Chrome is a loss leader and if cut out to it’s own company will die, because browsers are not a business that can make money anymore (same with eg C compilers for x86), AI maybe, but the only advantage AI has at google is that it has a crap-ton of data to train it with. Without that? The market just has one less AI product.
Regardless of how you split it, whomever ends up with search ends up with the value. And I guess the only way to split search would be into a background service api you could query and then have the front page be its own business. Others could then buy access, but the problem with that is that you then have a supplier that has all the power…
That's the definition of anti-copetitive monopoly abuse, not an argument against doing something about it.
What I'm seeing however is nothing more than toothless, political pointing sticks.
Both IBM, Microsoft and Google have clearly at some point obtained total domination of their markets. Consequently they've all found themselves at the antitrust chopping blocks, however these companies have become so important to the economy that actual verdicts are reduced to a "carry on, just don't exert your dominance too much".
Or have I misunderstood antitrust laws?
Edit: s/excert/exert
You could also see easy ways to force a company that is using a dominant position in one industry to gain an upper hand in another to divest from that expansion.
Most of that falls apart with the nature of these markets, though?
Obviously this isn't the modern understanding, and the act was later amended.
its uncanny how even people in the industry lives in the make believe world where google is a charity, moving mountains just so you can have a browser with "faster JavaScript" (which it's not, its all prefetch and marketing)
google made more money from the features they normalized by strong arming the w3c via chrome than anything else.
2. Ads. As a separate advertising network, for which google.com will be just one platform/site, like thousands of others.
3. Mail as a separate service, leave the ability to log in to other sites through this account, so you keep one login for everything (who needs it). It can also be an advertising platform for any advertising network. You can offer better services for a fee, while keeping the basic functionality free.
4. YouTube as a separate service, as well as a platform where many other advertising networks or advertisers will compete for advertising space. Introduce paid plans for creators, where there will be a certain volume limit after which you will need to pay for the service.
5. Cloud services. Separately.
6. Google Docs. As a separate online document service, you can charge a subscription fee for certain features as in 365.
7. Browser. No need for Manifest v3. Improvements to the extension store. You can also sell advertising space and make integrations with various tools, as Opera does, for example. You can even make some kind of subscription, or make paid extensions that will speed up sites, improve the look, and cut out ads.
This is the first thing that came to mind. This can be thought out better. This will create competition for other players and for these potentially divided campaigns. General improvement of products. And all of this can be kept "under one login, in one ecosystem," with the ability to make "one system and one login" in conjunction with other tools.
They pointed out that a monopoly is not the sin, the sin is to abuse that market position for unfair advantage.
So your summary of their verdict in a way is what the US view of antitrust is.
Here’s the part of the transcript:
> It is not necessarily illegal to be a monopoly. It is illegal to abuse your monopoly power. This court is examining both of those questions. (1) Is Microsoft a monopoly? (2) Are they abusing their power?
It depends instead on the overall health of the Internet.
We are moving away from open commerce and into walled gardens. Once Google makes deals similar to their Reddit deal with Meta and Bytedance, it's going to become basically impossible for an upstart search engine to index anything competitively.
Besides, I'm replying to a comment about the wider trust case against google. It's not just about search engines.
Maybe that's why I haven't heard of them?
Although Qwant looks kind of nice and obviously localized.
I also think it's interesting that I know about Kagi already but don't know about Mojeek despite Kagi using their results.
I fully agree that Google is a monopolist that has been oppressing the search engine market but at some point if you're going to start a company you need to do some marketing. DuckDuckGo is an example of success in that realm, it's nearly overtaken Yahoo.
It may have a lot to do with them not having to develop a search engine from scratch though, since they use the Bing API for their results. Mojeek predates them by some years but does their own crawling/indexing/ranking.
Even Ecosia who are essentially identical on the back-end (Bing results) market themselves on planting trees for every search and I see them mentioned a bunch. Interestingly they don't seem to factor in the energy consumed on Bing's side of the search - where the heavy lifting of data is done.
Also that US investors have a much bigger risk appetite means the likes of Neeva (who IIRC were also using other's results) can spring into existence and seemingly get a love in from the press because of their big tech connection.
So, a powerful solution would be to make targeted advertising illegal. This would make it easier for new competitors to enter the market and make it visible if someone abuses the ad industry to push political agendas.
As a Google antitrust watcher, I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop with what remedies the court will actually recommend to correct this monopoly. If you ask 20 experts, who all otherwise agree that Google is a monopoly, you might get 40 different answers about what to actually do to fix that monopoly. It'll take a while to get the answer and to work through all the appeals to this ruling and whatever remedy the court will put forth, and it's not clear or really possible to know ahead of time whether the courts will put forth small, medium or huge changes to the search engine market. Exciting times!