U.S. Proposes Breakup of Google to Fix Search Monopoly

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mooky1977@reddit

Lots of companies need to be broken up, Google included, but the tendency proposed makes no logical sense.

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Lots of companies in all markets are too big. If true competition is to exist, I sometimes think any company with over 20-40% of any given market should have to actively work to reduce their marketshare down to 40%, or get hammered.

But then who determines what market boundaries are? Also why would any country like USA break up a very successful global company?

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MyGoodOldFriend@reddit

Why don’t companies just prestige?

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EspritFort@reddit

Also why would any country like USA break up a very successful global company?

Because entities that exceed the power and influence of nation states pose an existential threat to the very concept of a nation state. Anti-trust efforts on this scale are, in the end, a matter of self-preservation.

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perkited@reddit

The government also asked the judge to stop Google from entering into paid agreements with Apple and others to be the automatic search engine on smartphones and in browsers.

I'm not sure how long Firefox (Mozilla Corp) would survive if that happened, unless they've lined up another company that can get close to the $400-500 million they receive annually from the Google Search deal. I know in the past Mozilla has been against breaking up Google, I haven't read anything from them recently though about this attempt.

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100GHz@reddit

Firefox, as any other open source project will find volunteers. Chances are more that chrome will have more troubles once Google 's cash reduces it's flow there

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blenderbender44@reddit

The problem is, for something as complex as a browser engine "volunteers" Really isn't anywhere near enough. Think about it, even MS, gave up on maintaining their own engine. Even apple struggles to keep up with features. Even with hundreads of millions of dollars per year in funding gecko engine struggles to keep up with chrome. If we have to rely on unpaid volunteers to work in their spare time the gecko engine is as good as dead

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Karmic_Backlash@reddit

Problems will recover, firefox will survive, and things will change. The issue right now is that google is harming the landscape of the internet by controlling everything. This is only a problem because the powers that be let it get this far. I don't want there to be a dark age of internet browsers, and by extension the internet at large, but if we continue on our current path then things will only get worse.

Just another reason to bunker up for the next few years.

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mercurycc@reddit

The only thing I agree with your 3 main points is the last one.

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TheRedPepper@reddit

Honestly, chromium will probably be the one to survive. Too many big companies have their web browser product based on chromium. Firefox only has Mozilla. Don’t forget, chromium is also a fully open source project.

Between the two, I feel Firefox is better to maintain, but that’s a different question.

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burdellgp@reddit

How is that different from Chromium project?

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ZeeroMX@reddit

There's bing, yahoo, duckduck, and many others, ¿how can anyone argue about monopoly?

Dominant position yes, the same as Microsoft windows OS on desktop and laptop computers, or AWS in cloud, etc.

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AlexTheMediocre86@reddit

Hence why they broke up Microsoft and should break up Amazon…

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rslarson147@reddit

In the article, they state the break up of Microsoft was overturned by the appeals court

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AlexTheMediocre86@reddit

Yeah, it was and it wasn’t. Microsoft had to meet some requirements to stay together and then Peter Theil’s approach to tech company structure was implemented across all tech companies. You can’t declare a monopoly today bc all tech companies can argue that there’s no actual way to define them that way. It’s a catch 22 for regulators, and it’s done purposefully.

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doobydubious@reddit

That's just smart business. Markets and Capitalism generally tends towards monopoly. Might as well be on top.

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Delta-9-@reddit

You've correctly identified the fundamental, and fatal, flaw of Capitalism.

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AlexTheMediocre86@reddit

Yeah, it may be. I don’t want to pretend to be an expert on economics. I’m from a lower income part of New Orleans and so my opinions are from that context. I’ve seen us trade our video stores for Netflix and YouTube streaming, our book stores for Amazon and a ton of other local business just getting screwed up from the weird dynamics these huge tech companies have created. I may be right or wrong about where these companies stand as a monopoly, but I firmly believe that the acceleration in business growth of companies in the past 25 years, largely lead by these massive tech companies, has resulted in our communities and towns being depleted, which none of that money coming back to help our communities. Idk what the path forward it light of increasing automation, but we need to move back toward localized economies stabilizing the local community. We had that in the 90s and bc we don’t have that now, there’s a massive class divide.

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ZeeroMX@reddit

I thought monopoly is when you have no competitors at all, maybe the definition has changed.

For the record Microsoft never was break up.

But why stopping with Google, why not break all the fortune 500 for that matter?

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AlexTheMediocre86@reddit

I would recommend reading “Zero To One” by Peter Theil. This is the manifesto, if you will, that tech companies use to prevent the gov’t from declaring them a monopoly. This is by design, by declaring their business category they operate something overly vague. For example, Tesla and Netflix aren’t car or media companies, but tech companies. This is all based on a strategic approach to navigate around the restrictions that were placed on Microsoft in the 90s.

Theil is now arguably the 3rd most important person in the Trump orbit now. He’s a primary VC for all Musk’s projects and was the primary investor in JD Vance’s campaign for Senate and later push for VP. All this is by design.

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Deathnote_Blockchain@reddit

Why not fuck motherfucking Theil instead of reading shit he wrote

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AlexTheMediocre86@reddit

To be clear, I’m no fan. Full disclosure, I come from a lower income part of Nola. I admit, as a family primarily of engineers, that I was a big Musk fan from about 2013-2017. I grew up idolizing Hawking and Feynman (went to school for physics) and then learned about this dude using science “for good”. I was a gullible idiot. Naive. These policies are destroying our communities and Thiel’s philosophies are inherent in all of Musk’s views.

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Niarbeht@reddit

Bing and DuckDuckGo are the same thing.

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megasxl264@reddit

Because in the eyes of the law a monopoly isn’t inherently an issue. The issue comes when it can be proven that you’re deliberately using that monopoly in ways to stifle competition.

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skhds@reddit

Isn't that what Microsoft have been doing for decades, though?

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TeutonJon78@reddit

Yes, and the EU and US have fined them a lot for their unfair practices.

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DRAK0FR0ST@reddit

Google could just make another Chromium based browser, or start a new one from scratch.

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liftizzle@reddit

If there is a court order preventing them then they won’t be doing that without violating the court order. It’s not Chrome the browser that is the problem, it’s the fact that Google makes a web browser.

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DRAK0FR0ST@reddit

That would be a tough sell.

One thing is to force a company to divest something they acquired, but forcing them to sell something they created doesn't make sense.

It would be easier to make Google sell AdSense, after all, they bought it.

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