Alphabet needs to be broken up. Chrome, Search, Android, Youtube need to be separate companies. It's not the only company that needs this treatment.
Alphabet needs to be broken up. Chrome, Search, Android, Youtube need to be separate companies. It's not the only company that needs this treatment.
We had a glimpse of that antitrust future on the horizon with the previous admin. This spooked all the big tech weirdos so much that they put their weight behind the other guy and, well, they won. Antitrust is dead for another generation. Yay.
Lina Khan is lying in wait.
Doing great work in New York actually.
She'd have some teeth with President AOC.
I actually laughed. Thank you.
I couldn't agree more with your point. But also, precisely because I agree with you, I'm flashing back to Proton CEO Andy Yen claiming that Trump would be great on tech anti trust and an improvement on what came before, which was ridiculous from the moment he said it but symptomatic of a certain kind of tech bro mindset.
If only the DNC was interested in promoting candidates that work for the people and aren't just interested in lip service while mostly maintaining the status quo. Things could have been different. Imagine what 8 years of Bernie and a functioning Congress might have accomplished.
That "functioning Congress" requirement is doing a lot of the work in that claim, and no single election result would make that happen.
I didn't make that claim, you misread what I said. I explicitly mentioned a functioning Congress because that's a necessity, a functioning executive branch is not enough. We are in agreement.
We're in agreement, so what did I misread? :D The point is, there's not some realistic, single-point "if only" scenario where "things could have been different", because the problem is largely Congress.
You had me until Bernie
Which candidate would you have preferred?
Agreed. But on the topic of antitrust specifically, Lina Khan was absolutely doing the work, and Biden 100% deserves credit for appointing her. He could've chosen some do-nothing loser like everyone before him did, but he chose Khan.
I agree, it was a great move.
However, it's generally hard for me to give Biden much credit for anything, however, given his own and his party's general complicity with decades of genocide and apartheid in Palestine. Same for Harris.
That and oversight of many more atrocities also carried forth by his predecessors really puts a damper on any good deed and make it hard to buy into any narrative of authenticity when it comes to politics that benefit human beings.
I also generally think Bernie would have played hardball on antitrust and given what we got with Biden, I'd prefer to have seen what Bernie could have done with the time.
Terrible narrative. Lina Khan under Biden was more than willing to go after big companies. She was forced out because the American people voted Trump into office.
Eight years of Sanders would have left us with a far more gridlocked country. The man has virtually no political talent.
Some argue gridlock is a feature, not a bug. I'm of two minds about it, but I understand the appeal.
I love Lina Khan as much as the next guy. But as you've already pointed out, it's kind of pointless if the fundamental problem is a malfunctioning executive branch (and a federal government with far too much power). But I'm going to need receipts on your claims about eight years of Sanders.
>The man has virtually no political talent.
More unique individual people donated to his primary efforts than any other candidate in history. Wouldn't this be indicative of some large amount of political talent?
I think people grossly underestimate "money is speech" that is spent by corporate interests. PACs and SuperPACs are something I've just never understood how their donations are not just bribes
Well, the current cronies that run the USA may seem to have won for the time being, but sooner or later the population in the USA will realise how much fudged up the orange clown is. Only about 30% approval rating - that will continue to dwindle.
There’s a partisan floor¹ that’s in the neighborhood of 25–30% where people will vote for their party no matter what. The 2004 Illinois Senate election was a good test case where when the Republican nominee went down in self-inflicted flames and was hurriedly replaced with Alan Keyes, who had no in-state constituency and, being Black (which, no doubt was the cynical reason for his recruitment), eliminated the racist choice. He gained a mere 27% of the vote which is likely the floor for a major party candidate in a contested broad-population election (smaller-level partisan elections, whether for single congressional seats or in small states, generally have demographically skewed populations which can result in wider margins).
⸻
1. Although as I think about it, this may only be valid on the right side of the spectrum given the data points.
The Democrats already tried out the idea that Trumpism would blow over and everything would go back to "normal" with Biden's 2020 campaign, but it didn't really turn out that way. Right-wing reactionary politics has been overrepresented in the US since its founding due to state based representation, and I expect that this will continue to be the case for as long as the US exists in its current form.
They'll immediately fall for the next such guy. Republican voters aren't actually reconsidering their views. Corporations and oligarchs have known no major blowbacks in decades and keep winning on every front, further eroding the Republic and its institutions little by little. And they won't stop until all that's left of America is an empty shell, a dead state like Russia, a sandbox for the Epstein class.
I hope we get to the Idiocracy timeline before the one you describe
I still say the [Waldo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Waldo_Moment) timeline fits closer. Just a bunch of empty signifiers stuffed into a costume.
We are there now.
Nobody is working on solving death/aging.
You have to pay rent, go to work, companies have average Joe’s shilling for them.
