[mikel205]

Unironically I think this would be a good thing for Google. Lots of smart people, and a lot of amazing technology.

If you took away the firehouse of money from search I'm sure a lot of those other parts of the business would find a way to make some incredible products. Think of everything that came out of the Baby Bells

[gradys]

I’m not as familiar with the Baby Bells, so this is a surprising comparison to me. Bell Labs was famously so productive while it had the monopoly money hose, and not as much came from it after Bell was broken up.

What are the most noteworthy accomplishments of the Baby Bells?

[linguae]

While I lament the decline of Bell Labs and unfettered research in general (unfettered research labs need protection from market forces that only a monopoly, government, academia, or the very wealthy can provide), I also believe that the breakup of the Bell System was overall a good thing for society. For example, there was a time when AT&T customers had to rent their phones; they couldn’t own them (https://memorial.bellsystem.com/bell_system_property.html). Customers were finally allowed to purchase their own phones once the divestiture was underway. In addition, I’m not sure if we’d have a competitive cell phone market in America today had the Bell System remained in place, not to mention how I haven’t heard anything about long-distance calling charges in about 15 years due to how many modern cell phone plans work.

[freedomben]

Ironically, we're nearly back at the "renting" phone stage. Sure the companies selling the phones don't use that terminology, and it's a one-time payment for the life of the device, but full control of the device is never transferred to the user. The company holds the keys and will only allow you to do what they want you to do. This certainly describes iPhones and most Android phones to date, and it's getting worse on the Android side as root becomes harder and harder.

[delfinom]

I just don't see any positives here though. Apple will be given 100% free-reign to take complete monopolistic control of the smartphone market without Google.

[jiqiren]

Calling people became cheap. Think about making a cross-country phone call in the pre-broken up AT&T era. It was like 25¢/min. Now I pay $35/month and can literally call most countries for up to 500min before I get metered (Visible+).

[birdman3131]

Cross country? You mean a 15 minute drive away. Many places local was only that town and maybe another town under 5 miles away.

[axus]

Really limited the range of those free BBS calls

[glimshe]

I'll just say one thing: BlueBeep. If you know what that is, nothing else needs to be said. :)

[DowagerDave]

it's hard to compare without a control, but a few key points: * none of the Baby Bells failed * because they segmented regionally, integration was super important and you could argue paved the way for the modern internet * consumer services under Bell was incredibly expensive and tightly controlled

In hindsight maybe they should have split up horizontally, nationalizing the natural monopoly components/infrastructure (ex: the physical lines)? It's interesting to see what looks like a reconsolidation of wireless now, I wonder what the future will look like.

[mikel205]

My opinion is that Bell Labs created great technology, but had no real incentive to make products and bring them to the public. The Baby Bells needed to compete however, and so they did.

[Eddy_Viscosity2]

I think even with firehose monopoly money that Bell Labs would have eventually succumbed to cuts and general enshittification as the CEOs and shareholders wanted ever increasing pay and dividends. "Do more with less guys! You're smart you can figure it out! The Board really needs this 10,000% pay raise, they have families you know."

[Const-me]

> firehouse of money from search

It’s not just search. They make such vast amounts of money because they hold a monopoly across several layers of the stack: web browsers (65% market share on desktop, 67% market share on mobile), internet search (90% market share), and internet advertising (AdSense and Ads together hold 67%).

Interestingly, this dominance isn’t the result of fair competition, but rather acquisitions. Google was allowed to buy YouTube, Android, and numerous online advertising companies. You can see the list there https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...

I believe most of these acquisitions should have been blocked by the FTC or DoJ, but they weren’t, which has allowed Google to become a vertically integrated monopoly.

[ants_everywhere]

> Lots of smart people, and a lot of amazing technology....would find a way to make some incredible products

One of the things I think a lot about with open source is that maybe not every amazing idea is profitable (or profitable in the current business climate).

It may be that some ideas have to be subsidized. Google subsidizes them with money from ads. But it also costs them a lot to maintain their monopoly, and the monopoly and the ads are IMO harmful to consumers.

So I think we need some more ways of funding digital public goods. I think governments can and should (and in fact do) play a role, but I think there need to be other sources as well.

Arguably the reputation Google has for killing its projects is a signal that they have more good ideas than they have funding capacity to sustain them. I realize it's also perf/promo driven. But it's also the pattern you see with smart people with ADHD where they start great projects but don't have the resources to continue them all. So we'll have more and cooler software if we find better ways of funding open source.

[DowagerDave]

>> Google subsidizes them with money from ads.

if this is true, it's very temporary and very fickle. It is well known that Google rewards (1) big, new initiatives over maintaining long-running projects, and (2) things that power the cash machine over anything else.

Neither of these are good for the OSS ecosystem.

[pphysch]

Being suddenly forced to increase revenues (to make up for lost subsidies) is unequivocally not the way to drive innovation.

[mikel205]

Competitive markets have generally proven to foster innovation?

[petesergeant]

Literally the only people this isn't good for is Google's senior management.

[freedomben]

You think this would be good for Android users? What do you see happening to Android if Google were broken up?

[fwip]

Lots of possibilities. One is that Android charges a per-device* fee to the phone manufacturers to license the OS, similar to Windows.

*with the usual hijinks where a high-end device requires a bigger license fee than a budget phone.

[freedomben]

Wouldn't that essentially mandate the discontinuation of AOSP? That seems like a massive loss to humanity, and certainly to the open source world.

I suppose it's possible that GAPPS would become licensed but the OS for free, though I could see the bean counters having a big problem with that.

[tmpz22]

Won’t somebody think of the Mountain View Realtors Association?

[nostrademons]

Google's headcount in Mountain View has decreased by ~30% since 2022, with many of the jobs being shipped to Bangalore and Hyderabad.

[basiccalendar74]

how much did it change compared to 2019?

[nostrademons]

About -25%. Current campus size is roughly what it was in early 2014.

The difference in the housing market is that instead of being 28-year-olds who live in apartments, all those MTV Googlers are 38-year-olds with families who are sitting on a couple million in stock compensation each.

[b112]

Not sure it would hurt them.

All of the broken up companies created, the Googlettes if you will, would be flush with senior devs and researchers, many of them somewhat well to do and likely with savings.

Many of those people will spread like the wind, create new startups, and will require a house with garage to house said startup.

The MVRA and agents will be happy indeed.

And we may get a new barbershop band out of it too.