[wilsonnb2]

So if Google is a monopoly, what should be done about it? Split it up into separate, competing mini-Googles? Keep fining them more and more money until they stop anti-competitive practices? Split off Maps/Android/Drive/etc into separate companies so that Google can't use their search monopoly to dominate those fields?

I'm genuinely not sure what the best way to go about this would be.

[thekingofh]

There's nothing objectively wrong with a large company unless they begin to squash competition with regulatory lock-in. This is what led to the breakup of AT&T/Bell. As far as I can tell, Google doesn't keep others out of the search market through any other means than just being better than the other guys. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I certainly haven't seen any shortage of search engines and alternative cloud services providers.

[lovich]

They routinely put their other products on top of the search pages, such as Google reviews over Yelp or Google maps over OpenMap results.

The issue isn't even so much as Google is dominating search, because they have been providing a better product in almost all cases until recently. The issue is that they are using their dominance in search to try and dominate other markets

[fixermark]

When a user searches for "Restaurants near me," how does Google answer that question reliably without using its own mapping service?

Trying to feed that query to a third-party service and then give users the results back adds significant risk that the third-party changes their API, changes their feature-set in an incompatible way, goes out of business, gets in a corporate fight with the search provider...

It's both cheaper and more convenient for the end-user if the search provider handles the mapping itself (in the absence of some kind of universal understood interface standard, complete with some kind of incentive to adhere to it).

[stuckinarut]

They pay to integrate with third party services via a bidding process.

> adds significant risk that the third-party changes their API, changes their feature-set in an incompatible way, goes out of business

All very unlikely to happen when dealing with a client the size of google.

> It's both cheaper and more convenient for the end-user if the search provider handles the mapping itself

added bonus, google gets to dominate mapping then jack up the cost 30x when they decide they want it to be a billion dollar business. LIke they did recently.

[fixermark]

> They pay to integrate with third party services via a bidding process.

It's an interesting idea; I don't think I've seen something like that floated before outside of the government space of fair bidding against contracts.

> added bonus, google gets to dominate mapping then jack up the cost 30x when they decide they want it to be a billion dollar business. LIke they did recently.

I hear OpenStreetMaps still exists, and has an API.

[stuckinarut]

An API not suitable for commercial use. So now you're relying on a third party who is suddenly trying to cope with some percentage of the insane traffic of google maps. If they can they make a lot of money.

if not you lose money by switching to them. if it's less than the new rate that you get from google, it's a hard sell to switch. You might point out that this third party should spend the money to scale, but unlike google they aren't equipped with an advertising firehose of cash that they can point at a losing business whenever they want. They have to operate a scale they can afford. Best case they have the staff to build out a service that they can scale quickly enough to take advantage. Realistically, that means using a cloud service provided by one of the oligarchs.

[RestlessMind]

If I am going to search for a business near me, I always prefer a Google maps based solution right there on the search results page, rather than having to navigate to yet another page (say, Yelp's) which is going to nag me to download their app and going to provide a shitty experience otherwise. Continuing along the same example, Yelp is not even going to provide me with all the useful service I might need (like driving directions to that business) and I will have to again navigate back to Google maps.

Google's practice of showing me data from other products (eg. Maps) right there on the search pages is definitely a win for me as a consumer.

[TomMarius]

It's their product after all; do you point people to your competition from your product? Everyone is free to use anything else. Anti-competitive would be if you couldn't use anything else.

[xg15]

"Your product" is something completely different if you're a mom-and-pop shop or startup or if you have 90% market share. This is why antitrust exists and what arguments like this always seem to ignore.

[TomMarius]

Can you be more specific, what exactly is and when exactly it becomes different?

[xg15]

In short, network effects. Longer: the amount of power their decisions have to affect society. If the mom-and-pop shop would refuse to serve readheads, that's (mostly) their decision. If Google decided to lock redheads out of their accounts, or block from using Chrome, Android or Search, those people would have serious disadvantages simply going around their daily life.

[briandear]

Is the consumer being harmed? That’s the only question that matters in anti-trust. That mom and pop can’t compete isn’t a symptom of a monopoly, it’s a symptom of mom and pop not doing more to be the best choice. Mom and pop could compete if they had a better, cheaper product. If you want to compete — be better than the competition. Many startups are not — that isn’t the fault of Google.

[xg15]

Yes, e.g. by stiffling sale of alternative Android-based operating systems, as the EU just concluded. Google uses their market power and control over Android to give competing OSes a disadvantage, whether or not they would be better than Android/Google Play.

