Google needs to be broken up.
They own the browser market. They own the web (through Adwords). They own Search. They own mobile. They own most of the video sharing market with 2.5 billion monthly annual users. They own a good chunk of email with 1.2 billion monthly annual users.
They have amassed an incomprehensible amount of power and influence over humanity and they have proven repeatedly that they are willing to use that power to the detriment of humanity and to entrench themselves further.
Google needs to be broken up.
Chrome and Android are open source, and there are several forks of both thriving in the ecosystem. Yeah it would be cool if there was a decent open source alternative to GMail and Drive, but no one else seems to have figured out how to get the incentives right for something like that.
Google's open source projects are open in name only.
No, it didn't, it restructured itself into Alphabet, with many subsidiaries. But, all the core businesses are still under that umbrella organization, with most web-related businesses remaining inside the current Google entity.
A forced divestment of the browser business might help. Same for the productivity products.
The link at the top of the page is pointing to the GitHub repo, where you can see literally over a million contributions from thousands of people working at hundreds of companies: https://github.com/chromium/chromium/commits/main
I've worked on both Chrome and Android (Chromium and AOSP) professionally, and never worked at Google.
No one has paid for a browser in almost 3 decades and even then few did.
Considering NCSA Mosaic’s initial release was just 30 years ago this year and it’s considered the first browser, think you might be using a bit of hyperbole there? Twenty years would’ve been more accurate.
To make it explicit: the only way this happens is by Americans voting for it. The FTC has been more active on anti-trust issues in the past two years than at any time in the past 30. That's a direct result of the 2020 election. Elections matter.
Have seen FTC going against Amazon because the FTC chair had published prior work against Amazon's practices. Not defending Amazon but FB/Google are a much bigger threat than Amazon.
What I should've written is that: yes, they are open source, but there's no way to influence the direction they are going. These projects are 100% Google-run, and very few (if any) decisions are public.
For most projects there's also a significant proprietary part in the actual final product
https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/alphabet-inc/recipients?id=...
Here is them lobbying specifically around antitrust reform legislation: https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/bills/specific_...
> Private equity deals and transactions in the healthcare and technology sectors continue to attract heightened antitrust scrutiny...
> The US agencies have also demonstrated an increased interest in challenging vertical transactions.
> In January 2022, for example, the FTC sued to block Lockheed Martin's US$4.4 billion proposed acquisition of Aerojet, which the parties subsequently abandoned.
> Increased enforcement, combined with the agencies' reluctance to approve remedies, has created an uncertain environment where commercial parties should be increasingly prepared to litigate mergers.
> The ramping up of antitrust enforcement in 2022...
https://www.whitecase.com/insight-our-thinking/us-ma-fy-2022...
Here's another:
> Since 2020, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) have filed multiple lawsuits against major tech companies...
> "The agencies have started laying the foundations for a more interventionist stance over the last two years, and this year is when we'll start to see some of those efforts come to fruition -- or be stopped in their tracks by the courts," Kass said.
https://www.techtarget.com/searchcio/news/252528606/FTC-push...
I'm sure you can find more.
Active against Google though? Remember, Google can help a certain political party in tough times (e.g. rollout of healthcare.gov).
https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/amazon-com/recipients?id=D0...
and Microsoft:
https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/microsoft-inc/recipients?id...
And yet we see high profile activity against them from the current FTC.
Because to me it just feels like it might be legally separated, but still owned and directed by the same handful of people. And it being separated makes it safer, in that they can't forward e.g. large fines to the parent company.
Disclaimer: I don't know anything about large corporations. or economy. or governments.
Just because they don't sell floppies in a box like it's 1994 doesn't mean these aren't businesses.
And I'm not American so it's not even some sort of patriotic comment. If Europe , or anywhere else, had a Google sized Behemoth, they wouldn't mess with it no matter how "anti tech" they might seem now. If anything they are anti tech because they don't want foreign big tech to have massive influence over them. You'd bet they wouldn't cripple big tech if they were European. On the other hand, as long as they are American that massive power is a feature, not a bug for the US government.
The reaction to Tiktok is a good example of how nationalism/geopolitics shape the reaction to big tech, which is why google is probably safe.
"FTC rewrites rules on Big Tech mergers with aim to ease monopoly-busting"
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/07/ftc-rewrites-rul...
"FTC prepares “the big one,” a major lawsuit targeting Amazon’s core business"
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/06/ftc-prepares-the...
"The Federal Trade Commission sued Amazon today, claiming the online giant violated US law by tricking consumers into signing up for the $14.99-per-month Amazon Prime subscription service and making it annoyingly difficult to cancel."
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/06/ftc-sues-amazon-...
"FTC files to block Microsoft’s $69B Activision Blizzard acquisition"
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/06/report-ftc-will-file-...
"A Federal Trade Commission lawsuit filed yesterday accused Ring, the home security camera company owned by Amazon, of invading users' privacy"
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/06/ftc-amazon-ring-...
"Microsoft will pay $20 million to settle an FTC complaint that its Xbox platform illegally collected and retained information about children without their parents' consent"
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/06/xbox-coppa-violations...
And that's all just from one news source, in the last three months.