The entire society is death marching toward - well - death! And nobody notices or cares in the slightest.
The vast majority of people think they will live for all of eternity “in heaven” and many others just don’t even think about it.
The shortness and pointlessness of their lives doesn’t even cross their minds - worse - they think the point is feelings!
And so it’s a war of who can have the best feelings for ~80 years and that’s it.
Doesn’t get any more idiotic than present day wealth inequality and total lack and void of real intellectual pursuits
What does solving death/aging mean?
Humans have figured out an easy medicine to reduce weight, which is the number 1 causal factor in morbidity/mortality.
There are also novel cancer immunotherapy medicines that are drastically increasing quality and quantity of life for cancer patients, like keytruda and blinatumomab.
You are painting with extremely broad strokes here.
Painters with broad strokes have done extremely well the past few decades.
We wouldn't be in this mess is Obama wasn't sleep at the wheel. When it's been 20 years with a 10 to 10 split its not a democrat vs republican issue.
I think there's a remarkably clear precedent at least for browsers, which is having Android users pick from a list of browsers instead of having Chrome as the pre installed default. That's already been done previously with Microsoft and I believe with search on Apple, andI think it would reverse the Mozilla market share trend overnight.
I don't think Chrome being spun off as a company leaves them with a realistic path to revenue unless, ironically, they do something like what Mozilla does, and strike a search licensing agreement albeit a much bigger one proportionate to their share of users.
I also don't think it should just be Alphabet/Google because at full strength they are an important check against the power of Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and arguably Facebook. Weakening Alphabet while leaving them unchecked could have the net effect of increasing monopoly power of the other giants. I think the order of operations would go something like (1) Amazon (online retail), (2) Google (search and web), (3) Facebook (social media). Microsoft and Apple are giants but I don't think they are strategically cornering any particular tech markets right now (though I could be wrong).
And I think international competition is complicating the picture of how close to monopolies they really are, though Google at least is clearly abusing its position in the browser and web standards space.
I look forward to a new era of trust busting.
It's an old American Tradition in need of revival
This type of populist message seems like such an easy path to popularity for an aspiring politician. You don't have to be a leftist like Bernie Sanders to be a trust buster. Just acknowledge that almost every large corporation has seemingly made it their mission to make life worse for the citizenry in the name of profit and vow to fight it.
Anyone running with that type of message will be squashed by said "every large corporation". They will finance their opponent(s). They will run deep fakes against them. Until "every large corporation" is prevented from spending unlimited money, things will not change.
What would limiting corporations from contributing more than the total of max donation per employee? I've never seen numbers from that, but I've heard people discuss it.
Was saying this about Chrome and Android a decade ago.
> Alphabet needs to be broken up. Chrome, Search, Android need to be separate companies.
As well as youtube, and the combination of google drive/docs.
YouTube really could hold up as its own company these days.
It was a better platform when it was its own company back in the day.
That's so long ago I honestly can't see that being true. It used to be a funny home video hosting platform in those days. The quality of content you can get on youtube these days is incredible.
Okay, Google bought YouTube earlier than I remembered (2006). For some reason, I remembered the purchase being somewhere around 2009-2012.
So, if I may change my opinion, early YouTube was better, despite being owned by Google. I feel like the platform has been atrocious in the last decade or more. Constant clickbait, a new NordVPN or Raid Shadow Legends ad every 15 minutes, politics being injected into every other video, creators trying to game the algorithm to escape the rat race, the obnoxious algorithm itself, and now I am getting an absurd amount of LLM generated videos.
I would not dare claim there is not great content though. I am listening to a YouTube video as I type this. Though, I have been listening this particular creator since 2006, if that tells you anything.
Nevertheless, I cannot help but feel YouTube is just getting the slow squeeze of death -- like everything Google wraps its tentacles around.
The LLM scripts has been a plague but I don't think that's Google pushing it, it's youtubers optimizing to create the most minutes of video as quickly as possible.
Paying for views is both why we have high quality content, and why the site is so gamed.
Really? I don't remember it from back then, but right now must be better in terms of the content available, the player (not the shorts one; that's awful), automatically generated subtitles with transcripts that can be searched, automated translation, dubbing, etc.
I would enjoy automatically generated subtitles more if they weren't wrong about 10% of the time.
I constantly get something like "Today, we are going to discuss which model is better at programming. Is it an tropic's latest model, Cloud Fable? Or is it, Open AI's Chat G pity?"
It's as though Google hired my dyslexic ass to write the subtitles. It trips me up even more because I can't tell if I misread something or the chat messed up sometimes.
I cannot comment on translation or dubbing. English is the only language I can somewhat understand.
I'd like to nominate, Amazon marketplace, Amazon Ads and AWS to be separate as well please. ;)
I really wish we had an admin that would be willing to do this.