[xg15]

So, genuine question. If some company (with sufficiently deep pockets) decided to buy up all land, buildings, roads, infrastructure, etc that makes up a city and then decided that certain groups of persons are no longer allowed to tresspass its private property and must therefore leave the city, would you be ok with that?

[lovich]

When a company completely dominates a field they get different rules to prevent them from taking over every related field one at a time. "It's their product" doesn't cut it as a member of our society when that means they can control entire industries and jack up prices.

Having a single company own one industry after another is completely antithetical to the idea of capitalism, and if we're not going to do capitalism then we might as well start taxing Google even more to pay for public services, which I am sure they also don't want

[stuckinarut]

Except google dominates search and search is the only way.

This is like if one company owned the street signs, and just took them down arbitrarily.

[TomMarius]

You are free to use duckduckgo.com, bing.com or several more alternatives. Your metaphor is invalid.

[lovich]

All of those alternatives together don't even provide a fraction of the service that google provides.

The monopoly takes control and keeps prices higher than they would be with competition. New competition comes along every now and then but a monopoly just has to compete heavily for a short time to put the new comes out of business and then it's back to mining the market. This is how monopolies work and what anti trust legislature is supposed to stop.

Based on your comments here, I have to ask. Is there any situation you can think of where the government should step in to break up a company, short of violence or breaking a contract?

[stuckinarut]

right.

I'm gonna stretch my metaphor a lot.

Imagine street signs use polarized glasses (or something, I'm not an optics). I can see only those signs whose glasses I where.

I choose to wear google glasses. Everyone does, the competition is pretty good but google has been around for so long that I just don't really bother with anything else.

Now google takes down some signs. Am I really going to carry 3 pairs of glasses (N pairs, M are relevant) in order to figure out what street I'm on? or am I just going to walk a block to the next street and use the service google hasn't arbitrarily decided to destroy.

[xg15]

Google doesn't keep others out of the search market through any other means than just being better...

They have 98% market share in europe. They also provide the main revenue source (AdWords) and the most important implementation of the web stack (Chrome) - which fitted with mandatory automated updating. If you combine those factors, they are in a position where they can to a large part dictate what the de-facto standards for a successful website are. They can also rapidly change those standards or choose to promote or bury certain technologies.

If that is not an advantage over competitors, I don't know what is.

And this is just for the web. On Android - about half the worldwide market for mobile apps - they are not even a market participant at all. They are basically the government.

[fixermark]

Quick experiment you can try to check if Google is blocking competition:

1) navigate to bing.com

2) do a search

If it works, congratulations; Google isn't blocking competition. The 98% market share is probably because the market is winner-take-all, and people don't see a need to use a new competitor that's even equivalently-effective over one they are already comfortable with.

[xg15]

Imagine you run a website. Some day, for whatever reason, Google is blacklisting you. Are you going to say "eh, no big deal, I'll just have my customers use Bing instead"?

[fixermark]

Your customers already know how to get to your website: yourdomain.com.

Do you mean "Some day, for whatever reason, Google stops directing traffic to your website of people who don't know who you are, for free?"

Sounds like it's time to spend some money on advertising.

Their ability to kick a bunch of traffic towards you or refrain from doing so makes them a market-maker, but they share that with newspaper and television networks. It doesn't make them a monopoly. It's not their fault or responsibility if people don't "tune in" to the Bing channel.

[Merad]

You haven’t interacted with many average users, have you? When instructed to go to “yourdomain.com”, they’ll bring up google and search for yourdomain.com. If it doesn’t appear in google search results, it effectively doesn’t exist to an enormous segment of users.

[stuckinarut]

You deserved it because you served an ad that google didn't like the style of. Also their adblocker in chrome is fine too because that's not a conflict of interest.

- typical HN response.

[briandear]

Market share does not equal monopoly. Why aren’t Europeans building better search? It isn’t because of Google, it’s because of the risk-adverse tendencies of investors in Europe. If you pitched a search engine to a Euro-VC, you wouldn’t even get asked for a deck. Europe isn’t very innovation driven: they prefer the 2x rather than the 200x. The proof is simple: just look at the flow of European investment money: rarely do they invest in high-risk, high-reward ventures. While in the US, you can raise money for almost anything.

[xg15]

Ok, we built our awesome EuroSearch. How do we get it on the start pages of Firefox, Chrome and Android?

