[adventured]

The US Government already controls Comcast and Time Warner Cable through the regulations in the telecom industry, the FCC, and so on. The Feds, for example, can easily interrupt their merger at any time they see fit. These companies are government regulated monopolies (or at the least near-monopolies), much like AT&T and Verizon.

The problem with Google, as far as the US Government is concerned, is that it is not a government regulated monopoly. They fear anything with such vast scope and influence / power, that they don't have a certain level of direct control over.

The purpose of pursuing Google on anti-trust is to bring them under supervision of the US Government. The same reason the Feds were interested in Microsoft. It surprisingly takes very little to cause anti-trust problems for a major company, as little as one powerful senator dedicated to the issue. Google will be brought under a consent decree in the next few years most likely, and by the time the Feds get around to doing that, the market will have likely already made Google's dominance in search a lot less important.

[jacobolus]

There’s no “they” here, the “US Government” isn’t “concerned” about anything, and the Comcast/TWC merger is at the mercy of an enormously complex political process/system, not some singularly acting Feds who can “see fit” to do one thing or another. Anthropomorphizing an institution as big as the US Federal Government is dangerous, because it easily leads to reasoning about institutions as if they were individual people, but such entities behave in entirely different ways than individuals.

Anyway, with that digression out of the way, if you want to understand the relationship between government regulators and telecommunications companies, I highly recommend Tim Wu’s book The Master Switch. Government regulation of telecommunications industries has often been contingent, contradictory, and somewhat chaotic (in the sense that small nudges lead to dramatic unpredictable changes).

[sdrinf]

| ...by the time the Feds get around to doing that, the market will have likely already made Google's dominance is search a lot less important.

Can you elaborate on how that might happen, operationally?

[varunjuice]

As internet shifts to mobile phones & apps become the dominant way to use the internet, it will automatically diminish the importance of Google Search, & the market will (is already) pricing this in.

I think Peter Thiel alluded to this in an interview recently. From what I recollect, he suggested that by the time Feds act, the monopoly has already been disrupted elsewhere.

45 minute mark of this interview http://thisweekinstartups.com/peter-thiel-launch-festival/

[Chichikov]

Apps are a temporary state of affairs (but isn't everything these days?). In a few generations, your phone will be little more than a terminal that connects to your personal virtual machine hosted on Apple/AWS/Google servers. This VM will run the respective company's OS as well as its native apps. These apps will be unrecognizably more powerful than the ones currently on your phone, and your phone itself will be significantly lighter and more efficient (and, yes, probably wearable).

Google will continue to make money from ads delivered into this virtual space and it will also have more leverage to regulate 3rd party apps, giving it access to the space within the apps as well. Oh, and also all these virtual spaces will have private and public modes.

The biggest problem really is screen area. The only reason Google can't exploit Android to its fullest potential is that phone screens just aren't large enough to dedicate a sufficient screen area to advertisement (it's a funny paradox: the phone as a real-life implement is limited to a form factor that precludes advertising space, which by its nature is always limited to 'sub-prime real-estate'). Perhaps OLED will be the solution to this, though I am more partial to drone-phones that hover beside their owners and use lasers to project the "screen" onto special eye contacts.

[sandipc]

mobile phones and apps, > 50% of which run an operating system, browser, and app store made by Google?

[sdenton4]

It's a funny position to hate regulation on the one hand, and say it's useless on the other... Imma chalk this one up to Thiel saying things more in service of his ideology than relating to reality as she may exist.

[higherpurpose]

> They fear anything with such vast scope and influence / power, that they don't have a certain level of direct control over.

Their cozy relationships with the big banks could've fooled me.