> If a large enough bank goes under, it takes out not just the bank, but huge sectors of the economy, affecting many more businesses and jobs. That's why the government bailed out the banks when they failed.
That is why the banks should have been broken up into smaller banks long before we reached that point, and it is why Google should have been broken up long ago. The only way to prevent the situation you describe is to never allow any single entity to become so important to so many people.
It's like planting a tree. The best time to break up a big company is twenty years ago (before it became so big). The second-best time is now.
I strongly disagree. If Google was broken up 20 years ago, nearly ALL the services listed above would not have happened. They are all FREE too, mind you. Everyone would still be paying for email. The enormous amount of free education on YouTube would not have been accessible to the world. The economy that we know today would be vastly different and in my opinion far worse off. So much of the economic growth came off the back of the free and ad-subsidized services Google provided for us. The reason Google is the size it is today is because it provided better services at better prices than all the competitors. If Google was broken up 20 years ago, the consumer would have paid the price.
The consumer did pay the price. Google built on empire on making consumers believe they were getting things for free while selling other businesses a direct line to its customers' wallets. It's been a very effective sleight of hand operation, to the point where even relatively savvy people on HN seem to forget that advertising pays the bills by getting its targets to spend money they would not have otherwise spent.
A world without Google would not be a world with less disposable income for regular people, but it might be a world with less disposable junk.
Even if you discount the effectiveness of ads (which seems foolish given how many people have so much staked on them working), the eye-watering prices Google charges for them get directly passed to the consumer in the form of higher prices.
Monopolies are rarely if ever good for consumers, but some monopolies are better than others at offloading the responsibility for their harm onto other businesses.
> A world without Google would not be a world with less disposable income for regular people, but it might be a world with less disposable junk.
If the argument is "more ads = more junk" then the argument is essentially "my values are more important than other peoples values". I'm also anti-consumerism, but if someone sees an ad and finds a product intriguing enough to purchase, they believe that thing might have value in their life. We might not agree, but we should not have the ability to control what other people find value in. I think this is equivalent to an argument of coercing people to conform to our values instead of convincing them to have our values.
That's only true up to a point. If I say "more plastic in the ocean = more junk", you can say "oh, that's just you pushing your values, if someone else would rather have a disposable plastic water bottle than a clean ocean, that's their choice". But, as with (physical) pollution, the costs of this kind of ad pollution and covert data harvesting are not transparent to consumers, so it's not possible to say they have actually given informed consent to it.
More insidiously, the proliferation of this type of "junk" crowds out other business models, meaning that increasingly people can't even "test" whether they would prefer something else. It's basically the tyranny of small decisions. It's not just a matter of "I will trade you five minutes of my eyeball time for 6 months of email", because every such transaction increase the likelihood that in the future you will find yourself with no option other than to engage in such a transaction in order to, say, pay your electric bill.
It's my claim that my viewpoint is actually in accord with a majority of people's values, in the sense that if we considered an alternate universe with less ad junk, more people in that universe would look at ours and say "Wow, I'm glad I don't live there" than vice versa. It's just that there are lots of clever boiling-frog ways to get people to act against their own values without their being fully aware of it. The mere fact that something has happened doesn't mean most people actually wanted it to happen, or are happy it happened, or even realize they would in fact be happier if it hadn't happened.
I'm not sure where you got that I'm trying to impose anything on anyone—sounds like you latched onto a side note and decided to reply to what you thought the side note was implying instead of the substance of my comment?
The argument has nothing to do with values or imposing them on others, it's simply this: These things are not and never were free. Google wants you to think they're free, but either the ads are effective at driving revenue and consumers are paying for Google's products in the form of increased consumption or Google is a parasite that lies to businesses about the efficacy of their ads and consumers are paying for Google's products in the form of the parasitic Google tax. Most likely it's a bit of both.
Either way, Google offering these products for "free" did not have a positive effect on consumer wallets and paid solutions emerging to replace Google if it actually does dissolve will not have a negative effect.
