[hzia]

I think most people do not understand that Google funnels a lot of their profits to make Chrome and Android into OSS.

Youtube may be the only viable company that can come out of Google. Rest will either have to charge a lot of money or die.

And we will be left with an even more profitable ad giant, that sends back all profits to it's share holders.

[mumblemumble]

I think that similar arguments were made about Ma Bell and Bell Labs back in the day. And it's true, a lot of great things did come out of Bell Labs.

In fact, it almost seems like the only people able to produce great things in the 1970s were massive entrenched corporations like Ma Bell.

Funny, that.

Come to think of it, wasn't there a much more vibrant browser ecosystem in the late 90s and early 2000s, before Google used its dominant position in the ad market to undercut the competition? There used to be a lot more mobile operating systems out there, too.

I wonder what happened to all that competition? It's almost like some sort of massive anti-competitive influence came into force in the tech scene somewhere in the 2000s. . .

[stego-tech]

I recall a video essay years ago that made the case that the reason companies like Bell and RCA were so successful and produced so many R&D products was because the tax code incentivized reinvesting profits into the company, and the pursuit of patents to license to other companies specializing in manufacturing as a means of revenue as opposed to vertical conglomerates. Wish I'd bookmarked it, because they did an excellent job citing sources as well.

My subjective experiences tell me that, just like the early days of the microcomputer revolution, anything is possible with talented nerds who don't have to worry about grinding at their day jobs to survive. Early markets are often defined by those with the privilege to innovate absent the need to work to survive, and sharing the fruits of their labors with the masses because that's their entire intent - and that being able to live off of that income instead of a corporate gig was a nice bonus.

If you want more innovation, focus on eliminating societal precarity instead of slashing regulations or growing monopolies.

[Suppafly]

>Come to think of it, wasn't there a much more vibrant browser ecosystem in the late 90s and early 2000s, before Google used its dominant position in the ad market to undercut the competition?

No? It used to be IE and Mozilla, and now it's Edge, Chrome, and Mozilla. Opera existed then and now, and probably more people use it now, but it's still small enough that no one cares. I suppose you could make a point about Edge using Chrome's engine, but that's because the IE one sucked and the new one Microsoft made for Edge sucked so they eventually switched to using Chrome's. But the idea that the browser market was somehow better back in the day is hilarious and wrong.

>There used to be a lot more mobile operating systems out there, too.

Not really. I suppose early on during the smartphone era, blackberry was still around, but they mostly lost out due to Apple finally getting decent MDM, and not bothering to improve their product after a while, than the fact that Android was growing in popularity. Microsoft entered kinda late and never really developed their phone OS enough and eventually gave up, but that's because their product wasn't good enough, not because of anything the others were doing to stop them.

[Calavar]

Edge is reskinned Chrome. Opera is also reskinned Chrome. The whole point of having multiple browsers is to get multiple competing implementations of web standards, so a single vendor can't force unilaterally force its features or its particular interpretation of a feature over the entire market.

[DoctorOW]

Before: Trident, Webkit, Gecko, Presto After: Blink/Webkit, Gecko/Quantum

We're seeing less engines which is far more important than the browser wrapper. Also Quantum's development is pretty much driven by a desire to maintain feature parity with Blink which means Google gets control over what the web is according to every major browser. The fact that there are a variety of companies whose browsers are under Google's control is irrelevant in terms of anti-competitive discussion.

[jorvi]

> The fact that there are a variety of companies whose browsers are under Google's control

Que?

If Google did some heinous stuff, tomorrow Microsoft would hard-fork Chromium and Brave et al would just switch their upstream to Edge.

[paulryanrogers]

> Microsoft would hard-fork Chromium and Brave et al would just switch their upstream to Edge.

Doubt.

I'll believe it when I see it. Maintaining a hard fork is almost as hard as a greenfield browser like old Edge or old Opera. There are no serious competitors doing hard Chromium forks besides Apple. (Afraid to admit Firefox isn't a serious competitor anymore.)

[Suppafly]

>We're seeing less engines which is far more important than the browser wrapper.

That's moving the goalposts, but honestly in the past it was IE and sometimes mozilla deciding how the web was going to work and anyone else playing catch up, which is essentially still what it is.

[jorvi]

> Microsoft entered kinda late and never really developed their phone OS enough and eventually gave up, but that's because their product wasn't good enough, not because of anything the others were doing to stop them.

Not sure if this is meant tongue-in-cheek.

Google very aggressively chased any 3rd-party Windows Phone apps out of town that were Google—services compatible, whilst refusing to release 1st party apps themselves.

Microsoft shares a fair part in the blame because they made developers switch frameworks like… 5 times (?) in the span of 3 OS versions. Not to mention the constant sunsetting of devices.

The UI was amazing though. All content and no dressing, performant on low-end hardware, had dark mode half a decade before Android / iOS.

