[shadowgovt]

Not for an antitrust lawsuit. The remedy for antitrust is divestiture; if found guilty and the judge assigns that penalty, Google can't just pay their way out of it; they'd have to shut down / slice off into an independent company (probably) DoubleClick and some other acquisitions.

Think less "EU fair practices violations" and more "Ma Bell breakup." The difference is that the EU lacks criminal authority (or jurisdiction or, like, an army to extrajudicially invade the United States) to jail Sundar Pichai, but the US absolutely could if the company is found to be an illegal trust and he fails to take steps to remedy the situation.

[snowwrestler]

Divestiture was on the table for U.S. v Microsoft but ultimately Microsoft paid a penalty and operated under federal supervision for years afterward.

It's hard to know how big of an impact that had on them. They definitely stagnated and missed huge product opportunities like search, social, and mobile. But it's not clear whether they would have missed those anyway based on their business model and culture at the time.

[danaris]

While I hope to see something along those lines, please be aware that divestiture is not the only possible antitrust remedy. Fines, time-limited consent decrees, and other lesser measures are not only possible, but much more likely, especially in our current political climate.

[scarface74]

What does a divestiture of Google’s ad business when their entire business is selling ads?

[shadowgovt]

Google has several separable ad verticals.

To name only two: AdWords / AdSense is the "auction model" that made Google famous as an online ad brand and is the one they developed (mostly) in-house: advertisers bid on ad impressions, publishers get paid for offering slots on their pages to do the impressions. It's a very hands-off model in that advertisers don't need to control what sites their ads run on and site owners don't need to control what ads get run; Google handles all that handshaking (and brokers all that money).

That model doesn't work at all for a lot of companies that need way more control over the content shown on their pages (either because they have serious concerns about brand-image that they're unwilling to hand to a third party or they're just wedded to the traditional "steak dinner and fancy suits" advertising model and aren't comfortable working with their advertisers at arm's length). So Google also sells a suite of data-management products for companies that broker their advertising clients directly but are vending ad space on digital services. This is the DoubleClick model: it's (for example) the New York Times's pages and the New York Times's ad clients but Google's infrastructure physically vending the ads, tracking conversion data, tracking completion of advertising contracts, running predictive models to see how valuable ad slots can be, etc.

To the layperson, this is just all "ads," but a not-very-sharp knife can be driven clean through these two business units (from the outside. From the inside, they are no doubt built atop the same Google special-sauce NIH fabric, so it'd in practice be a colossal pain in the ass to divest either of them; either one will have to be rewritten to work as a mundane cloud service or the company carved off will be taking a copy of Google's infrastructure special-sauce with it, running Borg and the logging infrastructure, using stubby and dapper, resolving global resource contention with chubby, etc... All stuff Google really doesn't want to compete with in the holistic way it's woven together inside their house).

[dekhn]

I am not sure Google could survive splitting prod. The enormous value of internal vertical integration that enabled them to grow ads & search traffic would be hard to replicate if there wasn't one signal source of truth that you could contact directly when there is an infrastructure problem.

I think "colossal pain in the ass" underestimates the order of magnitude of pain it would involve (borne by the hapless engineers, no doubt). Divesting the Cloud part of Google (IE moving Cloud into its own independent "prod2") is also somethinig interesting to think about.

[andromeduck]

They already have silos so might not be so bad if a separate tools & infrw team can be formed/shared between the resultant companies.

[scarface74]

So now they are going to have to separate into three businesses - an infrastructure business and two other business that buy services from their infrastructure since it really can’t be separated at this point.

And you really think that the government is going to go that far or that it’s a good idea?

[crazygringo]

Google would still make $$$ because of all of their ad space on Search, YouTube etc.

But they would farm that ad space to multiple exchanges that would be competing for both advertisers and space, and so profits from running the ad exchanges would go down and those ad exchange profits would not be flowing to Google.

I'm neither arguing for nor against this, but that's conceptually how it would work.

[ivalm]

They sell in several vertices, they can start by separating them (eg youtube ads, gmails ads, search result ads, ads on 3rd party websites)

[neon_electro]

Maybe Google can keep the ads and divest the products? It's a great hypothetical question you ask that I'd love to see more discussion of.

[crazygringo]

Google's ad space is far more valuable than its cut in ads, I'm pretty sure.

But in any case if it's anything like the breakup of Ma Bell, stockholders would wind up with separate shares of both 1) the products and 2) the ads. Which one calls itself "Google" is just branding. (Although obviously the search engine would keep the brand.)

[basch]

All of their businesses that display ads could display ads from AdWords/DoubleClick, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon, just like any other website that hosts third party ads.

[scarface74]

So now the government is going to force a separation into multiple companies and by doing so increase user tracking and sharing information across companies…

Win???

[shadowgovt]

You and I are in agreement. It's one of the reasons I think trying to break up Google is actually a terrible idea for the health of the Internet (in any frame of reference other than an anarchist "burn it to the ground" mentality).

[crazygringo]

I'm not defending it, but the win would be for website owners who might make slightly more profits, and advertisers who might pay slightly less for ads -- all because increased competition would reduce profits by ad exchanges.

Of course, that's against not just more tracking/sharing as you mention, but also probably significantly worse ad loading times and bloat in general.

It's awfully hard and hypothetical to estimate the impact of either.

[scarface74]

You realize you’re really supporting the Bork view that anti trust should be about user harm. Everything you said makes the user experience worse.

[crazygringo]

> You realize you’re really supporting

You realize I literally prefaced it with "I'm not defending it"?

> Everything you said makes the user experience worse.

Yes, that was the whole point of my second sentence.

I was just explaining why some people do see it as a win. Even if you disagree, it's not an absurd position to take.

[Spivak]

Google sells the ability to run ads on search to DoubleClick and DoubleClick buys Google's user data.

[scarface74]

Wow that sounds like a step forward for privacy and the consumer…