True, these services are not and never were free, we pay for them with our data. I would say this is all fairly common knowledge, my parents who are not tech savvy understand this, and I genuinely don't believe people care enough. I know this trade off, my tech savvy friends and acquaintances know this and yet we continue to make this trade off because frankly I don't think many value their personal data at all, and I think that's why we say these services are "free" because we're not trading anything we find particularly valuable.
The problem is that you don't actually know how valuable it is without knowing how it's being used. If your ad-view statistics are used to charge you personally a higher price for a product than someone else who didn't click on the same ads, is that still okay? If they're used to raise your mortgage interest rate, is that still okay? If they're used to sell scam products to old ladies, is that still okay? If they're used to peddle political misinformation to support the election of a fascist, is that still okay? You don't know what tradeoff you're actually making. Maybe you'd think it was okay, maybe not.
Modern companies have become very, very good at making consumers believe they are getting a good deal by trading an obvious benefit for the possibility of a hidden harm. The type of data tracked by internet companies is only one form of this.
I fully agree with you - the practice of price discrimination is illegal under the Robinson-Patman Act and Google should be penalized for violating this law if they have been found to do this. I am only trying to push against the notion that Google (or any company) should be broken up just because they are big. This is the nuance that makes these discussions important IMO
My position is basically that enormous market power is like a ticking time bomb. It's not going to work to try to patch over it with specific prohibitions like the one you mention, because big companies will always find loopholes, use their market power to exploit them, and use their wealth and "too big to fail" status to drag out any attempt to enforce the rules. It is an endless game of whack-a-mole that can never work. It's better to just limit the total power of companies to do anything; doing so will also limit their ability to do harm of any kind.
You have to explain why and how you are rejecting it.
The point of the poster above is that you're ultimately paying for your free email with a Google tax on every carton of milk and every smartphone you buy. That is, if advertising were banned and you had to pay for Gmail, most of your other purchases would be just a little bit cheaper, because they wouldn't be paying for Google ads to support your free email.
And this is just basic finance: the advertising budget has to be paid for somehow, so it is priced into the goods themselves (either through higher prices or lower quality, of course).
Propaganda, which is what advertising is, is generally a way to trick people into doing things that they wouldn't otherwise have done, typically by making them believe things that are not true.
In the case of advertising, those untrue things are usually "X is a much bigger problem than I thought" and "Y will solve problem X and make my life a lot easier". That you can convince people of these things doesn't make them true in all cases. Washing machines are extremely useful; egg cookers, very much unnecessary. Yet commercials will often look the same for both kinds of products (not for washing machines today, obviously, as the case for why they are useful to have has long since become obvious, and commercials are mostly about which brand is better).
This is an often overlooked thing in discussions about advertising. A major part of the propaganda effort is not "which brand of X should I buy", it's "I need to own an X". That's where they lie to people the most, and convince them to waste money, not on an inferior product, but one that shouldn't have existed at all.
I think if I ate a lot of eggs, and egg cooker could be very handy.
If Google can use targeting advertising to identify customers who eat a lot of eggs, and tell them about the existence of egg cookers, that's a win for everyone except the chickens.
I don't know for sure, but I'd bet egg cookers aren't a useful tool for anyone, compared to the alternatives (boiling the egg without taking up extra room in your kitchen).
But even if you're right about this being useful to some people, advertising is not the right tool for discovering this: advertising will always exaggerate any positive of something and downplay any negative. The goal of advertising, and the incentive, is not to neutrally inform people about products they might use. It's to convince people to buy this product by any means necessary. If it weren't explicitly outlawed, advertisers would probably add "enlarges your penis and cures cancer" to every single product ad.
It can't be that objective if there are multiple schools of thought. Getting two economists to agree on why what happened yesterday happened is hard enough, let alone getting them to agree on what we should do today to have a specific outcome tomorrow.
> while selling other businesses a direct line to its customers' wallets
What does this mean?
> Even if you discount the effectiveness of ads (which seems foolish given how many people have so much staked on them working), the eye-watering prices Google charges for them get directly passed to the consumer in the form of higher prices.
But then...why is anyone buying them if they don't work? How do you run this experiment without Google in to show that hand-curated ads on TV etc would've been a better, cheaper way to do ads in the long run than automated ones?