Would Chrome, Android, and YouTube be viable companies without the money-printing engine that is Google’s ad business? I’m for less consolidation in the tech industry, but I wonder whether a good balance could be struck between great services like these versus how they actually make money.
The latter two potentially yes, as they can sell a product. Chrome - not so much: sell the browser, embed ads… nothing palatable.
A $1 a year payment (like in WhatsUp) from all the current Chrome users can easily cover all the reasonable browser development.
Bonus: they might not be able to fund the anti-user behavior like sunsetting MV2, all of the "anonymous audience tracking" that prevents any other advertiser from identifying you (but Google's scale still can), aggressively pushing 'sign in with Google', retracting their stance on blocking third party cookies, continually removing settings that drive user control, and more.
> Would Chrome, Android, and YouTube be viable companies without the money-printing engine that is Google’s ad business?
Short answer? Yes. Long answer? Definitely.
> I wonder whether a good balance could be struck between great services like these versus how they actually make money.
I see you have an unconventional definition of the word "great". I'll take that to mean you're an outside-the-box thinker, so you're in a good position to understand that a break up of Google would radically change all the markets they're dominant in.
If Android 'dies' post-breakup, that would leave a gaping hole in the economy. iOS might fill it, but regulators would need to break them up too. Say iOS 'dies' too, would we all collectively just stop using smartphones? Obviously not. Entrepreneurs who can see opportunity will raise money and hire the right people to build a new OS, foundations will apply for grants to maintain Android or iOS forks, industry standards will form to improve interop and reduce development costs, etc. The sky's the limit!
I'm all for breaking up Google, but how do you see Chrome making money without ads?
If they charged users directly, everyone would just switch back to Firefox.
Why does 'Chrome' need to survive as a standalone company? It never had a business model besides "support Google's monopolies", so it shouldn't survive (IMO). Lots of browser vendors already use Chrome's open source codebase, so those orgs can fork it, or they can collectively come together to fund development, or apply for government grants or something.
I think that Chrome development team members will have plenty of new job and business opportunities available to them if this ever happens. New markets will open up for browser tech that didn't exist before, and I think everyone will come out winning in the end, even users who would never even consider paying money for a web browser.
> Why does 'Chrome' need to survive as a standalone company? It never had a business model besides "support Google's monopolies", so it shouldn't survive (IMO)
You just explicitly claimed that Chrome has definitively a viable business model as a stand-alone company ("Short answer? Yes. Long answer? Definitely."). Now you claim the opposite...
Is the argument also as strong for the other cases?
Sorry, I forgot this was HN and wasn't obnoxious enough in my reply.
The original question was:
> Would Chrome, Android, and YouTube be viable companies without the money-printing engine that is Google’s ad business?
Please take note of the absence of the word "standalone" in that quote.
My response to the response to my response (henceforth responses['bogwog'][1]) was thus:
> Why does 'Chrome' need to survive as a standalone company? ...
Please note the truthiness of `'standlone' in responses['bogwog'][1]`
From this evidence we can surmise that my point was 'Chrome' the non-business can't survive as an independent business, because Chrome is not a business. Likewise, the 'Complimentary Cheez-Its' you get on an airplane can't survive as an independent business were we to break up the airline, as 'Complimentary Cheez-Its' isn't a business.
But can Chrome the project survive without Google? I say yes, just like Cheez-Its can survive without being complimentary additions to overpriced flights. For why I think that, please refer to my other comment in this thread.
Thank you.
Search licensing would be one of the big ones
> Short answer? Yes. Long answer? Definitely.
No one is paying for browsers. Maybe there is a market for enterprise support contracts for it, but this is not going to replace the money spigot of Google Ads. If I were to guess, Chrome "as its own business" would go bust very fast, with the staff being picked up by Microsoft (to support Edge, which basically is a Chrome fork) and Apple (to make Safari decent).
Android I'd say could survive, at least as long as it is bundled in the same entity that handles Play Store, that thing is a money printer. Without it... I'd say Samsung won't care, they already have their own marketplace and mess around in AOSP to an unholy degree, and everyone else will either attempt to fork Android like some Chinese brands did, go for Graphene or go bust like HTC.
Youtube... they probably got enough Premium subscribers now to keep the lights on, the problems are going to start when they have to separate their infrastructure. Bandwidth is still insanely expensive and at the moment they benefit a lot from Google being the top dog, able to tell even the largest ISPs "peer with us for free, or else". Without that leverage, with their own infra, bandwidth costs are going to eat them alive.
We've done this in the past. AT&T was broken up into the regional baby bells. Eventually, the baby bells started to get absorbed back into the monolith AT&T again. Nobody stopped it. I assume that the fact that few people use landlines and there are more than one provider of communication services where the AT&T voltron is no longer a monopoly.
