The housing and finance markets seem like a fitting example. Under and over investment respectively fueled bubbles that fed each other until their inevitable pop took the entire economy down and required a decade of artificially suppressed rates backed by trillions in debt setting us for bigger problems when an actual economic crisis occurs (Covid). We’re still weathering this storm of financial mismanagement on a national scale. Narrowing in, housing is now being over invested in fueling a bubble while the communities houses exist in are victims of underinvestment.
Zooming back out, whatever pain comes from breaking Google up today will be less than the pain of doing so in a decade. Even more broadly, the pain of breaking up any monopoly (a matter how small) today will be less than when their breakup is as or more pressing than any of the historical antitrust cases.
As Senator John Sherman put it, "If we will not endure a king as a political power we should not endure a king over the production, transportation, and sale of any of the necessaries of life."
Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, ATT/Verizon/Tmobile, and hoards of smaller but similarly situated companies behave as kings shaping markets, acting without accountability or culpability, and shaking down the public at their whims. The gospel of the stock market has paralyzed our legislators from taking action to put these corrupt, wasteful, polluting and abusive businesses in their place or out of operation.
I don't follow your point. All rates are set arbitrarily according to the monetary policy followed on any specific moment.
What leads you to believe that arbitrarily setting a rate one way is natural, but arbitrarily setting it another way is more natural?
> Zooming back out, whatever pain comes from breaking Google up today will be less than the pain of doing so in a decade.
Will it, though? Think about the problem for a second. Do you think it would be more painful to break up Yahoo now than it would have been a decade ago? What about Intel? What about IBM? I mean,do you think Google of all companies is doing great?
The bigger problem is that by conglomerating all of these businesses that are operating in different industries, Google has cut out competition from companies that would provide those services.
Why does Google search use Google adwords? Is it because adwords has given them the better terms than their competition or because they have no choice by virtue of being the same company?
>AdWords was primarily built by purchasing the biggest competitor, DoubleClick.
Your timeline is not right. Google was created in 1998. DoubleClick was acquired by Google +9 years later in 2008.
AdWords was a homegrown Google project starting around 2000. AdWords was an internally built auction-based system selling keywords using some ideas from Goto/Overture.
In contrast, Doubleclick was an ad-exchange-network marketplace for publishers and advertisers. This was a different market from AdWords that Google wanted to expand into.
Today, yes, both products are more integrated with each other.
AdWords came out in 2000. Google acquired DoubleClick in 2007. AdWords was much better before the DoubleClick acquisition. It turned into crap as DoubleClick management forced the engineering-focused AdWords management out.
I don't know if you have any personal experience from that time period, but AdWords was magical for an online business in the mid-00s. You could get conversion rates orders of magnitude higher than display ads like DoubleClick. Whole businesses were built off of providing a solution to a problem that people were searching for. It was also a hell of a lot less intrusive than the banner ads that occupied the web in the late 1990s - AdWords was text only, and worked because you had a need, somebody had a solution, and Google matched them up. You didn't have to see all these products that you didn't need.
We're unfortunately going back to the brand advertising days of a corporate monoculture, largely because Google Search (and the web in general) sucks now.
They didn’t have to go into new business sectors under the same parent company. They chose to because it allowed them to control multiple sectors without competition.
Regardless, there is not competition in their business in areas where there should be according to monopoly rules.
> If what comes after is not better, then we waited too long to break this monopoly up.
I don't follow your logic, because it does not have any logic.
Can you clarify your line of reasoning? I mean, if breaking up a company creates more problems than the ones it solves, what leads you to believe that anticipating the breakup would have any impact whatsoever in the fact that breaking up the company creates more problems than the ones it solves?
The main thing I specifically value about Google being whole is that there is a part of the business that is a firehouse of money, and some sizable % of this money is used in a Patronage system, supporting not the arts but open source technology & standards.
This world would be much poorer a place without this open source work & protocols.
I struggle to think of how else we would have got this, what action we would have taken to keep this outcom, while not "waiting too long".
> I don't follow your logic, because it does not have any logic.
You do not follow it because you do not wish to.
Think of Google as a cancer.
You can ignore it for the rest of your life, and your quality of life may get shittier and shittier until you die.
Think of anti-trust like surgery, you may be permanently harmed, lose a limb, skin, organ, etc... but you will be better in the long run. Sometimes surgery has no side effects, sometimes it harms you, we won't know until we are out the other end.
In this case, we may have waited so long the cancer might kill the host by removing it. I don't believe that to be the case however.
The system is very fundamentally not designed to support such an approach (much as I agree that it would produce a better result).
The way to break up companies is to win antitrust lawsuits against them. Except in cases where the companies are actually tied together in some meaningful way (ie, they're not fully separate companies in practice), there's no way to link such suits to each other; each one has to stand or fall on its own merits, and on its own timetable.
