Hard to find the sense in this action.
The only thing the government will be interested in is the spying which they aren't allowed to do, but unaccountable corporations are allowed to do. As people become more aware of this it means google becomes less and less useful.
When companies buy ads with Google they’re quite literally bidding for microtargeted user intent data.
No one can go to Google and buy information about a specific person.
No, you can’t buy user data on 1 specific person (then again, there’s many examples of people buying ads on a persons name to catch them googling themselves), but you can buy user data on small groups of people.
What does this mean? What is the value of "catching" someone googling themselves?
Demographics: Target users based on age, gender, parental status, household income, and more
Interests: Target people based on their interests, even if they're visiting pages about other topics
In-market audiences: Target users who are actively looking for products or services similar to yours
Custom intent audiences: Create and target audiences based on their search behavior and interests
Remarketing lists: Reconnect with users who have previously interacted with your website or app
Customer match: Use your first-party data to reach and re-engage with your customers
Similar segments: Expand the reach of your best-performing audiences by targeting new users with similar characteristics
Affinity audiences: Reach people based on a holistic picture of their lifestyles, passions, and habits
Life events segments: Target users
If they see the ad they fall into the category combination I specify. If they click the ad then I known all of that stuff about a visitor because I know which visitors clicked and which found their way outside of ads. If they signup or enter email or anything like that then I know exactly who they are for most people. Even if I have only an email but no name I can create a shell profile and use a data broker to find the name behind the email a lot of the time. Then I have everything tied to a person.
Multiply this times thousands upon thousands of ad impressions across multiple campaigns and you can bud a pretty good database with highly specific data. Sure 100% accuracy isn't guaranteed but neither is it guaranteed through more direct data brokers.
- I sell red bowling shoes
- I pay Google for access to anyone searching for ‘red bowling shoes’
- Once they land on my site I know who came via the Google ad (via the URL params)
- A certain percentage converts, and I get their personal info and payment info
I personally don’t think there’s anything wrong with that chain of events! It’s a win-win for both buyer and seller.
However, to argue that no data was sold is disingenuous at best. Google is the monopoly broker of the intent data on every buyer in the world.
Why should I let Google profit off of my thoughts/interests? Why shouldn’t I be making the money that the bowling shoe manufacturer paid to access my thoughts/interests?
You pay to show your website to people searching for red bowling shoes.
> However, to argue that no data was sold is disingenuous at best.
No user data has been sold.
When a TV station sells ad time to a company, and then someone sees the ad, comes into the store, and says "hey, I saw your TV ad while watching Law & Order", we don't say that the TV station has sold data to the merchant.
> I'm going by this document from the Irish Council for Civil Liberties and a lawsuit brought against Google, signed by member of Congress, that alleged data brokers are "siphoning" off bid-stream data and reselling it . It makes the claim that U.S Dept of Homeland Security uses real-time bidding data for warrant-less phone tracking.
> https://www.iccl.ie/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Mass-data-bre...
> https://www.tampabay.com/news/2021/05/07/google-selling-user...
After Bill Gates rode on a golf cart with Bill Clinton, he realized the need to pay the expected tribute to the politicians.
Of course, I wish things did not work this way. But isn't it a bit naive to think it doesn't?
Source? (They settled with Multiven.)
> isn't it a bit naive to think it doesn't
No, it's naïve to think that level of influence can be bought. Not an uncommon mistake. Bankman-Fried made it, and it's increasingly looking like Bytedance did too. But D.C. is a town obsessed with power over money. People regularly toss aside lobbyists and their clients if it's politically expedient. In part because it's not like the lobbyists (or their clients) ditch them after being spurned.
Corruption on the highest levels is very similar. Not everyone is on the buyers club.
BTW, if you're not dressed properly, some high end stores have a security guard who won't let you in. This can get tricky these days, as many wealthy people dress like slobs.
I once wandered into Cartier's in NYC, dressed in my trademark slob clothes. The security guard tailed me about a foot behind me, obviously trying to intimidate me into leaving. I just kept me hands in me pocketses, took a look around, then left.
This is unfalsifiable. To the extent electeds can be bought or lobbied, it's on the fringes--they didn't know about crypto and now they do and have a mildly favourable view towards it instead of not giving a shit. Certainly not around something involving the DoJ.
The naïve view is electeds in America can be bought and sold like a Patek Philippe. You can just buy one of those, for the simple reason that there exists a secondary market. Power, on the other hand, is perishable. Go back to Bankman-Fried's downfall and note how many people thought he had banked favours with his cash. (I sometimes think he thought he bought favours with his cash.) That isn't how D.C. works. It isn't how power centre works. Power is personal and perishable, and that makes it unique in comparison with the things we usually trade money for.
Ferrari still curates their customers. If you buy a Ferrari and paint it pink, you get on their "nope" list. You also cannot buy a new Ferrari today unless you have a previous relationship with them, or are very very rich.
depends on the selection process, of course. At least in the US and I imagine most of the EU. You can paint a ferrari pink and get blacklisted. Not sure how it would go if they say they don't sell to women...
If you want the super special stuff like Monza SP1/2 or Daytona SP3 you need a longstanding relationship with Ferrari, but you can walk into a showroom and drive out with a 296 or Roma this afternoon if you have the cash, and let's not pretend a 296 isn't a very special car.
An article I read around 2000 about why the DoJ didn't go after Cisco, despite Cisco having a monopolistic position at the time.
Sorry I don't have a photographic memory.
> it's naïve to think that level of influence can be bought.
Not at all. Where do you think the money for the Clinton Foundation came from, for example?
Bill attended Georgetown and Yale (where he met Hilary), was governor of Arkansas for 12 years and had a short stint of running the country before the foundation was founded. Hilary was a director at a school of law and worked under Carter's administration, and had decades of other legal feats before entering the senate right after founding the foundation.