A lot. Here's a link where you can read about some recent activity in the tech industry (change it to sort by Date, I couldn't figure out how to do that in the URL): https://arstechnica.com/search/?ie=UTF-8&q=ftc You can probably find more on Google (or perhaps Duck Duck Go? :) ).
https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-appeals-court-opens-docket-...
Or Judges fast-tracking lawsuits to allow those being prosecuted by the FTC to get things over quicker, ex: https://www.reuters.com/legal/illumina-wins-fast-track-appea...
And I think the biggest blow may actually come about because of the SEC lawsuit that will be heard this upcoming term at SCOTUS: https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-supreme-court-decide-legali..., which will likely heavily reign in the power of administrator judges and the ability for an agency to keep initial fights in-house (blocking litigants from taking fights to the normal courts).
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/24/technology/google-ads-law...
n.b. I've found a lot of comfort by conciously rolling away from any subject that leads me to do "They"-ing, i.e. name an enormously large group, then talk about them as a unit. The more I avoid it, the more I realize how prevalent it became and drives how a lot of us feel society shifted.
And Intuit: https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/intuit-inc/recipients?id=D0..., https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/cases-proceedings/1...
And Epic: https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/epic-systems/recipients?id=..., https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/cases-proceedings/1...
etc. etc.
I'm also European and I think almost pretty much 100% as you think on this, but to play devil's advocate, and how I think this should have worked in theory in a free-market economy, is that the US, by allowing companies like Google to do their nefarious and frankly evil things right now and in the near future is also, at the same time, not allowing future potential companies, more innovative than Google is now, to take Google's place.
But what happens is that the US is focusing on having a strong and national security-enhancing company (Google) on its side now and in the near future, versus having an even stronger and, potentially, even more national-security enhancing company (the one that would have taken Google's place had the free market been allowed to do its thing) in the medium to long future.
On the face of it this compromise of security now and in the near future vs security in the medium to long future looks like a decent bet, the problem is that evil colossuses like Google are actively getting rotten from the inside, and at some point in the medium to long future they'll fall almost in an instant, with no company to take their place. That will leave the US highly vulnerable at that point in the future.
The US did this with Standard Oil in 1911, Bell/AT&T in 1983. And the same laws were used against Microsoft in 2001, though the company was able to avoid a break-up.
Breaking up Google might not be the best option. Perhaps more rigorous regulation by the government would be better, similar to Microsoft. But a break up should be an option.
Meet the new boss…
And because of this, I don't believe that the US is able to break Google or the other flagship companies despite of reasons existing for such action.
Today, Google can provide Chrome as a loss-leader, making up for the "free" browser with ad revenue.
The new Chrome Company can't operate that way. It needs to make money on its own. Perhaps MS Bing offers more money. Or they build their own ad system. Or pivot into some other business area.
Anyway, I don't think anybody is arguing Google/Alphabet must be broken up, only that it's a tool that's available in the US, should we (society) decide other regulation is insufficient.
> Or they build their own ad system.
And we still are being tracked by BigTech with the same business model that people object when Google does it.
> Or pivot into some other business area.
And what other method do you suggest for funding besides ads or people paying for the browser? The second option has never been a long term successful business for browsers?
>The FTC has been more active on anti-trust issues in the past two years than at any time in the past 30
FTC being more active in past two years over previous 30 is a strong statement.
Because in the short term it would disrupt a major company (ala Standard Oil), but in the long term it would allow the US to remain competitive in the global market.
If we allow Google to continue abusing its monopoly power in the US, that guarantees that the US will not be the home of the future technologies of the world. Innovations will be sucked up and killed as acquisitions. Enormous energy will be focused on blatant moat-building like WEI instead of developments that benefit the world. etc.
Not going to happen. Rationally there should be broad political consensus about cutting Google back to size: from rabid libertarians worshiping the miraculous abundance generated by "competition and free markets" to bleeding-heart socialists keen on pushing back corporate power as the root of all evil.
Alas, these political categories no longer have any meaning. The US political system has mutated into something else (the messenger being a horned man) which will probably require some time to properly characterize and name using terminology that is appropriate to use in good company.
So the fate of Google will be more shaped by actions of external entities than as part of US regulatory efforts. Powerful countries that antagonize the US are simply degoogling and creating their own copycat panopticons.
The question is what will be the course of action of powerful countries that are alies of the US (i.e. Europe and a few others). Will they accept that their digital society will be feudal in nature because the broken US political system cannot deliver on even basic responsibilities?
FTC is on a losing streak, with the latest fiasco being the Microsoft Activision acquisition fiasco.
The Germans, British, Australians and French are also attempting to build their own panopticons.
Any successful US-based tech post-breakup would be acquired by larger international players, like Tiktok was.
Given that it's open-source and anyone can roll and distribute a tweaked version of Chromium (and many have, notably Microsoft), it's really hard to see an argument here that Google is acting anti-competitively. If anything it's very pro-competitive to give away your secret sauce to your competitors.
Just because their browser is more popular than you would like, and you don't like a feature they're adding, doesn't mean a judge is going to stop them from adding it.
It's a simple observation. They don't have the interest to make it pass but they still have to do it to save face.