[bobajeff]

I think Google should just be split up into baby Google's that each have to cooperate with each other. Like we did with Bell. Also we should do the same thing to Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook. In fact I think we should do it again to AT&T and also Comcast. This should probably be done every so often as maintenance.

[iAMkenough]

Don't forget the other industries suffering from the same problem: Walmart, UnitedHealth Group, Berkshiere Hathaway, ExxonMobil, JPMorgan Chase, etc.

[black3r]

The problem with Google, Meta, Amazon, et. al. is that they have a steady stream of income from their main business, and use it to enter new markets with loss leader schemes obviously designed to destroy their pre-existing competition...

I'm not from the US, but it seems to me like the companies you mention stay in their respective market and don't try to destroy competition in other markets, like Walmart is a supermarket chain, UnitedHealth is just health insurance, Exxon just deals with gas, JPMorgan Chase is just a bank, etc...,

meanwhile Google operated YouTube, Chrome, Gmail and other services at significant losses for years up until the point where they basically have monopoly in those areas because the competition couldn't keep up with Google's free products, and now when the competition is destroyed, they are destroying these free services with increased pricing or ads, neither of which were there while they still had competition in those spheres...

[viraptor]

> and don't try to destroy competition in other markets, like Walmart is a supermarket chain

Have a look at the list of services offered: https://www.walmart.com/services

They're not all over the place, but definitely expanding to what's interesting to them.

[creato]

hotmail, yahoo mail, etc. were also free when google started gmail. gmail won because it was just way better, and it has changed very little in terms of its value proposition in all that time.

[kweingar]

How should free webmail work?

[stevenwoo]

The egg cartel, the potato cartel, the corn cartel, almost every food resource silo has its own monopsony or monopoly of some kind in the USA or globally. In the USA at least it seems many of these things are constructed to avoid the letter of the old laws around monopoly.

[bsimpson]

I don't understand how this worldview coexists with countries like Russia and China.

If the feds kneecap US companies, it's not going to make the next generation of US companies stronger, just cede influence to worse jurisdictions.

[lillecarl]

Yeah but it's also not great when Amazon can undercut their way into every market because AWS is a crazy cash cow, which hurt other US companies. Do you really need Amazon to be a "second government" who can decide what "you" buy, see and to some degree think.

It "works" in China where the government just stomps their feet if companies misbehave too much and everyone complies instantly or get replaced.

Edit: s/Amazon/Jeff Bezos/g?

We have megacorps in EU too, Airbus and Lidl comes to mind, though I don't think Lidl operates anything but their main business outside of Germany, in Sweden we have Lidl grocery stores however.

[forty]

Absolutely agree on the fact that we don't need / should not have "second gouvernements" (and non democratically choosen too). Which is why we should also apply this regular "maintainance split" to largest fortunes too.

[iLoveOncall]

Some companies / services are just not viable as a standalone company, but still provide immense value to customers.

What will end up happening is not that Amazon will have to compete with others on video game streaming for example, what will happen is that video game streaming will disappear because not viable.

Browsers won't suddenly flourish when Google cannot finance browsers anymore, they'll just turn to shit.

People won't spend $50 a month to subscribe to what Google currently provides for free, they will just lose access.

In the end the users will just flock to the Chinese equivalents which will be happy to steal all of the western data for the low cost of providing file hosting.

[alt227]

> Browsers won't suddenly flourish when Google cannot finance browsers anymore, they'll just turn to shit.

Maybe what will happen is there will be a slowdown of new browser standards as Google wont have the muscle to push things through in the browser space anymore. This would be a great thing, as it would stop the moving target of web standards and would allow other browsers to catch up.

It would also stop google being able to do things like force Manifest V2 out of Chromium just because it serves their own purpose.

I'd like to see this outcome.

[smnthermes]

> Browsers won't suddenly flourish when Google cannot finance browsers anymore, they'll just turn to shit.

Great! Let's go back to actual applications.

[sunshowers]

Why would browsers turn to "shit"? The web platform is quite capable these days.

I think Chrome on Android is already pretty "shit" these days, because it doesn't support ad blocking at all.

[ehutch79]

*Points at firefox*

[AnthonyMouse]

Alternative browsers raise money in proportion to how many people use them. Google funds Chromium development and advertises to get people to use Chrome, so Firefox market share is eroded until they don't have enough to sustain themselves. Meanwhile Google pushes through changes to web standards at a rapid pace which consumes smaller competitors' resources implementing them. Also, Mozilla in particular is a mismanaged organization.

