Reminds me of "Life of Brian"

REG: Yeah. All right, Stan. Don't labour the point. And what have they ever given us in return?!

XERXES: The aqueduct?

REG: What?

XERXES: The aqueduct.

REG: Oh. Yeah, yeah. They did give us that. Uh, that's true. Yeah.

COMMANDO #3: And the sanitation.

LORETTA: Oh, yeah, the sanitation, Reg. Remember what the city used to be like?

REG: Yeah. All right. I'll grant you the aqueduct and the sanitation are two things that the Romans have done.

MATTHIAS: And the roads.

REG: Well, yeah. Obviously the roads. I mean, the roads go without saying, don't they? But apart from the sanitation, the aqueduct, and the roads--

COMMANDO: Irrigation.

XERXES: Medicine.

COMMANDOS: Huh? Heh? Huh...

COMMANDO #2: Education.

COMMANDOS: Ohh...

REG: Yeah, yeah. All right. Fair enough.

COMMANDO #1: And the wine.

COMMANDOS: Oh, yes. Yeah...

FRANCIS: Yeah. Yeah, that's something we'd really miss, Reg, if the Romans left. Huh.

COMMANDO: Public baths.

LORETTA: And it's safe to walk in the streets at night now, Reg.

FRANCIS: Yeah, they certainly know how to keep order. Let's face it. They're the only ones who could in a place like this.

COMMANDOS: Hehh, heh. Heh heh heh heh heh heh heh.

REG: All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?

XERXES: Brought peace.

REG: Oh. Peace? Shut up!

It's not the number that OP is arguing, its this:

> Their assets give them undue and unsupervised influence over a very big chunk of what's happening online. This gives them ability to control big part of collective human consciousness, across languages and borders.

Agreed, that’s an overly reductionist way of seeking a resolution.

I say focus on worker capture.

The only “market” Adam Smith mentioned is a free labor market, which is free by its ability to move between offers fluidly.

We have that to an extent in tech but not really and it’s hardly pervasive.

If the problem is the billions to influence culture, IMO its employee culture spend that’s the biggest downside to monoliths.

Wealth-caring becomes the corporate mantra. Or Jesus in the old days. It’s clear there is a biological addiction to privatized monoliths boxing in agency to fetishizing the monolith, by tickling our limbic brain just right and repeating “New trend we’re selling!” all day.

Let’s not let them do that, but let people work.

Actually, they said,

"I do have a problem with them being the best [six things], at the SAME time."

It's reasonable to read that as the OP thinks the number should be less then 6.

Yes, they also said other things, but I think I'm giving them a fair read of that sentence.

It's not in the number of the products, it's in the scale of each of those products and the influence that they give them.

What should the law say is the new limit for the scale and influence they should be able to have?

Well if you look at the Sherman antitrust act I imagine the answer is whenever the scale and influence starts to touch on things that act says is a no go.

Obviously that's a bit over simplistic but probably a good place to start.

Are there any anti-competitive behaviors they have engaged in w/r/t #3, #4, #5, and #6 or would this just be punishment for punishment sake?

I remember browsers before Chrome and Firefox. They were terrible. I'd love to see why Google should be punished for making a good product. I'm open to a good explanation.

Same for Youtube. I cut my cable because we now get all our entertainment from Netflix and Youtube. We dont get locked into 2yr cable agreements, dont get magical regulatory recovery fees, $100 of charges, and stations that disappear (e.g., Disney on Fios). I'd hate to lose it just because the product is too good

Also for youtube, how many people are now able to make a living producing content which they fully own and have control over the means of distribution?

I love the fact that the Youtube ideal has let independent creators make so much good content for the world. And after some haggling, Youtube has let the creators retain full ownership.

But the various de-monetization and search algorithm changes show that Youtube retains full control over distribution (and ability to make said living). The creators are totally at the mercy of Youtube and their advertising.

Imagine if there were Utube, Vtube, and Wtube, and a creator could shop around for the best placement and ad deal. It would not be better for the viewer (more like which network now has my favorite show, and do I have to subscribe to all 3), but it would be better for the creators.