There are mire dark patterns in this than you can think of. Have you ever wondered what does Amazon do on the top of the search results typing “something ebay” into google?
I can certainly think of some, but that doesn't mean that removing Google would result in lower prices. It could be that replacing automation with manual work could even raise prices.
>getting its targets to spend money they would not have otherwise spent
That's not necessarily a bad thing, if they're getting value from those purchases.
Plus, maybe they just would've learned about the product through some other channel, e.g. by watching TV. Which has more positive externalities: Google, or TV?
> If Google was broken up 20 years ago, nearly ALL the services listed above would not have happened.
And that would be fine. To me this is like saying "if we had jailed those meth makers and dealers 20 years ago, all these meth labs today would never have existed". If these services cannot exist without a business model built around transparent, bounded transactions (e.g., no hidden data harvesting), then they should not exist. The problem is precisely that Google and others of its ilk have essentially gotten millions of people addicted to "free" services whose true costs are hidden.
> The reason Google is the size it is today is because it provided better services at better prices than all the competitors.
No, they've just been better at hiding the costs, exploiting legal loopholes, and exploiting their privileged position to raise barriers to entry for other participants.
Free email existed before Google - Hotmail and Yahoo come to mind immediately, but there were plenty of others. You also got a free email address from your ISP - even AOL users had email.
I remember hotmail before gmail. Attachments had a 2 MB limit. I couldn't even share HQ photos using hotmail. And the whole inbox had a 25 MB capacity. I do believe there were paid alternatives with more storage.
Gmail came in with 1 GB storage and grouping emails as conversations. To me, both of these aspects were revolutionary, and other email providers shortly followed suit.
* "other email providers shortly followed suit" means that it was never out of their reach to begin with, they just needed more competition to convince them to try: which didn't have to be Google and didn't have to be ad- or surveillance-supported.
* 1GB storage in 2004 to 15GB storage 21 years later suggests that something vital has stalled. Every other storage metric (price of RAM per MB, price of hard drives per MB, price of cloud storage per MB) has improved 100 fold over the same time period[1,2].
> 1GB storage in 2004 to 15GB storage 21 years later
The original marketing was the the storage would grow forever, and you could believe it. Google was riding the an incredible high from smashing out what felt like constant Amazing New Things throughout the noughties. In fact, when they originally made the claim, back when Don't Be Evil was still the motto and they hadn't bought DoubleClick, I'm sure they believed it. By the time the final upgrade (or rather joining, of 5GB photos/Drive to 10GB mail) to 15GB came round in 2013, there was definitely a hint of the horns in the hairline.
Which freemail service isn't ad- or surveillance-supported?
> suggests that something vital has stalled
Why does it have to be a technology-driven limit? I dare say Google thinks that anyone with more than 15GB of email is a serious enough user to pay for it.
It could also mean that you can't invest indefinite amount of storage to ever growing user base, if storage metrics would not improve indefinitely. There is a break down and 15GB cap is nothing comparing with Google Photos cut, which is a strong sign that storage is the problem even for behemoths.
Yes, and Gmail hasn't improved for decades. Why not? Because Google is a monopoly actor and does not need to compete.
Example: you can't create a new email label in the Android client. You have to log on to email in a browser and do it there. This was true when smartphones were a niche way of connecting to email, and it's still true today.
Fair point. Maybe I'm too young and have bought into the narrative that Google was the first widely available and free email. Still I think though, the plethora of their other services widely available for free (maps, drive, sites, youtube) were extraordinary for the price, at least for me.
I think this is sort of missing the point: I’m happy to trade a bit of attention here and there for services because I’m just going to go without a lot of things if I have to pay real money for them. If we go to a model where every site charges for usage, I will start using fewer services regularly and will use each service for more things which seems a bit counterproductive in terms of monopolies.
That's what you don't get. You aren't just watching ads. You are giving them data about you, a lot of data. That data is used to heavily manipulate you. This isn't like the old days of broadcast TV where ads air and you aren't directly tracked. If you ever find a product that is free, it isn't. You are the product that is being sold.