[Suppafly]

Microsoft just didn't want it bad enough. It's a similar situation to when they joined the video game market, except they wanted that and took a loss to stay in the market and now are essentially the main console.

[hzia]

I agree on the Bell Labs analogy

Most browsers have consolidated over time because we are constantly updating web standards and bar for security is so high. On top of that everything has to be insanely backward compatible

WebGPU is a good example. Implementing that securely in a nightmare

[verdverm]

It might be time more of us think about the browser/chromium like Linux/kernel

There are lots of distos out there, but we all use the same core and make it better & safer together.

[stego-tech]

> It might be time more of us think about the browser/chromium like Linux/kernel

Coming from Enterprise Architecture world, if you're not already treating browsers as full-fledged operating systems to manage and secure, then you're operating dangerously. In fact, that's actually why I'm resistant to further "webification" of software and applications, as it's the same drawbacks as nested virtualization: now we have the OS layer that makes the computer run and the web browser layer to interact with stuff to worry about, both of which have their own performance penalties and threat profiles.

As much as I love REST APIs (and boy, do I love them and their simplicity), I don't like the idea of everything running a web server when it doesn't have to be.

[verdverm]

I agree with your statements

What I was trying to say is that we only have a single kernel in the linux world without complaint, so having a single browser "kernel" (chromium) can be seen as a good thing. We have multiple distros (chrome, edge, brave, etc) for the browser as well

[jorvi]

For what it’s worth, I have been making the exact same argument for a few years now. At this point, Blink has become the kernel for the web, so why not focus all our efforts there?

Hell, even Firefox could relatively easily swap to running on Blink since most of their UI these days is CSS+JS.

[T-Winsnes]

I think you underestimate the value of controlling the platform that you base all your revenue from. Chrome controls the internet and android has a huge market share on mobile.

The latest changes to chrome that breaks plugins like ublock origin allows them to keep maximising their advertising revenue.

I think these two being open source is a major reason why they have been so successfully adopted. It isn’t direct revenue, but the control and indirect revenue that comes from that which is the driver

[hzia]

I think you are drastically overestimating the revenue gain from ad blockers

But I agree that default search with being Google must have heavily blocked competition.

Comparing how much they pay Mozilla and Apple to maintain search, it would be reasonable to estimate Chrome’s implementation to save them $1b a year

But I highly doubt they make any back given > 1k people work on it

[thayne]

Possibly a greater benefit to Google is the influence it gives them over web standards.

For example, if google didn't control the most popular browser, they probably would have had to say goodbye to third party cookies a long time ago, but since they do they've been able to delay it for quite a while, at least for a considerable portion of users.

[SR2Z]

Google is the group pushing hardest for the removal of third party cookies; they don't need them because they get your data from other sources.

It's everyone else who wants to keep them around.

[thayne]

Firefox and Safari have disabled third party cookies years ago, but chromium based browsers still have them on.

And then look at Google's "privacy sandbox proposals, that aim to replace third party cookie functionality. They have largely been rejected by Mozilla and Apple, over privacy concerns.

[paulryanrogers]

Firefox still accepts 3rd party cookies by default. They've made some moves to reduce reliance on them. Sadly privacy zealous prefer the perfect over the good, so won't get either.

[Kbelicius]

> I think you are drastically overestimating the revenue gain from ad blockers

I think you are underestimating it. There must be a reason why google is trying to work around ad blockers on their platforms.

> But I highly doubt they make any back given > 1k people work on it

Where did you find that number? I highly doubt it. Maybe if you are counting contributors to chromium.

[lolinder]

What you're describing is why Google is willing to sink money into Chrome, and you're right. But that doesn't mean that Chrome can become a viable independent company.

Chrome synergizes with the rest of Google's portfolio.

[shiroiushi]

>android has a huge market share on mobile.

Not in the US they don't; it's a minority share, split across many different manufacturers who all have their own flavor of Android, their own (crappy) app stores and pre-loaded crapware apps, etc. Apple has a clear majority of the US smartphone market (and it's a vertical monopoly, with Apple controlling the phone hardware and the app store and not allowing any alternatives), but no one's looking at breaking them up.

>I think these two being open source is a major reason why they have been so successfully adopted.

iOS isn't open-source, and it has a commanding majority of the US smartphone market.

[sciurus]

If these measurements are correct, iOS has about 11% more of the US market share than Android.

This is very different from the global market share, where Android has 45% more.

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/ios-vs-android-market-s...

[shiroiushi]

>This is very different from the global market share, where Android has 45% more.'

This case is about US antitrust law, so what happens outside US borders isn't really that important, except as far as it affects the companies' revenues and profits. Supposedly, the actions of any antitrust action are to protect consumers/the general public, but what that really means is consumers in the US. Consumers outside the US are irrelevant. And the simple fact is that, by your own numbers, consumers in the US are mostly using iOS, not Android.

