Now break up Coca-Cola, those tax dodging fucks.
Let’s include the airlines in that too. Fuck em!
If you’re angry at companies avoiding taxes, you should direct your anger towards the government. Companies that avoid taxes usually do so legally, either through loopholes or through intentional terms in the tax code. The fact that companies find ways to legally reduce their tax liability just means they’ve got good accountants that understand the tax laws.
This is such a pointless comment. What, do you work for Coca-Cola?
Companies lobby the state for these hand outs. This has nothing to with being “good” and everything to do with them capturing the law making and regulatory processes for their benefit. Politicians are willing whores, no doubt.
Sure Goverment is limp dick but but it takes corporate lobby to make this corruption work.
Very naive take tbh.
Also brave of you to assume they are not actually breaking any laws considering what we know about US mega corp behaviors lol
coca-cola, apple, windows, amazon…
Don’t stop with them
Crush corporations, swiftly and without fanfare rebuild capitalism with worker co-ops, seize the means of production without all that stagnation and failure that usually follows.
Will cooperatives really be able to offer good services or will they become corrupt sooner or later?
Can’t predict the future but a system like this could be better than our current state of affairs where we already suffer user-hostile services and corrupt action all concentrated in a few private companies to which we have no alternatives.
If cooperatives were a more prevalent structure, there would likely be more of them since the power incentives to consolidate are lessened, but not eliminated. Because there would be more competition in the marketplace, there would be more incentives to provide good products and services. We can assume that underperforming cooperatives would generally be less successful.
Also, with more participants in the marketplace and greater decision-making by members, less power would be concentrated in the hands of the owners and managers. While that’s not a guarantee against corruption, limiting power concentration lessens the impact of any individual’s corrupt actions and provides opportunity for others not to have to do business with them. Compare to the current state of Google’s leadership directing so much of the company’s efforts not toward providing service but toward manipulating people and markets to squeeze more money out of them.
There are, however, things we likely would lose out on with a more cooperative-based economy. For one, while there would be more incentive for co-ops to produce higher quality products and services, they would probably spend less effort on the “high polish” (for lack of a better way to say it) that attracts marginal customer/user growth. In other words, things would work better but probably be less pretty.
Another potential drawback is in economies of scale. Theoretically, market-dominant and tightly integrated companies can produce more for less while every piece of the puzzle just fits together. I don’t see this as a very compelling argument since the efficiency gains don’t usually benefit anyone but the owners, with excess profit directed not to increased quality but to marketing and manipulation. Since cooperatives would be less able to build up their own “walled gardens,” interoperability may be more incentivized and this drawback may be mitigated.
Really, though, anything has got to be better than having so many smart people working toward finding new ways to squeeze money out of us rather than doing something actually productive.
Another potential drawback is in economies of scale. Theoretically, market-dominant and tightly integrated companies can produce more for less while every piece of the puzzle just fits together.
Personally, I have a pet theory that economies of scale fall start working backwards once a company reaches a certain size because so many employees become so disconnected from the actual activity that makes the company money that 1. Various management types try to do good but instead accidentally impede the money making process, 2. Various inefficies emerge just due to the sheer number of people involved and miscommunications are amplified 3. You reach a scale where lots of B2B products (especially SAAS products) start making sense, but B2B generally charges you a premium for the convenience compared to doing it in house, so the cost benefit can quickly get out of whack while lock-in and corporate intertia makes it harder and harder to change
History says corrupt…
rebuild capitalism
Replace, yes?
Let’s just choose our words carefully for now or the people with the money will get spooked and pay the people with the missiles to start blowing things up.
I’m already on a list.
I’m trying to make things easier for my own FBI agent, we’ve been through a lot together.
God I hope it ends up splitting off Chrome. I think Google has done a great job with Chrome. But the recent Manifest v3 makes it clear they’re going to greatly degrade their users’ experience for Google’s bottom line. And they’re using their market dominance to do it.
What does that even look like as a business model, though? There’s an expectation now that you don’t pay for web browsers. What would a standalone Chrome, Inc. look like?