If those two can't network in those 30 years for funds, then America as a whole is a sham.
The entire topic is dancing around the question of what corruption looks like in jurisdictions where you can’t just buy the government, and the answer is, mostly, regulatory capture.
If you use real life examples and history as a benchmark
I contend the even more disturbing mirror is the trust/monopoly/cartel structure of virtually all industries and markets in the United States.
The ultra rich are a symptom, not necessarily the cause: we need a massive breakup of practically every sector in the United States, and it's not just for what the parent of this comment says about wealth creation: increased employment, more job mobility, more innovation, overall competitive advantage in the world, more resilience to global supply chain disruption, and innumerable other national security and economic concerns.
Monopolies are really bad for freedom. As we see with the closed no-appeal ban systems of internet companies and utter lack of customer service, your very day to day freedom can sharply be curtailed at a whim by the centralized power of monopolies.
You would rather ruin everyone else than have a functional economy? That says a lot about you.
This isn't because the US broke up their chip monopolies, though. This is because chip companies believed they could save money by shipping their expertise overseas and building things there instead. And they were right. They only had to put the US's economic future in jeopardy to do it.
I think there's two big things wrong with this. For one China is actually breaking up its tech companies or even culling entire sectors, like education tech, as they do in AI, this kind of argument is basically just American oligopolists inventing a red scare to stave off regulation.
Secondly American companies have a lot of trouble abroad, in gigantic markets like the EU and increasingly India and Japan with stricter privacy regulation on the way because they're so large. So if anything, American anti trust would send a good signal to most markets that the US is in line with global trends.
Sure Google is everywhere, but Meta holds much more data on our inner personal sides, which are the easiest things to actually abuse to no end. That and pornhub.
I don't use meta for much. Google on the otherhand takes some pretty dedicated behavior to avoid.
Absolutely not discounting all of that; there are some pretty strong parallels between the data you can infer on a person based on their gmail graph versus their fb messenger graph, for example.
Meta has a lot more "self-revealed-preference" data, though. Which of $thesePosts did you engage with? Does this pattern continue if we mix in $someOtherVariable? How long did you dwell on that one post before like/dis-like? Are you more likely to come back and spend time here if we tell you that $thisPerson has commented on your post instead of $thisOtherPerson? ... etc.
I think only YouTube serves as a plausible source of dwell time in the "at what part of $thisVideo did you click the like button" sense. If you don't use YouTube or use it signed out then it's (slightly) harder for google to attribute your actions to you. Facebook doesn't really have _anything_ that can be accessed without logging in.
Legally speaking, Google's not supposed to be correlating most of this data. But, as we know well, that doesn't mean they aren't doing it.
https://www.npr.org/2024/04/01/1242019127/google-incognito-m...
Sorry for the snark, but no one anywhere needs advertising. Advertising in it's current form is a plague on humanity.
But there have been businesses based on lead pipes for drinking water plumbing, asbestos for residential insulation, and so on. You could make an argument that these technologies enabled many businesses as well. That doesn’t mean we should allow lead pipes for drinking water or to use asbestos in residential homes.
to name a few: LISEN, Qifutan, Loncaster, YKYI, Holikme and SXhyf. And who could forget VWMYQ?
And it still doesn't justify Google.
An alternative effect could be that online ads are an avenue for better resourced established companies to out compete and stifle upstarts. Startups are always pressed for resources and running an effective online ad campaign can take significant resources.
You're surely right that some small businesses have benefited from the online ad market, but I suspect that on average larger companies have benefited to a greater degree.
[0]https://www.uschamber.com/small-business/small-business-data...
Ceteris paribus. Running a small business in most states involves more rules today than it did in 2000. (Common denominator: the cost of financial transactions due to post-9/11 anti-money laundering rules.)
Put yourself in the mind of someone making a THING, how do you plan to reach your possible customers for THING?
THING is the best in class, better than the competition but how would you make the world aware of THING existing?
trade shows, trade magazines, word of mouth, window-dressing in the THING-quarter, ...
why are personalized ads on a website indispensable?
They aren't. This is exactly what I mean by modern advertising.
If ads were just contextual based on the content of the page, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
I'd still be blocking them, though.
There is no before advertising
Pretty sure we have ads from Mesopotamia
Advertising (4000 BCE)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_advertising
Fact-checking is literally just a Google search away. Irony intended.
Plumbing is good and useful. Plumbing using lead pipes is harmful.
Advertising can be good and useful. Modern advertising that requires tracking everything a user does is harmful.
That X enables many businesses to exist doesn't mean that X is a good thing on balance, because X itself can have harmful effects that outweigh the benefits.
This is of course true, and I can look past the inelegant phrasing.
But to make this a credible argument you need to argue for why the costs of advertising outweigh the benefits.
They're looking for depth where there isn't any. You're attempting to prove advertising is bad by claiming it's like lead pipes, on the basis of them both being bad. It's tautology. One could similarly "prove" ad blockers or puppies by this analogy to be whatever because they, too, can be good or bad.
Modern advertising is what I'm against, not advertising as a whole.
Similarly, I'm against lead pipes for plumbing, not plumbing as a whole.
IME this is only true about drop shippers and similar business models. The vast majority of small businesses are, as a rule, awful at advertising. The few ads I see they are very poorly put together.
Even when they manage to get people to the business, small businesses are almost inevitably awful about maintaining their web presence, which makes it moot. Here's an example thread about such from the local reddit. Including some hostile responses from, charitably, overwhelmed small businesses about how you need to call to confirm a price https://old.reddit.com/r/Calgary/comments/1ewlsib/open_lette...)
I’m assuming most of the places that redditor contacted to buy UPS batteries from are B2B shops that aren’t geared to selling to people off the street.
