anth1988

> They just need one viable competitor

I'm not convinced that is sufficient. Facebook at 80% isn't really any different than facebook at 99, or whatever. Google has a viable competitor in Bing, but google still dominates search to a massive degree.

> In my world-view, the cause is the state

What does this even mean?

> To illustrate my point with an extreme example: making it illegal to kill your slave doesn't solve the underlying slavery issue, but hopefully it would stop some slaves from getting murdered, in the meantime.

The state outlawed slavery.

Rules written in blood. If you aren't prepared for a bit of bureaucracy then you have no place being anywhere near this industry.

> Don't plan to drive anywhere on eclipse day

> Don't make any solid plans until 3-4 days before. Most places only have about 40% chance of it being clear.

If you haven't made plans already, you are probably driving.

Best I could do was get a room in portland the night before. Gonna have to get up stupid early and try to make it. 3-4 days before is gonna be tough.

Or you could see a bunch more smaller companies that still make acquisitions, and a whole lot of smaller IPOs that return a decent profit.

> How is google even a monopoly? Bing exists, yahoo still exists. In Asia Google isn't even the most popular search engine.

Not a monopoly is not a high enough bar. They are dominant in search, browser, and mobile.

> Try using evidence

Evidence like using their position in search to shove Chrome in our faces, then using that position to help shove DRM on us.

Evidence like their ridiculous plans with the ad blocker?

I won't really miss any of those things when they are gone, because others will come and take their place.

> if you're one of the uber technerds that thinks that Google is unabashedly evil

as opposed to the people who worship at their altar?

> In 2013, the European Commission fined Microsoft for giving preferential treatment to its own browser, Internet Explorer.

I don't understand why Microsoft gets fined, but Google gets a pass when they used their other products to push Chrome to a dominant position.

> Also, what would be the point of dropping out of this coalition?

It would remove the obvious conflict of interest. To be clear, I'm talking about dissolving the coalition of advertisers and instead having the group agree to regulation from an outside group.

> But keep in mind the alternatives are either government regulation

and I've stated outright that I'm in favour of breaking up Google over this.

Not just this, but partly.

The lead is not only factual, but greatly strengthens the points made within. Google makes the vast majority of their money off advertising and data, they are taking steps that will help them to get an even stronger hold on that market with high potential to be extremely anti-competitive.

> that allows Google and Facebook to raise advertising prices above equilibrium pricing

Maybe, but do they need to do that or do they just sit there and reap the profits of being an ever expanding proportion of the market (which is now thriving again because they killed other ad blockers). Regulators will just ignore them that way.

I'm not disagreeing that this is possible, but I don't think jumping straight to such a nightmare scenario really does any good. The reason being is that they just don't go that far and it's suddenly seems okay in comparison to what "could" happen.

More realistically, I think Google hurts other ad blockers and expands their oligarchic position in the ads space (especially on mobile).

> But doesn't it hurt the advertisers? That's not a given either

Easy scenario, I come up with a new ad style that works pretty well (worth loads). Google (et al) say no, that violates some standard we set, blocked. They just cost me a bunch of money.

> Google is in a unique place to tackle the problem of poor advertising by filtering truly bad experiences

By leveraging a leading (at least) position in search, browsers, and advertising.

If they want to drop out completely from their "Coalition for Better Ads", make it a consumer group instead, then maybe I'll trust them on this. Right now this is the type of move that really makes me agree with the author, Alphabet should be broken up.

I also wonder if they are going to punish ads that look like page content (google search) or before youtube videos.

I think you could make the case that the current idea actually makes it pretty much impossible not to screw over new companies in favour of the entrenched group (google, facebook, etc...). If you are going to be restricted to the ads google already does extremely well, why wouldn't you just go with Google?

oh, and we have the issue of Android. The vast majority of mobile users just use the browser already on the phone. That would be chrome, which will have only the ad blocker provided by Google unless they change things.