And yet, somehow, Tobacco is still profitable.

https://killedbygoogle.com/

This is the end result of trying to run your massive corporation like some kind of start-up incubator. No wisdom or strategy, just throw shit at the wall and see what sticks.

As sad as killing Stadia was (it's still the best cloud gaming service, the UX was marvelous), it couldn't have been done better.

Better late than never.

I agree

But placing limits on private property accumulation is a controversial idea

But it is an idea who's time must come, or we face a dreadful future of robber barrons and peons

The US wouldn't need a legal limit on wealth to prevent Google from becoming this large.

Every major Google product since gmail in ~2004 was acquired. Google Maps? Acquired from Where 2 Technologies. Google Docs? Acquired from Writely. Android? Acquired as a startup. Google Analytics? You guessed it, acquisition. DoubleClick? Once again, acquisition. Deepmind? Acquisition. reCAPTCHA? Acquisition. Youtube? Believe it or not, acquisition.

This isn't a story of a business getting big because of their innovation and the vast demand for their much-loved products.

This is a story of US competition regulators sleeping on the job for 20 years.

Aside from that, in 2004, Google was a ~30B company, 1/3rd the size of e.g. UPS. For comparison, Microsoft was ~10x bigger.

The rewriting of history in this thread is just crazy. I don't disagree that google today is huge and some regulation is necessary, but what you are proposing should have been done in 2004 is off the charts ridiculous. Not even totalitarian dictatorships exert that much control over their populations.

Why?

FOMO? Or another reason?

At the time, google was a $30B company, 10x smaller than Microsoft. Where 2 Technologies was a 1 year old company with 4 people, with 0 documented sales or market share that I can find. The only evidence I can find of the company actually doing anything is a picture of a whiteboard. I'm not dinging the company, just saying that it was very, very early in its life.

Suggesting that competition regulators should have blocked this is basically suggesting that the government has veto power over almost any hiring decision by any of the top ~1000 companies by market cap.

Ok. I am not suggesting that. I do assert it is not "totally insane".

And it is not the "hiring decisions". It is the merger decisions.

So if you enter the top ~1000 company territory, you loose a few freedoms. Is that so bad?

I personally know of probably a dozen cases of a small team of <10 people getting hired into various companies that all would be scrutinized under this reasoning, and yeah, I think that's totally insane.

Those are good ideas to consider, too

But also very radical

We are beyond the point where we need to be open to the "unthinkable "

My even bigger worry is actually the effects on privacy, security, and people's data. I'm very curious what other companies people would trust more with their data.

The problem is one company with all the data.

I realize, but the idea that we won't have another giant company succeeding at achieving the same seems like wishful thinking.

The only reason why we have the mess we do is because we have made our antitrust toothless starting in 1980s, and it's only gradually coming back now.

etc.

I built my free web stats service in 2004 because I couldn't afford an Urchin license. Google bought Urchin Live and rebranded it as Google Analytics, and gave it away for free. My service barely pays for itself 20+ years later, but I'm still here and would have an offering for that market on day one that Google Analytics shut down. So would dozens of others.

Nearly everything that was acquired was a) already free, and b) built (and given away for free) in hopes that someone like Google would acquire them.

If you look at most startups, their exit strategy is acquisition. Some would live to IPO, but that is a much tougher road.

It could be argued that IPO is a less likely exit strategy because of Google’s and others’ position, but I think it’s disingenuous to imply that startups (that are already giving away their products for free) are getting acquired as a last resort.

Most CEOs plan and hope for it.

And that is a part of the problem.

I don’t think so, at least, it’s not their main motivation.

For most, I imagine the VC fueled free period is to lock up customers and increase you have their sensitive data, you start making moves so you can start to charge them, usually a fairly hefty sum. It’s a classic lock in strategy.

Were all built within google. For most people (who do not sell software on the internet) we get a great trade from the current state of things!

Google Maps was built on the acquisitions of Where 2 Technologies, Keyhole and ZipDash.

Chrome is based on WebKit, built at Apple.

Waymo's hardware came from the acquisition of 510 Systems, and the software came from the acquihiring of the team that developed Stanford's self-driving cars for the 2005 and 2007 DARPA challenges, who brought their code with them.

Chrome's renderer (Blink) is indeed a fork of Safari's renderer (WebKit) but that in turn was forked from Konqueror's renderer (KHTML).

They're not disputing that google has provided all these services, they're arguing that google's ability to subsidize them prevents market solutions for these same problems being produced.

The internet is, in this view, somewhat of a planned economy with Google as the central planning committee. You get google's maps and google's docs and google's search, rather than a maps marketplace, a docs marketplace, and a search marketplace.

Google is able to enforce this on the market because it holds a unique position where it can extract a significant amount of the value generated in the internet economy in 'ad taxes'.

Both Apple and Google need to be disrupted here. We should be able to see lots of healthy verticals for every single one of these product categories. They shouldn't accrue to two players and be impossible to dislodge.

I propose the word "Googolith" to describe {Google, Apple, Amazon}, though it's not a great attempt. We do need some kind of word or language to describe these anti-competitive titans that are impossible to innovate against. The word "monopoly" gets shut down, but the control they wield may as well be monopolistic. There's no choice and there's no competing. They're practically nation states.

People may celebrate the break-up of google, but it will be short lived when they find that now everything they do on the internet that they used to do through google costs a monthly sub. Or is ad supported with zero tolerance for ad-blocking.

The reason competing with google is impossible is because people are deathly allergic to paying for things that they think are free. Vid.me sucked all the air out of the room for a few months in 2017 and was pulling tons of yotubers over. Then it went bankrupt because "People don't like subscriptions, people don't like ads."

You know what will be short lived? The disruption itself. We're not talking about the death of Sol.

The most significant fact in all of this is that everything will stabilize and we'll all be fine (except the monopoly, which is the point). And when it's all said and done, we'll come out the other side better for it.

Maps and Satelleite view are astounding, especially when you consider that they are free.

>How is this a desirable outcome?

The list speaks for itself. There are many valid complaints against google, but this is not one of them.

Search Engine: Google is fantastic with its index. Very poor with the results it returns. Sampling of the problems:

- There's a reason people add site:reddit.com - the default results are often very low quality. Sure, Google has the good quality stuff indexed, but over the last 5 years they've been declining like crazy in actually showing you what you need.

- When I search for something on mobile, I get fairly unstructured results. First, an AI blurb. Then the first batch of results are videos. Then some web sites. Then a break with "People also ask...". Then more web sites. Then image results.

99% of the time I just want the web sites. Before, if there were video/image results, they'd be on the top and I'd conveniently scroll past them to get to the meat. I can't do that any more. Google keeps breaking the flow by adding more and more sections. When I hit "More search results", the problem continues.

Thank God for Kagi.

> gmail

Lots of people don't use it (including me). Other than people losing their mail, I'm not sure what is lost if this goes away. Email providers are aplenty. What am I missing by not using Gmail?

> maps

I'll grant you this one.

> android

It's nice to have an alternative to Apple, but that's the only good thing about it. Using Android reminds me of the old Windows. Very unstable. Full of spyware/bloatware.

> chrome

The only thing Chrome was better at than Firefox was stability - for a brief period in its history. Firefox is just better. If a site works on Chrome and not Firefox, that's not because Firefox is inferior.

Calling Chrome an "incredibly, breathtakingly good product" is just insane. It's merely an OK browser.

Being free to run whatever code we want as users (F-droid is a treasure). Plus actually having a "disable animations completely" button to remove unneeded slowness.

Right, we've been through all that stuff with Internet Explorer—sites often preferred it over others even though its HTML extensions weren't standard W3C. Chrome is better but it's still favored for the same reasons.

> Gmail

Gmail is the best email provider of all time by a huge amount and has been since it's inception. I use proton mail as well and it's worse, a lot worse. It's slower, has fewer features and is not as good looking. From what I've seen of apple Mail and outlook they are worse still.

> Android

Personally, I prefer Android. There are a lot of things I'd miss going to iPhone. Like custom launchers, having a different browser, an app drawer, the way widgets work, ect...

> Chrome

I am concerned about the chromium engine creating a browser monoculture so I use Firefox. I have used Firefox every day for years and I have to say it's worse. Whenever I use chrome for a small thing I need I realize that its better. It's faster, better looking, things just work on it (I know part of this is because of its dominance but that's irrelevant when evaluating product quality). I don't use it but I'm not going to pretend that it's worse.

It is a bit like comparing a bank, a stock option broker, and a gambling site, and discussing which provide a better product to hold your money. It make no sense comparing them unless we view them as providing the same service.

