Not denying their monopoly position, but how could Google meaningfully be broken up? It's really just a single business (advertising) with a gaggle of loss leaders adding up to less than 20% of revenue. Even pushing advertising down to 80% took a huge amount of effort.
It's not like Standard Oil which was a vertically integrated trust of several points in the value chain, or the bell system which could be broken up geographically (and manufacturing spun out). Or FB which could divest business units like Instagram and WhatsApp.
A better way of looking at it is that Google is a collection of traffic drivers (YouTube, Gmail, etc) and monetizers (ads).
If you break the monetization into a separate company, the traffic drivers aren't profitless: because a large part of the ad profit was created from their traffic.
If Google Ads had to buy space / share ad revenue from Google YouTube, Google Gmail, etc then economics would look a lot more reasonable.
And I'd frankly be shocked if that isn't what they do internally, albeit more in the sense of "How much ad traffic do you drive, from your corner of the company?"
If an oil compnay gave away cars for free and became a car monopolist, people would be up in arms, vut Google's BS is somehow acceptable
YouTube, Google search, deep mind, Google fiber, waymo, Fitbit etc
Seems pretty easy to break up if you want to.
Google Cloud is big enough to be significant in terms of revenue, but AFAIK is only maybe breaking even in terms of profit. If you break up Alphabet into 26 or more different companies, you haven't broken up the monolith into non-problematic small companies 1/26th the size of the original, you've got 25 irrelevant companies and then one subsidiary that gets Ads which is almost as big as the original. Google even says as much in their financial statements, most of those listed companies are listed as 'other bets' and are a tiny fraction of the main line item that represents ads.
Google cloud gotten profitable enough that they only spent $5B to earn $4B in revenue last quarter. After a dozen years that's the best ever (classic case of monopoly leverage to get into a different market).
Advertising is "only" 81% of revenue but almost 100% of profit.
Some other commenters have proposed that properties like YT and Android drive ad traffic but when I looked at the last 10Q it looked like YT was about 10% of ad revenues. I believe Android is a net loss but worth it in that it's an offset to reduce payments to Apple. But I just skimmed the filing because this is just an HN comment.
It would also stop them favouring their own products in search results
Few, if any of those companies would be viable on their own. They require monopoly support. For example Google Cloud loses a billion a quarter (they spent $5B last quarter total in $4B).
As far as the cloud market goes there's really only one player, the profitable, pure play AWS. Everybody else is losing money, and mostly fudging the numbers (Google "cloud" includes Gmail, Google Workspace etc; MS's cloud includes running Windows for big customers, Office 360 etc etc).
Nest is marginally profitable.
Otherwise it's pretty thin gruel.
Perhaps Google Search, Chrome, and the advertising business could be split. Or Google Search could be split into Google Search 1 and Google Search 2.
0: https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-al...
With competing "engines" (defined as a ranking algorithm and frontend to query said algorithm) building from the same, high-quality index competition in the search space could get much better.
Engines such as DuckDuckGo relying on Bing for the majority of their index is a decent example of how this might work.
Big things would be Advertising separate from other things and bound to only advertising, and require it contract with the other units on public and FRAND terms. Web Search would be another unit, and it would be barred from developing its own advertising platform and need to use a mix of advertising platforms based on public criteria, probably with a cap of say 75%? AdWords. You'd have at least one more group for communications (mail, the 7 messengers, etc) which maybe includes the document tools too, and might include G Suite; this group could develop its own ad platform, but not to sell ads on 3rd party sites. Android would need to be a separate unit, it could either require a per device fee or FRAND terms for search etc bundling (similar the what they do in the EU); Chrome maybe fits in this group, or may need its own group. Google Fiber would probably get shut down or sold to an incumbent telco, but maybe just spun out. Waymo and other research stuff would probably need to be spun out, not sure if that can live on its own though.
Cloud services would be its own group, perhaps providing services to the other groups, possibly requiring public pricing, but I don't know if that's really an issue.
I think that's most of it. Lawyers from DOJ and Alphabet could work out the details. Getting a competitive ad market out of the deal would be hard, but at least it could be more transparent, and eliminating cross-subsidization of Google businesses is definitely possible.
Start by cloning the whole source repository for each company, and prune out the things that don't need to stay; if in doubt all successor companies get access to all of it.
Android is a separate unit, AFAIK.
Most people are angry at Facebook for reasons like not understanding their business model (they sell my data! is one I hear often) or because Facebook allows a platform where average people can speak their thoughts.
They would immediately be acquired by a competitor or declare bankruptcy.
I mean, yeah this is exactly the point. They have locked competition out of the loss-leading categories by undercutting them. Breaking them up forces the loss leaders to compete on an even playing field, which will mean more competition.