I’m assuming this because sometimes I buy replacement UPS battery strings, and I pay with a purchase order after talking to or emailing an inside sales person, not with a credit card at a register.
Places like this don’t even need to advertise, the professionals they’re selling to know where to find what they need.
I think a lot of these businesses could succeed using alternative promotional strategies. Some of them might suffer because the owners have more money than time and advertising is a good tradeoff in that case, but overall good products are still going to do well.
Google ads was (and is) incredibly good for niche companies, since it makes it possible to advertise to people who are interested in your product instead of the general public.
So if you sell Warhammer paraphernalia, you can buy ads to be shown only to people who have searched for Warhammer related words, rather than "everyone in Wisconsin".
This lowers ad costs by many orders of magnitude, and makes a lot of businesses possible that simply couldn't exist before.
I'd want some damn good reasons to go back to the old ways!
Tracking people and shoving your wares in their faces is not the only way to reach interested parties. You could go to a Warhammer convention, join a Warhammer forum and offer to send members samples, or just post images of your stuff in a sharing thread, whatever. Engage with people while they're searching for the thing you're offering.
Of course, word of mouth requires you to actually make a good product whereas with advertisment it's enough if your product looks good.
I'm telling you what actually happened in the real world.
BTW, back in the olden days, magazines were sold, but the bulk of the magazine revenue came from advertising.
Without advertising, the magazines would have cost the consumer quite a bit more.
And, as someone who paid for ad placement in computer magazines, the sales directly corresponded to the advertising.
Why do you think Google provides you with free searches? It isn't because they are altruistic. It's because companies pay to advertise on it. If everybody installed an ad blocker like you, you'd find yourself having to pay for search.
> *Advertising in it's current form* is a plague on humanity.
Magazine ads were not highly targeted towards every user that bought one. We liked magazine ads, they were high quality and usually contextually relevant.
Modern advertising is nothing like magazine ads. We don't take screenshots of ads on webpages, print them out, and hang them on our walls like we did with magazine ads.
> Why do you think Google provides you with free searches?
To deliver ads. The same reason Google does everything else.
Who pays for it? Not my problem. I'll use whatever free service exists, there will always be one.
Without a search engine? The internet would fail and targeted ads would cease to exist.
You'll get advertisements, then.
I.e. if you don't want ads, you'll need to pay.
No, Marketing. Advertising is only one form and the most antisocial one. There is a huge difference between making it possible for people interested in your product to find you versus going out of your way to shove your product in front of the eyes of people who are doing something at best tangentially related.
Advertisements can be good (when the business is good and genuinely wants you to know about good new product), and they can be bad (when the business if bad / misleading / scammy). An optimist would say there are more good than bad. I suppose you wouldn't consider yourself an optimist.
With regard to modern advertising, you are absolutely correct!
That said, I fully understand and agree with the usefulness of advertising. What I'm against is the modern state of advertising. If all ads were simply contextual based on the content being shown and not the user, I don't think many of us would have problems with the ads industry.
If I were browsing a mountain biking forum, I'd see ads for mountain bikes and other related services. They would be MORE relevant, rather than the current ads I get for the product I bought 2 months ago.
>or through a UI element on the website that lets the visitor choose the language.
This is nonsensical too. People don't just speak only one language. If I'm going into an English website and you're giving me a language pop up I'm going to pick English. But ads that are in English are not relevant to me whatsoever.
Also, I would like to note that language redirects are, in my experience, absolute trash. It makes using sites like Adobe awful.
Even the language settings in windows lead to a bad user experience. I have to keep English as my first keyboard language and locale to make sure that websites don't default to other languages for me.
I have zero faith that they would get this right.
What people don't like is the current advertising business, which is intrusive, a blackhole of privacy concerns, rarely useful, and full of abusive companies (clickbait sites, for instance) that exist on the back of scummy behavior that hurts the advertiser (costing them money) and annoys/infuriates the consumer.
They don't like having an ad-free 7usd Netflix/Amazon/etc account that is now 12usd with ads, or 22usd without ads and the same privileges.
I utterly despise how so much of the Internet has been gentrified and sanitized to appeal to advertisers at the expense of communities and culture.
No, they're an amazing benefit to your business. I'm sure your candles are great, but society doesn't need them (your candles, specifically) to survive. People would continue to find candles without your advertisements. Maybe candles that aren't as nice as yours, but people will get by just fine, and wouldn't know (or care) what they were missing.
> Advertisements can be good (when the business is good and genuinely wants you to know about good new product)
Advertising is emotional manipulation. Why do I need to know about good products, even genuinely good ones? If I have an actual, articulated need for something, I can go out and look for it. But if I'm not actually looking for something, but someone advertises to me and convinces me to buy their thing, likely I would have gotten along just fine without it.
> An optimist would say there are more good than bad. I suppose you wouldn't consider yourself an optimist.
False dichotomy. Whether there are more good companies that honestly try to hawk their wares, or more bad companies that try to trick people into buying their garbage, is irrelevant. Advertising is a blight on society.
The thing that really makes my stomach churn, though, is that if I ran a company, I'd absolutely advertise. It's the prisoner's dilemma. Because advertising exists and others will use it, I can't opt out of using it myself. I feel super gross about this fact.
I always thought they missed out on a great opportunity to name the umbrella company AlephBet instead of AlphaBet ([1]), perhaps with a tag-line that reads: "stop thinking in constants" (to contrast Googol being equal to 10^100).
GDP? Have people forgotten that a vibrant 'Free Market' requires breaking up monopolies?
When did supporting a 'Free Market' turn into, "don't touch our giant corps".
The Baby Bells started their re-merge back in the 90s. In 2000, when Verizon was formed, it was a combination of Bell Atlantic (New Jersey Bell + Bell Company of PA + Diamond State + C&P), NYNEX, and GTE. (I watched this all in real-time, as my father worked for Ma Bell -> New Jersey Bell -> Verizon for more or less his entire adult life.) I'm sure similar things happened in the rest of the country with other Baby Bells, though I don't know the history very well.
