Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by FrankBooth 2212 days ago
Microsoft? It’s not the nineties. Try Google.
3 comments

Google doesn’t have a monopoly on OSes though, which is what GP stated and seems like a reference to MS to me.
Google still owns Android - an OS the majority of the world uses, and is required to ship with Chrome (among other programs) pre-installed if the OEM also wants access to the Google Play Store.
I think you mean Alphabet, and yes. Nuke Facebook and Amazon while we're at it. Break up all the huge conglomerates.
Maybe there is a better word than “Nuke” to describe this? Perhaps a word not so strongly associated with death and destruction, unless you truly mean the physical locations of these orgs should be hit with atomic weapons?
That's fair, let's not call it nuking.

I think a starting point for discussion is to get past equating antitrust issues with monopoly status. In the previous century, these things went together coincidentally, but the scale of our economy has grown to a point where it is no longer necessary for the largest companies to have monopoly power in their market to engage in damaging anti-competitive practices. We instead see cartel-like cooperation between these companies instead of competition, such as apple-google wage fixing that was revealed years ago. Or their complete insulation from consumer feedback necessary for healthy capitalist markets to function, because their economies of scale insulate them by making consumer choices insignificant signals lost in the noise.

Why? How small do the pieces have to be to satisfy you?
Amazon should be forced to spin off AWS and release Twitch. Facebook should be forced to release Instagram and Whatsapp. Alphabet should be forced to release Youtube, Waymo, etc. That's about the right scale of antitrust required here.
But why? What will that accomplish?
Actually, Google is illicitly leveraging its monopoly on web search traffic, not operating systems.
It can be both - Android and Google Search both push consumers towards Drive, Docs, GMail, and as GP mentioned, Chrome.