The data is not just used to manipulate you, but everyone like you. Also you are giving away data from everyone that contacts you. You are non consensually making that decision for everyone in your inbox (and, I suspect, many others too).
if you think a bit harder, you shouldn't be. the data on you isn't just used to manipulate your choices on the market, it also ends up being used to manipulate your choices as a citizen -- politically, socially. You might think you're above such psychological tactics (and perhaps you are, but many many people are not, and whether you believe the democrats accusations of electoral fraud in 2016 or the many accusations on both sides since, there is absolutely no doubt that the corporatization of the internet has played a giant part in the most repugnant aspects of american and world politics since 2016)
Democrats didn't say there was election fraud in 2016. It was that the Russian government had workers on social media posing as Americans supporting Trump's campaign, and that they also got access to thousands of DNC emails due to a spearphishing campaign targeting DNC employees.
What they are probably referring to is that the Clinton Campaign in one of the Rust belt states asked for a recount as "claiming election fraud." The votes were close and within the margin for the campaign to ask. They asked, it got recounted and Trump ended up with slightly more votes after the recount. Then that was it. You know, what normally happens. The Clinton Campaign did not send someone to go do a press conference outside of the Four Seasons landscaping to repeat over and over claims that were repeatingly found false in courts.
You’re not actually paying with attention—attention isn’t money. Google’s customers are paying for your attention and you are paying for more expensive products. All of the money in Google’s pockets comes from their customers and we all end up eating that cost as participants in the global market sooner or later.
This is a reductive view of the economy: one pays for something whenever one trades something of value to one’s counterparty to something that’s of value to oneself. In many cases, in fact, it’s preferable to do this sort of “bartering” to reduce the expenditure of money you might need for other things.
Finally, I have, in fact, benefitted personally from products that were advertised to me on the basis of user tracking data so a bit ambivalent about the anti-tracking argument.
Firefox was also extraordinary for the price. point being that Google has never been the only option, just the most popular because why not your gmail is already plugged in.
Firefox existed before Mozilla's contracts with Google. Firefox was actually funded by AOL (to the tune of a couple million in sending off money when they shuttered Netscape) and Mitch Kapor (hundreds of thousands because he's a great guy who saw the potential) with some other donations from IBM, Oracle, and a few more big tech players.
No, Mozilla is 90% funded by Google ads. Mozilla does a ridiculous number of non-browser things. Konqueror and Navigator existed long before Google ad funding.
> "If Google was broken up 20 years ago, nearly ALL the services listed above would not have happened."
People didn't need them 20 years ago, so why do they need them now?
> "They are all FREE too, mind you."
No proprietary software is free. You either pay with your money (you do this with games, for example), or you pay with your data (and this is what you do with Google). Sometimes with both (you do this with Microsoft).
You can't state with such certainty that all these things wouldn't have happened without google. For all we know there would be 20 free or cheap alternatives to each service if google hadn't outcompeted them all with subsidies from ad revenue.
Nearly all the services mentioned here were acquisitions or had strong competitors at the time of their launches. It is undeniable that Google has made these into quality products and led to their dominant position in their fields. However, Google's existence was necessary for none of these classes of products.
Those service are certainly not free. Google doesn't offer them just to be nice: they make money from them. The costs to the consumer are hidden and indirect, but they are costs nonetheless.
> I strongly disagree. If Google was broken up 20 years ago, nearly ALL the services listed above would not have happened. They are all FREE too, mind you. Everyone would still be paying for email.
People weren't paying for email before gmail. It was predated by hotmail, Yahoo mail, and innumerable free online email offerings by small players. Being free wasn't even a selling point for gmail; the selling point was that they gave you a lot of storage.
Speaking of things that happened before Google, Yahoo Maps and Firefox are older than Google Maps and Chrome. And... Google Flights is a Google acquisition, not a product that they developed.
And then...
> Can you imagine how the world will be affected when these go away?
> Google Fi
> Google Fiber
> Google Pay
Yes, no one will notice.
> Google Groups
It already has gone away. Also, Usenet is something else older than Google.
> Google OAuth
Eliminating "sign in with [popular site]" would be a hugely positive change.
