[epolanski]

Between Android, App Store, Chrome and Search Google has a very big stronghold over how people access and consume the internet.

Google has an insane competitive advantage over most of the internet into knowing exactly what are people looking for and being the first to provide it.

This isn't any different to what Amazon does on their shop. They know what sells and for how better than any of their sellers, and they will know what basic product to launch and kill the competition.

But honestly, I think that if I was Google or Amazon...I would do the same? They aren't in the business of charity or powering internet users but making money for shareholders.

As a user I despise that, but as an entrepreneur monetizing information and channeling it to your own services is such a no brainer.

This is a very difficult topic to discuss, one that's born from people defaulting to Google Search and the lack of any realistic competition.

It doesn't matter how worse google search gets, it's still going to be the default search for ages due to it being default already on pretty much every device bar Windows computers when using Edge.

At some point this is an issue for legislators I fear, because I just don't see how anyone can fight this.

[bomewish]

Hate to say it but this is where we get the state to step in and simply dismember the company.

[izacus]

Dismember into what? Except for a lot of ranting and stamping of feet on HN, I don't see a lot of HNers jumping in and providing free alternative services for Google services?

There is a lot of DEMAND for free services for sure, but doesn't seem a lot of people are putting their money where their mouth is? Kagi hasn't grown all that much, neither have services like Nebula?

[fidotron]

Android, cloud, email, youtube, maps, search and advertising could all be entirely separate businesses in an actual sense.

[avidiax]

Android -- a cost center. No viable business model. Maybe Samsung would fork AOSP for their phones.

Cloud -- has to run at a loss in the immediate future to capture marketshare

Email -- nobody pays for email. Get ready for a much smaller mailbox and ads targeted by email contents. Get "sponsored" emails in your feed.

YouTube -- was a separate company before

Maps -- will become a free tourist map, may have to pay to unlock any zone except your home.

Search -- if it can sell ads independently, could be a viable business.

Advertising -- all the other units need advertising to survive. This could be a clearinghouse

In short, not clear that the pieces make sense as independent businesses with some exceptions.

[fdw]

But isn't that the very problem?

The market for these loss-leading services is skewed because Google subsidizes their free offerings so that they improve their ads branch. Because it is hard to compete with a free (actually money-losing) service, it is very hard for competitors to spring up. And thus the whole thing is anti-competitive.

If they were separate companies and had to compete on their own merit, not subsidized by the ads division, they'd have to ask for money too. Then, competitors actually have a chance to offer something better. And through that, the reach of the ads business is limited unless they start to work with the competing services. This opens up the market for other ad markets, too.

And then we are a step closer to the free market that is efficient and good for consumers.

[danaris]

Precisely.

The argument "but if you spin off this major part of the company, it wouldn't be profitable enough to survive on its own" is the whole damn point. Using your monopoly in one area to prop up an otherwise-unprofitable arm controlling another area is exactly the kind of behavior antitrust law is designed to combat.

Too many people (especially around here) seem to forget that.

[izacus]

> And then we are a step closer to the free market that is efficient and good for consumers.

With Apple, Amazon and Microsoft doing the same in same markets... are we? Because it doesn't seem like "whap the random company that didn't pay enough for marketing" strategy isn't really working into establishing proper competition that benefits society.

Maybe... a different approach needs to be taken? How about starting to talk about legislation which would force large companies to allow competition into their vertical integrations - ALL of them, not just the single pet megacorp we hate this week. Level playing field and all that.

[wuschel]

You cut off one head ...

How would the market change in the wake of such a move? I can imagine that other companies will try to rebuild what Google was in other form. And these companies might not be US entities.

[grotorea]

> Android -- a cost center. No viable business model. Maybe Samsung would fork AOSP for their phones.

The Android company could simply get paid licensing fees for its OS and extras like Microsoft? Or maybe AOSP would instead continue as a intercompany project somewhat similar to Linux (the kernel).

> Cloud -- has to run at a loss in the immediate future to capture marketshare

That's dumping and I don't think it should be allowed so routinely anyway.

> Email -- nobody pays for email. Get ready for a much smaller mailbox and ads targeted by email contents. Get "sponsored" emails in your feed.

So, if people care they can pay for the paid service.

