So let's not call for a breakup to fix something a breakup can't fix and for reasons that are so obiously bad that they can be used to discredit more serious criticism of Google's dominance.
Really? Breaking up the search unit and the ads unit into separate companies would solve that problem, no?
An option might be that the search provider can license the search results to different companies putting their individual ads on topmofnthe results. Then different sites could compete for the the best dispaly and usability.
Similar to the way elictricity grids are split from providers or railway tracks are split from train operators in many European countries.
Issue of course is that with electrical grids and rail networks are a "solved" issue with little innovation. In the search market there is still lots of room for improvement and constant need to adapt to spamers.
I think the common suggestion is that they're not allowed to continue to own the content providers like maps or YouTube or shopping.
Other suggestions include stopping them competing with other aggregators like hotel ratings (TripAdvisor, etc.), shopping, flight finders, review services (yelp, etc.).
The 2nd one is a bit trickier because in some ways, it's valuable to users, but extremely easy for Google to essentially become the landlord of the internet and easily engage in extreme rent seeking behaviour.
It obviously won't; splitting search from ads as businesses wouldn't change that people aren't willing to pay for search and the way that free search, like most other free online services, is funded is ads. It just means that the vendor you pay for ads won't be the search engine provider directly but the ad network the search engine provider relies on, just as is the case for many other online services.
For instance, Josh Doody, the author of “Fearless Negotiation”, has been interviewed on six or seven podcasts that I follow.
How many companies have gotten popular by advertising on podcasts? If your entire business model is based on search results, you are bound to be disappointed. You are just one algorithm change from being made irrelevant.
Where is the violence in Google's behavior ? They offer a private service, and their good spaces are of high values that companies are ready to pay for to maintain their own market dominance.
If we should break up Google, then we should also breakup Basecamp (company behind the original author's tweet)
Before: few people find you
After: more people find you
Google is providing a "low" quality service but they do help. The before and after makes it clear. But it's easy to forget how things were and just complain.
After: less people find your competition when searching for you
The issue is that coupling search and ads violates the expectation of "First result = Best result". Especially when A direct 100% fit can be replaced by a competitor (or even a parasite (in legal terms)) targeting your users.
If a company is ready to pay to be displayed first, then so be it
It is for you and I, but not for the average user. My grandpa clicks on sponsorized links because they are at the top, no matter the presence of the word "ads" or "sponsored".
It would be a lot clearer not to have ads at the top but elsewhere, so that the “best” result is always at the top.
Now, one issue here is that Google the search engine cannot be "just split". The least good, but easy way, is probably to nationalize it (since it's akin to basic infrastructure at this point.) A better, but harder way, is to figure out how it can be decentralized...
I’m sure there would be just as much consternation from Democrats if the situation was reversed.
It also encourages giving “both sides” equal weight whether they deserve it or not.
The whole point of Google is to be a centralized entry to the decentralized Web.
Are you seriously saying a company worth north of $300 BILLION needs ads on their search engine to generate revenue?
Whereas duck duck go proves that a search engine can operate successfully as a startup.
A search index is not simply a function from search string to results. Treating it as such would oversimplify the potential value or future innovation of a search engine. A search index includes the data and metadata of all the pages indexed, plus derived data in various forms ranging from data structures to trained neural networks, plus sufficiently fast access to the data to make it possible to generate new such data structures or train new networks. And all that while continuing to index new pages as fast as possible.
A search index used internally by one company can change formats and technologies as long as the products using it have updated accordingly, and can provide many different facets of information. A search index used by multiple entities (likely competing entities) can't easily co-evolve with the search engines using it, can't easily change formats or technologies, can't easily discard older ones (and thus needs far more resources if it innovates), and has a much more difficult time providing previously unanticipated information.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see a good way to support innovation on the scale of a production search index without requiring billion-dollar infrastructure, but separating the search index from a search engine would substantially increase the complexity and expense of both, and seems quite likely to curtail innovation.
That's because it's being done in an extremely wasteful way that isn't really necessary. Proper regulation could enforce a better interface between websites and search engines than stupidly and repeatedly crawling bloated web pages and throwing away almost all their contents. Google has used its computing resources to stay ahead in this game and has no motivation to fix this waste of time and energy. All they've done lately is to suggest using sitemaps for dynamic web sites so their crawlers don't get stuck there forever.
As a site owner you have the problem that people searching for you are using Google and your site will only come up below adds for your competitor. Even when searching for your company name. Thus unless you pay a "Google Tax" (paying for ads) many people won't find you. In some cases even Google themselves will add features to compete with your service (flight booking is a relatively recent example)
If splitting up will solve that is questionable to me, though. The search has to be financed and unless we make it some base service paid by tax or similar they need a revenue service and ads is the only which seems to be working.
From a "civil rights" perspective to me it is also clear that Google has too much influence and power. But still fail to see a good way to regulate that.