The point? Not really sure, but as much as I'm all for breaking up Alphabet, I'm not convinced it will work. I'm willing to give it a go though
Trustbusting is like weeding your garden. It's just a chore that must be done periodically to counteract the natural tendency of markets to degenerate into monopolies. It's not something you do once and then never again, it's something that you have to do regularly, forever, if you want a functioning market.
Your "do regularly" got me thinking. There's only been 2 companies in the US to have been busted up, Standard Oil (1911) and ATT (1984). Microsoft (2000) got close but cut a deal. So yeah, we haven't been tending garden very well
This won't ever happen, the US and the US government can't afford to weaken its corporations and risk impact their data collection, social control, influence and profitability world-wide.
I'm quite torn on this.
The United States needs a strong economy to counter China and keep Europe safe.
In the short term, this might be nice, but in the medium term these moves might cause significant disruption to what makes the United States the highest gdp in the world.
I'm unsure what the polymarket on this post is will be flagged. It's kind of surprising for HN to be so educated but not know (academic) international relations Realism.
Why are these two points, countering China and keeping Europe safe, the framing for this? Who is needed to counter the US and keep foreign countries, like Iran, Venezuela, Afghanistan, and so on, safe from the US? And who needs to be strong to counter the US's state-sponsored terrorism via Israel?
One could argue that it’s all the centralization and monopolistic behavior which hinders tech development in the usa. So a breakup might have short term stutters but long term gains.
Tech development is hindered in the USA?
By monopolies, yes. Know what an acquihire is? Heard of a buyout leading to a shut down?
That hinders development.
Why would you be "torn" on this? Competition breeds innovation, and monopolies are literally the opposite of competition. A break up of big tech doesn't destroy anything or reduce economic activity, it can only accelerate it.
America is totally fucked if we keep betting it all on these monopolies. China figured out that competition is the key to winning, and is why their AI companies have been able to catch up so quickly despite all the sanctions.
> I'm unsure what the polymarket on this post is will be flagged. It's kind of surprising for HN to be so educated but not know (academic) international relations Realism.
I have no idea what you're trying to say here. Are you placing degenerate bets on HN threads? Also the second sentence is unrelated, so now I'm wondering if you're a bot.
Companies flooding the space with ads making the internet unusable != strong economy to counter china?
China has just been plain better then the USA at capitalism for a while now.
anti monopoly actions != weak economy
Actually the opposite monopolist (and oligopoles etc.) tend to sooner or later stop innovating (they don't need to, they win by default) and decay into customer abusive absurdity. And to some degree we are already seeing this with alphabet.
What such concentration of money also means, is a concentration of power under the hand of a few people, wich then can use that power to e.g. undermine or outright destroy democracy, force countries to make really bad decisions (including economic ones), destroy industries "on a whim" etc. Worst huge economic crisis tend to long term make the richest of the rich even more wealthy and more important tends to open doors for even more power/abuse, exceptions in laws, state subsidization etc. So you can't even rely on them not intentionally fucking up their countries economy because "that would be bad". Not for them, at least not long term. And tbh. at the net worth we are speaking about "it being bad" still means they can live in luxury for the not just the rest of their lives and have multiple millions left to inherit to their children.
> know (academic) international relations Realism.
or you not knowing less about economics then you think
> to counter China and keep Europe safe.
eh, the financial support of right US milliadaries of right radical political groups which want to both dismantle the EU (and overthrow democracy) in combination with US mono/-oligopols in combination with corruption & US political pressure, is effectively killing most efforts for local EU competition. Honestly this is likely doing far more harm in how much EU is "able to resist" China then any "safekeeping" the US does (mostly indirectly by protecting their own interests).
The US just added a colony in Venezuela in cooperation with their local Reichskommissar and is looking to secure its oil. American perception of their country is quite something.
Drumming up incoherent fears about China is the new favorite oligarch talking point, yes.
The realpolitik is not lost on American HN readers. It's like you say - there's a balance between maintaining a competitive economy and a fair one.
In this instance, should we let AdSense persist as a platform? It does turn out lots of revenue, but it does so by creating a closed ad space economy that Alphabet manages. This not only gives Google and YouTube unfair advantages on their own ad service, but it also creates a blind auction for businesses that don't know what their advertisements are worth. The entire system is deliberately and artificially segregated from competitors to AdSense.
We see this throughout America's economy, with Apple and Microsoft too. It undoubtedly incurs fiscal damage to legitimate competitors that should be given fair ground to offer a better service. But since the US federal government encourages consolidation, all of America's services get described as "enshittified" by their customers while China innovates.
Hahaha, today I learned that we need to keep Google's advertising income intact (~75% of their revenue) so that the US economy doesn't fall apart. We can't stop projecting these ads onto people's eyeballs, or literally the entire world goes to shit! AHAHAHAHA