> YouTube -- was a separate company before

Was it profitable through? I see Alphabet published revenue numbers but I didn't find profit numbers. So maybe it would be hit by costcutting like limiting video length in some cases.

> Maps -- will become a free tourist map, may have to pay to unlock any zone except your home.

OpenStreetMaps exists, so an independent Google Maps company would have to compete with that.

> Search -- if it can sell ads independently, could be a viable business.

It's the starting and most profitable part that paid for all the rest, no? How it could not be viable.

> Advertising -- all the other units need advertising to survive. This could be a clearinghouse

But is the profit in the clearinghouse part or the selling ad space part? I'm guessing both.

[epolanski]

> It's the starting and most profitable part that paid for all the rest, no? How it could not be viable.

It relies on your information taken from your phone/email/search/youtube history/etc. Without all that data the value of ads is much lower.

[bongobingo1]

Is it possible to do that without there just being implicit back channels between the businesses, and they continue to operate as before?

I guess you could enforce some kind of open-tender requirements on their projects or something but that seems extremely difficult.

[Scarblac]

There is anti-cartel legislation that should prevent that, I think.

And why would it be in the interest of shareholders of the parts to only do business with the other old Google parts?

[BitPolice]

I don't have the answers here any more than anyone; but I notice that most approaches tend to cut along the existing verticals (e.g. the product areas).

The break-up of AT&T provides another perhaps more viable arena for thought...

There the breakup resulted in multiple, independent competing companies cleaved from AT&T. Three organically produced combinations now remain of the original 7: 1. Verizon is what was the north eastern region (Bell Atlantic + NYNEX). 2. The now reunited trademark AT&T started as the western ones (Pacific Telesis and Ameritech) then added the southwest (Southwestern Bell/SBC) in 2005 and the southern states' one (BellSouth) in 2006. 3. The midwestern region was Qwest which is still around in some form as CenturyLink/Lumen.

From one massive company which did everything you got a bunch of companies that actually competed with each other in the main and market dominant sector. The market continued to evolve and real market forces forced combinations among them; IMO this is a good and natural thing.

Remember MCI and Sprint? Did you know they were already around pre-breakup as starving competitors of the monopoly? Suddenly they became national brands and introduced their own leaderships' priorities into the consumer marketplace (MCI in particular was early in seeing the importance of several early Internet packet-based technologies and in consumer email).

Prior to the breakup did you know that the domestic television networks (ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, there wasn't Fox yet) had long-term contracts to send their signals over AT&T's terrestrial network? Almost immediately after the breakup (this is not a causal thing, but there is a lot of correlation) they all switched almost immediately thereafter to sattelite distribution (which had been available for nearly a decade).

-- The point I'm making is that you don't have to just draw inside the preexisting lines. The goal isn't the punish Alphabet, but to maximize competition in the market to the benefit of the nation (externalities positive and negative) and its consumers (first-order real good). Promoting competition may result in 2 search companies that can't reunite or something equally unthinkable...

[kubb]

Why do you hate saying it? Thought crime guilt?

[krapp]

Thoughtcrime on HN would be assuming Google actually does good and provides value. Wanting FAANG companies to be broken up, by violence if necessary, is such a common opinion here it's banal.

[izacus]

But only the FAANG that have failed to properly market this month - Meta is currently in favor (or at least out of weekly rant cycle), Apple and Microsoft have managed to spend enough on marketing lately to be spared the bile floodgates of HN with Google being its usual incompetent self.

But the pendulum will shift again.

(The core of my annoyance here isn't ranting over FAANGs, but the fact that any kind of suggestion of systemic fixes immediately brings out libertarians accusing us of trying to undermine poor economy.)

[throwaway4good]

Google provides value but its monopoly provides less value than what would have been created by a multiple of companies freely competing in an open market.

[epolanski]

I do think that Google is indeed too big to the point it's a threat for the future of the internet and fair competition indeed.

But I also don't like the idea of legislators having to sort it out, they may do more damage than good for all the parties, from companies to users to Google.

[throwaway4good]

Google is a US company but the "welfare loss" its monopoly create is on the whole (western) world and not just the US economy. That is why it won't be regulated out of existance.

That and national security.