Gmail is well below mediocre, it’s so sluggish and unresponsive even on fast hardware. Compare with fastmail; it’s hard to go back.

The search engine consistently gives me pages of blog spam before a useful result. Eg Kagi is dramatically more useful despite having a tiny fraction of the resources to work with.

I agree. The search index is great, the presentation is shitty.

As for maps: The most prominent features on it are ads. The rest is low contrast. For navigation the map is really bad. The satellite view is great.

Yeah not mediocre: It's great tech enshittified.

People at Google work on many things, but they also build lots of shit.

I literally laughed out loud at this. There is nothing further from the truth when you look at what else is out there. I feel like a lot of these comments are shilling for Google they're so biased.

Search is not amazing. Search is littered with garbage. Try out Kagi or even DDG for a day, but let's not pretend search hasn't been a dumpster fire for years now.

Here's a prior comment of mine explaining one poor search scenario: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43348712

I've just found another, "G Jones collab album" hardly has any results about his collaborations. In the first page of results there's only one relevant link and it's for Acid Disk 2 with EPROM. Spelling out "collaboration" doesn't make much difference. The results in Google are much more relevant to the key word here being "collab".

As an aside, I love duck.ai and use it frequently especially with work as I trust the privacy.

In fact, that's how things used to be before Google and their ilk used ads to make an ecosystem, and their ecosystem was better and free at the point of use than what came before

Also most people would probably prefer not to pay for the ad fees that google extorts from pretty much any company.

You can pay for Google One right now, roughly exchanging cash for storage capacity on the otherwise free services. I see no viable competition for that model. Protonmail is comparatively expensive.

I really don't want the Internet to turn into the mess that is video streaming where every independent licensing agency tries to capture an audience for $15/month.

Another great example is Let's Encrypt. It's a public good to provide quality TLS certificates and the marginal cost is $0 with some sponsorship. I'd far rather other core Internet services like e-mail and basic file sharing are sponsored.

- one skippable 5s ad

- two skippable 5s ads

- one unskippable 5s and one skippable 15s ads

- aforementioned or two 15s ads, one skippable

- two 15s unskippable ads

- removed the prerenderer 'skip' button to make it more difficult to immediately skip

- removed the ad amount indicator and precise length indicator (now just a bar) to psychologically drive people into sunk cost feelings

God knows what they're cooking up next.

And for large swathes of content, there is no alternative to YouTube.

I'm a firm believer in the issue being one of pricing, not that the consumer is willing to pay nothing at all.

I have this view because we've already seen how users flocked to iTunes, then Spotify/Apple Music and Netflix/other streaming services when the pricing was right. We are also now watching as people depart streaming services and return to direct sales and P2P file-sharing due to incrementally higher prices.

To me that's a sure indicator of price being the problem, not an insatiable appetite for zero cost.

The math largely makes sense too. Particularly in music if you're the type that has a taste for a genre of music, rather than just wanting to listen to the top 40.

It's crazy to me how entitled people are and how completely blind they are to how the ad supported model works.

Then these same people complain that youtube has no competitors. Yeah, no shit, who in their right mind would invest in a customer base like youtubes? Oh, that's right, Vid.me, and they went bankrupt in a year. Wonder why...

Remove active content from online advertising and I'll disable my ad blocker.

No, that’s not how it works, at all.

I give money to some people on Patreon, I pay for Nebula, but I am never going to give Google a single euro willingly. I’ll leave YouTube in a heartbeat the moment the people I follow (whom I am already giving money otherwise) make their content available elsewhere.

It's good you do it, thank you, and people run at the opportunity to show everyone they are doing the right thing (creating an illusion of popularity), but I can tell you from having seen the stats - essentially nobody does it.

Nebula, which you mention, has about 700k subscribers. Yet they host YouTube videos for creators who collectively have over 120M subscribers...that is a 0.6% conversion rate.

I believe you, really. I still prefer that than people profiting off me without my consent.

There is hope, there are some media who manage with strategies ranging from complete paywalls (like Nebula, though I would be very curious to know how profitable it is for the uploaders) to the opposite (like the Guardian, who seem to be getting enough money despite very little friction to get to the articles).

Thinking about good old-fashioned newspapers, most of the readership did not pay, either. There is no reason why a combination of subscribers, non-invasive advertising, and sponsorship could not accommodate a certain number of freeloaders.

> Nebula, which you mention, has about 700k subscribers. Yet they host YouTube videos for creators who collectively have over 120M subscribers...that is a 0.6% conversion rate.

Nebula has a chicken and egg problem, and YouTube has an infinitely broader reach. It certainly is not perfect. That said, I don’t think Nebula needs to make as much money as YouTube, just enough so that people can make a living producing good stuff instead of slop optimised for ads.

YouTube is no longer using ads to pay the bills. They're using them to be user hostile.

Normally I would say "just use a different service". But YouTube is a de facto monopoly.

Hence, if YouTube wants to act user hostile, you are well within your moral rights to be service hostile.

The same people telling us to 'just watch ads' then complain when the web gets a bit more crappy the next week, when another service or site uses the shifted window of tolerable behaviour to become more user hostile in chase of a bigger cut of the loot.

And a lot of them already suffer from subscription fatigue.

This is a point that will be recurring and merits more thought IMHO.

Google services are mostly better because they crushed competition. Cutting their advantage will also mean better alternatives (money will flow to competitors instead of being sucked by Google).

As an analogy, it's like athlete doping: they sure were faster than the other athletes, but that's part of the issue.

Google tapped into that by creating an ad economy, which since it's inception also comes with a payment optional feature (ad-blocking).

People may hate google, but by god do they ever love the internet google created.

I actually wonder how much people actually like the current web. People bitching about popups and ads is enough of a staple of our culture.

What Google "gives" isn't popping from nowhere, the billions they use to fund it still came from us, just in indirect ways.

If the parents were slowly siphoning off enough of the teen's money through a convoluted set of channels such that the teenager indirectly paid for the truck anyway and the parents ended up effectively taking a share of the money, that would be definitely worth hating.

People are blind to this, they think Google is a charity that got greedy. Meanwhile they haven't let a Google ad through their ad blocker for 15 years.

Youtube Premium is $13.99/mo or you get ads with also zero tolerance for ad blocking. We've already been there for a while wherever Google is serious about it.

I don't think people understand that it would be trivial for Google to block anyone with an ad blocker from accessing any Google domain.

And if they did that, cut off the people who use the services but never pay, those people would complain.

[0] https://www.techspot.com/news/107221-youtube-anti-ad-blocker...

And little of value would be lost.

No. Google is making money, it is not a charity. More than that, they do everything they can to obfuscate that fact and brainwash us into thinking we just get it for free thanks to their generosity. It is not the case at all. All these services are data funnels for the actual main business of Google, which is to sell ads.

If they make money off our backs, it is not unreasonable to have some expectations.

Which is why the services exists at all, thank god for that. What it is though, is cheaper and better than the alternatives, which is why their products are so overwhelmingly popular.

There are many difficult-to-estimate costs for monopolies, especially ones like this. That does not mean that the costs do not exist. That's the entire point in making people believe that things are "free" or "cheap", you rob them of even the opportunity to even evaluate alternatives to realize how much better it could be. There are very good reasons that these kinds of things should be illegal.

Actually, we don't. Google is a prime culprit in the 'enshittification' of the Internet. As Cory Doctorow can explain[0] to you.

[0] https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/08/who-broke-the-internet/#b...

At least they opened up the password completion APIs.

Google, interestingly, is much better.

I don't know what to say. It's clear that the Internet Ecosystem has a megafauna of Google and taking it out would be an ecosystem collapse, but the other Megafauna are... worse.

Google drive is likewise awful. I upload something to it and there it is. I come back 10 years later and it's still there. Why doesn't it do more? Why can't it make my file better over time? Why can't they take ideas from dropbox, or box, or onedrive. Stupid monopoly forcing us all into one choice.

And as for Google Fiber, well there are so many ISPs offering gigabit plans now, what is Fiber going to offer to do better? It's like you said we need a healthy marketplace with competing companies, not just the one monopolist with shitty gigabit ethernet service.

And don't even get me started on gmail!

What functionality are you expecting?

In the first case they could have paid someone $20 on fiverrr or whatever to go and physically look to see if it's closed and update it more quickly. Not sure about the second case, but either way if a maps service put in the effort to have more accurate hours they could do so, and that would be a reasonable thing for users to pay for.

And even if Gmail does have a majority of the market, there are plenty of other email providers.