[kelnos]

If anti-trust action in the US results in the break-up of Google, it affects users worldwide, not just in the US.

Regardless, 42% (in the US) is still a huge market share. Huge doesn't have to mean majority or even plurality.

[dimitrios1]

Correct. "Huge" in the case of antitrust matters is big enough to act anti-competitively. It's much more broad than you think, and it sees a lion share of litigation done by the Feds.

For example, there's currently an ongoing anti trust case against "Al’s Asphalt Paving Company"

https://www.justice.gov/atr/case/us-v-als-asphalt-paving-com...

[hzia]

Majority of revenue base lives on iOS globally (due to being a monopoly in the US)

That's why Apple has higher profits than all other mobile operators combined!

[bryanrasmussen]

I thought the higher revenue was because Apple charges more for everything, and the people who buy Apple products are also more likely to purchase other things, driving product for app store etc. (based on some study I saw many years back that is probably out of date by now)

[briandear]

iOS isn’t a monopoly.

[kelnos]

> Not in the US they don't

I'm not sure in what world 42% isn't huge when it comes to market share. iOS having a majority isn't really relevant to this point.

And regardless, GP didn't say "in the US"; globally, they are far ahead of iOS. Sure, this anti-trust action is a US matter, but a break-up would absolutely affect Google globally.

[briandear]

Windows isn’t open source. Perhaps Office and Windows should be broken up? They have far more market share comparatively speaking. The fact that most of the enterprise run on Microsoft could be more concerning than an consumer App Store.

[shiroiushi]

That would have been nice 20+ years ago, back when the US tried it, but the government shut it down just as soon as Bush took office.

[IX-103]

People keep bringing up Manifest v3 like it's some evil plot to show people ads. Nevermind that Chrome already ships with its own adblocker which blocks bad ads.

The fact is that with the Spectre mitigations added to Chrome, the performance of networking with manifest v2 was bad. Having to keep sending every network request through 3 different processes just in case there is a plugin (uses by the minority of users) that wants to filter the requests before they are made.

Of course, blocking resource fetches like that could have easily been detected by any server that cares about it, and the interaction with service workers was...weird.

With manifest v3 you can still block ads. You can remove them from the DOM, you can make them invisible, you can replace them. You just can't programmatically decide which resources to filter - only a declarative model for resource filtering is supported.

[kelnos]

> Chrome already ships with its own adblocker which blocks bad ads.

No it doesn't, because I define all ads as bad, so Chrome's ad "blocker" is does not even remotely meet my needs.

> You just can't programmatically decide which resources to filter

That "just" is doing a ton of work there. Declarative ad blockers aren't terrible, but they're not great either. And I don't want my browser fetching ads (which could also be malware) at all. Downloading them and then hiding them is insufficient.

[rockskon]

Bad ads?

No, that is horseshit.

The goal of blocking ads isn't to only allow in "good ads".

It's to block ads. Not some ads. Not a few ads. Not just malware delivered via ads. Not just Google's competitors.

It's to block ads. All of them. To stop the relentless harassment of the advertising industry claiming other peoples' screens and time as their own.

[Workaccount2]

At least be intellectually honest here

Ads might suck a lot, but you are also not entitled to free content.

[mission_failed]

Ads force you to pay for some thing

Actually no, it's worse. Ad companies take everything they can from you using any method they can including monitoring everything you browse or watch on TV or say near your phone or TV or in your car or what you look at in every shop or what you buy or who you chat to, compile massive secret databases and sell 'you' to anyone willing to pay, regardless of what the information is used for.

[Workaccount2]

I mean, every other business I am aware of forces you to pay for something too?

I don't see what is confusing here. Consumers love the ad-model because they can get things "free". If the real cost of ad-supported products is too much for you, then its too expensive for you to use.

Like someone found the backdoor to the movie theater, and people just go in that way rather than pay for a ticket, and then these same people go on rants about how movie tickets are a rip-off and they make you watch 30 mins of ads before the movie, and candy is 5x overpriced, and proudly declaring "I will never pay for a movie ticket again!", as if they are some righteous moral champion standing against the greed of people wanting to get paid for their work.

Straighten out your head, then come back and make an argument.

[rockskon]

And you are not entitled to kill off your competitors by operating at a loss until they're dead and then raise your price (e.g. amount of time you demand from people for them to see ads, amount of personal data you collect, and all but hiding content that isn't up to the standards you present to advertisers) to ridiculous levels.

You don't like it? Go out of business and have companies that are able to operate at the price consumers are willing to pay rise up in your place.

[mossTechnician]

Likewise, no third party is entitled to loading resources on my computer or displaying content on my screen without my permission.

[Workaccount2]

So the people who view the ads and make it possible for you to load just the content are suckers for doing so?

[lupusreal]

Websites aren't forced to send me their content even though I use an adblocker. If they do, then the "" harm"" to their business is Not My Problem.