The break up occurred in the 80's. and since then through mergers/acquisitions, they have re-joined.
So we have monopolies again.
Somehow we have lost the will-power in government to impose the needed actions to ensure a free market. Like also denying mergers that would create monopolies.
Like how was Ticketmaster even allowed to happen. We let it buy its competitors and now it is a monopoly.
Youtube may be the only viable company that can come out of Google. Rest will either have to charge a lot of money or die.
And we will be left with an even more profitable ad giant, that sends back all profits to it's share holders.
The latest changes to chrome that breaks plugins like ublock origin allows them to keep maximising their advertising revenue.
I think these two being open source is a major reason why they have been so successfully adopted. It isn’t direct revenue, but the control and indirect revenue that comes from that which is the driver
The fact is that with the Spectre mitigations added to Chrome, the performance of networking with manifest v2 was bad. Having to keep sending every network request through 3 different processes just in case there is a plugin (uses by the minority of users) that wants to filter the requests before they are made.
Of course, blocking resource fetches like that could have easily been detected by any server that cares about it, and the interaction with service workers was...weird.
With manifest v3 you can still block ads. You can remove them from the DOM, you can make them invisible, you can replace them. You just can't programmatically decide which resources to filter - only a declarative model for resource filtering is supported.
which is really just absurd when you think about it. I don't care about another hour of battery life, but even if I did, I'd be perfectly happy if Chrome just told me "hey these extensions aren't very battery-efficient!" and I got to make my own decision about that.
If you're stuck having to run a ton of shitty JS code with ad malware in it, because your web browser doesn't allow you to effectively block it, that's probably going to cost you more in battery life than the overhead needed by MV2 to block that stuff.
No, that is horseshit.
The goal of blocking ads isn't to only allow in "good ads".
It's to block ads. Not some ads. Not a few ads. Not just malware delivered via ads. Not just Google's competitors.
It's to block ads. All of them. To stop the relentless harassment of the advertising industry claiming other peoples' screens and time as their own.
Ads might suck a lot, but you are also not entitled to free content.
You don't like it? Go out of business and have companies that are able to operate at the price consumers are willing to pay rise up in your place.
Actually no, it's worse. Ad companies take everything they can from you using any method they can including monitoring everything you browse or watch on TV or say near your phone or TV or in your car or what you look at in every shop or what you buy or who you chat to, compile massive secret databases and sell 'you' to anyone willing to pay, regardless of what the information is used for.
I don't see what is confusing here. Consumers love the ad-model because they can get things "free". If the real cost of ad-supported products is too much for you, then its too expensive for you to use.
Like someone found the backdoor to the movie theater, and people just go in that way rather than pay for a ticket, and then these same people go on rants about how movie tickets are a rip-off and they make you watch 30 mins of ads before the movie, and candy is 5x overpriced, and proudly declaring "I will never pay for a movie ticket again!", as if they are some righteous moral champion standing against the greed of people wanting to get paid for their work.
Straighten out your head, then come back and make an argument.
Also, if the industry actually did something, anything to address the grievances of ad block users (a lot of whom I'm willing to bet aren't inherently against advertising and fully understand it funds the content they consume and enjoy), it might be less of, if not a complete non-issue. But no, ads are still distracting, still heavily affect page load speed, still track every little thing visitors do, and still infect millions of peoples' systems with malware every year, and the industry just collectively shrugs and ploughs on towards maximum profit at any cost.
There was a user revolt, people flocked to U-block, and ad-block plus died.
Advertisers are greedy, but don't be a fool and think users are not equally (if not eve more) so.
I'd be happy to pay for no ads, and I have before for streaming services. But as time goes on it gets harder and harder. Often the only choice is ads, at which point I block or move on to a different service.
Ads use up my time and attention. Which, to me, is much more valuable than a small amount of money.
No it doesn't, because I define all ads as bad, so Chrome's ad "blocker" is does not even remotely meet my needs.
> You just can't programmatically decide which resources to filter
That "just" is doing a ton of work there. Declarative ad blockers aren't terrible, but they're not great either. And I don't want my browser fetching ads (which could also be malware) at all. Downloading them and then hiding them is insufficient.
But I agree that default search with being Google must have heavily blocked competition.
Comparing how much they pay Mozilla and Apple to maintain search, it would be reasonable to estimate Chrome’s implementation to save them $1b a year
But I highly doubt they make any back given > 1k people work on it
For example, if google didn't control the most popular browser, they probably would have had to say goodbye to third party cookies a long time ago, but since they do they've been able to delay it for quite a while, at least for a considerable portion of users.
It's everyone else who wants to keep them around.
And then look at Google's "privacy sandbox proposals, that aim to replace third party cookie functionality. They have largely been rejected by Mozilla and Apple, over privacy concerns.
I think you are underestimating it. There must be a reason why google is trying to work around ad blockers on their platforms.
> But I highly doubt they make any back given > 1k people work on it
Where did you find that number? I highly doubt it. Maybe if you are counting contributors to chromium.
Not in the US they don't; it's a minority share, split across many different manufacturers who all have their own flavor of Android, their own (crappy) app stores and pre-loaded crapware apps, etc. Apple has a clear majority of the US smartphone market (and it's a vertical monopoly, with Apple controlling the phone hardware and the app store and not allowing any alternatives), but no one's looking at breaking them up.
>I think these two being open source is a major reason why they have been so successfully adopted.
iOS isn't open-source, and it has a commanding majority of the US smartphone market.
This is very different from the global market share, where Android has 45% more.
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/ios-vs-android-market-s...
That's why Apple has higher profits than all other mobile operators combined!