Apart from all of the illegal things, it's just bad that it exists.

The upshoot is if they are independent, they will be forced to compete fairly with other services. Which, does increase competition and choice.

If Android goes away, I am not sure who is there to pick up The OS of the world, not IOS, certainly, but who?

All else, good riddance. More competition will make better products.

If manufacturers would just upstream their drivers and make them less shit, then android could take advantage of the entire body of work in GNU/Linux userland.

Even further, if your business is coupled entirely to the continued existence of a single corporation, or if the totality of your economy is entirely coupled to the continued existence of a single corporation, we have a word for that: a monopoly. As far as I know, permitting the existence of monopolies is broadly agreed upon by experts to be a bad idea for many reasons, the least of which is the stifling of viable alternatives. The most severe is that it threatens the legitimacy of the entire government through regulatory capture and, at root, there is no organization that I think is actually "too big to fail" except the actual government.

Breaking up Google creates short-term disruptions and penalizes those that let the market even get to the point that the FTC and DOJ needed to intervene (I'm looking at you Mozilla). Everyone, including those now dependent on Google, is benefited in the longterm.

The existence of none of those services depend on Google, and Google's cross subsidisation distorts the environment dreadfully

Worse it puts Google at the centre of so many data flows, and now we realise we do not want a single index of all data, it is positively destructive

Good riddance Google.

Most of the services you listed above are hardly best in class, and giving them away for free is basically scraps off of the table. The ones which are best in class like Waymo have a good shot at being commercially successful on their own.

I dispute that. Google Docs/Drive/Mail are supported by enterprise subscriptions. Android Auto is also a commercial product that can live off license fees. Fi/Fiber/Pay/Waymo are also not free services, and can survive on their own.

Free GMail/Forms/Groups/Translate can probably survive off ad revenue that they can get from third parties. They are pretty trivial expenses at this point.

Android and Chrome are the main projects at risk.

Existing Fiber customers are basically a free money printing press. That's not going to change. But the new area buildouts can slow down.

Honestly, Google has been so un-innovative for so long, that it's hard to make a case for them. They just don't have a lot of products that are really benefiting from being under the umbrella of a large company.

I can definitely see an argument that back in 2006, Google Docs would have been impossible without access to the internal Google infrastructure and the unique expertise of Google engineers. These days? It's just a run-of-the-mill cloud application that can be trivially hosted on commercially available AWS or Google Compute.

Perhaps treating Google as a huge VC company would be more fair.

Some of the services you mentioned are already very irrelevant:

* Fitbit -- no explanation necessary

* Google translate -- I don't know about if people use their APIs, but for me personally, I have not used translate for a few years. ChatGPT has been my go-to.

* Google Pay -- it has a smaller market share than Samsung Pay.

Then next tiers of services -- they are doing ok but there are plenty of competitors in the field:

* Gmail, Drive, Docs, Groups, Forms, Cloud, Flights, Fi

I even use some of them, but I really don't care if they go away.

Life gets a bit more difficult if Maps, Chrome and Android are gone all of a sudden. Maybe we'll be back to using Garmin. Heck, I love the idea that everybody uses Nokia, Bing or Garmin for navigation, and we actually have a decent website -- like the Yelp or Zagar in the old days -- for restaurant reviews. I still see "#1 Rated Zagat" stickers from near two decades ago at many restaurants.

Anyway, personally, for the vast majority of the things listed here, I don't see them going away being a bad thing that would even affect as many people as you think.

Gmail and Docs are children's toys for people, who don't know much about e-mail and proper documents. Those are the majority of people on the Internet these days though, so Gmail and Docs are going nowhere any time soon.

If by that you are talking about anything that doesn't have built-in version control and simultaneous editing, good riddance to it and the v4-edited-copy-FINAL-edited it rode in on. But there are a few actual competitors to Google Docs that have built-in versioning and simultaneous editing.

People complain so much and don't appreciate what they have.

Plus, I am supporting content creators better while avoiding ads.

I watch a great deal of YouTube, probably more than any other streaming service now. It's very usable with Premium.

Hard to agree on this one.

Most of the time when I’m the country side of Hungary and some Nordic countries Google Translator it’s essential for communication of foreigners that lives I those places. I can tell several anecdotes of international people being able to communicate with their local in-laws via Google Translator conversational feature; or even cases of people being able to read after a mechanical translation.

Almost all of these products are subpar garbage that would never survive in a competitive world. Almost none of them have done anything different or interesting or new for over a decade.

All these products do is use the search monopoly to take away the opportunity for us to have good versions of them.

What we're getting, in many of these cases, is an inferior product that drove out better competitors through Google search integration.

I consider Google Maps to be the best application ever created. Products like Google Mail, Calendar, Search, Chrome, Android are absolutely best in class. To call them inferior is laughable.

It's already too late, Google is already a monopolistic beast.

Waiting even more will only make things much worst with the a.i revolution.

If monopoly is attained over such segment failure of those products and services is less bad outcome.

I think there are better options than you suggest.

The whole doc suite can be had from Microsoft. Maybe folks need to ten bucks a month for something that used to be free, but it’s not like we fundamentally lose capabilities.

This is a completely different order of magnitude than banks going under, where people were impacted to the tune of thousands or millions of dollars when they lost their homes.

But on the business side, there are 6 million businesses that use Google Workspace to manage their company - their drives, documents, email, distribution lists, SSO, etc. They can't just flip a switch and migrate their entire company to another provider. It would take months to years for most companies to fully migrate. And that's for the products/services that there's an analogue for. Not every Google feature and product has a 1:1 replacement.

Back to the consumer side - it will be insane the number of things affected that nobody is thinking of. Off the top of my head, imagine the billions of people who have used Google SSO to sign up for random websites, and imagine that just stops working. And on top of that, they were all using Gmail. So now they can't login to all the websites they're signed up for, and they can't send a password reset, because their email no longer works. This is just a few of the thousands of issues there will be, for a large chunk of the planet.

Sounds like it'll be plenty profitable as a business in its own right, then.

> Off the top of my head, imagine the billions of people who have used Google SSO to sign up for random websites, and imagine that just stops working.

Why would it suddenly stop working? Lots of third party websites use Google (or Microsoft) SSO.

Given that Android gets to take a 30% cut of every app sale and in-app purchase, I think they'll survive.

DOJ is in the wrong when trying to open up search and ad, it should simply split Google up in the way I mentioned earlier. Search and advertising should be their own completely independent company. Mostly everyone wins that way: Competitors, the public , shareholders (one product line won't sink the rest, no "all your eggs in one basket" situation) and even majority shareholders.

More recently, LLMs will offer far better translation than anything else.

Also we don't need a hypothetic situation: Google already kill off a fair chunk of their tools and services, and alternatives rapidly come to fill their place.

Google's position largely exists because loss leaders tied against leveraging network effects – and as others have noted, many of their services are piss poor.

Google's loss won't be Apple's benefit in any meaningful way, the masses are with Google because it's free, and that's precisely what Apple isn't, and there isn't a great overlap in their services.

As a counterpoint I don't think the government's case is the right approach, they should be establishing the rules of the game at the legislative level, everyone needs to be affected by the potential changes, Google didn't form in a vacuum.

Start by splitting Google into two identical, full-stack companies, each with all the core products. A year later, split them again. Over time, you get 4 or 8 Googles competing across the board.

Employees could be assigned algorithmically to avoid chaos. This feels more like cell division than amputation—preserving the synergies while creating competition.

- one company gets control of gmail.com and the other has to register a new domain nobody has ever heard of.

- the companies share control of gmail.com and users see no changes.

Anyone who must upend their digital life (email, contacts, Android login, YouTube login, analytics, 'login with Google' around the web, payment data, etc. etc.) has a problem, the company which gets the domain has a massive advantage. If they share it how are they competing with each other, which one can change the Gmail experience or pricing scheme?

Similar with GCP, which split gets to run a big customer's services? The customer isn't going to pay twice for them to be cloned. Does the customer have to update all their logins and API keys and contracts and payment details?

Who owns all the Exabytes of pre-existing YouTube data and what happens to all the ISP peering and CDN server hosting contracts which run it?

What happens to the legal contracts, tax deals to have offices in certain countries, employee visas, paying the datacenter maintenance bills or office cleaning bills? If the employees sit next to each other and now one works for Google_A and keeps everything the same, the other works for Google_1 and has to move to a new office which hasn't been built yet... same problem as Gmail but internally, one company gets a big advantage the other gets a big disruption.

What happens when you algorithmically split employees 'to avoid chaos' but one company ends up with no senior people who have access to a certain system?

