine companies can compete. Without these huge amounts of data, they have no chance.

Done!

I'm flumuxed that Google is the first tech company to be ruled a monopoly. I would put them fourth on the tech monopoly list, behind Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, in that order.

I don't think there would be much benefit to society by breaking up google. Whereas I do think there would be great benefit to breaking up Apple or MS.

I think Google is really big, but the mail in the coffin for me is that android is open source.

I don’t see how apple beat epic but google lost. Lawyers

How is Google more of a Monopoly than Microsoft?

If what comes after is not better, then we waited too long to break this monopoly up.

We either start ripping this band-aids off or we will just continually have a worse and worse internet.

Android should almost definitely be split off as a separate company.

I could see Android and Chrome as a combined company.

"What if we broke up Google and Meta started operating bits of it?"

There are some head scratching serious leaps of logic here. Why would Meta start running android if it became an independent business?

It's never explained.

This article is rather clumsy FUD.

The best way to tackle this is enforce right for repair and require opensourcing of various components. Breaking up google will be an impossible job.

If we mandate that our electronics and software must be repairable then these companies will automatically no longer be able to hold monopolies on their platforms.

Separate ads from them.

No need to break up Google because of their search dominance.

Search is about to get disrupted by LLMs. Heck, aren't teens searching on Tiktok more than Google nowadays?

There is no chance this happens.

what happened to employees at companies that were broken up in the past? do they generally just leave to competitors?

The problem of so-called "break-up" option is that there are not many buyers who can afford operating those services (those costs at least billions every year even if those could be purchased for free) and those who can afford are already serious monopolists. Imagine MS buying Chrome, Meta buying AdWords, Apple buying Android etc etc. You probably don't want that.

Other feasible way to avoid this would be keeping Google ads to subsidize them, but then what's the point of change? This is why the remedy should touch very specific illegal practices. Structural changes need proper legislation which targets the entire market. Otherwise, you'll just see balloon effects in action.

Google's "search results" are the textbook definition of a monopolized good/service. The whole thing is almost a casino, rigged to the point of absurdity.

There has been nothing in my life so disillusioning as working on a Web app for a company that is more or less required to play Google's game.

Yeah, just like with Standard Oil...

break off chrome and enable AD block again.

Google is about to pull from its war chest to create a PR frenzy to make this a very bad thing for consumers/users. They'll appeal to conservative and neoliberal circles. Personally, as a former Google employee, I want them smashed to pieces.

Yes, everybody is still super upset that Microsoft got hit by antitrust in 2001 and shifted heavily to B2B. We've really missed out on having more fantastic Microsoft software forcibly intertwined in our daily lives. I wish Microsoft owned all of desktop AND mobile computing AND the internet so I was forced to do everything via the fantastic Microsoft Windows!

Darn these regulators for trying to allow competitors to enter the market. Everybody knows, competition only makes things worse!

/s

Google’s deal with Apple is def problematic but apart from that I really don’t think it’s a monopoly.

Google leadership (according to public info) was in a panic about ChatGPT and rightly so. It was eerily similar to what Google once was at its inception: a no bs way to get better answers to your questions.

Luckily for Google, hallucination is a significant issue. Just “GPT it” is already in the modern vernacular. Google is in serious danger of becoming Facebook: only used by boomers (now millennials) while the new gen gets their adds on Insta, TikTok and could soon be served Llm generated product reviews and comparisons with link to buy from ChatGPT.

Like US vs Microsoft, by the time a resolution arrives, it will be 10 years out of date. No one cared about IE bundling, and IE had already lost dominance.

Search and web are dead media. in 10 years no one will care.

I think Google can win this easily by using the public opinion against the regulators.

They just need to say that they are gonna start charging for all their services because without the level of integration they have it doesn't make sense to keep running businesses that otherwise would lose money.

breaking it up will also weaken US Dominance in Tech, the fact that Android and Chrome are under them same umbrella helps them share IP across the company and decreases RD costs because some of the costs are shared.

Japan tried to curb the Yakuza by enacting laws to specifically punish them. Not only it didn't work as well as they thought, but other criminals also flourished in the underworld by virtue of not being Yakuza. Whatever they do to go after Google must be really well thought and coordinated otherwise they will just be passing the crown to someone else a little bit smarter.