Something very close to Mozilla in my opinion. They’d have the browser as their core product, a few more apps as a logical extension of that (maybe a mail client like Thubderbird), perhaps Chrome Inc would inherit google’s office suite? That would be a breath of fresh air. Maybe revive a few of Google’s killed ventures that seemed more than promising.
Mozilla is about to have serous issues because almost 90% of their funding was from Google’s illegal payments to make them the default search engine.
So maybe not the best model after all.
Mozilla basically gets all its money from Google
Chrome on its own does not make Google money, in fact the only reason they care about chrome is because it helps Google search engine. I can’t find the article, but there was an email from a google exec saying something along those lines
Isn’t Manifest 3 about 3rd party tracking cookies?
Everyones going ape about UBlock, but that’s an unintended consequence.
I’m very happy to have 3 party cookies more limited. FB already tracks me everywhere everywhen.
(But I will be very very sad when UBlock doesn’t work anymore)
I so want this to happen, but at the same time I’m scared that Samsung or whoever will buy AOSP and enshittify it completely
Isn’t it already licensed under permissive Apache v2? Anyone can fork and carry on the project without the permission of Google, every manufacturer already does as a result of the license.
The OS is but the Google Play backend isn’t. Google has a monopoly over Android by keeping a monopoly on the appstore which dictates that you must allow google spyware to run on your OEM fork to be able to qualify as a “Secure Device”.
Several Chinese OEMs have China only variants that don’t use GPlay and also ship with some some other cool apps, but they can’t sell it globally because Google says “screw you” since no one publishes apps outside Gplay, and because several major apps refuse to run on Googless android which GrapheneOS has threatened to sue
This is still just the tip of the iceberg though. Google already got sued for GPlay monoply last year and reached a $700 settlement just for developers.
On top of that, several of Android’s underlying features are considered archaic and dated. They always have huge kernel patching issues because no OEM (especially Qualcomm) releases the source code for proprietary binaries, meaning no one easily upgrade kernels (practically impossible for FOSS android, expensive for OEMs). The android runtime is imo a piece of crap compared to some low power optimized linux distros. ADB is still needed to delete system apps. Settings lies about permissions, which themselves are poorly sorted. Oh and Google hired the dev behind Android rooting (magisk) so they could kill magisk hide which circumvents system app abilities to tell if you are rooted and therefore not worthy of running proprietary apps.
There’s so much more the deeper you go, it’s just really hard for any contender to step up because of the sheer might Google has over the market. They have so much power that they coerced Samsung into dropping RCS support which makes Google Messages the only app on android that supports RCS, even though RCS is an open OEM standard from 2008
NY Post
Going to need a much better source than this.
Thanks.
Justice Department officials are considering what remedies to ask a federal judge to order against the search giant, said three people with knowledge of the deliberations involving the agency and state attorneys general who helped to bring the case. They are discussing various proposals, including breaking off parts of Google, such as its Chrome browser or Android smartphone operating system, two of the people said.
…
Last week’s ruling that Google was a monopolist was a landmark antitrust decision, raising serious questions about the power of tech giants in the modern internet era. Apple, Amazon and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, also face antitrust cases. Google is scheduled to go to trial in another antitrust case — this one over ad technology — next month. Any remedies in Google’s search case are likely to reverberate and influence that broader landscape.
TIL, the ruling might actually carry some consequences. I guess we’ll see where this takes us.
Do it.
Big tech needs far stricter regulations but I don’t think people would like the internet very much if Google was forced to sell off services like YouTube. Nobody else is offering unlimited free hosting, discoverability, promotion, and bandwidth for video content and nobody ever will again. If the chromium project was sold off to some other shitty tech company, do you really think they’d keep the open source ‘ungoogled’ version readily available for everyone? A Google breakup would just mean that other tech companies like Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, etc get more powerful.
If there’s an appetite for breakups why not start with the companies that control our food and news
It’s not 2010, video streaming isn’t unprofitable anymore and Youtube doesn’t have a monopoly on it. Chromium is open source, and as far as I’m concerned, Google has been actively making it worse with their efforts to fill it with ads.