Since we didn't ask for our accounts to be copied to Google1, do hundreds of millions of us have send Google1 a 'delete my account' request to get rid of them? If I delete my account from GoogleA do they have access and legal right to delete the copy from Google1 as well? If they don't, does my deleted login to GoogleA still work backed by the copy of my account on Google1, because there is only one GMail.com domain and it has to keep working?

It's conceptually easier to say maps.google.com is under control of a new company, not subsidised by Google Advertising income, and it needs to compete with other map providers, even if technically it's hard to extract the accounts and data from Google's server infrastructure.

The world would change, but I think quite a bit less than you seem to think. To put it another way, the world was undeniably changed by Google, but the change has been done, and they're no longer necessary to keep the biggest changes from reverting. (I'd be more worried about SBCL development if google flights' backend couldn't find a new home -- the product itself has tons of competition + just going directly to airlines.)

In actual reality, of course, these things don't disappear overnight, making the pain of switching much, much less for businesses and individuals heavily dependent on some of these things. Even if "google collapsing within a few years" was likely (they have something like a third or more of annual operating expenses saved as cash on hand), a few years is more than enough time. If a business can migrate off of Salesforce or SAP (it can be expensive and time consuming but you can do it!), it can migrate off these.

If Google suddenly went out of business and 5% of xooglers started companies, we would see a gigantic burst of innovation in computing.

It’s not the whiteboard interviews that makes that possible. It’s the prestige (especially from a few years ago), job security and salary. And the opportunity to work with other smart people. Google has an excellent talent pool.

One of the most detestable parts of Google are all the people with a smarmy self entitled sense of elitism. I had someone get off of a call, and they showed utter contempt for the customer, because in their words, "if they were smart enough they would work here, and every one wants to work here, therefor they are dumb and I shouldn't have to deal with stupid people" What a fucker.

We went back and forth. He readily admitted he didn't know anything about rails. But his position was essentially that because he worked at google, he was smart enough to know rails is bad without needing to actually know anything about it. He was beyond needing any facts or experience to know it was bad.

It was amazing. I've never seen someone convince me they were an absolute tosser like that before. Nothing I could say would make him think twice about his stupid opinion.

But, Google isn't that one guy. They have 183 000 employees. Thats a really large number of people - more people than most of us will meet in our lifetime. They have some entitled wankers for sure. But also, some of the best people I've ever worked with are googlers or ex-googlers. I'm sure Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, etc are just the same. You don't really work with the hundreds of thousands of people at the company. You work with the dozen or so people on your team. At the end of the day, getting on with them is what actually counts.

If Waymo cannot make the case that it should exist or be funded by itself, then it’s just not viable. Kill it.

  - Google Mail - I dumped gmail after Google google'd GDomains and sold it to squarespace so I moved to proton

  - Google Drive - lol, this is a literal multibillion industry with dropbox, box.com, etc

  - Google Docs - lol, maybe high schoolers will finally use paper and pencil now? either way proton docs looks promising and perheps a new competitor will take the space

  - Google Groups - email listservs are still a thing, use that
 
 - Google Forms - this seems like a serious loss but surely there will be another competitor

  - Google Cloud - there are better ways to do on prem now, either way you can use AWS or Azure

  - Google OAuth - ok this one will be a big loss but also people need to get it together that google isnt mail.

  - Google Search - this product has been going through a collapse since pre covid give me a break

  - Google Analytics - lol
 
 - Chrome - web standards have been cannibalized by google already so like who cares at this point. just switch to Firefox

  - Android - another major loss but it still suffers from fragmentation, hopefully Chinese competitors fill the void?

  - Android Auto - lol 

  - Fitbit - lol didn't they just release an update where you cant export your data anymore

  - Google Fi - another MVNO that may die out? I mean cricket is still good right?

  - Google Fiber - a genuine loss and hope they will be treated with care but probably not given the large legacy telcos that will acquire it

  - Google Flights - another major loss? but even as someone who loves flying it is becoming an untenable situation given the current regime in the White House and ATCs getting knocked out

  - Google Translate - another major loss but this can be solved with LLMs
  - Google Pay - lol

  - Waymo - lol

Android? It's not a big loss. It's no longer the open platform it used to be. Hardware remote attestation will get us locked out of every app if we "tamper" with our devices. It's just a shitty version of iOS now so who cares?

It's beyond stupid. Everything is gonna require this. Banks want it because fraud. Streaming apps want it because copyright infringement. Ordinary apps want it because advertising. If we must be in some walled garden, might as well choose the better kept one instead of the Google nonsense.

This is how computing freedom dies. There's absolutely no point to free software if we can't run it.

I can see most of these being reasonable standalone businesses. And if they can't be they'll die and get replaced by one that is better.

In aggregate it won't even hurt to transition to that: consumers are, in aggregate, already paying for these things in the form of increased spending on unrelated products they were sold by the ads and increased prices on goods (because their suppliers pay Google monopolistic prices for ads).

Not because they're not a monopoly in ads. No no no. They want us to believe they're a good monopolist that can't be broken up because they're giving us so many good things. Don't let it sway you for a second that Google is proven to hinder competition and raise ad prices.

I don't buy it.

If Google is an ad business, then each of those non-ad products they're giving away for free, supported by the money from the ad machine, is another market they're gaining dominance in by leveraging their position in another market. That's textbook monopolist behavior.

Maps? Switch to the many alternatives. Android? Now that they've got hardware remote attestation all of the "openness" has been lost so it's become nothing but a worse version of iOS. Only the loss of gmail would be painful and the suffering would not last long.

Let it happen.

> In the best case, killing these will force consumers to move to Apple.

Break Apple up too. Don't forget about Meta and Amazon and all the others.

> Apple has no alternative for much of the Business-focused products, so that will take considerable time for companies to adopt alternatives.

Not a big deal. Adapt or go out of business. Better yet, price it in by adapting ahead of time: ditch Google now.

Moving to Proton Mail with my own domain was much easier than I'd anticipated. It's great.

> The whole web will shrink

Welp. Sounds like the web is gonna go back to its roots. Sign me up.

> huge swaths of the worldwide economy will disappear

This distorted economy that rewards total nonsense just because it attracts attention?

Let it disappear.

Things are just too screwed up and I don't think they're ever gonna be fixed unless something biblical happens. This might just be it.

That is why the banks should have been broken up into smaller banks long before we reached that point, and it is why Google should have been broken up long ago. The only way to prevent the situation you describe is to never allow any single entity to become so important to so many people.

It's like planting a tree. The best time to break up a big company is twenty years ago (before it became so big). The second-best time is now.

A world without Google would not be a world with less disposable income for regular people, but it might be a world with less disposable junk.

Even if you discount the effectiveness of ads (which seems foolish given how many people have so much staked on them working), the eye-watering prices Google charges for them get directly passed to the consumer in the form of higher prices.

Monopolies are rarely if ever good for consumers, but some monopolies are better than others at offloading the responsibility for their harm onto other businesses.

If the argument is "more ads = more junk" then the argument is essentially "my values are more important than other peoples values". I'm also anti-consumerism, but if someone sees an ad and finds a product intriguing enough to purchase, they believe that thing might have value in their life. We might not agree, but we should not have the ability to control what other people find value in. I think this is equivalent to an argument of coercing people to conform to our values instead of convincing them to have our values.

More insidiously, the proliferation of this type of "junk" crowds out other business models, meaning that increasingly people can't even "test" whether they would prefer something else. It's basically the tyranny of small decisions. It's not just a matter of "I will trade you five minutes of my eyeball time for 6 months of email", because every such transaction increase the likelihood that in the future you will find yourself with no option other than to engage in such a transaction in order to, say, pay your electric bill.

It's my claim that my viewpoint is actually in accord with a majority of people's values, in the sense that if we considered an alternate universe with less ad junk, more people in that universe would look at ours and say "Wow, I'm glad I don't live there" than vice versa. It's just that there are lots of clever boiling-frog ways to get people to act against their own values without their being fully aware of it. The mere fact that something has happened doesn't mean most people actually wanted it to happen, or are happy it happened, or even realize they would in fact be happier if it hadn't happened.

I assume you're a fan of GDPR banners?

>my viewpoint is actually in accord with a majority of people's values

It's not hard to install some privacy and adblocking extensions in your browser.

I think you're still doing that thing where you assume others share your values.

The argument has nothing to do with values or imposing them on others, it's simply this: These things are not and never were free. Google wants you to think they're free, but either the ads are effective at driving revenue and consumers are paying for Google's products in the form of increased consumption or Google is a parasite that lies to businesses about the efficacy of their ads and consumers are paying for Google's products in the form of the parasitic Google tax. Most likely it's a bit of both.