Come to think of it, I'm surprised Netflix hasn't gone after some of the big YouTube channels or that Patreon hasn't expanded into curated video hosting. Imagine if Netflix Community had 100's of what we now call Youtube channels--all the respectable ones and none of the dreck.

>> Imagine if there were Utube, Vtube, and Wtube, and a creator could shop around for the best placement and ad deal.

Except there is already a Utube, Vtube, and Wtube and they have been around for 50 years. They are called ABC, NBC, CBS, and there are also like 50 others.

You can "shop around" your product to them, but you have to:

1. Have to gone to the right schools to meet decision makers

2. Have the right connections

3. Not be a minority (there is literally almost no diversity in the industry amongst decision makers.)

I publish on YouTube. There is no way I could publish on ABC, NBC, CBS, Disney, or almost any other broadcast service. Even though I meet criteria 1 (ivy league degree), I dont have the connections and "dont have the look"

Before we burn down YouTube, can we step back and consider how much YouTube has enabled people? Can we also see the very obvious ulterior motive the MSM has to dislike YouTube?

Clearly, I was mimicking the TV network model in my proposal, but the "Utube" naming was meant to imply they all follow the YouTube model (free video hosting website) not become broadcast media with all the elitism that entails. There would be 3 choices when you create your own videos, each offering different ad/placement deals (as opposed to accepting YouTube's or perish).

As the sibling comment states, Twitch is an alternative, but I think that however big the gaming and live video market is, it doesn't generalize to most YouTube content. I'm not sure if Vimeo has ever reached the same level, every time someone on HN mentions them, a creator has said they tried and got no traction/views on Vimeo.

Patreon is odd, they host some exclusive content, but it seems nearly all creators retain their YouTube channel for discovery and Patreon is mostly for processing the donations. I guess in a way, they have siphoned off some YouTube functionality, taking the cream off the top (paying subscribers), and letting YouTube do the expensive part of hosting the content.

I suppose that short of the feds swinging the anti-trust hammer and breaking YouTube into 3 equal companies that compete in the same market, the YouTube monolith is here to stay by market forces alone.

But a creator can? There's Vimeo, Twitch, and Patreon to name the big ones that come to mind.

Youtube has real issues with de-monetization and search algorithms that should be addressed in some way, but I don't see how it's anti-competitive that they have built a platform that attracts tons of viewers, nor that they've found a way to monetize those viewers.

I do like to point out that whatever shenanigans YouTube is doing with their discoverability and promotion features, they still provide unlimited lifetime 8K video hosting for free. And that's a pretty good deal.

Not only that, they allow anyone to become a publisher. You can be poor, you can live overseas, you can be a minority, you can have no connections -- and you still get to publish on YouTube -- and if you are good, they even send you traffic.

Now show me another major media network that allows that.

Yes, it’s called dumping, and it’s illegal to do this to expand a monopoly.

Dumping is only bad if it is temporary. Otherwise, it's called a natural monopoly.

Good question.

These are questions we possibly should have asked in the 60s or 70s with the Automakers.

Heck, let's think about THAT for a moment. When we look back at history we see that the big 3 took a number of anticompetitive actions over the years while managing to usually avoid government action through careful planning. (GM at times would hold back products in those decades, knowing if they went over a magic number of market share it was bad news.)

But look at the RESULT. Look at 2008. Look at the future of self driving cars and the future of the trucking industry.

By letting large monopolies run unchecked, they embed their ways of dependence into society such that impacts can be felt for generations.

Maybe its not about the number but what the damage is.

Edit: hit reply early, sorry.

The big 3 managed to get taken down by the factors of the oil embargo and the growing Asian auto industry, but we still felt the effects I listed above.

And, to that end, its worth restating that GM specifically tried to 'avoid' fitting the government definition.

So put a tax on bigness equal and opposite to its negative externality. Put the tax revenue in a rainy-day fund for whole-economy stimulus after market crashes.

Think about it like this: what are the chances any other competitor will be able to challenge those products and succeed?

If some other innovative company “started in a garage” or whatever does challenge one of those, Google has the power to kill it before it becomes a threat, cripple it while they copy the technology or poach the development team, acquire the company with a truckload of money, etc.