More breakups do sound good, though.
There’s also how much of a pain that would be for the end user. Would I have to create new accounts for all their services? That would be a mess.
Fully support the action, don’t know how the timing works…
Best case, you only start to basically outline what this looks like before the election. Worst case, you enliven the complacent, left-centrist billionaires to vigorously join in with the perpetually batshit right wing billionaires to get trump in to “live to fight another day” with the reasoning of, “we need to save ourselves first, then we’ll deal with trump when he goes full fascist” and then they either won’t be able to or won’t care to because they won’t want to upset their share price.
Yea, I’m afraid of that, tbh, if more corpos go full elon.
Well, something, but that action is only temporary because those companies that were the result of the division are reunited to form or are acquired by other large companies.
Obviously they will no longer be what they were in the original company. But something is something.
So they’re breaking up Google but giving Intel more free money after it cut 15k jobs?
Google also cut 12000 jobs in Jan 2023, but it does not have an AMD or Nvidia to kick its ass in search when it fucks up.
Intel is a near monopoly and it controls the physical hardware that runs the entire universe with the exception of mobile devices and embedded.
If you’re going to break anyone up that’s who I would go for first but because of the pipe dream of making computer chips in 'Murica these idiot politicians keep propping up Intel’s Wall Street investors while its employees get fucked over.
At the very least the x86 duopoly has to end. It’s not only legal but kept the way it is because of legal contracts. The courts need to declare them void because their enforcement leads to to the violation of antitrust laws.
IFS is struggling to compete against TSMC, Datacenter is bleeding and loosing Customers to AMD, Ampere. Microsoft, NVIDIA and Google are also working on ARM server CPUs. Client Computing Group is loosing marketshare to Apple and AMD, with Qualcomm also recently entering the ring. They had to kill Optane, sell their NAND business, they’re not really relevant in GPU, have to IPO Altera again to get some cash and Mobileye already had to be IPOd again.
Clearly the CPU market didn’t need intervention to get competitive again, Intel didn’t have the power to prevent others from competing in the market and as soon as they got complacent others got ready.
Relying on TSMC as the exclusive manufacturer for bleeding edge semiconductors would be insane. We need Intel and Samsung to remain competitive.
At the very least the x86 duopoly has to end.
AMD, Intel and Centaur/VIA have x86 licensees. ARM exists, RISC-V is gaining traction - No need to implement all the legacy baggage of x86 when you can start with something a little bit more current.
Kagi is kicking their ass.
Who?
really? Is it growing that fast? I expected it would remain more niche than Linux, particularly if you need a subscription.
Oh I just mean in terms of product quality. It’s gonna take forever to even teach people they can change search engines.
Almost as hard as picking a lemmy server :D
How is this related?
Will this work out for consumers if other tech giants like Apple, Microsoft, or Amazon, etc. aren’t also broken up simultaneously? Won’t Google’s assets just get sucked up into another existing monopoly and we’ll be right back where we were but with one less choice than before?
I’m genuinely curious.
It won’t. It simply benefits Apple and Amazon who should have been broken up a decade ago
Amazon literally has had a mostly worldwide monopoly
Don’t forget that the right wing has a hard-on for Google. People like them are Apple’s target market (I guarantee their families were the first to get iPads) and don’t forget their really warped questions during the congressional hearings which demonstrated that they had done absolutely no research and had a huge inherent bias. Stupid questions like “if I walk 3m to the right, can you guys see that”. Or, why does president Trump come up as the first hit on Google for loser
I support this, but only if it happens to all 3 companies simultaneously . Otherwise, we’re just transferring more power to Apple (who honestly have followed some Trump style tactics over the last 25 years)
I get the idea behind a duopoly, but from an economics and game theory point of view, but, if applied unequally, another monopoly will simply take advantage.
Capitalism finds a way.
May I recommended watching “The YouTube Effect” if you don’t see the problem with big tech companies.