Either way, Google offering these products for "free" did not have a positive effect on consumer wallets and paid solutions emerging to replace Google if it actually does dissolve will not have a negative effect.

I'm fine seeing ads. I wouldn't pay commercial rates for the services I use.

I find ads maybe 20% useful and for me that's a good deal.

The point of the poster above is that you're ultimately paying for your free email with a Google tax on every carton of milk and every smartphone you buy. That is, if advertising were banned and you had to pay for Gmail, most of your other purchases would be just a little bit cheaper, because they wouldn't be paying for Google ads to support your free email.

And this is just basic finance: the advertising budget has to be paid for somehow, so it is priced into the goods themselves (either through higher prices or lower quality, of course).

Modern companies have become very, very good at making consumers believe they are getting a good deal by trading an obvious benefit for the possibility of a hidden harm. The type of data tracked by internet companies is only one form of this.

Economics is the distribution of finite goods amongst infinite desires.

It’s the objective way to optimize an economy given some normative set up.

In the case of advertising, those untrue things are usually "X is a much bigger problem than I thought" and "Y will solve problem X and make my life a lot easier". That you can convince people of these things doesn't make them true in all cases. Washing machines are extremely useful; egg cookers, very much unnecessary. Yet commercials will often look the same for both kinds of products (not for washing machines today, obviously, as the case for why they are useful to have has long since become obvious, and commercials are mostly about which brand is better).

This is an often overlooked thing in discussions about advertising. A major part of the propaganda effort is not "which brand of X should I buy", it's "I need to own an X". That's where they lie to people the most, and convince them to waste money, not on an inferior product, but one that shouldn't have existed at all.

If Google can use targeting advertising to identify customers who eat a lot of eggs, and tell them about the existence of egg cookers, that's a win for everyone except the chickens.

But even if you're right about this being useful to some people, advertising is not the right tool for discovering this: advertising will always exaggerate any positive of something and downplay any negative. The goal of advertising, and the incentive, is not to neutrally inform people about products they might use. It's to convince people to buy this product by any means necessary. If it weren't explicitly outlawed, advertisers would probably add "enlarges your penis and cures cancer" to every single product ad.

Maybe they've got a big kitchen.

>advertising is not the right tool for discovering this

What is the right tool? How would new products find customers without advertising? I think any alternative would be much slower and less effective.

>advertising will always exaggerate any positive of something and downplay any negative.

Customers know this. You're underrating how smart customers are.

>If it weren't explicitly outlawed, advertisers would probably add "enlarges your penis and cures cancer" to every single product ad.

You really think people are stupid and they need someone like you to protect them from their stupidity, huh? Of course advertisers wouldn't do such a thing. It would be terrible for brand equity.

I'm not sure, but I don't think that speed is a major concern here. Even if it becomes harder to introduce new product categories, that would be a small price to pay for stopping the huge waste of money (and CO2) that advertising tries to induce.

Most likely, professional product review sites are a better solution, with a good enough legal framework to prevent them from becoming direct advertising or attack sites. Ultimately, what you need is an impartial expert trying a product and reporting their experience.

> You really think people are stupid and they need someone like you to protect them from their stupidity, huh?

No, I just think systematically lying to people is a bad thing and should be legally discouraged. False advertising is a huge problem, even with laws that try to punish it.

And sure, maybe they wouldn't put those specific claims on every product, but you can bet that without false advertising laws, you'd see much wilder claims in every single ad than you do today.

What does this mean?

> Even if you discount the effectiveness of ads (which seems foolish given how many people have so much staked on them working), the eye-watering prices Google charges for them get directly passed to the consumer in the form of higher prices.

But then...why is anyone buying them if they don't work? How do you run this experiment without Google in to show that hand-curated ads on TV etc would've been a better, cheaper way to do ads in the long run than automated ones?

For consumers ads are a net negative. They inflate the cost of the product and favor incumbents and monopolists to retain that position.

Ads certainly work on average and Google has positioned itself in a way that they can extract much of the created value for businesses who buy them.

We are getting them for free. What a strange point to try to make.

It might help if you read the rest of my post first.

That's not necessarily a bad thing, if they're getting value from those purchases.

Plus, maybe they just would've learned about the product through some other channel, e.g. by watching TV. Which has more positive externalities: Google, or TV?

Free email existed before Google - Hotmail and Yahoo come to mind immediately, but there were plenty of others. You also got a free email address from your ISP - even AOL users had email.

None of their services are free. You just pay for them in other ways, even if you don’t realize it.

The whole “attention” thing is just a proxy.

Finally, I have, in fact, benefitted personally from products that were advertised to me on the basis of user tracking data so a bit ambivalent about the anti-tracking argument.

dropbox was free synced storage several years before google drive

youtoube was an independent free ad supported video site before google bought it

there are a million and one free website hosting services

Gmail came in with 1 GB storage and grouping emails as conversations. To me, both of these aspects were revolutionary, and other email providers shortly followed suit.

* 1GB storage in 2004 to 15GB storage 21 years later suggests that something vital has stalled. Every other storage metric (price of RAM per MB, price of hard drives per MB, price of cloud storage per MB) has improved 100 fold over the same time period[1,2].

1: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/historical-cost-of-comput... 2: https://jcmit.net/memoryprice.htm

Which freemail service isn't ad- or surveillance-supported?

> suggests that something vital has stalled

Why does it have to be a technology-driven limit? I dare say Google thinks that anyone with more than 15GB of email is a serious enough user to pay for it.

The original marketing was the the storage would grow forever, and you could believe it. Google was riding the an incredible high from smashing out what felt like constant Amazing New Things throughout the noughties. In fact, when they originally made the claim, back when Don't Be Evil was still the motto and they hadn't bought DoubleClick, I'm sure they believed it. By the time the final upgrade (or rather joining, of 5GB photos/Drive to 10GB mail) to 15GB came round in 2013, there was definitely a hint of the horns in the hairline.

Example: you can't create a new email label in the Android client. You have to log on to email in a browser and do it there. This was true when smartphones were a niche way of connecting to email, and it's still true today.

People weren't paying for email before gmail. It was predated by hotmail, Yahoo mail, and innumerable free online email offerings by small players. Being free wasn't even a selling point for gmail; the selling point was that they gave you a lot of storage.

Speaking of things that happened before Google, Yahoo Maps and Firefox are older than Google Maps and Chrome. And... Google Flights is a Google acquisition, not a product that they developed.

And then...

> Can you imagine how the world will be affected when these go away?

> Google Fi

> Google Fiber

> Google Pay

Yes, no one will notice.

> Google Groups

It already has gone away. Also, Usenet is something else older than Google.

> Google OAuth

Eliminating "sign in with [popular site]" would be a hugely positive change.

and google literally acquired and then killed deja news. If anything this is yet another argument for the antitrust.

google bought youtube 19 years ago because their own attempt was doing poorly and youtube was booming right after its founding, they didn't win in the space because they were good at it, they bought success in a way that probably shouldn't have been allowed

you're acting like google invented ad supported online services

the problem is now that google doesn't have to be the best any more, they can be third best at nearly everything but still own the market share because they can afford to give things away for free which ruins competition

And that would be fine. To me this is like saying "if we had jailed those meth makers and dealers 20 years ago, all these meth labs today would never have existed". If these services cannot exist without a business model built around transparent, bounded transactions (e.g., no hidden data harvesting), then they should not exist. The problem is precisely that Google and others of its ilk have essentially gotten millions of people addicted to "free" services whose true costs are hidden.

> The reason Google is the size it is today is because it provided better services at better prices than all the competitors.

No, they've just been better at hiding the costs, exploiting legal loopholes, and exploiting their privileged position to raise barriers to entry for other participants.

So yeah, I think the world would be a better place if they had not been developed by Google.

People didn't need them 20 years ago, so why do they need them now?

> "They are all FREE too, mind you."

No proprietary software is free. You either pay with your money (you do this with games, for example), or you pay with your data (and this is what you do with Google). Sometimes with both (you do this with Microsoft).

They still can be broken up. As for not being competitive on the global market - neither is regular labor compared to slave labor. And just like companies employing slave labor are (or should be) barred from the US market, so can companies that are too large. Solving such prisoner dilemmas is exactly what government is for.

That fantasy doesn't seem to take into account the specific realities of current day.

The consequences should be weighed and considered, but shrugging and letting Google keep on keeping on because it's too big to fail isn't a viable option.