I don't get where this bizarre belief that "moar free market" will solve issues. Let's setup proper legal framework where these companies must have a good reason to terminate contract instead - and properly explain it with the ability to appeal.
Businesses aren't people, they're legal fiction. The individuals who make these decisions do and should have the right to do business with whomever they want, based on any criteria they deem appropriate. This constitutes the distinction between the private and public sphere.
There's a subtle distinction where you may have layered your own individual beliefs onto this statement by using the word "should", rather than indicating what is actually the law. While you may feel they "should" have that right based on your own feelings and personal morality, there are specific laws that say they do not. In many jurisdictions within the U.S., for example, businesses generally do not have the right to refuse business to a person based on that person being part of a protected class.
In any case, I disagree. Some things are basic necessities.
https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/banking/can-my-bank-close...
That said I do wish there was some regulation for accounts for Apple, Microsoft, Google, Steam, etc as closing an account can have huge reprocussions.
Go find them on LinkedIn, message your experience and statement that you're leaving.
When corporations put up higher and higher walls around their official channels of communication, you either need to get louder or go around the wall.
I am working for a big e-commerce corp., we are made to read/go-through customer feedback occasionally. That is just to find a %1~ of potential conversion improvement we can make.
Companies do care about conversion/retention. Problem is only the communication between the customer and the right team of people inside.
Eric Shmidt: I would agree, sir, that we’re in that area....I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding of monopoly findings is this is a judicial process.
From: https://www.businessinsider.com/is-google-a-monopoly-were-in...
Also, the FTC's initial memo from 2012 that somebody higher up in the food chain quashed is pretty interesting: http://graphics.wsj.com/google-ftc-report/
In short, dominant market share in web search. Though I think you could argue other things, like dominance in affordable smart phones. Android is effectively a monopoly for people that can't afford an iPhone.
Having Market Share Dominance != Monopoly
Being a monopoly means having sole control over the supply of a market (conversely, Monopsony is demand). When people say Bing, Baidu, DDG, Yahoo, DDG, etc. are all a click a way, that means Google does not control the market supply.
Just because the majority of people choose to use something on an open market doesn't mean that thing has a monopoly.
===
A. GOOGLE HAS MONOPOLY POWER IN RELEVANT MARKETS
A firm is a monopolist if it can profitably raise prices substantially above the competitive level. [M]onopoly power may be inferred from a firm's possesion of a dominant share of a relevant market that is protected by entry barriers. Google has monopoly power in one or more properly defined markets...Staff has identified three relevant antitrust markets...
===
I think it's at least fair to say that some people with expertise in the space feel like Google could have monopoly control over one or more markets.
Also, a half-redacted document written by an anonymous person that was accidentally released almost a decade ago does not change the definition of a monopoly.
Yes, you can assume that it's written by someone who knows what they're talking about, just as much as you can also presume they were wrong because it was squashed. That's a moot argument.
None of that changes the fact that being popular does not make something a monopoly.
I didn't say that, though, or anything like that.
I did mention market share dominance. But that's often related to things like "A firm is a monopolist if it can profitably raise prices substantially above the competitive level.".
"may be inferred from a firm's possesion of a dominant share of a relevant market that is protected by entry barriers"
Arguably I left out "protected by entry barriers", but that seems obvious for search.
You're splitting hairs over the word popular now.
For example: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/7273448-DOC.html (page 3)
I'm not saying they are "for sure" a monopoly. I am saying notable numbers of reasonable people with expertise in the space think they are. It's not as clear cut as you're saying.
This entirely new example you are giving is an example of partisan posturing, not evidence of a monopoly. Look at the political affiliation of every single person who signed the letter, and look how many days it was filed before the last federal election.
Again, being popular doesn't make something a monopoly, neither does being a popular target for Republicans.
Google ad revenues mostly come from 3 services: Gmail, which holds a disproportionate share of all email for what started out as a federated network. YouTube, which basically holds a monopoly on video sharing. And Google search, which basically holds a monopoly on regular web searches.
I count at least 2 monopolies here, both held by Alphabet. The fact that Facebook is able to make advertisement in some other part of the web is immaterial, the same way TV ads are immaterial.
Facebook has 90%+ market share of social media. Do they have a monopoly?
GitHub has a 90%+ market share of open source code hosting. Do they have a monopoly?
I don’t know whether this kind of market dominance factors into the legal determination of monopoly, but conceptually I think it makes sense to say that Google has a monopoly in the web search market.
The customer in a web search isn't the USER. It's the BUISINESSES whose ads are placed on the search results page.
THEY are certainly paying for the web search.
They own the highway, the restaurants along the way, the billboards and even the car most people drive.
If consumers preferred a search engine with good customer service, they would use the search engine with better customer service instead.