[freeone3000]

And yet, people put out tons of free content all the time! Clip out the ad and it’s right there.

[Workaccount2]

It's not free, the people who view the ads are covering the cost for those who don't.

[lupusreal]

All ads are psychological warfare being waged by corporations against the public. They ruthlessly exploit human psychology to sell product.

[andriesm]

People are mindless pawns? People are not free to say no thanks, ignore or tune out? That's what I do my entire life. And I actually appreciate and value highly targeted marketing messages that show me things I'm interested in and WANT to buy. Really good targeted marketing is a win-win, it helps consumers find stuff they want and it helps the companies generate profits. (which in turns pays salaries to employees) I don't have a solution for weakminded and vulnerable people, but perhaps such people should be under parental supervision.

[lupusreal]

Your ability to say no to an ad does not in any way negate the point that ads are psychologically abusive. Why are you so keen to simp for the interests of corporations anyway? The ads have effected you more than you admit.

[ledauphin]

it's at the very least an evil plot to stop users (and extension authors) from _making their own decisions_ about the efficiency trade-off.

which is really just absurd when you think about it. I don't care about another hour of battery life, but even if I did, I'd be perfectly happy if Chrome just told me "hey these extensions aren't very battery-efficient!" and I got to make my own decision about that.

[shiroiushi]

>I don't care about another hour of battery life

If you're stuck having to run a ton of shitty JS code with ad malware in it, because your web browser doesn't allow you to effectively block it, that's probably going to cost you more in battery life than the overhead needed by MV2 to block that stuff.

[mvkel]

This just sounds like Hobson's choice. There's only one right answer, and Google is making it on behalf of the user. Fine.

[ineedasername]

The Android Play Store alone generates about $100B/year for Google. I saw $40B as what Google has spent over the years on Android. That seems like a viable business.

[threeseed]

At least according to this, Google generated ~$47B/year.

https://www.businessofapps.com/data/google-play-statistics/

https://www.statista.com/statistics/444476/google-play-annua...

[hzia]

That’s revenue not profits. Majority goes to app devs.

Profits are all that matter

[ThunderSizzle]

This is a naive take. Companies want their book-profit to be as close to zero, because they make their income tax to the IRS close to 0.

Most companies intentionally waste money on expenses to help drive future growth, or atleast avoid taxes. This is why you hear constantly Amazon pays almost no taxes compared to their revenue.

[gizmo]

Amazon was the exception actually. That's why it's the poster child for being perpetually break-even. The surge in AI capex spending of the last couple of years is partially because big tech has finally found something to shovel their billions into. Before that big tech just sat on their billions with no plan of what to do with it. But even AI spending doesn't really put a dent in the money pile because big tech is so astonishingly profitable. Apple makes $100 billion in accounting profit annually. Google and Microsoft each $75 billion. How can you reinvest that kind of money? You can't. It's too much. Even Amazon gave up and booked $44 billion in net profit.

[homebrewer]

So they effectively burn money, and yet OSS funding is an unsolved problem, and large parts of our foundation rely on unpaid volunteers "in Nebraska". Fantastic. I love the industry more and more with every passing day.

[triceratops]

Some real "they just write it off Jerry" energy in this comment.

[ThunderSizzle]

No. Your confusing different accounting methodologies. For tax accounting purposes, the goal is to show the IRS near-zero profit.

Their internal books will track expenses in a different way so as to produce a non-tax profit, buy that's all internal non-tax accounting, and tends ro be private compared to SEC filings.

[nl]

Profits are not all that matters.

The money Google spends internally either on development or on cross subsidies is no profit and is what most of the issues in this discussion are addressing.

Profits is just money they couldn't find a place to spend on growth.

(Also a maximum of 30% goes to app devs which isn't a majority any way you measure it)

[bobviolier]

70% goed to app devs (right?)

[yreg]

of course

[__MatrixMan__]

I disagree, the government should absolutely consider how much app devs would lose out on before they decide on how to carve up google.

[meiraleal]

We would gain a lot from an independent Chrome and app store that needs and respect devs.

[__MatrixMan__]

That's my point. Let's ensure that however we carve up Google, whatever pieces are left continue to support the developers.

[ekianjo]

People still consider revenue = profits?

[starspangled]

Not a lot of their profits. A minuscule fraction of their profits, and far less than OSS has given value to them. And the value from contributing back to open source is generally pretty high by itself because you get a lot of review and maintenance from the community on the features and code you want for your proprietary business, so it's not like they are doing a lot of it out of pure altruism.

OSS would be fine without Google, it was great before Google ever existed. There are intrinsic motivations to contribute, which is why thousands of companies do.

[wvh]

How much effort do Chrome and Android require from a company the size of Google? It's a genuine question.