When I compare the cost cutting happening in my supermarket over pennies and then compare it to the exuberant prices at airports, festival venues and sport stadiums it is clear how much many industries are ripping customers off.

Note that a legal monopoly is not the same as the extreme simplification of "zero other options". "In law, a monopoly is a business entity that has significant market power, that is, the power to charge overly high prices, which is associated with unfair price raises." [1]

"In United States v. Google LLC, the federal government alleges that Google has unfairly hindered competition in the search market through anti-competitive deals with Apple as well as mobile carriers. The government alleges that, as a result of these practices, Google has accumulated control of around 88% of the domestic search engine market.

In doing so, the government alleges, Google has additionally monopolized the search advertising market at the expense of competing services. Per the government's estimation, Google has been able to accumulate control of over 70% of the search advertising market. As a result of lack of competition, Google has been able to over-charge advertisers versus what they would pay in a competitive environment." [2]

Statcounter seems to align quite closely with the government's assertion. [3] Extra creepily, it appears to be even a hair worse globally, where Bing is less used (not that I like Bing or MS either). [4] But there is no international framework I'm aware of to handle global-scale monopolies, so that's outside the scope of the suit.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2... [3] https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/un... [4] https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share

  - Google Maps
  - Google Mail
  - Google Drive
  - Google Docs
  - Google Groups
  - Google Forms
  - Google Cloud
  - Google OAuth
  - Google Analytics
  - Android
  - Android Auto
  - Fitbit
  - Google Fi
  - Google Fiber
  - Google Flights
  - Google Translate
  - Google Pay
  - Waymo

Android: they lost a court case over this one that has lots of details if you care to look.

The rest are a weird mix of paid services that should be fine to stand up on their own or not even products at all (OAuth).

If enough users choose Chrome willingly on the desktop to make it the majority, do you think unbundling is going to help some scrappy startup hosting video at scale with all of the associated cost is going to arise instead of everyone just downloading YouTube?

Google Drive has plenty of competition and it’s not even the majority.

If Chrome was able to compete in a level playing field, then so should the other Google services. You seem to believe that Google makes an effort to tie together its services because they are stupid and don't realise they are not gaining anything from it.

Standard Oil bought or bankrupt competitive refineries, pipeline companies, regional railroads, even mom&pop gas stations & groceries often at considerable costs to ensure no part of the oil supply chain was profitable for its competitors.

There is absolutely nothing that Google has that can’t be avoided - or that’s even best in breed. Even Google Search hasn’t been good in years. My default search engine is now ChatGPT with web search.

Also, let's dispense with inappropriate jabs such as referring to other perspectives as "fantasy".

I think GP was arguing for exactly what I asserted, and it's a literal fantasy to imagine doing something 20 years ago.

I'd like to point out I wasn't being dismissive, at all. Sorry you read into it that way.

Perhaps you've never heard the expression about "The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now." It's an aphorism, absolutely not literal. [1] Additionally, even if it were intended literally, which it clearly was not, saying it should have been done 20 years ago is not the same as fantasizing. It also obviously concludes that it should be done now, which is not fantasy.

I didn't say you were dismissive. If you have valid points, you should be able to make them without rewording everything into something else that you can tear down. That's called a straw man argument. "... the informal fallacy of refuting an argument different from the one actually under discussion, while not recognizing or acknowledging the distinction" [2]

[1] https://english.stackexchange.com/a/603725 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

You are far too intelligent to be engaging with a simpleton like me. I suggest you peddle your wares elsewhere.

Anyway, I've done what I set out to, which is leave something for readers to think about. Changing your mind is not on my priority list, some people just can't be reasoned with. Facts are what they are, regardless of your acceptance or lack thereof. Say whatever further mean-spirited personal attacks make you feel like you "won" here, since that's apparently important to you. Go ahead and get the last word in. I'll leave you to it.

I was not, as I explained in another comment.

That's why we need anti-trust in the first place.

The problem is that once the monopolist is entrenched and all competition killed off, those cheap bundles stop being cheap. Hence why you need someone to take the long term view and nip these kinds of things in the bud. A democratically elected government is the best avenue for that.

Moreover, it seems to me these laws ought to strengthened to make executives/decision makers even more accountable.

The people who made Google a monopoly aren't stupid and knew full well what they were doing. They should not be able to hide behind Google's corporate structure and also should be penalized for their bad behavior.

Moreover, CEOs, directors, boards etc. should also be held accountable even when they are not directly responsible (like captains of ships are). This would have the effect of ensuring that those in charge would mandate an ethics and behavior policy for the company and ensure that all employees were aware of it, and violation thereof would result in dismissal.

Thst said, to be fair, you can't blame management for the unacceptable behavior of a wayward or stupid employee. Commonsense must prevail and laws must allow for such things.

Google, as a search provider, has billions of eyeballs a day. They will still have ad revenue from that. Their basic business model of surveillance capitalism is intact.

It just says they can’t control both sides of the ad market. If history is any lesson (the AT&T breakup specifically), divesting ad would create a more competitive ad market and Google the search engine would make more money by playing multiple suppliers against each other, fostering competition.

From a principles perspective, if feels like too severe of a remedy and I don’t support it. But “if AT&T is broken up nobody will ever be able to make a phone call again” is too extreme to take seriously. Money follows value. Google has plenty of value outside of its monopoly position.

What a shame.

Opens popcorn, unfolds garden chair

To you the only implied solution is to just let Google eating all the money in the market?

Most of the products on your list are products that are or can be profitable on their own and have profitable competitors. Google could be broken up and Apple wouldn’t just take over the world as you assert.

Google wouldn’t just magically go out of business just because of the scenario you describe. They’d still command a huge part of ad spend because they’re a huge brand name. Even if competitors get a much-deserved leg up, it would take a whole lot of sustained momentum to unseat them.

google is killing that themselves.

- Google Fi - Google Fiber - Google Flights - Google Translate - Google Pay

won't miss these

How many potentially world dominating mega-corps are there? Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, Musk-corps, OpenAI, Nvidia...

It seems like any reasonable rejigging of things would require attacks on multiple sources of monopoly. And any other attack on a given player is just going to strengthening other players.

Google is exactly the monopoly we need less of. These arguments for it are uninformed. You don't need any of these products. In fact, when Google is out of the way it opens the door for new and better options. Google's products aren't great. They're good enough. And they're only good enough to keep users in the platform to continue to siphon off user data and serve as a conduit for their true business: ads.

I'm not convinced making the ad tech sector more competitive would prompt that outcome but, "It would disrupt mature products" isn't a compelling argument to allow the existence of a monopoly.

Google is a monopoly, they exert monopoly power and enjoy monopoly pricing.

I think the more likely outcome would be more dynamic products under smaller bannerheads.

This argument was stronger a couple of years ago. But search is being commoditized at such a rapid pace that it's not clear that this is true anymore.

When analyst measure companies moats, they measure their strength in years/decades. How many years would you give Google Search at this point?

Whether AI and search are similar enough to call them competitors, at least right now, is highly debatable. I don't know about other people, but I for one have definitely not started asking chatbots questions instead of looking for informed, human-authored content.

EDIT: Note that I mean downward trend in total, not the percentages shown by statcounter. Statcounter does have a separate chatbot page though, if you're interested in that. Still doesn't answer your totally valid question of how many people are chatting instead of searching, though. Maybe Google or ChatGPT could tell us :)

1. In terms of US monopoly status, the USA chart would be more relevant than worldwide (also tangential but is Baidu really that weak in China or is there just no data?)

2. Google certainly has a stranglehold on mobile search (unsurprising given that both Apple and Android use Google search). In USA desktops Bing still isn't that strong, but it is 10% and not very low single digits. It makes sense to me that search volume has moved to mobile. It's super convenient to search quick things on phones wherever you happen to be vs finding a computer. But if for example a remedy was to essentially ban Google from Apple's mobile devices then it would really move the chart quickly given Apple's dominance in US mobile marketshare.

3. The biggest issue is those are percentages and not volumes. If search becomes irrelevant because people switch to other modalities it's not going to appear as a decline in these charts.

Less and less people are using search engines to shop, ex:Amazon makes >$57B a year from search ads, but also look at Temu and Shein which are mostly glorified product search platforms.

No one is searching for "funny videos" when you can just open Instagram and Tiktok.

The only real unique thing that search engines can do is queries that are not directly commercial (e.g. education, information seeking, etc.) and competition is insanely intense (w/ ChatGPT, Perplexity, etc) there.

Aside, ChatGPT is horrendous at filtering web search.

What is monopoly pricing?