I didn't know that about Maps and Chrome. I did know Android was an acquisition, and that YouTube was, but in both cases I think Google's put in enough work not to dismiss them as Google projects.
almost no one ever paid for email, there were many free providers and people got accounts from their isp
google bought youtube 19 years ago because their own attempt was doing poorly and youtube was booming right after its founding, they didn't win in the space because they were good at it, they bought success in a way that probably shouldn't have been allowed
you're acting like google invented ad supported online services
the problem is now that google doesn't have to be the best any more, they can be third best at nearly everything but still own the market share because they can afford to give things away for free which ruins competition
YouTube is profitable though. If their Google ties were severed they could still be ad supported, but they'd be able to pen deals with different ad networks and platforms.
> That is why the banks should have been broken up into smaller banks long before we reached that point
They still can be broken up. As for not being competitive on the global market - neither is regular labor compared to slave labor. And just like companies employing slave labor are (or should be) barred from the US market, so can companies that are too large. Solving such prisoner dilemmas is exactly what government is for.
"That's why we need anti-trust in the first place."
Moreover, it seems to me these laws ought to strengthened to make executives/decision makers even more accountable.
The people who made Google a monopoly aren't stupid and knew full well what they were doing. They should not be able to hide behind Google's corporate structure and also should be penalized for their bad behavior.
Yes, this is one of the big changes that need to be made to really reform things. Companies act based on decisions made by individuals. Those individuals should be held accountable if the company's actions are found to be harmful. There should be lots of CEOs and board members of companies in oil, healthcare, housing, retail (as well as tech) who should be facing fines in the hundreds of millions (if not the billions) on their personal assets.
One thing I forgot. There's another good reason to hold CEOs and others personally responsible and punish them accordingly as it acts as a deterrent. Whenever we see Google, Facebook, etc. get levied with fines we rarely learn who the nameless gnomes are who perpetrated the act, or approved it, etc. Knowing that their names would be in the public domain would send shivers down their backs, even if acquitted it would likely not bode well for future employment.
Moreover, CEOs, directors, boards etc. should also be held accountable even when they are not directly responsible (like captains of ships are). This would have the effect of ensuring that those in charge would mandate an ethics and behavior policy for the company and ensure that all employees were aware of it, and violation thereof would result in dismissal.
Thst said, to be fair, you can't blame management for the unacceptable behavior of a wayward or stupid employee. Commonsense must prevail and laws must allow for such things.
Customers frequently prefer cheap bundles. The right time for an antitrust decision is often when the company is large and stops behaving competitively.
Customers acting individually have a short-term perspective which leads them to prefer low prices in general, which is why strategies like price dumping work - yet they are illegal for a reason.
The problem is that once the monopolist is entrenched and all competition killed off, those cheap bundles stop being cheap. Hence why you need someone to take the long term view and nip these kinds of things in the bud. A democratically elected government is the best avenue for that.
No, the comment is saying that the situation is only going to get worse from here. There will never be a better time to solve Google's anticompetitive behavior.
The consequences should be weighed and considered, but shrugging and letting Google keep on keeping on because it's too big to fail isn't a viable option.
I set the bar even lower than the other commenter. I don't care if it's a monopoly, nor even really if it's engaged in anticompetitive practices. I just care if it's big, like big enough to have outsized market power. I think that markets with large disparities in size and market power among participants are inherently anticompetitive. I think that in most market sectors --- banks, automakers, airlines, media, you name it --- there are a small number of large companies with outsize market power, and those should all be broken up.
Absolutely right. Customers benefit most if there is a working market and monopolies and other kinds of capture are restricted.
When I compare the cost cutting happening in my supermarket over pennies and then compare it to the exuberant prices at airports, festival venues and sport stadiums it is clear how much many industries are ripping customers off.
The lawsuit focuses specifically on search and search advertising. So the answer to your question is Google Search.
Note that a legal monopoly is not the same as the extreme simplification of "zero other options". "In law, a monopoly is a business entity that has significant market power, that is, the power to charge overly high prices, which is associated with unfair price raises." [1]
"In United States v. Google LLC, the federal government alleges that Google has unfairly hindered competition in the search market through anti-competitive deals with Apple as well as mobile carriers. The government alleges that, as a result of these practices, Google has accumulated control of around 88% of the domestic search engine market.