Jolla/Sailfish make a mobile operating system with a handful of people, and even though that system pretty minimal, I'd say the added value on the Android side is the ecosystem of apps and porting to devices, which is done by other developers and manufacturers than Google. And I'm not sure how many people work on Firefox itself on any given day.

I guess it's just really hard to get a clear picture on what all those people in large companies are really doing day to day. The overhead must be enormous, and likely a lot of engineering effort is thrown at the wall to see what sticks.

[lolinder]

> Jolla/Sailfish make a mobile operating system with a handful of people

My biggest question is how long they can stay at a handful if they become popular. The increased burden of security patches alone would likely turn that handful into a small army.

Security through obscurity is often mocked (for good reason), but it actually does work in cases like this as long as you don't reach Android's scale.

[lupusreal]

I wonder what percentage of the workforce Google has working on Android is dedicated to fixing security issues. Probably a sizable minority... Maybe one in ten? I'd love to know the real numbers.

[maeil]

Chrome would be absurdly profitable. Imagine selling the default search engine setting to the highest bidder on Chrome when it already goes for $20 billion/year on the far less popular Safari.

[creato]

But that behavior was just determined to be illegal, at least when the bidder is Google. It seems ridiculous if the sequence of events that happens here is:

1. Google is fined/broken up due (in part) to paying for the default search engine position.

2. In the newly broken off chrome company, they auction the default search engine position.

3. Google cannot bid on it. So I guess Microsoft is going to win that position? Who else is going to pay for it?

I can't imagine this is what happens. This would just make the DoJ look absolutely foolish and would basically put the DoJ in the position of being Microsoft's personal attack dog. But on the other hand, what else could happen? It's still ridiculous even if it's anyone other than Microsoft that is the winning bidder.

[kelnos]

Perhaps that behavior wouldn't be illegal in a scenario where Google has been broken up, and Chrome and Google Search are separate legal entities.

[creato]

Why would that matter though? Google owning chrome doesn't really have anything to do with them paying Apple for the safari default.

[thayne]

> what else could happen?

It prompts the user to pick a search engine on install? And let's be honest, most people will probably pick google anyway.

But then the question is, how will companies like Mozilla and a spin-off company for chrome make money if they can't auction off the default search engine anymore?

[realusername]

> think most people do not understand that Google funnels a lot of their profits to make Chrome and Android into OSS.

Chrome maybe but for Android, it's debatable at best to state it as OSS. AOSP doesn't run on a single phone on earth, not even the emulator and the freedom of users to modify it is very limited in practice.

I'd put it as "mostly source available" instead of open source.

[krackers]

So if Google dies then we'll have more diverse browser and mobile ecosystem? Where exactly is the downside?

[agent281]

Google funds Chrome. Other browsers use Chrome as a base. The majority of Firefox's funding is from Google. They will suffer as well. MS would need to step back up with browsers and you would also have Safari left over. I think it would be a major shock to the browser ecosystem.

[kelnos]

I really do question how much of Mozilla's financial backing would really be needed to keep Firefox development going. There are plenty of open source projects that are independent and run by foundations, but are funded by various corporations. A browser is certainly a complex piece of software, but I don't see why it couldn't be run the same way.

[justinclift]

The current salary of Mozilla's CEO could certainly fund several full time developers instead. :)

[brendoelfrendo]

Other browsers use the open source Chromium project as their base, not Chrome. If Google killed off Chrome tomorrow, those other browsers could continue using the Chromium codebase, and new maintainers could step up to manage the Chromium project. Nothing needs to change.

[diffeomorphism]

Wishful thinking. It is much too large of a project for "new maintainers could step up" once google jumps off both chrome and chromium. Chromium would either slowly wither away or the new maintainers would be MS Edge or Amazon or some other large company.

[stephenr]

Before the current Chromtastrophe, multiple companies maintained their own, fully independent rendering engines, according to web standards.

Microsoft didn't stop developing EdgeHTML because it's too hard, they stopped because Google kept giving them the fuck around on sites like YouTube.

The whole point of web standards is that you can have multiple implementations for the same thing - there's zero reason that post-Google, Blink needs to be maintained by a single entity.

Microsoft can maintain their own fork of Blink, or bring back Edge, or adopt WebKit, or whatever works for them.

Opera and <insert laundry list of chrome-but-not-chrome browsers> have the same options, sans EdgeHTML.

The whole reason these companies are using Chromium/Blink is that Google has a stranglehold on web standards, and by being a me-too Chrome-alike they get support for Google's half baked ideas for free, to prevent the ever-fickle user base from switching browser because their browser doesn't support the latest half-written web standards draft.

[account42]

Right, making a browser is "too expensive" largely because Google can make it too expensive by dumping tons of money into Chrome.

[davedx]

"Won't somebody please think of the browsers!"

This is not a good reason to break up anti-competitive monopolies: that it would harm the technology their monopoly depends on

[agent281]

I'm not saying that they should stop anti-trust work for browsers. I'm saying that it won't necessarily make things better for the browser ecosystem as things stand. Things would definitely get worse before they got better in browser land.