I’m guessing it can be found on YouTube?
lol, no :) I tried
the place is there, but it looks blocked to me, maybe it’s a region thing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2Lle0vMBoM
if that don work, there are places to stream from e.g. https://pw1.unblockit.download/movie/1467291-the-youtube-effect
Its on YouTube in the US, but you have to buy or rent it to watch there.
How does this affect or concern me?
No one really knows yet.
This could affect you in several ways:
Search Experience: If Google is broken up or forced to share data, you might notice changes in how search engines operate. Competitors like DuckDuckGo or Bing could become more competitive, offering better privacy, search results, or features, potentially giving you more choices. Privacy and Data: If Google is required to share data, there might be concerns about how your data is handled across different platforms. On the flip side, increased competition could lead to better privacy practices as companies vie for users. Technology and Services: Google’s services are deeply integrated into many products and platforms. A breakup could impact the availability, integration, or performance of these services, which might affect how you use technology in your daily life. Economic Impact: Google’s size and influence mean that any major changes could have broader economic impacts, potentially affecting industries related to technology, advertising, and beyond. This could indirectly influence job markets, investment trends, or even consumer prices.Overall, these changes could alter how you interact with the internet, your privacy, and the services you rely on daily.
did somebody specifically ask you to look at this and comment? just wondering why are you asking such a weird question
Didn’t know there were stipulations to me commenting here. My, my. What an extremely hospitable user you are to this new, welcoming website. User since last year.
well howdy and welcome, stranger! i was just wondering why anyone would leave such a comment. i didn’t intend too imply that you couldn’t comment, of course.
I’m hazarding a guess that since you immediately went and looked up statistics about my user account and included them in your reply, you’ve come here with a lot of habits from… the other place.
i don’t run this place or anything, and this is just my observation, so don’t take it as gospel. i would say that the tone here is generally a bit friendlier, so (imho) there is no need to assume hostility on the part of other commenters. i was just curious!
Okay now do Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia, Blackrock, etc etc
Not sure how that would work…
I’m old enough to remember the breakup of Ma Bell and the way that worked was the creation of a bunch of regional telecom services, that’s not going to work on the Internet.
I guess they could mandate spinning off Android, but that’s not really the problem addressed in the antitrust case, is it?
Maybe split the AdWords side from the Search Engine side?
Neither you nor almost anyone who upvoted you or replied to you read the article, huh
FTA:
“DOJ attorneys could ask Judge Amit Mehta to order Google to sell portions of its business”
That’s the author of the article speculating, they don’t know what it would actually look like any more than you or I do.
Bonus, as I noted, it doesn’t address the primary issue of a search monopoly. Even if they sell off those business unit, the search monopoly remains.
There was more discussion of potential remedies in the article than that.
I’d guess it would be a vertical breakup rather than horizontal: separate android, cloud, youtube, search, chrome, ads…depending on how aggressive they want to be.
I think the problem with Google is that none of their side projects actually make any money. I don’t have a solution here
I’m drooling at the thought.
If you seperate Youtube from Google, I cannot see youtube surviving. It’s probably a loss leader for them.
I really don’t understand why people have that believe. They’ve heard over a decade ago that Youtube wasn’t making a profit (which was mostly because they reinvested everything to grow and become the monopoly they are now), but by how much money it’s raking in every quarter and with how monumental Google’s infrastucture is, I find it extremely hard to believe Youtube isn’t a big money machine by now. They’re really squeezing everything out of it not because they have to, but because they have a monopoly as a user generated video platform that has more to offer than just shorts.
I think it’s a combination of the old news, how expensive hosting video is compared to anything else, and how Twitch is basically a boat - a hole in the water that you throw money into.
People lose the connection that burning money like it’s going out of fashion is only step one in the game. Step two is capitalizing on the market share that you acquired in step one. And, as every social media company has shown, ad revenue and data harvesting are very profitable. Otherwise, every tech giant wouldn’t have pivoted to that years ago.
So YouTube shall fail.
Pretty sure youtube is revenue generating on its own now. Youtube doesn’t work as a loss leader because it’s so different from all other products.
But if they’ve only been found to monopolize search, how does that remedy the search monopoly? Presumably the new separate Google Search company would still have a search monopoly.
