Google isn’t the only tech giant that needs smashing into pieces, Microsoft, Amazon, Adobe, all need to be broken up. The tech industry shouldn’t be dominated by a few companies.
this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2024
441 points (99.6% liked)
Technology
59347 readers
4401 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
~~The tech~~ industry shouldn’t be dominated by a few companies.
FTFY
I am somewhat biased, as an employee of a big tech company - but I am okay with them moving into different industries as long as they don't undercut while also providing just the worst employment experience of all time. It sucks to see nice startups from passionate people get steamrolled by a 100 person org full of people fearing for their job while some exec rides the coattails of their boss.
I'd be more supportive of big tech if they were nice places to work, but many of them simply aren't. They have "prestige" (whatever the fuck that means), but some of them are full of some of the most broken, beaten-down people you'll ever meet.
Co-opify them, wipe equity and put the workers in democratic control of their own subunits
This article made my day a bit better. Google complaining how "radical" the changes proposed are is a sure indicator that they would likely cause some damage to them.
Please, DOJ, smash Google with a hammer and redistribute the pieces!
Bury the ashes of the pieces in the deepest hole. We need rid of this whole concept of information being monopolized and harvested for profit.
Not sure why they mention AI search, as it's practically non-existent right now.
As far as I know Google and Bing return AI results just above the usual web page results.
In addition AI LLM tools like Copilot (the mobile app) and Perplexity which cite their sources with links to websites really make it easier to weed out the BS from LLM answers, if you use them carefully. In my case, these tools replace search engines in 80% of the searches that I do.
The more I run searches on Google and queries through copilot the more my trust evolves.
I use the one latched into Skype more, though.
The one in Skype works quite well and is usually not blocked by companies firewalls... Or so I've heard...
If you're following citations, may as well just search for the citations themselves... aka just a regular search engine.
Yes but the power of it is that you can in effect refine your search using natural language, like talking to a person, as it remembers the last 2-3 exchanges.
And it presents the information the way you asked to see it.
For example (my side of the "conversation"):
- What is hamas?
- Compared to Hezbollah?
- what are the differences between Shia and Sunni?
The citations confirm the information, they are not the end goal. The added value is the fact that the information is pre-digested and presented in a way that matches my learning process. It's a lot easier for me to assimilate information by getting answers to questions that I've asked.
Yeah, if search hadn't become dog shit I'd be happy with it
Instead, everything is a video for some reason, and the results are purposely worse than a year ago...I don't want to watch a video, I can read 20x faster than I can listen, I don't want to read an ad in article form - I'm generally looking for one little nugget of information
I took this into my own hands - I'll use free services if they work, but increasingly they're just demos for a product that may or may not be better. So I spun up a searx container, I point a local LLM at it, and I let it filter read through results. My next stage is to crawl documentation, use LLMs to feed it into a vector db, and use AI to retrieve exactly what I want without sifting through garbage myself
Would YouTube get shittier if Google was broken up? I was under the understanding that YouTube is a loss leader service for Google, but I still think its one of the best social media sites on the web. Even when you consider the number of ads (that doesn't affect a revanced user).
Not neccessarily. A spun off YouTube would still have YouTube premium and ad revenue. They could also sell user data to 3rd parties (I doubt Google currently does it on a large since it's in their interest to have a better ad network than its competitiors). A move similar to Reddit's with their API and exclusive search agreement or agreements to feed certain videos to AI would both fetch a higher price and upset the quality less since the vast majorty of videos watched are found through YouTube itself.
That all sounds shittier to me NGL
The idea behind breaking up a monopoly is to allow competition. So if a competitor to YouTube arises, then both companies will have to offer better service to entice more users.
How would breaking up Google break up the "monopoly" of YouTube, which is what we were discussing.
The argument is that google uses integration between its own ad network and YouTube to outcompete any similar service. If anyone else tries to launch a video platform and sell ad space to google, which is likely given that google owns the world’s largest ad network, it’s in googles best interest to either give their own competitor an unfavorable deal or to completely lock them out of their ad marketplace.
If YouTube and google were forced to operate as independent companies it eliminates this conflict of interest.
Youtube is owned by Google (technically Alphabet).
I really would prefer them to go after Amazon and Apple before Google, or at least all of them at once.
They should practice on ISPs and other broken industries first before these level 0 bureaucrats head straight for Dracula castle after not doing their jobs for 50 years and the Bell system re-merged. Kill Verizon & atnt, for instance
before these level 0 bureaucrats head straight for Dracula castle
Rather they are buddies with Dracula, so should at least play better than this
They’re actually going after all of them at the same time. They’re just at different stages in each case.
Man, there's such a long line of companies that need breaking up, I can't see the end of it. The entire global economy is currently controlled by monopolies and oligopolies.
It’s sorta like multinational corporations can get away with their shenanigans since they don’t have to strictly abide by a nations set of rules.
So what could be better than getting started?
Agreed. Roll up the sleeves and get to work.
Apple is not a monopoly in any sense of the word
I don't think Apple's business model fits the definition of "monopoly", but they are a different kind of anti-competitive, in my opinion. Forcing users to use your own ecosystem by forcing competitors to be shittier or nonexistent through technical means is still anti-competitive.
You're not forced to use their phones.
No, which is why I said it's not a monopoly. It's a different form of anti-consumerism.
Yeah, which is why I've never owned an iPhone. Hell, I was pretty big into Apple a while ago, but I never bought into the iOS. The OS convergence is why I completely jumped ship.
This seems to me to be a weak substitute for good privacy regulation.
That's way too late. I have been using duckduckgo for years now and so does so many others i know. And the questions it can not answer goes to perplexity or chatgpt. The timing with this is very off, google's search monopoly is probably going to end anyways.
Them all at once.
You'd think they'd have more sophisticated remedies than cutting it up. Which won't improve anything, won't change the incentives and will eventually put us right back where we started.
I mean duck manifest v3, but the government abdicated their responsibility for 50 years and now they think they're going to save us with solutions from 1930 ? Do better you ducks !
You think breaking up a monopoly won't do anything? What?
In the long term, no. It’s a temporary measure. It’s like fighting against entropy.
Jesus Christ what a pathetic outlook.
In countries where monopolies are forbidden, internet costs about €20 per month
I'm guessing OP is paying about $80 lol
It’s a Red Queen’s Race.
Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else—if you run very fast for a long time, as we've been doing."
"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"
Well the important thing is to make sure everyone knows it's impossible to make any sort of positive change, ever.
Clowns lol
Whoever said anything about that? You can make positive changes, just don’t expect them to be permanent. Nothing is permanent. That’s life! Eventually we all die.
This defeatist attitude is immature and unnecessary. Please refrain from posting such negative comments in the future.
If you have a competent anti-monopolistic government, you can make positive change faster than the market makes negative change.