[YokoZar]

Firefox has had different default search engines in the past. At one point Yahoo was the default, and I believe it varied by continent.

Ubuntu once switched from Google to Yahoo in its Firefox as the default search engine, citing higher payments from Yahoo.

[sievebrain]

Pay higher referral fees. Or did you think Firefox used Google search for free?

[orteam]

By also building the awesome EuroBrowser? It worked for Google, just saying

[zjaffee]

This is how they would do it. When Microsoft ware being ruled against for anti trust, they would have forced them to split the operating systems business from the rest of their product businesses.

My guess would be that google would get broken up in a way that separated things that were strategically vertically integrated, say, search+android (their big platforms for directing you at their services) and things like youtube, maps, ect. which are services to be consumed.

[Aunche]

Technically, it would almost be easier to rewrite Google from scratch than to split it up. Google is a giant monorepo, so anything can depend on anything else. Also, all their services run on the same data centers.

[briandear]

How does splitting Google benefit the consumer? Is the consumer being harmed right now? Are they being price gouged or forced to use inferior products?

[zjaffee]

The need to break up monopolies isn't about the consumers as much as it is about having a competitive marketplace, where other businesses didn't have to struggle against googles ability to self promote itself. Markets work best when companies can compete on as close to equal terms as possible (which these days we only really see during the emergence of a new industry).

[xvector]

It benefits the consumer by creating two or more highly competitive organizations, thus leading to a breeding ground of growth and innovation.

This is the basis of all antitrust laws.

[stuckinarut]

> or forced to use inferior products?

Potentially, yes. Google abuses their search monopoly and ads duopoly to kill off competition in other areas.

They use their browser control to control internet standards.

They do things like effectively kill RSS via EEE style tactics.

[notriddle]

I agree with almost everything you said, except that RSS was never as popular as Twitter is now. Copying and pasting a URL is too technical, and Live Bookmarks were the wrong UX all around. Mailing lists are still more popular than RSS ever was.

In retrospect, if Firefox had used a New Tab Page with an RSS driven feed like what they do with Pocket now, we'd probably still be using it today. Too bad 2005 Mozilla didn't have UX designers calling the shots.

[jhall1468]

Do you have any examples of these things taking place in reality or is it just "possible" stuff. And Google did not kill RSS lol, it was always super niche.

[stuckinarut]

and yet the users of RSS continue to lament the loss of Google reader.

[jhall1468]

Never said otherwise. The problem is, there weren't very many of them.

[avar]

    > Keep fining them more and more money
    > until they stop anti-competitive practices?

I believe you're referring to the EU's fines against Google here. In that case that's pretty much the only weapon the EU has. They can ultimately deny Google market access to the EU, and argue that case at the WTO, or seize Google's assets in the EU, but they can't decide to split up a US-based legal entity.

[trhway]

Due to various double sandwiches there a lot of non US Googles with good assets to go after.

[tobias3]

The EU also cannot prevent Google from buying US startups, furthering they monopoly position. And US startups get more funding because they might be bought by Google.

[acover]

Technology often leads to a natural monopoly as it has high fixed costs and low variable costs.

One way I can see changing this dynamic is using open source services. That way anyone is able to clone, improve or change them. Provide consumer choice.

However businesses are aiming for monopolies. Crowd funding and open source might change the dynamic.

It's probably too late for search as the lead is too far. I also doubt most people care to solve a problem before it happens.

[fixermark]

... and benefits from horizontal scaling.

Maps is okay, search is okay. Maps that can take signal from search to figure out what people care about, and search that can utilize geographic signal to guess what a person might want as an answer for "restaurants near me" is huge.

[acover]

You make a good point.

I don't see why that type of sharing can't happen with open source services. Though it would require more customer consent.

[fixermark]

Personal opinion: the fact that type of sharing hasn't happened with open source services speaks volumes about the priorities of the open-source communities and is the single-biggest argument in favor of allowing large corporations leeway to create big cool things with big data. I don't see anyone else stepping up to solve the hard problems like this.

[acover]

Have there been open source projects that had the opportunity to and decided against it?

[fixermark]

OpenStreetMap currently exists. Is there an open-source search engine out there that could try to integrate with them?

[komali2]

Even if everything about search was open source, how would an upstart competitor possibly compete on the hardware front? A single Google-style data center would imo be an insurmountable capital cost.