I’m speculating, but perhaps the thought would be that separating Google Search from the rest of the company would deprive them of the alternative revenue streams they used to maintain their market position? If I remember the ruling against them correctly, one of the key pieces of evidence cited by the judge was that Google spent like 30 billion dollars a year to have 3rd parties use their engine by default.
But the ads on search are the big revenue driver for Google overall. Presumably those stay with the Google Search subunit, and they would have plenty of cash to do whatever?
without search and their abuse of that monopoly, google wouldn’t have dominant positions or massive market shares that many of their other properties (products, services, software, etc) have.
Because that search monopoly allows them to boost their other products above all others. It’s not an impartial search result anymore. There is a financial incentive to favor their own products.
Google search has some features that alternative search engines don’t. I use DuckDuckGo for 99% of everything, but I occasionally use Google to see local busy hours, or sometimes any hours, reviews, phone numbers without navigating a shitty website, etc.
I think there are ways to break up Google search on its own, and make some of those features separate and accessible on other search engines.
Then there’s the matter of advertising, data collection, SEO, exclusivity with corporations like Reddit, etc.
Google is doing things with its search that seem to intentionally reduce the ability of other search engines to compete with them, and that’s really all that the antitrust laws are meant to prevent.
I think you go about it the other way: break data analytics and advertising off from everything else. If every unit has to be self-sufficient without reliance on data collection and first-party advertising I think you fix most of the major issues.
They removed something that I used to use: using “-word” to exclude a keyword. Apparently it is because advertisers don’t want you doing that, so they turned it into a weighting. So there are features and antifeatures too. I’ve seen ddg do that too before, but right now it works :)
I think each of these needs to be handled in separate ways. For example, search could continue to be a conglomeration that includes maps, mail and possibly cloud. Android can just be split very easily into a separate company and same for Youtube, since that would basically be another Netflix or whatever.
Ads, in my opinion, is the most important one though. That absolutely has to be shattered into thousands of tiny pieces, all of which need to be forced to compete with each other, for the benefit of all internet companies anywhere. It would be a massive boon to companies everywhere and would provide an opportunity for lots of innovation in the advertising space, ie. trying ads that are less intrusive or ones that are cheaper because they don’t rely on tracking information.
And another thing I think people need to understand about search is that building the search engine is not the hard part - the hard part is figuring out how to pay for it. Search is really expensive - crawling websites, indexing, fighting spam abuse. That’s what really makes Google successful - the fact that they coupled it with advertising so that they could cover all the expenses that come with managing a search engine. That’s much more important than the quality of the results, in my opinion.
And as for Chrome: well, personally I think that monopoly has been the most damaging to the internet as a whole. I would love to see it managed as part of a non-profit consortium. There should not be any profit motive whatsoever in building a web browser. If you want a profit motive, build a website - the browser should just be the tool to get to your profit model, not the profit model itself. And therefore it should be developed by multiple interest groups, not just one advertising company.
Anyway, I know this is all an impossible fantasy. Nothing in the world is done because it’s right or wrong, it’s done because it serves whoever holds the most power. But if there were a just world, this is what I think it would look like.
Never forget that the baby bells slowly reassembled themselves. They’re not a single company but they’re down to 3 or 4 now
Which is exactly where it should be… having regional phone companies sucked. Having 1 phone company sucked. Having 3-4 is the least sucky, but we have real competition.
Before tearing apart Google and Amazon, I’df much prefer we have 3-4 choices for internet providers (unless we can turn them into utilities, then we should do that).
Fuck that. Any Canadian will tell you, you don’t want an oligarchy
Making YouTube its own thing again wouldn’t be that hard.
Not breaking up Google because the effects would be inconvenient would literally be letting a monopoly regin because they’re a monopoly.
Shut down services if needed. We can adapt.
Do it do it do it do it do it do it…
Smash them with a hammer. Google should not exist as it is. Not for decades.
Break up AdSense, chrome, search, android, shatter them all into separate companies that can stop selling out literally every waking aspect of life as their sole business model.
and then prosecute them for antitrust if those companies conspire together