If you take Google out of it, Chromium gets to be its own thing. Then Chromium and Firefox compete with each other on equal footing and people use whichever one is better, but they're both actually open source instead of "Chromium is open source but everybody actually uses Chrome" and the latter isn't controlled by the company trying to break ad blocking and push DRM.

[radlad]

I'm a happy Firefox user on desktop and Android. Can you be more specific?

[sunshowers]

I use Firefox on desktop.

Firefox on Android is sadly not great either -- it regularly drops frames on my 120Hz Pixel 9 Pro. Firefox on iOS doesn't have extension support.

I hear Edge Canary on Android has extension support.

[nyc_data_geek1]

Breaking monopolies doesn't kneecap US companies. Noncompetitive markets do that. Forcing healthy competition is how we keep competitive advantage, failing to do so is how we lose it. See: Deepseek

[benrutter]

Seen this argument a lot recently, it's a really interesting take that I wouldn't have really considered before.

The common argument for breaking up monopolies is to provide more competition in the key area, since monopolies tend to focus efforts on things that don't benefit the consumer (like buying out smaller companies to stop them existing).

From that view, monopolies don't really benefit the US, if anything it stops the US market functioning competitively, and eventually running themselves into the ground.

I guess the other view is that "somebody is going to have a monopoly so why shouldn't it be my country?", but I'd say that ignores the fact that you can just curb other non-competitive behaviour fron foreign countries, like the EU has been trying to do with Apple and Google.

[vlovich123]

Smaller companies would be more nimble and efficient. Also, Google’s main dominant product (e.g. search & ads) would be forced to compete & innovate vs leveraging Chrome & Android to keep themselves dominant.

[Tanath]

Smaller is less efficient. They don't get to benefit from economy of scale as much as larger.

[vlovich123]

They also don’t have the communication and process overheads and don’t have existing contracts that constrain how fast and where they can go. If smaller companies weren’t possibly to run more efficiently, you’d never see startups leapfrogging established players. Economies of scale are a strength and can also be a weakness (e.g. your economy of scale to do X means you can’t do Y which is more profitable / cheaper)

[epicureanideal]

We should run our economy in the way that has the best long term outcome, which is likely with plenty of competition rather than monopolies.

If other countries are doing something to advantage themselves relative to that, there’s tariffs or other ways to relevel the playing field.

[marcosdumay]

> If the feds kneecap US companies, it's not going to make the next generation of US companies stronger

Worked pretty well when they broke AT&T and not only got an extremely innovative lab full of small projects, but also kickstarted the internet era.

[xvector]

AT&T did not have international competitors.

[regularjack]

You think monopolies should exist?

[jay_kyburz]

Instead of smashing up successful businesses, you should tax them, and use the tax revenue to improve deficiencies in the market.

If the government thinks there should be more browsers, (or mobile os's) they should tax the existing ones and pay folks to improve the open source alternatives.

You _should_ outlaw behavior that creates monopolies, like predatory pricing etc

[transcriptase]

Canada tries this.

The result is higher prices for consumers and taxpayer money flowing into zombie companies that just happen be in regions where the party in power needs votes.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Instead of smashing up successful businesses, you should tax them, and use the tax revenue to improve deficiencies in the market.

The deficiency in the market is that laws exist that allow market concentration. Should we tax them to fund regulatory reform?

> If the government thinks there should be more browsers, (or mobile os's) they should tax the existing ones and pay folks to improve the open source alternatives.

Let's review the problem with Chrome.

Chromium is open source. Chrome is Chromium with some corporate misfeatures like DRM, but is also the thing with an advertising budget. Nobody notices that their browser quietly supports DRM, except that then more sites use it, and then open source browsers on open hardware cease to be viable because if you try to use it, it doesn't support the DRM, and then no matter how much better it is people won't use it because half the internet is broken.

If you made Chromium better, Google would just keep making Chrome based on Chromium and then Chrome would have all the improvements you made to Chromium and you've solved nothing. If you made a different open source browser under a license that didn't allow them to do that then they still have billions of dollars so if you do anything better then they can just add the same feature to Chrome. At which point people still don't use your thing because they want to watch Netflix, and Netflix continues to require windvine because the Judas browsers have the most market share so devices that support DRM are common and demanding it doesn't bankrupt them.

Or, you could fix the law that allows DRM to be used as a fig leaf for the true motivation of vendor lock-in and simply create an explicit adversarial interoperability exception to DMCA 1201, not only as a defense but as an affirmative right. Then the open source browser can legally break the DRM in order to implement an ad blocker and create a feature that Google won't put in Chrome, without giving Chrome any abilities the open alternative doesn't, allowing the alternative to gain market share.

