Right after the case was settled, Microsoft sold their shares again.
It’s said that this investment likely helped Apple survive through that period.
Given Apple’s market position right now, it’s not a stretch to assume this to be a direct result of the antitrust case against Microsoft.
I don't know much about the internal structure of Google, but my naïve intuition is that it could be broken up into several profitable companies relatively easily a whole a bunch of different ways, given how many different products there are.
It seems like the first thing would be to split off Youtube, which is apparently already independent enough that it has its own CEO. Actually, I'd be comfortable arguing that Youtube is big enough by itself that breaking it up somehow would benefit consumers, but at least in that case it does seem hard to imagine how it would be done.
Then, I would guess the next step would be to split Google Search from everything else. As far as I can tell, it's mostly stand-alone, and most integration with other products seemes more harmful to consumers than beneficial.
After that, it gets harder, but I feel like you could do something like this:
1. Adsense 2. Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs 3. Android, Pixel / whatever other hardware Google makes. 4. Everything else
E.g. If Android becomes it's own company, it's still the only player in the mobile operating system space. If search was it's own company, it's still the dominant search engine.
Admittedly, I wasn't around at the time, but what use was breaking up Ma-bell into the sub companies, from a choice perspective? I certainly understand that from a telephony devices perspective, consumer choice drastically increased, since third parties could now make telephones, but you still ended up with local monopolies for all of the fractured components.
Also, how is search's integration into other products harmful in all circumstances? It's extremely convenient that typing the name of a restaurant into Google search gives me reviews, the menu, directions, etc.
As I understand, the desired goal is to stop the dominant player in one domain (search) from getting an unfair competitive advantage in another (advertising backends). It might also be true that allowing one company to have complete dominance in a particular domain stifles competition within that domain, but that's a seperate problem.
> Admittedly, I wasn't around at the time, but what use was breaking up Ma-bell into the sub companies, from a choice perspective? I certainly understand that from a telephony devices perspective, consumer choice drastically increased, since third parties could now make telephones, but you still ended up with local monopolies for all of the fractured components.
I know nothing at all about this particular topic, but I have two immediate thoughts:
1. It would be easier to break a monopoly held by a company that made just one component, because once you finished your replacement for that component, you'd be able to ship a product, whereas if one company had a monopoly on every component, you'd need to make replacements for every component.
2. I don't find "It might stay just as bad as it is now" to be a very strong criticism if the alternative is doing nothing.
> Also, how is search's integration into other products harmful in all circumstances? It's extremely convenient that typing the name of a restaurant into Google search gives me reviews, the menu, directions, etc.
Sure, but Duckduckgo does those things as well and doesn't own any products that do those things. Whereas there are some google products that seem really tightly coupled, like Drive and Docs that I can't really imagine working as well if they came from different companies. As for harming consumers, I was mostly thinking about search data → advertising.
(cries in Firefox)
The social, political, and economic damage Google is causing as one of the leading forces pushing the world into surveillance capitalism vastly outweighs the "good" derived from a few technical trivialities.
[1] http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/02/shoshana-zuboff-q-and...
Former intelligence agents have gotten into business intelligence as well engaged in legal surveillance work to predict trends just doing things like counting cars in factory lots from public spaces to analyse worker demand and thus production and sales - surveillance and capitalism are bridged by being in the same reality and a legal system where everything not forbidden is permitted.
I never said they created it; Google, FB, etc, are the "leading forces pushing the world" into a new type of economy. It almost certainly wo9uld exist without Google involvement, but the are involved and the damage from their business model is real.
> literally nothing to do with industrial outsourcing.
I don't see how this is in any way related to surveillance capitalism.
> counting cars in factory lots from public spaces to analyse worker demand and thus production
You're talking about specific examples of surveillance, which are only tangentially related to surveillance capitalism. As the article linked above explains, surveillance capitalism is an economic system with a new form of market. Capitalism has had many forms: mercantilism, factory and mass-production capitalism, financialization, etc. Each of these created unique types of market that incentivized different types of business practices.
An example of the problem from the previous [1] that illustrates the kind of economic change that Google/etc are causing:
>> Three or four months ago, the CEO of Ford says there’s a global auto slump, it’s really hard to sell cars, but we’re getting downgraded in the markets. He says, we want price-to-earnings ratios like Google and Facebook. How do we do that? We’re going to become a data company. We got 100 million people driving around in Ford vehicles. And what we’re gonna do is, we’re gonna now figure out how to get all the data out of this driving experience.
The problem isn't minutia like counting cars in a factory lot or a business trying to advertise to their customers; this is about creating an economic system that gives the most profit to whoever creates the most invasive surveillance so they can sell your pattern-of-life.
The end result would be that project leaders would be CEO-s belonging to Alphabet, but everything would be still running on the same architecture, platform, services.
They control way too much.