This case is about US antitrust law, so what happens outside US borders isn't really that important, except as far as it affects the companies' revenues and profits. Supposedly, the actions of any antitrust action are to protect consumers/the general public, but what that really means is consumers in the US. Consumers outside the US are irrelevant. And the simple fact is that, by your own numbers, consumers in the US are mostly using iOS, not Android.
Regardless, 42% (in the US) is still a huge market share. Huge doesn't have to mean majority or even plurality.
For example, there's currently an ongoing anti trust case against "Al’s Asphalt Paving Company"
https://www.justice.gov/atr/case/us-v-als-asphalt-paving-com...
With the extra clarification that just the size of the company or its market share aren't in and of themselves enough to constitute a crime. It's how the company acts once it has that power that constitutes the crime.
You could be a huge company, or dominate a market and still not run afoul of anti-competitive laws because you didn't abuse the position [0]. The abuse of position particularly (or only, depending on jurisdiction probably) if it brings harm to consumers is what lands a company in hot water.
[0] https://thehustle.co/originals/the-worlds-cutest-monopoly
I'm not sure in what world 42% isn't huge when it comes to market share. iOS having a majority isn't really relevant to this point.
And regardless, GP didn't say "in the US"; globally, they are far ahead of iOS. Sure, this anti-trust action is a US matter, but a break-up would absolutely affect Google globally.
Chrome synergizes with the rest of Google's portfolio.
https://www.businessofapps.com/data/google-play-statistics/
https://www.statista.com/statistics/444476/google-play-annua...
Profits are all that matter
The money Google spends internally either on development or on cross subsidies is no profit and is what most of the issues in this discussion are addressing.
Profits is just money they couldn't find a place to spend on growth.
(Also a maximum of 30% goes to app devs which isn't a majority any way you measure it)
Most companies intentionally waste money on expenses to help drive future growth, or atleast avoid taxes. This is why you hear constantly Amazon pays almost no taxes compared to their revenue.
Their internal books will track expenses in a different way so as to produce a non-tax profit, buy that's all internal non-tax accounting, and tends ro be private compared to SEC filings.
Microsoft didn't stop developing EdgeHTML because it's too hard, they stopped because Google kept giving them the fuck around on sites like YouTube.
The whole point of web standards is that you can have multiple implementations for the same thing - there's zero reason that post-Google, Blink needs to be maintained by a single entity.
Microsoft can maintain their own fork of Blink, or bring back Edge, or adopt WebKit, or whatever works for them.
Opera and <insert laundry list of chrome-but-not-chrome browsers> have the same options, sans EdgeHTML.
The whole reason these companies are using Chromium/Blink is that Google has a stranglehold on web standards, and by being a me-too Chrome-alike they get support for Google's half baked ideas for free, to prevent the ever-fickle user base from switching browser because their browser doesn't support the latest half-written web standards draft.
To repeat the question from above, where is the downside?
Microsoft only abandoned EdgeHTML and adopted Blink because Google owned sites like YouTube were deliberately breaking in Edge.
At this stage I don't imagine they'd go back (to EdgeHTML as their engine) specifically, but it's not hard to imagine a world where MSFT maintains its own fork of Blink for use in Edge, Opera potentially the same.
As for Firefox: they get money for being the default search engine - if Google is broken up, the search engine company that emerges will have even more reason to want to be the default search engine on as many browsers as possible (and thus incentive to pay money to other browsers).
> So if Google dies then we'll have more diverse browser and mobile ecosystem
Initially, this won't be true. A lot of the browser ecosystem relies on Google right now. Eventually it would be replaced. I just don't think that it would be immediately true.
No they abandoned EdgeHTML because it was shit. Seriously there are plenty of posts right here on hacker news about the internals of that decision. The team and product failed to deliver so badly that it got the axe.
There sure are:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18697824
> This is already happening. I very recently worked on the Edge team, and one of the reasons we decided to end EdgeHTML was because Google kept making changes to its sites that broke other browsers, and we couldn't keep up.
> Now while I'm not sure I'm convinced that YouTube was changed intentionally to slow Edge, many of my co-workers are quite convinced - and they're the ones who looked into it personally.
Now it seems to me that 0.5 billion is the "cost of not technically being a monopoly" when they are indeed a monopoly, and it's a net win if they're pulling say 10 billion synergistic monopolistic profit from not being broken up into baby googles as a monopoly trust buster case.
I would say this is capitalism in a pure form, the kind the communists rail against, the kind where a monopoly crushes out all the benefits to the people, government corruption, etc. True "for the people" style capitalism would mean two browsers truly competing, ideally more than two (duopolies are monopolies by another name and poison our society broadly). One browser as part of an american zaibatsu, with the zaibatsu punting a little money to save face and claim competition exists - by propping up the competition financially - is absolutely a disgusting thing. To say "oh no, the thing they're propping up will no longer be propped up" is also disgusting and capitalistically twisted.
This is not a good reason to break up anti-competitive monopolies: that it would harm the technology their monopoly depends on
Innovation requires reliable funding, such as monopoly profits or government funding. Monopoly leads to undemocratic concentrations of power and various private taxes on the public (e.g. in the case of Google, your personal information). Bell Labs was funded by monopoly funding with a law directing a certain amount to research.
Competition improves the balance of power, but destroys the ability to innovate except on relatively easy to engineer variations of existing tech within a 1-5 year window projects. The recipients of monopolist largess (such as OSS) whither on the vine as competition drives profits to zero over time (which then causes consolidation and monopoly formations...).
The answer I prefer of course is to create the efficiencies and innovative capacity of large scale industry but control them democratically. Nationalize Google.
People eventually recognise a good idea, you don't need a well funded research group to have one. You need an environment where it's plausible for the new thing to work and be profitable.