> You _should_ outlaw behavior that creates monopolies, like predatory pricing etc

Predatory pricing isn't a cause of monopolies, it's a consequence. If it's happening, the last thing you want to do is ban it, because it's a red flag that tells you the market is broken and you need to fix it. If you leave the market broken, a company with enough market power to charge excessive margins has enough market power to screw the customer in a hundred other ways, and trying to ban every possible abuse of market power is a million times harder than smashing up monopolies.

[jay_kyburz]

You've twisted the argument to be about DRM. That's a completely separate issue. The only people to blame for DRM are the people who use it on their content, not the platforms that are forced to implement it.

The _cause_ of monopolies are successful businesses. I don't have a problem with successful businesses. I also don't have a problem with monopolies per se. If I invent some cool thing and I'm the only person in the world doing it, I have a monopoly - good for me. If I can deliver a product better than everybody else, and everybody else chooses to not compete with me any more, also good for me.

The crime is when you use your power "unfairly" to drive others out of business. (So that you can create or maintain a monopoly). Predatory pricing or agreements that restrict who can use your product, or what others can do.

[AnthonyMouse]

> You've twisted the argument to be about DRM. That's a completely separate issue. The only people to blame for DRM are the people who use it on their content, not the platforms that are forced to implement it.

The people to blame for DRM are the legislators who created laws allowing DRM to be used for anti-competitive lock-in, which is its primary purpose.

> The _cause_ of monopolies are successful businesses.

That doesn't track. Costco is a successful business, does it have a monopoly? Starbucks? Honda? Dell? McDonald's? Adidas?

> If I invent some cool thing and I'm the only person in the world doing it, I have a monopoly - good for me. If I can deliver a product better than everybody else, and everybody else chooses to not compete with me any more, also good for me.

The only time this happens for a non-trivial period of time in the absence of anti-competitive practices or regulations is for so-called natural monopolies. Otherwise there would be low barriers to entry and correspondingly someone else wanting to make some money by entering the market.

And even natural monopolies are extremely narrow. They tend to get drawn with thick lines because whoever holds the natural monopoly will be trying to tie all kinds of other services to it through vertical integration, e.g. the natural monopoly is "roadside fiber conduit" rather than "internet service" no matter how much the utility company wants to insist that you should have to buy internet service from the company that digs the trench or installs the utility poles.

> Predatory pricing or agreements that restrict who can use your product, or what others can do.

Oh, you meant predatory pricing in terms of dumping rather than charging monopoly rents.

The problem is that's basically not a thing for digital goods because dumping is selling below the marginal cost and the marginal cost for digital goods is zero.

And corporations are sneaky. To reiterate the DRM point, what Google does with remote attestation is extremely nefarious, not least because it's simultaneously subtle and effective.

What they do is, provide remote attestation services to third parties for Google-approved devices. Then things like bank apps require them, even though they provide no real benefit, because they're marketed as providing "security" and risk-averse bank managers don't want to be seen not using a hypothetical security feature. But now anyone who wants to make a competing device that isn't approved by Google can't pass attestation and therefore can't get customers because customers expect their bank app to work.

Then it's the banks rather than Google requiring you to use a Google-approved Android device and Google will claim they didn't require anything even though Google providing that otherwise-useless feature has in reality created a large anti-competitive barrier for anyone trying to make a competing device without Google's approval.

[mullingitover]

There has never been a problem with having a monopoly because your product is so good that everyone wants it. There's also no problem with natural monopolies, for example there's no sense in having a competitive market for utilities.

[babypuncher]

I've noticed that the bigger a company gets, the shittier they get. I don't think the answer to the threats posed by countries like Russia and China lies in consolidating our markets under an oligarchy of bloated mega-corps.

Smaller companies are faster, more agile, and hungry for success. This breeds market competition, spurring innovation and rendering better products for the consumer. The Amazons and Googles and Microsofts of the world have largely outlived their purpose and only exist to hoover up money in their cornered markets rather than innovate.

[pllbnk]

I think with the current monopolistic trajectory there will not be the next generation of US companies because current companies just buy up everything that shows any kind of potential. There's no benefit to society from trillion-dollar companies - they don't need to innovate and they have the power to stop any would-be competitors.

[627467]

and how does your worldview work in practice? a protected and empowered US/Western conglomerate is more motivated innovate and outcompete mega corps of Russia/China/latest-boogieman and destroys them because of this? or is the point to just say: well Russia/China have their own mediocre protected conglomerates lets have ours too?

[jjmarr]

Both of those countries dislike powerful, large corporations because they are a base of power that could compete with the state or party. The Wagner Group comes to mind. But China also did a huge crackdown affecting companies like Alibaba and Tencent.