I think it would be hard to argue that Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc are actually arms of the same company. Thus, each of these Big Tech antitrust suits needs to happen separately, and some of the remedies might end up combining in counterproductive ways, because they are generally not able to consider each other's situations (the remedies have to be based on the facts of the individual case, AIUI).
It sucks, but it's the only antitrust system we've got right now.
In these types of discussions, people love bringing out the "But what about $OTHER_OBVIOUS_MONOPOLY?".
The solution is simple (the word simple here is doing a lot of work, I know); Meta, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Apple and any other similarly sized behemoth should be nuked, and not just in the tech world. Microsoft should've been properly nuked 30 years ago with the original anti-trust, yet alone now, same goes for the others.
Obviously nothing more than a coincidence, but very interesting this news came out days before 9/11. I wonder if this would have gotten more attention at the time.
Amazon is a funny example to imagine being broken up, since they famously try to isolate their business units from each other and keep them self-sustaining income wise. It might kill or dramatically change some business units like twitch, or IMDB though.
They use the money from their cash-cow businesses to artificially prop up their other lines of business, insulating them from having to actually compete on an even footing.
That's textbook abuse of monopoly (or market-dominant) position.
The funny thing is this is going to be benefit Microsoft significantly. Much of what Google did Chrome, Android, etc. was to prevent Microsoft from destroying it like Netscape, Novell, Lotus, Wordperfect, ...
It's probably no coincidence that Google's first external CEO Eric Schmidt was the CEO of Novell.
By the time Chrome was released, Google was already a behemoth. I can’t think of another .com that was anywhere near their size. Microsoft was only 2x bigger by market cap. They were hardly a small company that Microsoft could push around and had the advantage of not being dependent on anything MS was doing.
Google toolbar came first. Slipped in a Google search box on everyone's browser in exchange for blocking Google's competitors' popup ads (Google didn't use popup ads).
Now Google does invasive popovers within the page, etc., and this time with them in charge of the browser they are ahout to implement a plan to block extension makers from stopping it well.
What this means is that we also need antitrust action against Microsoft (particularly since the first one was thwarted by the election of a very pro-big-business administration, that stopped the implementation of fairly sweeping remedies).
It's not exactly a hot take nowadays that all the Big Tech companies are probably overdue for serious antitrust action.
It appears to me that your two paragraphs contradict each other. If we break up Google and what comes afterwards is worse, then break it up or we'll get worse? Is it worse if we do and worse if we don't? Which "worse" is worse?
Or do I misunderstand your point?
The whole point of breaking up monopolies is not moral principle. It's so that things get better for customers. If they don't, then what's the justification for breaking them up?
That seems to be in support of the parent's point.
So breaking up Google would have resulted in worse outcomes for consumers 10 years ago, but it would be even worse today? Then it wouldn't have made sense to break them up 10 years ago and it would make even less sense today.
I'm not claiming there aren't any good reasons to break up Google (I don't know), but this line of argumentation doesn't work as far as I can see.
> If your of the opinion that Google should not be broken up at all, ever, then your point is valid.
I don't think it's a good sign that you decided to resort to baseless personal accusations in reaction to a simple request to support your baseless clams.
The question is very simple: does it still make sense to break the company today? Not a decade ago, but today. It you believe so, why?
If you are neutral on whether Google should be broken up, and breaking up the company results in consumer harm, then breaking up the company makes no sense.
Your argument only makes sense if you start from the premise that Google should be broken up, and then try to back into an argument supporting that premise.
> Things may get worse for a while, but then maybe they'll eventually get better than (...)
This argument is perplexing. Isn't the whole point of this sort of intervention to fix things that are broken so that everyone is better off? You're arguing for major interventions at a time they are arguably not needed at all and would expectedly leave everyone worse, and the only mitigating factor you could come up was that perhaps who knows things might "eventually get better". Maybe. I don't know?
I'm not sure Search is the most important product (for users) at this point. It should be, but Gmail and YouTube come to mind as much more important services for end-users. People haven't really been 'browsing the web' for over a decade now. Search hasn't felt good for years, but Gmail for example has been pretty good for a long time.
Say the Search product is split off, it would instantly collapse as without the crutches of the Ad business it has no way to support itself. Maybe if we normalise paying for web products, and have some sort of "10 searches for free per day" starting point. That could open the door for a sustainable product that actually does what it needs to do. Perhaps the classic (and not in-line) ad sidebar with clear markings (and different markup) could provide some coverage there as well. But others have tried that (from scratch, with no brand recognition) and haven't really become a household name so far...
Google has essentially built a software Ouroboros, and if you try to take any of the critical (the most well-known) parts out, it fails and everyone is left with nothing.
We either start ripping this band-aids off or we will just continually have a worse and worse internet.