[epolanski]

Care to explain how is it better for "national security" that some of Google's division have to be sold/spun off into different companies?

What is exactly the threat of YouTube becoming an independent company again, e.g.?

The only thing I see is a loss for Google in revenue and in YouTube in the "quality" of their ads.

None of this has any implication on national security.

[throwaway4good]

It is better for (US) national security that Google keeps its (global) monopoly. (Non-US) competitors to Google would hamper the US's ability to surveil and gather data globally.

[yard2010]

There's always a bigger fish :)

[ric2b]

Did someone say anti-trust?

As you said, it's only natural for a company to abuse a monopoly in one area to boost them in other areas, that's why these companies have to broken up to keep competition healthy in the other areas.

[eloisant]

Yes, we can't blame Google for making as much money as possible.

But we can blame regulators for letting them.

[3np]

We actually can and should hold people and companies responsible for doing unethical stuff.

[kristjank]

There should probably be some legislative pressure to separate service providers and advertisers. Most of the problems of the modern web can be traced back to how well-integrated the advertising is into big corporations' widely used services.

[passion__desire]

Is the idea for commercial search engine a bad idea? Where only e-commerce websites are tracked instead of the whole web? I don't understand this idea of intent tracking, guessing and suggestions. I explicitly want good results for my query, I have already made my mind to buy something. For this reason, I despise that Facebook guesses my intent when I visit an e-commerce website through Google search and starts suggesting related websites on its apps in async manner. All I want is, give me an interface to search for relevant query. I don't care if I search on Google or Facebook.

[born2discover]

Your comment is based on the premises that Meta/Google... are there to help you shop/find the best result once you've made your mind. For that purpose, an optimised search engine is indeed very useful.

But I don't think that's why intent profiling exists. What if, instead of helping you find quickly what you are looking for, they forced you through a less perfect system that, while leading you to your result, suggests you other, somewhat similar articles... Maybe you'll buy more? That incentivises ads and thus increases profits for the AdTech.

[passion__desire]

I was talking about Facebook's not so subtle nudge when they have already guessed your intent. It's already known that they do that. Then they show ads on their online properties few minutes later, people have already sensed this deception and their are reels made on this behaviour. How about facebook lets me search through the catalogue of websites who have opted to advertise with them. Maybe once it is well known that facebook also allows for normal search within their apps, other e-commerce website would be willing to pay a nominal fee to be included in search results.

[lopis]

> I think that if I was Google or Amazon...I would do the same?

Of course. There isn't anything particularly evil in Google or Amazon. They are a result of the capitalistic environment. If not them, some other mega corp would have emerged to do essentially the same. Bigger companies get bigger. They are just optimization machines.

That's why we need governments to intervene, break up monopolies, stop mergers, etc. I don't care if it's "fair" for companies. Most people are worse off because of huge multinationals and monopolies.

[passwordoops]

They are the result of a capitalistic environment that systematically dismantled all rules and regulations to prevent monopoly and oligopolies from happening in the first place

[mordae]

That's why we have public roads.

[Barrin92]

>But honestly, I think that if I was Google or Amazon...I would do the same?

Youre always a person, and every single decision is always signed by a person. Yes, markets should be regulated and this should not be up to Google, and yes there are incentives within companies to make people behave in certain ways, but it's always been a strange line of argument to me that this absolves individuals.

If I worked at Youtube right now and someone told me to implement that stupid ad blocker I'd tell them to shove it. People who are fortunate enough to be in demand at Google or Amazon have a non-negligible amount of agency, and alternatives.

[zlg_codes]

Search engines are already doing it to themselves by screwing with the ordering of results, paid placement in results, "did you mean" anti-patterns, obscuring or ignoring their prior powerful tools to filter results, etc. I don't really trust what a search engine returns to me. I have to sanity check every result.

With generative text and image technology, the reliability of finding legitimately human and organic information is basically nil.

Intellectuals will begin forming smaller, more exclusive, and better-curated groups and content stores. We're already seeing a slow resurgence of micro communities, for example pubnixes/tildes, directories like ye olden DMOZ, blogrolls and protocol rings, e.g. Bongusta on Gopherspace.

None of them solve the search problem per se, but it's an answer to the eroding quality of web search results.