[stephenr]

> I think it would be a major shock to the browser ecosystem.

To repeat the question from above, where is the downside?

Microsoft only abandoned EdgeHTML and adopted Blink because Google owned sites like YouTube were deliberately breaking in Edge.

At this stage I don't imagine they'd go back (to EdgeHTML as their engine) specifically, but it's not hard to imagine a world where MSFT maintains its own fork of Blink for use in Edge, Opera potentially the same.

As for Firefox: they get money for being the default search engine - if Google is broken up, the search engine company that emerges will have even more reason to want to be the default search engine on as many browsers as possible (and thus incentive to pay money to other browsers).

[agent281]

I was replying the GP:

> So if Google dies then we'll have more diverse browser and mobile ecosystem

Initially, this won't be true. A lot of the browser ecosystem relies on Google right now. Eventually it would be replaced. I just don't think that it would be immediately true.

[tick_tock_tick]

> Microsoft only abandoned EdgeHTML and adopted Blink because Google owned sites like YouTube were deliberately breaking in Edge.

No they abandoned EdgeHTML because it was shit. Seriously there are plenty of posts right here on hacker news about the internals of that decision. The team and product failed to deliver so badly that it got the axe.

[stephenr]

> there are plenty of posts right here on hacker news about the internals of that decision

There sure are:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18697824

> This is already happening. I very recently worked on the Edge team, and one of the reasons we decided to end EdgeHTML was because Google kept making changes to its sites that broke other browsers, and we couldn't keep up.

> Now while I'm not sure I'm convinced that YouTube was changed intentionally to slow Edge, many of my co-workers are quite convinced - and they're the ones who looked into it personally.

[lolinder]

Frankly, I think the browser ecosystem needs a major shock. There are too many companies invested in the web as a platform for them to collectively allow web browsers to just stop existing, and a few years of discomfort may well be worth it if it shakes up the ecosystem a bit and brings more diversity.

[amy-petrik-214]

Google makes like 30 billion dollar PROFIT per year, and they pay firefox 0.5 billion per year.

Now it seems to me that 0.5 billion is the "cost of not technically being a monopoly" when they are indeed a monopoly, and it's a net win if they're pulling say 10 billion synergistic monopolistic profit from not being broken up into baby googles as a monopoly trust buster case.

I would say this is capitalism in a pure form, the kind the communists rail against, the kind where a monopoly crushes out all the benefits to the people, government corruption, etc. True "for the people" style capitalism would mean two browsers truly competing, ideally more than two (duopolies are monopolies by another name and poison our society broadly). One browser as part of an american zaibatsu, with the zaibatsu punting a little money to save face and claim competition exists - by propping up the competition financially - is absolutely a disgusting thing. To say "oh no, the thing they're propping up will no longer be propped up" is also disgusting and capitalistically twisted.

[davedx]

Most people do not understand this because Alphabet's financial filings are chronically opaque and break out very little of how the financials of the different parts of the group interact.

How do you know how much Google funnels of its profits (are you sure you mean this?) into Chrome and Android's open source projects? Do you work at Google and have access to this information? Are you sure you know what you're talking about here?

[danielheath]

I have always viewed android as a hedge against another player (eg apple) controlling advertising on mobile and undermining their dominance of the sector.

[tehjoker]

The ideological blindness that causes people to speak past each other is this.

Innovation requires reliable funding, such as monopoly profits or government funding. Monopoly leads to undemocratic concentrations of power and various private taxes on the public (e.g. in the case of Google, your personal information). Bell Labs was funded by monopoly funding with a law directing a certain amount to research.

Competition improves the balance of power, but destroys the ability to innovate except on relatively easy to engineer variations of existing tech within a 1-5 year window projects. The recipients of monopolist largess (such as OSS) whither on the vine as competition drives profits to zero over time (which then causes consolidation and monopoly formations...).

The answer I prefer of course is to create the efficiencies and innovative capacity of large scale industry but control them democratically. Nationalize Google.

[typewithrhythm]

This is a completely strange idea to me... You are seemingly measuring innovation within a specific product and forgetting that the product itself is a new creation that came without any monopoly as it built.

People eventually recognise a good idea, you don't need a well funded research group to have one. You need an environment where it's plausible for the new thing to work and be profitable.

Breaking up a giant like google seems that it would make it easier to promote an new idea, as it has less risk of being crushed by the interests of a tangentially related company.

[tehjoker]

The idea behind nationalization is that it takes Google out of the market economy and the profit motive. It's then possible to rationally design supports for new ideas, and removes one of the biggest reasons for fighting new ideas.

[typewithrhythm]

My experiences with actual nationalised companies does not support this; in general they are no more likely to support innovation or good design that supports other industries than the private sector, but they absolutely will create legal issues when trying to innovate around them.