Breaking up a giant like google seems that it would make it easier to promote an new idea, as it has less risk of being crushed by the interests of a tangentially related company.
Telecoms in Australia is probably the best modern example I can think of, the nbn was given a monopoly and now delivers an expensive inferior product, and there is no real way to compete or innovate around it.
It doesn't exactly take them out of the market, it just creates a enterprise with legal protections and non market motivations for what it actually does.
Nationalizing anything is an absolute disaster for innovation. What innovations did Aeroflot develop?
The free market and a thriving entrepreneur ecosystem creates innovation. The profit motive is a powerful one. Taking risks to invent the next big thing is what drives entrepreneurship in the first place. Governments are corrupt, inefficient, and don’t get punished by the markets when they fail.
This idea that governments are democratic is a myth. I didn’t vote for tethered bottle caps in the EU. I didn’t vote to send money to fund wars. In the U.S., one can vote, but the policies that actually happen are the result of what lobbyists spent the most money buying the relevant congressmen.
The answer to this is smaller government. The most democratic thing there is is the free market. Everyone can vote or not vote with their money. And the results are seen nearly immediately and companies have to respond.
If we could choose to pay taxes on a line-item basis, that would be the most democratic thing ever. Because a rep that you voted for on one issue and is wrong on another issue gets his “wrong” initiative defunded and his “right” initiative funded. We should bring free market principles to government not government principles to the free market.
The last thing we want is the common people, unaware of the intricacies of all the things a government pays for, voting on what and how government is funded. That's a great way to get some huge budgets for circuses while forgetting to allocate for bread. The most important aspects of life are not glamorous, but they need to be funded for.
There's some merit here (maybe people can choose where 5-10% of the federal budget goes), but before we can even think about that we'd need to get the national debt under control. There's negative money to allocate as is.
>In the U.S., one can vote, but the policies that actually happen are the result of what lobbyists spent the most money buying the relevant congressmen.
That's more of a lobbying issue than a democracy issue, no? Ideally a democracy would uncover a large gift and the PR would completely tank chances of re-election. But alas, the people aren't caring or well-tuned enough.
>The most democratic thing there is is the free market.
THe endgame of a free market is monopoly. So a small government would give the exact result we have here with lesser chances of an antitrust.
>Innovation requires reliable funding, such as monopoly profits or government funding.
we have more than enough angel vestors, normal investing, bank loans, etc. to get any innovation off the ground. And I think people forget that the original innovation hubs for big adacement came from Acedemia. Now retrofitted to be a recruiting wing for private businesses who pay to capture that knowledge.
The only downside here is that they then cannot proceed to offer that product for free for a decade to capture a market before squeezing said market they captured. Is that a downside for people who don't/can't pay? Yes. But that is historically how every business has operated. Figure out how to optimize costs so they can profit, and balance it against the market you are targeting. Big tech has forgotten about that and simply throws money around like it's monopoly money (and it kind of is).
We need a huge overhaul of how all this works. Ironically enough by going "backwards" in a few areas.
The way I see this argument is "Innovation requires an institution devoted to innovation, which requires reliable funding such as monopolistic or taxpayer"
As you say, on the 1-5 year horizon that's not true. Most successful startups are innovative, we need to look no further than Google itself with its pagerank innovation dominating search. Most universities have innovative researchers, and indeed explicitly set up innovative centers called "incubators" - but of course this is an example of government funding.
One of the first questions is what innovation requires 1-5 years. What about aha moment! innovation? Pagerank is an "aha moment" idea that takes a few months to demonstrate. There are more aha moment innovations than "grind for more than 5 years" I feel. Most of the "grind for 5+ years" innovations have yet to pay off e.g. fusion, super batteries, room temperature semiconductors.
A monopoly offers stable funding for some institution, but at what cost? No capitalistic incentive to improve product? Excess pricing because the consumer has no choice? Surely there are more fair ways to structure this.
Government control would destroy tech, government is not made for it. Look at Amtrak. A nationalized google would wither and get eaten alive by.. ... innovative search startups (themselves without research institutes funded by monopolies), or startups in one of the dozens of fields where Google has spread its tendrils.
Microsoft in its prime is a great example of monopolistic problems. They were a OS monopoly and kept leveraging that to smack down competition wherever they wanted to expand into. Google almost didn't make chrome - the CEO at the time was frightened that Microsoft would annihilate google if google should make a new browser. The monopoly engine allows for ease of dominating more and more industries through lateral growth. This all-encompassing destruction of captalistic price minimization, alone, is why we need to break down big tech monopolies such as google. An example of a "good citizen" non monopolistic company in this setting is Netflix - there's huge competition in entertainment field, they have innovated streaming tech, their profits are meritorious, and they haven't suffocated other fields like other big tech i.e. there's no Netflix phone, no Netflix video game console, no Netflix social media.
The other health of the Netflix / media ecosystem is it's not a duopoly. There's Netflix, there's Apple TV (hello, suffocating new industries!), there's Disney, there's paramount, there's hulu, and so on. This is what competition should look like. This is classic innovation in the capitalist sector, through brutal competition. We not only need to bust up monopolies but to consider duopolies or more generally - busting up groups of companies that collude to price or feature fix as holders of the majority of the market, which is what many duopolies are.
OSS would be fine without Google, it was great before Google ever existed. There are intrinsic motivations to contribute, which is why thousands of companies do.
1. Google is fined/broken up due (in part) to paying for the default search engine position.
2. In the newly broken off chrome company, they auction the default search engine position.
3. Google cannot bid on it. So I guess Microsoft is going to win that position? Who else is going to pay for it?
I can't imagine this is what happens. This would just make the DoJ look absolutely foolish and would basically put the DoJ in the position of being Microsoft's personal attack dog. But on the other hand, what else could happen? It's still ridiculous even if it's anyone other than Microsoft that is the winning bidder.