There's no reason why there can't be international co-operation on this subject.

[coliveira]

> Both of those countries dislike powerful, large corporations because they are a base of power that could compete with the state or party.

These countries are not different from any other in the world. The US also has anti-monopoly laws exactly for this reason: nobody wants a corporation that can compete with the government, be it democratic or not.

[cobbzilla]

What does compete with the government mean?

Should FedEx not compete with USPS on parcel delivery?

[ljsprague]

Just ban the ones from worse jurisdictions then.

[ndriscoll]

I'm happy to let China and Russia be the global leaders in panopticons and mass propaganda for their citizens. Google and Meta would be no great loss for Americans.

[Ar-Curunir]

So competition isn’t actually good for free market economics?

[creato]

A level playing field is good. The playing field includes other countries.

[AnthonyMouse]

Why wouldn't antitrust laws apply to companies from other countries? If you ban tying app stores to phone platforms and then China creates a phone platform and wants to tie an app store to it, they're not any less banned from selling that into your market than a domestic company.

[creato]

There's a whole world outside the US and China that companies are competing in.

[AnthonyMouse]

A market the size of the US or the EU is large enough to sustain a domestic industry. Competing suppliers can then recover their fixed costs from the markets where they're protected against monopolistic practices, which sustains their existence, and then sell into the other markets with the backing of a stable competitive domestic supply chain that can't be degraded by anti-competitive practices.

Example: Right now if you want to create a competing phone without Google, you lose most of the apps in the Play Store because they're encouraged to have dependencies on Google services. If that was prohibited in a large market then app developers couldn't assume those dependencies are available and the APIs would either have to become an open source part of stock Android or developers would use platform-independent third party libraries. Then the apps made for that market could run on a third party device -- but developers aren't going to make separate apps for different markets, they're just going to avoid the proprietary APIs that aren't available in a major market, and then those apps don't have those proprietary dependencies in the other markets either and your domestic competitor can compete there too.

Also, the whole world outside the US and China wouldn't even have the excuse of protecting domestic megacorps as a reason not to have strong antitrust laws themselves.

[martinsnow]

Which business units should be broken up?

[SteveNuts]

Microsoft and Azure, Bing, Office 365

Amazon (the retailer portion) and AWS, and probably their logistics wing

[forty]

For AWS we should split the platform and the managed services (no one should have to compete with "the platform". See elasticsearch, redis).

This also works for Amazon retail, they should not be allowed to sell on their own marketplace (they have to choose, they are either a marketplace or a seller)

[boscillator]

I've always thought is should be Azure, Office and XBox, and each should get their own copy of Windows that they could focus on different things while still being largely compatible. Don't know if XBox could survive on it's own.

[jonny_eh]

This would kill xbox

[dharmab]

Xbox has been nothing more than a budget, low-spec, walled in gaming PC for about 1.5 console generations. It no longer has exclusive games, and the hardware (console and peripherals) are mediocre.

(PlayStation is almost in the same boat, except they have significant sales in regions where PC gaming is much smaller than in the US.)

[selykg]

Xbox has killed Xbox... have you not seen the sad state of affairs there for, I don't know, the past generation or two of consoles?

[jonny_eh]

I don't disagree with your sentiment, other than the fact that it isn't literally dead… yet.

[alt227]

Xbox is now a cross platform brand, and arguably bigger on PC than in the console market.

[forrestthewoods]

Huh, why? Xbox is a great example of a business unit that should be self-sustainable.

Not that it matters.,Microsoft has done a spectacular job of killing Xbox even with its ability to sustain setting money on fire for the past decade. Xbox has been an unmitigated disaster since Xbox One.

[martinsnow]

None of those are owned by Google

[RIMR]

And? We were talking about other businesses that should be split up in addition to Google. It would be weird if the only answers were Google-owned ventures...

[martinsnow]

Not in the context of my question. You are welcome to start your own comment thread.

[awongh]

Chrome, search/ads, youtube, consumer apps - gmail & docs etc.

[martinsnow]

Breaking up workspace would hinder Google in competing with Office and Zoho

[azemetre]

Let me break out my violin for the trillion dollar transnational corporation.

[martinsnow]

Given that the likes of workspace and zoho were born out of Microsofts monopoly. I guess you should.

[AnthonyMouse]

If your only reason for not breaking up a megacorp is that you want it it to compete with another megacorp...

¿Por qué no los dos?

[azemetre]

That's fine with me. Let's do it so we can establish precedent then hopefully legislate this in Congress.

Baby steps bro, they will all have their moment in the sun soon enough.