[mardifoufs]

Why should the US break up an asset like Google? Would be completely self defeating. This isn't like standard oil or at&t, that mostly had influence and market share inside the US. It would basically be handing power to foreign competitors who would pounce at the opportunity

And I'm not American so it's not even some sort of patriotic comment. If Europe , or anywhere else, had a Google sized Behemoth, they wouldn't mess with it no matter how "anti tech" they might seem now. If anything they are anti tech because they don't want foreign big tech to have massive influence over them. You'd bet they wouldn't cripple big tech if they were European. On the other hand, as long as they are American that massive power is a feature, not a bug for the US government.

The reaction to Tiktok is a good example of how nationalism/geopolitics shape the reaction to big tech, which is why google is probably safe.

[strix_varius]

> Why should the US break up an asset like Google? Would be completely self defeating.

Because in the short term it would disrupt a major company (ala Standard Oil), but in the long term it would allow the US to remain competitive in the global market.

If we allow Google to continue abusing its monopoly power in the US, that guarantees that the US will not be the home of the future technologies of the world. Innovations will be sucked up and killed as acquisitions. Enormous energy will be focused on blatant moat-building like WEI instead of developments that benefit the world. etc.

[minsc_and_boo]

Tech competitiveness relies on network effects. Breaking up tech would just cede marketshare to companies like ByteDance and Baidu.

Any successful US-based tech post-breakup would be acquired by larger international players, like Tiktok was.

[paganel]

> Why should the US break up an asset like Google?

I'm also European and I think almost pretty much 100% as you think on this, but to play devil's advocate, and how I think this should have worked in theory in a free-market economy, is that the US, by allowing companies like Google to do their nefarious and frankly evil things right now and in the near future is also, at the same time, not allowing future potential companies, more innovative than Google is now, to take Google's place.

But what happens is that the US is focusing on having a strong and national security-enhancing company (Google) on its side now and in the near future, versus having an even stronger and, potentially, even more national-security enhancing company (the one that would have taken Google's place had the free market been allowed to do its thing) in the medium to long future.

On the face of it this compromise of security now and in the near future vs security in the medium to long future looks like a decent bet, the problem is that evil colossuses like Google are actively getting rotten from the inside, and at some point in the medium to long future they'll fall almost in an instant, with no company to take their place. That will leave the US highly vulnerable at that point in the future.

[lacrimacida]

One thing comes to mind: antitrust! It happened to Microsoft as well!!

[bagacrap]

...and Microsoft has more power than Google at the moment

[asadotzler]

But anti-trust stalled Microsoft's efforts at a critical time and allowed Firefox and Safari (like Gecko) to restore a standards-based web from an IE-based web. It's not a cure all but it worked. IE had 95% marketshare in 2002 and Firefox took a third of that from them in a few years thanks to anti-trust and the consent decree it forced on MS.

[bagacrap]

Chrome has nowhere near 95% market share so it would be hard to make the same case against them.

Given that it's open-source and anyone can roll and distribute a tweaked version of Chromium (and many have, notably Microsoft), it's really hard to see an argument here that Google is acting anti-competitively. If anything it's very pro-competitive to give away your secret sauce to your competitors.

Just because their browser is more popular than you would like, and you don't like a feature they're adding, doesn't mean a judge is going to stop them from adding it.

[mozball]

In which case foreign governments, the EU and the like who collectively represent the interests of the other 7+ billion people, should start levying taxes, penalties and fines on Google and haul it and the US in front of international agencies like the WTO for unfair trade practices.