[fixermark]

They could start on Google Cloud and work their way out from there. ;)

[HillaryBriss]

if there were an anti-trust court case, maybe a court would decide that Google is required to allow, say, a restaurant review site, to use Google Cloud on an equal footing with Google's own restaurant review service.

it reminds me of the decision where ATT was ultimately required to allow user-owned telephones to connect to its wired network. (in earlier times, ATT only let phones leased from and owned by ATT to connect to its network)

[briandear]

You could say the same about shipping companies, airlines or car companies. Yet, competition is everywhere despite high capital costs. Even space exploration has competition. High capital costs aren’t anti-competitive.

[dredmorbius]

True, though I'm coming to conclude that's only explaining a portion of the dynamic. Technlogy also produces points of control -- either of exclusion or coercion.

[amerine]

Ignoring the cynic in me that tells me that nothing will change, makes me think that the right answer is probably less to do with breaking apart or changing google but more likely the establishment of personal data privacy rights in the US. Once it’s more expensive to collect everything about us, companies like google will have a hard time.

I don’t think we’d realistically introduce laws like this until the citizens united decision is overturned. Until then the US political system is owned by the rich.

[paulpauper]

I don't see what the problem with google collecting my information is. You are more likely to have your data leaked by a careless or vengeful webmaster after visiting a small personal website than a massive corporate website like google.com. If you visit any website , your IP can be logged.

[binomialxenon]

If I visit a "small personal website" such as a blog, they're not going to know much more about me than my IP address, which pages I viewed, and possibly an inbound link ID.

One of the big things I find scary about Google is the sheer centralization of data. For a typical user of Google services, Google will have their complete browsing and search history, including "incognito", 24/7/365 location history, hundreds of voice recordings (perhaps some taken without user intent), advertisement tracking data, the complete email inbox and outbox, IM history, Android application history, documents and other files stored on Drive, contacts, possibly call and text history, and thousands of photographs (including ones intended to be private). There's a lot of harm one could do against a person with that kind of information.

[nugget]

If you required Google to license either their algorithmic search index or their search ad marketplace to other companies, it would have a dramatic effect on the competitive dynamics of the search market worldwide.

[fixermark]

Would it? Is the algorithm the source of value or the massive store of data harvested over a decade and stored globally in myriad datacenters?

[nashashmi]

Forcing the search business to open up and be overseen and governed by a transparent boardroom is probably the best way to go about it.

Since search has 90% market share and creates 90% of revenue, it needs to be both made into a standards organization and separated from google sufficiently enough that Google begins to pay better attention to the profitability and development of the other products and other bets.

[ProAm]

Im pretty sure this is why Alphabet was formed, they sort of split themselves up as a preventative measure.

[JKCalhoun]

I think they did it for investors, not for the sake of regulators. Investors were, I think, beginning to get a little tired of Google's string of goofy product flops — investors wanted Google to focus on what makes it money: ads.

[pvg]

I doubt regulators have ever suggested breaking up a company into a bunch of dependent subsidiaries. There's probably not an office at the DoJ where lawyers are turning over tables and screaming 'you have foiled us again with your restructuring shenanigans, Google'.

[neap24]

I've always been curious about that. Is a parent company + subsidiaries immune from anti-trust laws in the US? I mean, I'm sure Alphabet still shares Google search data across its subsidiaries--which is the real monopoly power concern.

[fixermark]

It's probably a lot less about anti-trust and a lot more about bankruptcy protection.

With the companies logically divided, Alphabet can choose devote $XYZ money to some specific initiative and have a guarantee that they're liable for AT MOST that much money. If the sub-company completely mis-manages its assets and goes belly-up, its failure doesn't impact e.g. Google or Waymo (in any deeper way than opportunity cost of the money going to the other sub-company instead of those). Bankruptcy responsibility stops at the owning company and doesn't trickle up to the assets of the company that owns that company, in general.

It's a common pattern for movie studios---Hollywood studios build out a short-lived company to own every film production to insulate themselves from liability and financial disaster.

[devmunchies]

Well android, maps, gmail, cloud, youtube are all still under Google so not really.

[nashashmi]

Structurally, youtube and cloud co have their own CEOs.

And they all make money. so they can be split from the rest of the company.

