this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2024

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126

A Judge Can Break Up Google Right Now. Will He? (www.thebignewsletter.com)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 95 points 7 months ago (1 children)

No.

That was easy.

[–] [email protected] 57 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Betteridge's law of headlines: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago (2 children)

What if the headline is “do you not like me?”

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Why would that be a headline?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago

No.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

[–] [email protected] 54 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I am going to guess that Google will not be broken up right now.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 7 months ago

Betteridge’s law would agree with you.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 7 months ago (3 children)

If Google is broken up what changes? Are there going to two different companies creating a map app?

[–] [email protected] 28 points 7 months ago (1 children)

The breakup this is referring to is splitting off the Android operating system from the rest of Google.

[+] [email protected] -12 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Even if you split Android off from Google, the Play store is still the Play store, nothing would change except it wouldn't be under Google anymore.

There's a problem too saying "it's a monopoly", as long as Apple is running their app store and Google has theirs, there's no monopoly. Change phones. Problem solved.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago (1 children)

On iOS at the very least, being unable to download apps from a source other than Apple is monopolistic behavior, as it does not allow the free market to determine what the added fee for app hosting and payment processing should be (versus an artificial 30% fee that bolsters Apple's profit margins), as well as limiting what apps are or aren't available on the basis of Apple's own app store policies. Apple can run their app store as they see fit, but as a consumer I should have to option to download apps from competing app stores.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

We call this vertical integration. Basically looking at any process you can make a table of different services for the process on the y axis and different providers of those services on the x axis.

The more width you get, the better. It means high competition, and that's healthy for a market now if it looks like a needle vertically, you got a problem. This is when we move closer to Monopoly, where a process can only be down by one chain of services. No competition. This means, that one provider can do what he wants, as people are bound to this provider and have to make do. Cue price increases.

Vertical integration means making your services interoperable to a degree where other providers can't keep up. If there's no other providers, there's no competition. Now you got a monopoly. That is what vertical integration is in it's final form.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago

nothing would change except it wouldn’t be under Google anymore.

That's a massive change.

Google is an ad company, so they have a vested interest in knowing what apps you use, how often you use them, and perhaps even what you do with those apps. Splitting that off means the app store needs to sustain itself without the massive ad network (I suppose they could sell the data).

It could even be split three ways:

Google - all the search and ad stuff
Android - just the OS, which survives based on license fees to manufacturerers
Play Store - just the play store

That way the Play store would need to compete with alternatives, like vendor-specific stores and FOSS stores. Whether that's desirable is certainly up for debate, but it would definitely be a significant change.

Change phones. Problem solved.

That's a duopoly, so no, the problem is absolutely not solved. If there were more than three phone OS options, I'd agree with you. But right now there are pretty much just two major ones, which means they can get away with a lot of nonsense because their customers really only have one other option.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Not sure what changes, but it's scary how much Google controls. Even if we just broke off YouTube from them, that would be a big deal.

Ideally we would split their search engine, YouTube, and chrome each into two competing companies. (Google A, Google B, Chrome A, Chrome B, YouTube A, YouTube B)

Because Google has so much power they can make changes that will break search results, websites, and browsers if you don't accept changes that are beneficial to them.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

Without the rest of Google, Youtube doesn't exist, because it doesn't make any money and it costs a shitload of money to run.

Google's actual businesses aren't Android, or Chrome, or Youtube (not including Youtube TV). They're AdSense, Google Cloud, their hardware division, the Play Store, the aforementioned Youtube TV, etc. Those are the things that make Google money, and really the only things you could realistically split off from Google and expect to still exist in a year or two.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

This honestly seems pointless. Would be better off just not allowing google to own the property, even as a subsidiary. That would throw a wrench into too many aspects of society, so I don't actually see that happening.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

What property?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Alphabet 2, Alphabet 3, Alphabet Final Final V3 ...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Yeah, I would bet that Alphabet would continue to own (or immediately buy) any separate split-off company Android becomes and there would be absolutely no meaningful change. 100% pointless.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 7 months ago

What would we do without one of the pillars of corruption and surveillance in America? There’s no way Google gets broken up.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 7 months ago

Best case scenario is Judge breaks up google which then goes to the Supreme court which will then overturn the ruling.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago (1 children)

What's the offshoot going to be called, "Soup"? Not like Alphabet is operating any more as "separate organizations" than Google was previously. Nothing changes there.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

The offshoot running Android would hopefully just be called "Android"

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

Yup, just like it was before Google bought it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:

This week’s monopoly round-up has lots of news, as usual, including some victories for the Antitrust Division, the government causing big health insurance stocks to tumble, and a privacy bill deal in Congress.

Over the last ten years, we’ve heard increasing criticism of ‘Big Tech’ – the handful of trillion-dollar giants that organize the information commons in our society – resulting in the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission bringing sweeping antitrust lawsuits against Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and – most recently – Apple.

The answer to that question requires an understanding of the facts and evidence in the case itself, Google’s acquisition history, and the purpose of remedies to unfetter markets from anticompetitive conduct and restore competition where it was constrained.

Epic showed how Google forced agreements on smartphone manufacturers that required pre-installation and prominent placement of the Play Store on hundreds of millions of devices.

Such a remedy can be broad-based, anything from monetary damages to break-ups to creating internal compliance departments to voiding unlawful contracts to banning senior executives from the industry.

We’ll know Epic’s request soon enough, Google will file its own more limited proposal, and dueling economic experts will jump in another of Judge Donato’s “hot tubs” at the end of May.

The original article contains 2,345 words, the summary contains 207 words. Saved 91%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

That McCloud looks like the "smarter every day" guy with a mullet