It prompts the user to pick a search engine on install? And let's be honest, most people will probably pick google anyway.
But then the question is, how will companies like Mozilla and a spin-off company for chrome make money if they can't auction off the default search engine anymore?
Chrome maybe but for Android, it's debatable at best to state it as OSS. AOSP doesn't run on a single phone on earth, not even the emulator and the freedom of users to modify it is very limited in practice.
I'd put it as "mostly source available" instead of open source.
No one can predict the future. HN commenters love to try, every day. For example, speculating about a "breakup".
If neither side changes their position, Google will be fighting the US government for many years to come. That we can say with reasonable certainty. Regardless of the remedy sought.
As a shareholder I do not want the company to be fighting the US government for years to come. It's not good for business.
But Google fans no doubt read the news and spin it to be positive. No matter what, in their minds only Google can win. Self-delusion.
Meanwhile, the legal process will continue. More money for the lawyers.
How do you know how much Google funnels of its profits (are you sure you mean this?) into Chrome and Android's open source projects? Do you work at Google and have access to this information? Are you sure you know what you're talking about here?
My initial search produces a lot of speculative numbers, but nothing verifiable. Admittedly, this is a realm I have little experience with, so perhaps I am looking for the wrong terms. It was also my understanding that the books of large companies like this are typically closed unless demanded by legal entities.
GTM and GA probably live with Display Ads
Chrome and Android probably live with Search
Who knows where ChromeOS, and all the hardware devices go
Jolla/Sailfish make a mobile operating system with a handful of people, and even though that system pretty minimal, I'd say the added value on the Android side is the ecosystem of apps and porting to devices, which is done by other developers and manufacturers than Google. And I'm not sure how many people work on Firefox itself on any given day.
I guess it's just really hard to get a clear picture on what all those people in large companies are really doing day to day. The overhead must be enormous, and likely a lot of engineering effort is thrown at the wall to see what sticks.
My biggest question is how long they can stay at a handful if they become popular. The increased burden of security patches alone would likely turn that handful into a small army.
Security through obscurity is often mocked (for good reason), but it actually does work in cases like this as long as you don't reach Android's scale.
In fact, it almost seems like the only people able to produce great things in the 1970s were massive entrenched corporations like Ma Bell.
Funny, that.
Come to think of it, wasn't there a much more vibrant browser ecosystem in the late 90s and early 2000s, before Google used its dominant position in the ad market to undercut the competition? There used to be a lot more mobile operating systems out there, too.
I wonder what happened to all that competition? It's almost like some sort of massive anti-competitive influence came into force in the tech scene somewhere in the 2000s. . .
Most browsers have consolidated over time because we are constantly updating web standards and bar for security is so high. On top of that everything has to be insanely backward compatible
WebGPU is a good example. Implementing that securely in a nightmare
There are lots of distos out there, but we all use the same core and make it better & safer together.
Coming from Enterprise Architecture world, if you're not already treating browsers as full-fledged operating systems to manage and secure, then you're operating dangerously. In fact, that's actually why I'm resistant to further "webification" of software and applications, as it's the same drawbacks as nested virtualization: now we have the OS layer that makes the computer run and the web browser layer to interact with stuff to worry about, both of which have their own performance penalties and threat profiles.
As much as I love REST APIs (and boy, do I love them and their simplicity), I don't like the idea of everything running a web server when it doesn't have to be.
What I was trying to say is that we only have a single kernel in the linux world without complaint, so having a single browser "kernel" (chromium) can be seen as a good thing. We have multiple distros (chrome, edge, brave, etc) for the browser as well
Hell, even Firefox could relatively easily swap to running on Blink since most of their UI these days is CSS+JS.
No? It used to be IE and Mozilla, and now it's Edge, Chrome, and Mozilla. Opera existed then and now, and probably more people use it now, but it's still small enough that no one cares. I suppose you could make a point about Edge using Chrome's engine, but that's because the IE one sucked and the new one Microsoft made for Edge sucked so they eventually switched to using Chrome's. But the idea that the browser market was somehow better back in the day is hilarious and wrong.
>There used to be a lot more mobile operating systems out there, too.
Not really. I suppose early on during the smartphone era, blackberry was still around, but they mostly lost out due to Apple finally getting decent MDM, and not bothering to improve their product after a while, than the fact that Android was growing in popularity. Microsoft entered kinda late and never really developed their phone OS enough and eventually gave up, but that's because their product wasn't good enough, not because of anything the others were doing to stop them.
We're seeing less engines which is far more important than the browser wrapper. Also Quantum's development is pretty much driven by a desire to maintain feature parity with Blink which means Google gets control over what the web is according to every major browser. The fact that there are a variety of companies whose browsers are under Google's control is irrelevant in terms of anti-competitive discussion.
That's moving the goalposts, but honestly in the past it was IE and sometimes mozilla deciding how the web was going to work and anyone else playing catch up, which is essentially still what it is.
Que?
If Google did some heinous stuff, tomorrow Microsoft would hard-fork Chromium and Brave et al would just switch their upstream to Edge.
Doubt.
I'll believe it when I see it. Maintaining a hard fork is almost as hard as a greenfield browser like old Edge or old Opera. There are no serious competitors doing hard Chromium forks besides Apple. (Afraid to admit Firefox isn't a serious competitor anymore.)
Not sure if this is meant tongue-in-cheek.
Google very aggressively chased any 3rd-party Windows Phone apps out of town that were Google—services compatible, whilst refusing to release 1st party apps themselves.
Microsoft shares a fair part in the blame because they made developers switch frameworks like… 5 times (?) in the span of 3 OS versions. Not to mention the constant sunsetting of devices.
The UI was amazing though. All content and no dressing, performant on low-end hardware, had dark mode half a decade before Android / iOS.
