[_vere]

Allowing a giant supercorperation to exist is generally not in the interest of the public. Google has been using the incomparable amount of money they have in many ways that do not serve the interests of anyone but themselves. Allowing one company to own the most visited websites, the most used browser, the most used advertising tools + marketplace, half of the mobile market and much more has not really brought us a lot of good. Their search service quality has decreased massively in recent years. Google searches for products are basically useless as all of the results are SEO optimized AI compiled listicles with amazon ref links, you can basically only find relevant info by adding "reddit" to the end of your search. Saying "see how you do without google for a day" is the same as saying "see how you would do without electricity for a day". They have worked very hard to become infrastructure, rather than a service.

[aurareturn]

You can say the same about LVMH in the luxury goods market. I don't see Europe trying to break up one of their own companies.

[piaste]

The difference is that LVMH-type products are irrelevant to 98% of the population, and have a highly questionable impact to the top 2%.

De Beers had an iconic monopoly on diamonds for over a century, but as far as I know the only time a major government really went after them was for colluding over industrial diamonds, which are actually important.

Ensuring that jewelry diamonds and checkered handbags are available at a competitive price would be an awful use of government resources, not least because the inflated price is the point of those products.

Luxottica (but only after the 2018 merger with their main competitor) would be a much better example.

[aurareturn]

I knew it someone would reply by saying Google's industry is somehow more important so Europe should regulate them but ignore their own monopolies.

[Yujf]

The commenter explains why that is and instead of reacting to his argument you are implying that it is just Europens who want to regulzte Americans while it is clearly not the case.

Not every monopoly is created equal and if you can not acknowledge that you are not arguing in good faith.

Edit: also I am looking into De Beers a bit more and it seems the EU has made steps to improve competition in the past.

Also if you want to argue that LVMH is a monopoly and that it has a bad impact, go ahead. I just think that since this is HN it is natural that most people do not feel the impact and do not really care. I do not know exactly how monopolistic they are and what the bad impact of that is but feel free to enlighten me.

[aurareturn]

What is the metric you're using to measure how important an industry is?

To some people, Google is more important. To others, LVHM is more important.

There are a ton of people who depend on the luxury goods industry. LVHM itself is a $500 billion company.

I know plenty of people who go crazy for luxury handbags, clothing, jewelry but could careless about which search engine to use.

[_vere]

The luxury goods market is not infrastructure. Not to say they shouldn't be broken up, but google is owning the roads you drive on, your car, everyone else's car and every parking space. The scale of the issue is just MUCH worse. Its not good that if you want the expensive child labor clothes, you have little choice but to buy from LVMH, but like, you can get other clothes. If you want to rid yourself of googles influence in your life, you have to abandon basically every tech item you own and live in the woods.

[aurareturn]

Neither is Google. If Google said they're going to disappear in 30 days, the world will move on and every single one of their services will be replaced.

[_vere]

If a power company suddenly shuts down and after the logistics nightmare that follows, they get replaced, they are still infrastructure. If just a few products that google make go offline for only a few hours, the economic damage that causes is in the hundreds of millions at least. Just because googles services could feasibly be replaced, it does not mean they are not infrastructure.

[aurareturn]

Ok, so you're basically saying that Google should be regulated because they're like infrastructure - even though they can be replaced given a few months. There are good to great alternatives for every Google product.

Yet, it's ok for Europe to ignore their own monopolies.

This is just moving the goal post. A monopoly is a monopoly.

What about ASML? They're a monopoly for EUV machines, which power our modern tech economy. That should be "infrastructure" enough right? Why isn't Europe looking at them?