[turc1656]

It's not complicated. But for some reason everyone misses the obvious. You go after the people responsible for taking these actions, not the "company" itself as an ethereal creation. If someone (or multiple people, as here) are in violation of Title 15, they are committing felonies according to the law. These felonies happen to be punishable by up to 10 years in prison, in addition to steep fines. However, the fines for the people who would be found guilty wont' make a dent so it won't deter them. Which is why you send them to jail. And, BTW, that's 10 years per count. If, for example these people are found guilty of multiple violations, send them to jail for a decade for each violation. Problem solved. No executives would be engaging in this activity anymore. And Title 15 definitely, absolutely supports the prosecution of both companies as entities and the individuals behind it. It also makes the mere attempt to monopolize any aspect of trade or business a felony. You don't even have to succeed - you just need to try to fuck people over. Also, it should be noted that harm does not need to be proved under this law. This was by design because the original architects of these antitrust laws recognized that prices could actually be lower because 1) they can afford to seek lower profit margins due to size/scale or that 2) these large companies can subsidize a business unit with a more profitable one to destroy competitors in the other. This is the tactic Amazon is using. Amazon has small profits margins when you look at the company as a whole. If you look at the retail business, which is what they are most famous for, they have staggering losses every quarter, usually to the tune of 15-20% for that massive business unit. If they didn't have their other business units they would be force to raise product prices and fees substantially just to break even, let alone profit. What Amazon is doing in this regard is supposedly illegal. Like blatantly, black-letter-law illegal - and has been for around 100 years. Yet no one is prosecuting them. That doesn't even touch upon the crap they do with sales taxes and determining nexus. And let's not forget that for anything Amazon sells on its own marketplace they won't face their marketplace fees, which usually are around 15%.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/2

"Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, shall be deemed guilty of a felony, and, on conviction thereof, shall be punished by fine not exceeding $100,000,000 if a corporation, or, if any other person, $1,000,000, or by imprisonment not exceeding 10 years, or by both said punishments, in the discretion of the court."

And the term "person" includes both companies/entities as well as people. "The term “person” means a natural person or an organization." https://www.law.cornell.edu/definitions/uscode.php?width=840...

Send these pricks to jail.

[andbberger]

You've got it backwards, and I find that way of thinking quite dangerous.

You have to go to the root of the problem to solve it, and the root is that corps are fundamentally driven towards monopolistic practices by competition. If it's legal, and it improves the bottom line corps __have__ to do it. Not should or will, __have__ to. Because if they don't someone else will and they'll die.

Need to treat corps like the organisms that they are. More than the sum of their parts, and with their own agency.

[turc1656]

Agree with you on your main point, but the conclusion you draw is strange. Yes, they are driven towards monopolistic practices and if something is legal, it will be done. Totally agree. But that's precisely why Title 15 exists. The government/society sets the rules of what is deemed acceptable and allowed to be done in pursuit of profit. If you violate those rules - rules which everyone else follows and is expected to follow, you have committed a serious offense according to the law. Why would/should that not result in prosecution? Because it's an "organism" that acts as a separate entity from a regular person? Fine, Title 15 allows for the prosecution of the entity itself so you can charge the entity but it also includes the ability to charge the individuals within the entity that acted in violation of the law". Make no mistake, in basically every one of these examples I have ever seen, there is most definitely a person or group of people that discussed the company's action/policy and decided to break the law. You think the decision at Google to promote their own products and put competitors on page 4 just magically happened? No. A person (i.e. product manager) or a group of people sat in a room and discussed how to increase profits and actively made that decision. They deserve to be individually charged for their actions and the company should be charged because they were all acting on behalf of the firm. The lawyers for these companies aren't stupid. But they know these laws are not being enforced...from the article: "Some were investigated, but only superficially, the government just really isn't enforcing our antitrust laws." That quote from the article was in reference to challenging the mergers, but the same larger body of law includes Title 15. And if they aren't even challenging these mergers properly, you know for damn sure they aren't enforcing the rest of Title 15 properly because that takes much more work on their part. These laws exist for a very, very good reason. As soon as you start strongly enforcing these laws, this problem will go away. These aren't obscure laws we're talking about. These are part of the bedrock of our laws regarding competition and fair practices.

EDIT: It is precisely because the rule of law barely exists regarding Title 15 for certain companies that we have this problem. The issue isn't that we are approaching the problem incorrectly - it's that this is a consequence of lawlessness and a lack of enforcement. All the tools to properly address this exist already and don't really require adjustment, just enforcement.

[stuckinarut]

> Split off Maps/Android/Drive/etc into separate companies so that Google can't use their search monopoly to dominate those fields?

That's what I want.