Telecoms in Australia is probably the best modern example I can think of, the nbn was given a monopoly and now delivers an expensive inferior product, and there is no real way to compete or innovate around it.

It doesn't exactly take them out of the market, it just creates a enterprise with legal protections and non market motivations for what it actually does.

[briandear]

So how did Apple invent iPhone? What monopoly did they have?

Nationalizing anything is an absolute disaster for innovation. What innovations did Aeroflot develop?

The free market and a thriving entrepreneur ecosystem creates innovation. The profit motive is a powerful one. Taking risks to invent the next big thing is what drives entrepreneurship in the first place. Governments are corrupt, inefficient, and don’t get punished by the markets when they fail.

This idea that governments are democratic is a myth. I didn’t vote for tethered bottle caps in the EU. I didn’t vote to send money to fund wars. In the U.S., one can vote, but the policies that actually happen are the result of what lobbyists spent the most money buying the relevant congressmen.

The answer to this is smaller government. The most democratic thing there is is the free market. Everyone can vote or not vote with their money. And the results are seen nearly immediately and companies have to respond.

If we could choose to pay taxes on a line-item basis, that would be the most democratic thing ever. Because a rep that you voted for on one issue and is wrong on another issue gets his “wrong” initiative defunded and his “right” initiative funded. We should bring free market principles to government not government principles to the free market.

[johnnyanmac]

>This idea that governments are democratic is a myth. I didn’t vote for tethered bottle caps in the EU. I didn’t vote to send money to fund wars... If we could choose to pay taxes on a line-item basis, that would be the most democratic thing ever.

The last thing we want is the common people, unaware of the intricacies of all the things a government pays for, voting on what and how government is funded. That's a great way to get some huge budgets for circuses while forgetting to allocate for bread. The most important aspects of life are not glamorous, but they need to be funded for.

There's some merit here (maybe people can choose where 5-10% of the federal budget goes), but before we can even think about that we'd need to get the national debt under control. There's negative money to allocate as is.

>In the U.S., one can vote, but the policies that actually happen are the result of what lobbyists spent the most money buying the relevant congressmen.

That's more of a lobbying issue than a democracy issue, no? Ideally a democracy would uncover a large gift and the PR would completely tank chances of re-election. But alas, the people aren't caring or well-tuned enough.

>The most democratic thing there is is the free market.

THe endgame of a free market is monopoly. So a small government would give the exact result we have here with lesser chances of an antitrust.

[johnnyanmac]

it's not blindness to me. It's as simple as me rather accepting some short term chaos for a healthier long term market. Big changes are never without sacrifices.

>Innovation requires reliable funding, such as monopoly profits or government funding.

we have more than enough angel vestors, normal investing, bank loans, etc. to get any innovation off the ground. And I think people forget that the original innovation hubs for big adacement came from Acedemia. Now retrofitted to be a recruiting wing for private businesses who pay to capture that knowledge.

The only downside here is that they then cannot proceed to offer that product for free for a decade to capture a market before squeezing said market they captured. Is that a downside for people who don't/can't pay? Yes. But that is historically how every business has operated. Figure out how to optimize costs so they can profit, and balance it against the market you are targeting. Big tech has forgotten about that and simply throws money around like it's monopoly money (and it kind of is).

We need a huge overhaul of how all this works. Ironically enough by going "backwards" in a few areas.

[fasa99]

>Innovation requires reliable funding,

The way I see this argument is "Innovation requires an institution devoted to innovation, which requires reliable funding such as monopolistic or taxpayer"

As you say, on the 1-5 year horizon that's not true. Most successful startups are innovative, we need to look no further than Google itself with its pagerank innovation dominating search. Most universities have innovative researchers, and indeed explicitly set up innovative centers called "incubators" - but of course this is an example of government funding.

One of the first questions is what innovation requires 1-5 years. What about aha moment! innovation? Pagerank is an "aha moment" idea that takes a few months to demonstrate. There are more aha moment innovations than "grind for more than 5 years" I feel. Most of the "grind for 5+ years" innovations have yet to pay off e.g. fusion, super batteries, room temperature semiconductors.

A monopoly offers stable funding for some institution, but at what cost? No capitalistic incentive to improve product? Excess pricing because the consumer has no choice? Surely there are more fair ways to structure this.

Government control would destroy tech, government is not made for it. Look at Amtrak. A nationalized google would wither and get eaten alive by.. ... innovative search startups (themselves without research institutes funded by monopolies), or startups in one of the dozens of fields where Google has spread its tendrils.