And also: breaking everything else off of the ad company is the obvious answer to the ad monopoly. Every other part of Google exists to feed its advertising monopoly and maintain its edge there.

Other parts of Google(mostly good for the world like maps and youtube and search) can't survive without ads.

And while Trump may set tariffs based on his mood at any given moment, this case isn’t a whim. I think a lot of thought is being given to what to do about Google. We may or may not like the results, but that doesn’t mean it was slapdash.

Then how do they still manage to mistakenly deport the wrong people and have to cover it with a smoke screen of lies? If this is what their "careful and thoughtful" planning looks like, I'd hate to see what their recklessness looks like, because it all looks like the same level of shit show from my angle.

It’s always a mistake to assume that people are stupid or incompetent just because you don’t believe in what they are doing. It looks reckless to you because that’s what most of the media in the country tells you, if you had a different Information diet, it would not. That’s why I intentionally read sources slanted in the other direction.

Epistemology has never been harder than it is right now

Whatever Google stopped tracking they did because of regulation not out of user backlash or goodwill.

Why should they siphon data to a third parties when they themselves want the data, and its a competitive advantage to keep that data for themselves.

What we are seeing is chrome becoming the new IE where alternatives browsers are not longer allowed on the internet. "You’re using a web browser that is not supported. In order to use [Insert website], please download Chrome for the best experience. Download Chrome here!". (https://www.datanyze.com/browser-support/ie/index.html)

Like Manifest V3, which explicitly makes it harder to strip out Google's own ad products on websites you visit?

> without Google all that BS would get bundled in the browser.

Or maybe it wouldn't. There are already lots of other browsers that don't.

You crush up the bitter pill in a spoonful of jam to make it easier to digest.

> Is apple doing similar things with Safari for nefarious reasons?

Yes? Look at what they tried to get away with with PWAs as an example.

This is illegal for a reason. It does NOT benefit consumers to make it impossible for anybody to compete with you. This is anti-competitive, not competition.

After all there's a reason people here care about PiHole and such, because ISP's are doing such shenanigans. Or TV makers peeking at pixels so they can phone home to report on what you're watching.

When it comes to Google, we already find ourselves dealing with worse.

Maybe we'll get something from Mozilla eventually - but I'm not holding my breath. I suspect it'll only happen if there's a massive awareness campaign that produces a demand signal for it in the general public (as opposed to just tech nerds).

it's not clear to me that an ad monopoly makes products cost more, even without getting into ads distracting the whole workforce

are expensive ads higher quality? but are they therefore pushed more to justify the cost?

does the higher cost improve the information conveyed?

I disagree:

    1) My wife and I have a FREE Gmail account we use for home and other combined interests.
    2) We watch all our streaming (movies, docs, etc.) and TV (Tablo TV DVR for free OTA) using FREE Chrome on Linux laptops in our LR, MBR and one for ambiance that runs all day between the kitchen and LR visible across both rooms showing relaxing aquarium and bird videos. We pay for YouTube Premium and Amazon Prime which we watch on Chrome and Netflix is free with T-Mobile. All courtesy of Chrome and Linux. Chrome is the leading browser. We don't want Edge as our main browser, even though it uses Chrome underneath it, like Windows 11 (which we also don't use) is loaded with Microsoftie crap and garbage.
    3) We have individual FREE Gmail accounts for our individual interests.
    4) I have my own FREE YouTube account for tech videos.
    5) We use only FREE Google Maps, the other map services suck in comparison.
    6) We pay $2 a month for Google Drive because it works well (although there is still no Linux client) it works well in the browser (any browser). Amazon's deal for uploading files doesn't work as fluently, tried it. Microsoft OneDrive works OK but only for large single compressed files in my experience, it gets confused with small files and especially borks .git folders.
    7) Google Search, even in the age of AI (or what we are all calling "AI") is still the  best search engine.
    8) There is no way I will ever use an iPhone. Microsoft got out of the phone market which is great since the only thing I can't stand more than Apple products like Mac (which I am forced to use at work because our COO is a die hard Apple fanboy).. is Windows. That leaves Android which has worked extremely well and is technically FREE except the two biggest vendors are Google and Samsung and in this case, Google sucks because we've had several Google phones and a tablet and all quit working too soon, became useless too soon or batteries failed too soon and Samsung is even worse than Microsoft at loading crap and garbage on their phones.
    9) We pay for everything with FREE Google Pay, it works extremely well and doesn't cost us a dime to use.

I'm not convinced that any of these would change for the worse. Maybe we will start using more content and services that aren't made by Google. That sounds good to me. Of course, the overall situation will be improved the most by breaking up Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon, too.

The fact that you and I are happily using Linux is great evidence that software made collaboratively is better than software made competitively.

Maybe an uncertain future isn't certainly bleak.

https://searchengineland.com/google-ads-search-and-chrome-bo...

No, they didn't. They explained why breaking Google up would kill all of those "free" services.

"Google is a monopoly, they exert monopoly power and enjoy monopoly pricing."

No, they aren't. There are a multitude of other ad platforms available for anyone to use. Google has no power to stop them. "Most desirable service" does not constitute a monopoly in an open market. Monopolies can only be created by government dictate, like old AT&T or modern cable companies.

By virtually every definition I can find, a monopoly is a an entity that functions as the sole, or effectively the primary, provider of a good or service in some market. That seems to perfectly describe Google’s position wrt web-based advertising. Do other ad-platforms exist? Absolutely. Do they exhibit the kind of market dominance or control that Google does? Nowhere close.

> Google has no power to stop them.

Fact? I’d argue that Google’s sheer size and dominance means they don’t need to stop them. Potential competitors simply don’t stand a chance given Google’s size, number of resources, and reach. Explain how that’s not a significant factor into Google “power to stop” a potential rival?

It's not a binary. By distilling the entire concept to a dualist perspective, you have evaporated most of the concept itself.

And you’re just naming random services most of which are already paid products like Google Cloud.

That gives users the impression that other providers are unreliable, and further bolsters their monopoly.

No, they are not, by historical standard. When the Standard Oil Trust was broken up in 1911, it controlled nearly 80% of gasoline market in the US and kept prices too low, so no one could enter the market.

Exxon, Mobile, Chevron, Texaco, Amoco, Gulf oil, and 30 other oil companies emerged. Today only 4 are still around, because anti-trust enforcement has been guted by both parties since WWII. Google babies will merge and raise, yet again.

The monopoly is possibly self-defeating at this point. Maybe the reason for the Google graveyard is that too big to fail has somehow turned into too big to succeed.

Today I hear often people asking me "What's your Gmail" and that is fucking dangerous!

I 100% admit everything above has value and has decreased friction for interconecting people and internet services but the idea is that should one corporation control everything listed there?

And IMO no. Microsoft had the same for them in the 90's and while I can see a rush into Microsoft and Apple Ecosystems, it will also give a window for new companies, new people to create products to fill in the gaps created by google being forced to spin off it's ecosystem.

Even if that were to be true and comes to pass then who is to blame? Clearly both Google and Government and its regulators who let Google get out of hand and allowed it to violate monopoly laws for so long when it's been obvious for years.

OK, what's to be done? You can't allow the law to continue to be violated especially now that everybody knows that it has been—if you do then you are giving all and sundry carte blanche to ignore laws as they see fit. That's a recipe for the break down of law and order.

If the Government legislates to give Google exemptions or some form of special privilege then it's not only further entrenching Google's monopoly but also further weakening democracy by favoring the rich and powerful (they'd be further privileged).

Now let's assume some compromise or whitewashing where Google is restructured or bits sold off without strong financial sanctions/fines etc.—ones that actually hurt shareholders' stocks significantly then no one will be happy. Google won't be happy because its already optimized its business structure for maximum income and a restructure would reduce revenues, and those who've been hurt would claim it was too little too late and they'd cry foul.

Yes, government has to take much of the blame but so do shareholders and Google executives. If little is done and there are no penalties that actually hurt the pocket of the perpetrators to a significant extent then it'll be back business as usual in short order. We need strong penalties to set an example to the world that violating the law won't be tolerated.

I'm not a Google shareholder but if I were I'd be selling my shares just in case.

Now with that in mind give me your solutions.

Even if that were to be true and comes to pass then who is to blame? Clearly both Google and Government and its regulators who let Google get out of hand and allowed it to violate monopoly laws for so long when it's been obvious for years.

OK, what's to be done? You can't allow the law to continue to be violated especially now that everybody knows that it has been—if you do then you are giving all and sundry carte blanche to ignore laws as they see fit. That's a recipe for the break down of law and order.