In doing so, the government alleges, Google has additionally monopolized the search advertising market at the expense of competing services. Per the government's estimation, Google has been able to accumulate control of over 70% of the search advertising market. As a result of lack of competition, Google has been able to over-charge advertisers versus what they would pay in a competitive environment." [2]
Statcounter seems to align quite closely with the government's assertion. [3] Extra creepily, it appears to be even a hair worse globally, where Bing is less used (not that I like Bing or MS either). [4] But there is no international framework I'm aware of to handle global-scale monopolies, so that's outside the scope of the suit.
I didn't use that word and no one in the chain above me did either. I specifically chose "anticompetitive behavior" to emphasize that a monopoly is not required to do damage to the free market or to trigger antitrust action.
So out of the list, how has Google behaved “anti competitively” in any of these?
- Google Maps
- Google Mail
- Google Drive
- Google Docs
- Google Groups
- Google Forms
- Google Cloud
- Google OAuth
- Google Analytics
- Android
- Android Auto
- Fitbit
- Google Fi
- Google Fiber
- Google Flights
- Google Translate
- Google Pay
- Waymo
Maps/mail/drive/docs/flights/translate: provided for free using their dominance in ad tech to bankroll it and feeding the data back in to the ad platform. No one else can compete, and using dominance in one market to ensure dominance in others has historically been a clear trigger for antitrust.
Android: they lost a court case over this one that has lots of details if you care to look.
The rest are a weird mix of paid services that should be fine to stand up on their own or not even products at all (OAuth).
Which “consumer” products? Android is less than 40% of the market in the US. Every single desktop user and iOS user who uses Chrome made an affirmative choice to download it and use it over the browsers bundled with the platforms supported by trillion dollar companies. No one is forced to use Chrome and it’s not even the default.
You can't have the Play app store on your Android phone unless you accept to install Youtube, Google Maps, Google Drive and Google Photos. This is clearly anti-competitive.
That line of reasoning didn’t work out to well against Microsoft. No there was no browser choice screen in the US and no forced unbundling.
If enough users choose Chrome willingly on the desktop to make it the majority, do you think unbundling is going to help some scrappy startup hosting video at scale with all of the associated cost is going to arise instead of everyone just downloading YouTube?
Google Drive has plenty of competition and it’s not even the majority.
Your two arguments contradict each other. Bundling YouTube is fine because there are no viable competitors. Bundling Google Drive is fine because there are plenty of viable competitors.
If Chrome was able to compete in a level playing field, then so should the other Google services. You seem to believe that Google makes an effort to tie together its services because they are stupid and don't realise they are not gaining anything from it.
Horizontal integration is a tried and true strategy of monopolies.
Standard Oil bought or bankrupt competitive refineries, pipeline companies, regional railroads, even mom&pop gas stations & groceries often at considerable costs to ensure no part of the oil supply chain was profitable for its competitors.
This is a straw man, nobody asserted that the consequences should not be considered. Clearly, whichever way we proceed there will be considerable consequences; I doubt there is any dispute about that. Your argument seems to fail to acknowledge the dystopian consequences of NOT doing something.
Also, let's dispense with inappropriate jabs such as referring to other perspectives as "fantasy".
You still haven't addressed the consequences of NOT doing something.
Perhaps you've never heard the expression about "The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now." It's an aphorism, absolutely not literal. [1] Additionally, even if it were intended literally, which it clearly was not, saying it should have been done 20 years ago is not the same as fantasizing. It also obviously concludes that it should be done now, which is not fantasy.
I didn't say you were dismissive. If you have valid points, you should be able to make them without rewording everything into something else that you can tear down. That's called a straw man argument. "... the informal fallacy of refuting an argument different from the one actually under discussion, while not recognizing or acknowledging the distinction" [2]
That is why the banks should have been broken up into smaller banks long before we reached that point, and it is why Google should have been broken up long ago. The only way to prevent the situation you describe is to never allow any single entity to become so important to so many people.
It's like planting a tree. The best time to break up a big company is twenty years ago (before it became so big). The second-best time is now.