[candiddevmike]

Surprised there's not much coverage on this on HN. I suspect this is the first of many legal cases against the tech empires, and if this goes south you may be able to conclude the rest will as well.

How much power and influence can Google buy (absolute best attorneys, call in favors...) vs the power of the US government? If the US government can't do anything, what does that mean?

[majormajor]

> If the US government can't do anything, what does that mean?

It means the US people would need to - if they wanted to - pass new laws specifically to target tech company's anti-competitive behaviors because they aren't exactly the same thing as what was being done by the companies the laws originally targeted.

I'm not convinced there is broad >60% popular support for expanded antitrust laws, so you'd really have to start with that in terms of what it means.

[nazgulsenpai]

Some of us lived to see Microsoft be found to be in violation of antitrust statutes and forced to break up only for them to become the behemoth they are today. Its hard to get excited about the Google since its already been proven with enough power and influence, not too much of this matters a whole lot.

I'm optimistic but quite jaded.

[bawolff]

Besides everyone else pointing out that they werent forced to break up - i think the more saliant point is they aren't the behemoth they once were.

Maybe its chance or maybe it really did work, but MS is not the evil monopoly it once was. Still very succesful but not a monopoly.

[safety1st]

It worked. The lawsuit had a tremendous impact on Microsoft's culture and had them running scared from the government for years. It made them less ambitious, more bureaucratic and reluctant to just buy up any Internet startup that posed a threat. Source: I was working there at the time.

[willywanker]

What worked was the decline of home PC users in favor of smartphones; Microsoft was never able to do well in this space despite buying Nokia's phone business (let alone dominating it as they still do on the desktop). Modern Microsoft has entirely switched to being cloud focused from just an OS vendor - their big money spinner these days is Azure, followed by Office 365 and then only Windows. It's also why Windows 10 and 11 are so user hostile compared to earlier versions; Microsoft doesn't have to care about a good user experience and will inevitably push the OS itself to a subscription model.

[umanwizard]

Microsoft was never forced to break up, they just had to change some of their business practices.

[AlbertCory]

to be pedantic: the trial judge did order a breakup. On appeal, that penalty was struck down.

[CSMastermind]

Which is honestly a shame. Even as a budding software engineer I didn't really understand the Microsoft anti-trust case at the time. It's only now that I appreciate the problem and do think it would have been better for everyone, Microsoft included, had they been broken up.

[Retric]

That’s the joke.

[AnimalMuppet]

Microsoft was forced to limit their behavior. I don't recall them being forced to break up.

Did I miss something?

[dmoy]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_C....

> On June 7, 2000, the District Court ordered a breakup of Microsoft as its remedy.

Then

> Ultimately, the Circuit Court overturned Jackson's holding that Microsoft should be broken up as an illegal monopoly. However, the Circuit Court did not overturn Jackson's findings of fact, and held that traditional antitrust analysis was not equipped to consider software-related practices like browser tie-ins.

[AnimalMuppet]

Ah, yes. I had forgotten that.

[Aunche]

It wasn't exactly intentional but the results were great for competition. They were forced to invest in Apple and to stop bullying them, and now Microsoft is completely dominated by them in terms of personal computing.

[gochi]

It's a monumental case, but hard to get people to care without intense clickbait and there hasn't been much that can be used as clickbait.

[AlbertCory]

It's not very dramatic, so far. Compare to David Boies making Gates look like an arrogant little dweeb, as he did in 1998.

[ndesaulniers]

Got a link?

[AlbertCory]

Just search YouTube. They're all there.

[tiffanyh]

Plot twist, you have to use a Google product to find & watch the video.

[Mistletoe]

Gates looking like an arrogant little dweeb will have a lot of results.

[patmorgan23]

"Bill gates Microsoft anti trust deposition"

[AlbertCory]

so you need instructions on how to search?

[Mistletoe]

I’m sorry, it was just a joke.

[rvz]

Looks to me that Googlers reading the news of this are quite concerned about their employer being held to account for not only their monopolistic actions, but as a result of that and retaining 90% of the market share, also having virtually close to no serious competition to challenge their monopoly.

It appears that this is the beginning of the end of the big tech party.

[matwood]

> It appears that this is the beginning of the end of the big tech party.

I think about it differently. First, the government going after a company for being a monopoly is the goal for every company in a capitalist system. It means they won the game by cornering markets and crushing every possible competitor.

Second, breakups will grow the big tech pie and increase shareholder and employee value. How many small, but growing endeavors has a company like Google killed? How many internal projects never see the light of day because they aren't Google scale day 1? Breaking up some of the current big tech behemoths will unlock and trigger a new big tech party, it will just be spread across more different companies.

[ThrowawayR2]

There are a lot fewer FOSS diehards and old school hackers than there were in 2001. And those that are still around are not going to be that anxious to admit that their darling Google, their ally and great hope for destroying "M$", turned out to be an even more heinous monopolist than them.

[asadotzler]

Google wasn't anyone's great hope in 2001.