If the Government legislates to give Google exemptions or some form of special privilege then it's not only further entrenching Google's monopoly but also further weakening democracy by favoring the rich and powerful (they'd be further privileged).

Now let's assume some compromise or whitewashing where Google is restructured or bits sold off without strong financial sanctions/fines etc.—ones that actually hurt shareholders' stocks significantly then no one will be happy. Google won't be happy because its already optimized its business for maximum income and a restructure of any significant size would reduce revenues, and those who've been hurt by Google's monopoly would claim it was too little too late and they'd cry foul.

Yes, Government has to take much of the blame but so do shareholders and Google executives. If little is done and there are no penalties that actually hurt the pockets of the perpetrators to a significant extent then it'll be back business as usual in short order. We need strong penalties to set an example to the world that violating the law won't be tolerated. Perhaps the dominoes have to fall to right things.

I'm not a Google shareholder but if I were I'd be selling my shares just in case.

Now with that in mind give me your solutions.

Really the only things that I'd worry about are Google Search, Maps and Gmail, as they don't seem like they would work if they weren't free to use and I don't see a way to monetize them. It might be interesting to also put Google Maps under the same umbrella as Android, so it could be jointly owned by the phone manufacturers who ultimately benefit from its existence. Gmail could surely survive for quite a few years by optimizing their costs like crazy and burning Workspace profits.

The rest of the things you listed have existing competition, so it could probably survive and if not, alternatives exist.

The lesson that we should have learned from 2008 is that businesses should never be allowed to reach that kind of size. Google should have been prohibited from the M&A that created such a behemoth.

  - OpenStreetMap, MapLibre
  - GMX, ProtonMail, Tutanota
  - Nextcloud, Seafile
  - Collabora, Etherpad, CryptPad
  - Discourse, Flarum
  - LimeSurvey Framaforms
  - Nextcloud, OpenStack, Hetzner, OVHcloud, Wix
  - Keycloak, Gluu, eduID, SAML2, OAUTH
  - Qwant, DuckDuckGo
  - Matomo, Plausible Analytics
  - Firefox, Brave
  - LineageOS, /e/ OS
  - OpenAuto, AGL (Automotive Grade Linux)
  - Open Health, Gadgetbridge
  - Fairphone, Various MVNOs (Mobile Virtual Network Operators)
  - Community Fiber Networks, Local ISPs (various)
  - Skyscanner, Kiwi.com, Amadeus
  - LibreTranslate, Apertium, Mistral
  - CB, Swish, Klarna, SumUp, Revolut (UK)
  - EasyMile, Navya, Aurora, Apriv, BMW, Daimler, Renault, Volvo, VW, Oxbotica, Zenuity

Mozilla is dependent on Google money.

>Brave

Chromium-based (another engine monopoly on itself) and crypto connections (if you're not a fan of them).

+ OnlyOffice

> Qwant, DuckDuckGo

+ Mojeek

> Matomo, Plausible Analytics

+ Wide Angle Analytics, Simple Analytics

> Firefox, Brave

+ Vivaldi

> GMX, ProtonMail, Tutanota

+ Infomaniak, Mailo, Runbox

and tons of others

Who's gonna tell him?

If they happen to disappear tomorrow it would cause a minor disruption in the markets, but the world would quickly adjust, and smaller companies would have a chance at competing. Until a new monopoly pops up, and governments are "forced" to break them up again. The circle of capitalism.

The problem with monopolies is that a company like Google, by dominating one space (be it Maps tech or Advertising marketshare), it can use that as a moat to start dominating other areas, even at a loss (which is what it has done starting from Google Search which it never really monetized as a business but instead jumped into advertising even though it was set up because founders hated online ads).

It's tricky to stop this from the get go, because you want to encourage investment into different markets from established companies.

Free markets are known not to be able to stop this, which is why we've got anti-monopoly laws all around the world.

People have valuable data? Sell it to a middle man.

People want to display targeted ads? Sell it to a middle man.

People want to buy targeted ads? Buy it from a middle man.

Not everything consolidated into a single company.

The whole infrastructure and market already exists, the problem is that Google has a monopoly on certain data and it’s abusing its position.

They could join up and finance Android development, and presumably Android Auto too.

Yes, there would be a disruption, a consortium likely isn't going to work as efficiently as google did, but it won't be Android's death.

Google Drive has competitors (Dropbox, OneDrive), so it to be possible to operate without sponsorship from other business units.

And so son...

>In the best case, killing these will force consumers to move to Apple

Then Apple will be broken up.

It often kills competition. Absent cross subsidies from the gusher of ad money, maybe Opera, Firefox, Garmin would have a chance to compete again in the browser and GPS world. Maybe Chinese companies that develop entry-level Docs alternatives (Lark) would enter the Docs market more favorably.

The alternative is not that all of Google's services stop existing, but that competition gets restored on a more even playing field.

Look outside. Competitors to _all_ of those product segments exist, there is a huge amount of untapped value waiting to be provided to consumers! They’re limping along, because there is a monopoly in the market distorting prices to maintain their market share.

“But just think: wherever will you get high quality oil if not for Standard! Think of the global economy!”

From your list, I (+family, circle of friends and most non-StartUp businesses) only use Android so yes, I can imagine a life without these.

Bring it on.

Power and Responsibility - those must be 2 sides of the same coin, or very very bad things happen.

The mindset of 'too big to fail', i.e. if things go badly wrong there, government must bail it out for the sake of avoiding seriously deleterious effects on the wider populace, more or less nixes out the responsibility part of the chain there, at least for 'the company' as a whole. At least, the way bailouts have so far been done with banks, which is basically: Give em money, _possibly_ require some sacrifices amongst the board or c-level execs, but the company continues effectively independently.

And, wouldn'tcha know it, bad things happen when you do that.

"Too big to fail" is, to me anyway, all I need to hear. If that's true: Kill that company. Right now. And do a governmental post mortem on how government could have failed so badly as to have just let it happen without writing out laws and regulations to stop it. Too big to fail is a really, really bad thing to ever happen. The only thing that should ever be too big to fail is the government itself. Where there certainly _is_ a balance between power and responsibility: If government fucks up badly enough, very bad things happen to what it represents, namely, the people.

Therefore then, if the consequences are indeed as gigantic as you say they are, then there are only two options:

1. Bite the bullet, split up google, suffer the consequences, and then find ways to break up any other companies that are 'too big to fail', and find out ways to write laws to avoid it from happening again.

2. Government writes some laws to eminent-domain it, so that it becomes part of government, so that bailouts can be done without breaking the balance between power and responbility.

Of course, given the current political climate in the US, that will never happen. But logic dictates that it should.

At any rate: Yeah, it's going to hurt. And it should be done.

Your final 3 paragraphs are missing the mark entirely. They just do not make any logical sense.

If google gets completely asploded by law, you think they all move to apple and apple will turn itself into a monopoly? After it just saw government make a meal out of google? That seems epically stupid, but then a judge just more or less literally called Tim Cook epically stupid for deciding to just flaunt a court judgement, so, sure, let's say Tim Cook did not learn his lesson and remains blind to this. Then.. government will make a meal of apple just the same. Once the first 'tech company too big to fail breaking monopoly laws gets thrown through a meat grinder' has concluded, the meat grinder is built and functional, so (threatening to) toss apple through it is easy at that point, relatively speaking.

I also think you're underestimating the viability of the web and the pernicious brokenness of where we are at today. If google ads just collapses overnight, however will people find stores? That's your argument? That it will simply be impossible to find the online presence of some store or other? I.. doubt that.

A whole company will just disappear because gmail failed? Proton costs 3.50 a seat a month, and that's just to make the point that the most gold plated alternative I know about does not seem like a company killer. Everything google does has an alternative. If a company cannot deal with the fallout of inventorying the services that it uses and making a decision on which alternative to employ plus the costs associated with updating their employees and policies to deal with it, that company was operating on a highly risky precipice already, if the margins are that low. Something was going to unbalance that company and it would fall into the abyss sooner rather than later. Might as well be this.

Breaking Google's stranglehold on how people access the Internet sounds pretty good.

Firefox would need to find a better deal than being slowly choked out by Google in exchange for the "it's not antitrust if we pay these guys while we do it" money.

Maybe they can finally double down on ad-freedom as their PR rather than keeping it at arm's length and letting Brave take the credit.

How many were developed by Google; how many were Google acquisitions.

These "arguments" are so weak, so desperate, they only expose Google's culpability even further. Silicon Valley routinely obfuscates, misdirects and even lies under oath. It's difficult to make convincing arguments absent any credibility.