[eplanit]

As a US citizen, I really wish I lived in a country with effective (i.e. actually used/enforced) antitrust laws, that would see the dominance in browsers (chrome and android), combined with dominance in search -- which promotes its ads (another industry it dominates), the alteration of how the web is experienced to favor itself (hiding site identity the browser and in search results, combined with showing scraped content instead of directing traffic to actual site), combined with ... as being monopolistic and anti-competitive practices. It's beyond ridiculous anymore.

[davidebaldini]

How do you wish the outcomes of these legal enforcements to be like?

An authority with the effective power to cripple the finances and business practices of Google for the purpose of reducing its market share to an arbitrarily lower percentage would be immediately detrimental to furthering the development of Google's products, and consequently detrimental to the utility of its users, while in the longer term it wouldn't be obvious that conceding the lesser competitors to scramble for this stolen market slice would yield better alternative products, nor that users would ultimately benefit from having more lesser competitors.

[CRConrad]

> in the longer term it wouldn't be obvious

Nothing ever is, a priori, so this is a non-argument.

> lesser competitors to scramble for this stolen market slice

Wow, "stolen". That certainly tanked your credibility at least in my eyes.

[eplanit]

Who says anything about crippling or destroying anything?

One approach is to split up the company in to separate entities. Search, YouTube, advertising, technology products and OSs, etc...

[davidebaldini]

...and prohibit these newly-formed entities to cooperate too much with each other toward holistic objectives, therefore reducing the efficiency of capital allocation to their detriment. If this new arrangement wouldn't be less efficient, less productive or crippling in any way, it would rationally be attained voluntarily without political imposition. Unless the intervention manifests in a hindrance so expensive to cause the market share to shrink in one or more service segments, and give smaller competitors the opportunity to collect unsatisfied customers who seek alternatives to the reduced quality of services offered by the former monopoly, what would the alleged benefit be for society?