Microsoft in its prime is a great example of monopolistic problems. They were a OS monopoly and kept leveraging that to smack down competition wherever they wanted to expand into. Google almost didn't make chrome - the CEO at the time was frightened that Microsoft would annihilate google if google should make a new browser. The monopoly engine allows for ease of dominating more and more industries through lateral growth. This all-encompassing destruction of captalistic price minimization, alone, is why we need to break down big tech monopolies such as google. An example of a "good citizen" non monopolistic company in this setting is Netflix - there's huge competition in entertainment field, they have innovated streaming tech, their profits are meritorious, and they haven't suffocated other fields like other big tech i.e. there's no Netflix phone, no Netflix video game console, no Netflix social media.

The other health of the Netflix / media ecosystem is it's not a duopoly. There's Netflix, there's Apple TV (hello, suffocating new industries!), there's Disney, there's paramount, there's hulu, and so on. This is what competition should look like. This is classic innovation in the capitalist sector, through brutal competition. We not only need to bust up monopolies but to consider duopolies or more generally - busting up groups of companies that collude to price or feature fix as holders of the majority of the market, which is what many duopolies are.

[0xEF]

Do you have any sources showing how Google spends its profits? Honest question, you got me curious. From my likely ignorant perspective, the devs I know build open-source products with a barely perceptible fraction of the money Google makes, and they seem fine, so I'm wondering just how much Google dumps into that.

My initial search produces a lot of speculative numbers, but nothing verifiable. Admittedly, this is a realm I have little experience with, so perhaps I am looking for the wrong terms. It was also my understanding that the books of large companies like this are typically closed unless demanded by legal entities.

[matheusmoreira]

> Google funnels a lot of their profits to make Chrome and Android into OSS

No, that is incidental. What is the first and principal thing it does, what needs does it serve by making open source browsers and operating systems?

Control. Google maintains appreciable control over mobile devices and the web by making their own mobile operating system and browser. In cases such as these, it is only a matter of time before they tightening the screws. They already have.

> we will be left with an even more profitable ad giant, that sends back all profits to it's share holders

But not one that can kill ad blockers or ram remote attestation down people's throats.

[youngtaff]

Youtube, Search, Display Ads, and Cloud Compute are probably the four profitable business units

GTM and GA probably live with Display Ads

Chrome and Android probably live with Search

Who knows where ChromeOS, and all the hardware devices go

[ulfw]

If you think Android couldn't survive on revenues from whatever they may rebrand their Store / "Android Play Store" as, I got a robotaxi to sell ya.

[fragmede]

The self-driving car taxi service Waymo is another Google division that could do well in terms of being a company and having a product.

[ekianjo]

Android is hardly the best example of OSS out there. It's clearly controlled by Google.

[briandear]

I don’t really care about Chrome or Android. Sounds like helping Chrome and Android has nothing to do with the acceptability of a near monopoly.

[troyvit]

Speaking to search, both DDG and Kagi seem to be doing fine, each with very different models. Google could figure out something there.

Google ads would be fine on its own. They'd continue to dominate.

Google Analytics would probably have a problem. The big thing going for it is that it's free. Without being able to funnel their data hoovering into the rest of the ecosystem they'd probably lose that. If they _did_ have to charge, would they release a simpler tier that isn't so mind-bogglingly complex? That'd be nice.

Docs? Yeah, I don't see a way forward with that unless they charge a lot. There are some competitors, but they suck, and they struggle, and google docs seems one of the major nodes of interoperability between a lot of their products. It's be really hard to replicate that if you're broken up.

Calendar. Hah. Well. Everybody gets to suffer given that google calendar uses its own protocols. It's not like everybody could just switch to DAV and have close to the same functionality, at least out of the gate.

I agree with you re: Chrome and Android, but I will say that current FOSS forks of Android seem to do well. I think they have enough runway to continue making a good product. It would put phone makers into a bind, but I personally think their suffering is also a good thing. Fewer phone makers == less e-waste. Maybe people start holding onto their phones for a few years.

Honestly I couldn't care less about Chrome, except that I hope it does die. But Microsoft could take over the engine and use its hegemony to continue funneling money into developing it.

Firefox would be in a tough spot. They'd have to find another sponsor. I know they've been trying to diversify but I think we'd see a very different browser from them within 3 years of the breakup.

The good news is that there is no shortage of oligarchs to help pick up the pieces. Which is good because I bet Alphabet is going to start whinging about "massive layoffs" soon.

[debit-freak]

Sure, a lot in absolute terms. A pittance in relative terms.

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

Pretending that this is a sincere comment, it raises a question: Why is Google fighting the charges. If divestiture creates a more profitable company for the shareholders, according to this HN commenter, then why not settle with the US government.

No one can predict the future. HN commenters love to try, every day. For example, speculating about a "breakup".

If neither side changes their position, Google will be fighting the US government for many years to come. That we can say with reasonable certainty. Regardless of the remedy sought.

As a shareholder I do not want the company to be fighting the US government for years to come. It's not good for business.

But Google fans no doubt read the news and spin it to be positive. No matter what, in their minds only Google can win. Self-delusion.

Meanwhile, the legal process will continue. More money for the lawyers.