So in the end, Google will always come out on top, and consumers will always be stuck with them. The only remedy to that situation is government intervention.

This is often repeated, but historical evidence does not support it.

Today, Google shares the majority of it's presence in online ads market with Facebook.

Did Google try to "kill" facebook? Yes, they tried super hard in 2011 with the launch of Google+. And that completely flopped and now Facebook is a major rival for Google.

If we look at Facebook - facebook probably tried to kill snapchat and tiktok, major rivals to Instagram, and look how well those services are doing.

Microsoft couldn't stop iOS or Android.

The list goes on...

I think a competitor could rise by doing the same thing tech giants do. Start small in a unrelated niche than with the success in that niche enter other sectors until you can compete with Google.

One is plenty. Especially if "OS" is in the list. Microsoft in the 90s, and Apple and Google today have all used their OS supremacy to quash competition... quite often in extremely questionable ways.

Assigning an arbitrary number in a law like this is ridiculous. So 1 under you're good, and 1 over that you're suddenly a law breaker?

Furthermore, as other point out, how do you even objectively count these categorized "things" correctly?

Even once you do have a number of "things" specified in a law, and this is somehow "objective", remember that objective reality cannot be perceived outside of the lens of the subjective.

Therefore, your honor, your laws on blood alcohol level when driving are asinine and I rest my case.

They all feed off each other and that's a problem. When iOS was taking off, Google was legit worried about their search dominance being threatened. That's why they paid Apple top dollars to replace Bing as the default search engine on iOS. Same reason why they bought Android to make sure Apple doesn't get to dictate terms. Also the reason why they built Chrome. All of this made sure they have the most eyeballs and the data to train their search models better and better and better. If you look at history of Standard Oil, you'll see a similar pattern. Antitrust regulations were invented when people saw how this perfectly logical combination of actions could accumulate so much power.

I sure hope anti-trust law makes a distinction between good business decisions (that build moats around your business and allow you to not become obsolete and be outcompeted) and anti-competitive decisions. Or are we going to say now that pretty much any good business decision is anti-competitive if it's about trying to not lose market dominance?

The same antitrust law that dictated breaking up AT&T and Standard Oil (among others): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law#Mo...

I don't think breaking up AT&T was a success story. Instead of a national monopoly, you got regional ones and a long-distance provider. It was all still very over-pried and silly. The situation didn't improve for consumers until cell phone plans got close to the price of landlines.

It's not like they are content dominating just those verticals. Agriculture anyone?

https://x.company/projects/mineral/

It's not about the number, it's about how much influence other society one company should have.

If we're not careful we may simply lose democracy to corporations. Some argue that it might already be too late.

I read this with "best" implying a product they choose to use and "top" implying more like "inescapable".

isn't all six combined into one giant Monster? each one of these six also feed off each other. that's scary. isn't it?

Lets say 1.

The divisions are arbitrary.

A search engine is a number of components - e.g. a crawler, an index, and a user interface.

Why should one company be able to own all three of these? Why not just one? Perhaps crawling should only be able to be sold as a wholesale commodity.

What is the exact point that a crawler needs to be decoupled (at the corporate level) from it's front end? Is it measured by MAUs? Pages scraped? Or is it going by "it can be decoupled, so it should".

The extreme version of your argument would have companies own the IP to a particular for loop's iterator variable name.

Indeed.

“My” argument is a generalization of the argument people are making that Google should only be allowed to operate “one” service.

So the ad business, which generates all the revenue is split off from everything else. All the various services including search die b/c they can't self sustain and all that's left is an ad platform akin to the former double click scenario. Now what?

Bing becomes the number one search engine.

one seems about right

Then government shouldn't have allowed them to buy YouTube back then. So Google might ask -- why it was legal to acquire YouTube back then, but now it's illegal.

We need to seriously reconsider SEC rules for approving acquisitions.

Law’s official motto is also “In God We Trust”, can you define God?

I happen to think it should not be the motto of the United States. In part because I don't think the Government should be trying to define what God is or is not.