My subjective experiences tell me that, just like the early days of the microcomputer revolution, anything is possible with talented nerds who don't have to worry about grinding at their day jobs to survive. Early markets are often defined by those with the privilege to innovate absent the need to work to survive, and sharing the fruits of their labors with the masses because that's their entire intent - and that being able to live off of that income instead of a corporate gig was a nice bonus.
If you want more innovation, focus on eliminating societal precarity instead of slashing regulations or growing monopolies.
No, that is incidental. What is the first and principal thing it does, what needs does it serve by making open source browsers and operating systems?
Control. Google maintains appreciable control over mobile devices and the web by making their own mobile operating system and browser. In cases such as these, it is only a matter of time before they tightening the screws. They already have.
> we will be left with an even more profitable ad giant, that sends back all profits to it's share holders
But not one that can kill ad blockers or ram remote attestation down people's throats.
Google ads would be fine on its own. They'd continue to dominate.
Google Analytics would probably have a problem. The big thing going for it is that it's free. Without being able to funnel their data hoovering into the rest of the ecosystem they'd probably lose that. If they _did_ have to charge, would they release a simpler tier that isn't so mind-bogglingly complex? That'd be nice.
Docs? Yeah, I don't see a way forward with that unless they charge a lot. There are some competitors, but they suck, and they struggle, and google docs seems one of the major nodes of interoperability between a lot of their products. It's be really hard to replicate that if you're broken up.
Calendar. Hah. Well. Everybody gets to suffer given that google calendar uses its own protocols. It's not like everybody could just switch to DAV and have close to the same functionality, at least out of the gate.
I agree with you re: Chrome and Android, but I will say that current FOSS forks of Android seem to do well. I think they have enough runway to continue making a good product. It would put phone makers into a bind, but I personally think their suffering is also a good thing. Fewer phone makers == less e-waste. Maybe people start holding onto their phones for a few years.
Honestly I couldn't care less about Chrome, except that I hope it does die. But Microsoft could take over the engine and use its hegemony to continue funneling money into developing it.
Firefox would be in a tough spot. They'd have to find another sponsor. I know they've been trying to diversify but I think we'd see a very different browser from them within 3 years of the breakup.
The good news is that there is no shortage of oligarchs to help pick up the pieces. Which is good because I bet Alphabet is going to start whinging about "massive layoffs" soon.
So I don't want Google to be broken up and lose business only for MS, Apple, Amazon and Facebook to gobble up its business
And for the people who think nationalizing businesses leads to socialist/communist hell, at the very least, if you've decided that a business is critical to national security, it should be funded at least in part by the government (with the government having a real, if not controlling, stake in it), and heavily, heavily regulated.
Even if we do want to nationalize anything for security reasons, defense contractors should be at the top on the list but they have already bought the US government so DOJ is after those who haven't paid their dues
They are critical to national security because of their ability to perform. Nationalizing them would complete distort their incentives and destroy the company so thoroughly we might as well have just broken them up.
It'd be ridiculous if Epic sued Pepsi and Coca Cola for something about their Soda and the same court ruled against Pepsi but for Coca Cola.
Google is an ad business. It sells human eyes and ears to businesses. They own a massive chunk of the ad business and everything they make benefits ads. People who are buying ads (businesses) might benefit with more competition, because as it stands, we have dumb stuff like lawyers in Missouri buying ads and people in Bangladesh clicking them. Google gains money even though that ad was completely ineffective to the customer.
Plus google's goal is to funnel everything into ads. Search sucks ass. It's all astroturfed or straight up fake content these days. Users are getting scammed clicking on these links. Small businesses are getting strangled out because they can't pay protection fees that the megacorps that aren't flooded out by AI generated and SEO-optimized slop can. We all suffer because of that.
Google has a stranglehold on email. Try sending a non-gmail message to a gmail account as a normie and you're probably going straight to the spam bucket. How much has it costed people who had their messages lost because they won't hand all their data over to Google?
Technically, competition "exists", but it's strangled out to the point of basically not existing. Other companies can offer all these services if they grow big. The problem is there's no other company that can compete with google in the US. And whenever a new company comes along that can shake up the game, Google/Apple/Microsoft buy them out and shut them down, unless they're part of the club already (e.g. OpenAI)
More on topic: It was a neat idea, but given how consistently every single walled garden has ended up hindering progress and exploiting users in the long term, I'd rather go back to that 90's geocities era where users had to be mindful of their content instead of letting an algorithm scroll for them showing what maximizes engagement. The experiment has failed with aplomb.
Break up Google, break up Microsoft (again, kind of), open up Apple, shake down Steam. Make this new money show why old money was historically regulated into being a proper public service instead of a winner take all conglomerate.
And that's the entire point here: Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, NVIDIA, etc. are hoarding the wealth. For the rest of us to actually benefit from the monetary value of the increased productivity of tech, that money has to be taken back.
In a country where 50 people own more wealth than 50%, the only beneficiaries to GDP growth are those 50 individuals. The rest of us are just getting fucked.
As for the rebuttal of "bUt ThE gDp", there's a counter-argument to be made that the GDP would have grown just as much with a higher diversity and stringent M&A regulations by spurring on new businesses and concepts, as opposed to mainstreaming fad after fad that seemingly solely benefits the established players. There's another argument to be made equating GDP values to desirable targets creates a Goodhart's Law problem, thereby making GDP as a measure of growth or success a bad metric; the rise of income and wealth inequality these past few decades, when there was increased focus on GDP as a target of growth or success, could be viewed as evidence supporting said argument.
It's worth noting that this case against Google is likely to be the bellwether for future divestments and breakups. Whatever comes next will be an invaluable learning experience for both sides, just like AT&T and Microsoft's own anti-trust woes were learning experiences for the current crop of companies.