Before anyone makes the argument that the EU should have no jurisdiction over an American entity, please remember that Google sells its services in Europe. It's well within the jurisdiction of the EU to regulate how anyone does business here. Google Ireland alone had a 50B euro turnover.
The breaking up of monopolies used to be in the toolbox of American antitrust policies, back when America enforced antitrust legislation on its own companies.
Not to discredit the rest of what you're saying, because it is true the EU has jurisdiction and that anti-trust is a lost art in many places in the world. Still, saying Google Ireland 'alone' is a bit funny when Google (like all multinationals) is known to take advantage of Ireland's tax laws to funnel as much of their EU business through.
Whatever money Google is making in Ireland isn't just what they're making from the Irish market, it's also from whatever they're making everywhere else in the EU who's origins are ambiguous enough to not be attached to any single country.
Eh, we can’t really complain. The international capitalist system owes Ireland a bit more; its predecessor, colonialism, screwed Ireland over for generations.
But the point is that Ireland does not really benefit from this money - it is only an accounting trick. Google funnels money through Ireland, but does not employ many people in Ireland, and does not pay much taxes there. In the end, the living standard of typical Irishman is closer to countries with $40-45k GDP, such as Italy or France, than to countries with $100k GDP, such as Norway or Switzerland.
Which means one employee per $6 millions of revenue. Which is exactly what I’m talking about: their actual presence in Ireland is much smaller than you would expect from revenue number alone, which again supports my claim about “accounting trick”
Because big companies are funneling money through Ireland, they usually need some corporate presence there. Because they already have a small office there, and there's a large English speaking population, when they want a bigger office in Europe, Ireland is a likely choice.
If they weren't already in the country for accounting purposes, they might choose different locations for offices.
well, that still means they have to follow Irish law. Just like shipping companies register their ships in other countries, that means they have to follow their laws too.
yes, but that's not the point of GP comment. Saying "Ireland alone has $50B turnover" might make someone think: "Wow, if they make so much money from such a small country, then how much do they make in the entire Europe?". And the answer to that is: $50B. There's not a single euro-cent is earned in Europe that does not go through Ireland.
You can't have it both ways though. You don't get to take advantage of Irish law to reduce your tax/costs, but then also say that Ireland (and the EU) has no jurisdiction over you.
You should check out the thread, lots of people throwing themselves in front of the firing line because I guess they think that messing with Google will somehow translate to messing with their own startups or whatever.
This is completely false, I stated very clearly that they have jurisidiction regardless and that anti-trust is fine. I was just pointing out that it's pretty unfair to use the size of Google Ireland as if it's "just another EU country" when it accounts for basically all EU-based revenue.
€50bln is still a huge amount, but based on the phrasing of that comment you'd assume we were talking about figures well over €1t!
A better argument is simply that the US routinely (and selectively) enforces its rules well beyond its borders. So why shouldn't anyone else with the clout needed...
Just for balance, the US had Canada arrest a chinese national who had never been to the USA, for doing business with Iran (and then a bunch of other weird charges)
> The breaking up of monopolies used to be in the toolbox of American antitrust policies, back when America enforced antitrust legislation on its own companies.
The US Justice Department sued Google in 2020 and is asking for pretty much the same disinvestment for pretty much the same reasons. The EU is trailing the US by two years here.
I'm eagerly awaiting the trove of patriotic comments which will undoubtedly follow the posting of such an article and will most likely entirely miss the point as usual.
> The US Justice Department sued Google in 2020 and is asking for pretty much the same disinvestment for pretty much the same reasons.
While true, 2.5 years later there is still no action. In that same time period, the E.U. released the largest anti-monopoly technology law in its history, the Digital Markets Act. This will take effect near the end of the year and impact all major tech companies. I think it's clear that U.S. antitrust is ineffective at present.
They’re advancing in spurts - a few events this year. Remember when the justice department suggested that google sell its buy side advertising unit, and somehow “what if we just spun it off into its own Bet?” got proposed. Good times. Perhaps the most brazen “FU” from google lawyers in the history of the company
I used to believe that company breakups should happen automatically when they reach 1% of the country's GDP. There are lots of ways companies could avoid having the government decide how to break them up such as issuing dividends instead of hording cash, spinning off non-core businesses, setting up independent IP companies that would license back IP to the core company (and as an indpendent company, be required to license to anyone else at similar rates), and things like that. The problem comes in if one country follows this paradigm but then you have a company like Samsung that's over 20% of their host country's GDP and there's no appetite in the host country to break them up. How can your domestic companies that are limited in size compete with those of other countries with no limit on their size?
This is just a lazy attempt to tie one thing to another, unpopular thing. What is the comparison here aside from "I don't like both"? In what sense is nationalization "corporate civil asset forfeiture"?
Not all nationalization is uncompensated, even in the real world. Further, you can imagine very fair ways, long term, to nationalize companies by e.g. requiring them to pay a wealth tax in the form of equity.
Changing the ownership does not address the problem, which is market concentration. You're still left with a company with too much power. That aside, look at the historical data. Nationalization has generally been disastrous and leads to all sorts of other pathologies.
Democracy allows authrotarians to rise in and of itself. Recent ones include Orban, Erdogan and Trump. Historical ones include, yes I know, Mussolini and Hitler.
I think what we’re seeing with “too big to fail” is that it also means “too big to succeed”.
Personally, I suspect that the 20 companies each at 1% GDP will out perform the 20% company in most or even all markets. (Setting aside the issue of relative GDP between nations.)
Often, the bazaar is more effective than the cathedral.
You've hit the nail on the head regarding the difference between the EU concept of antitrust and the American one.
EU antitrust law is grounded in harm to companies. If there are many companies, but one has sewn up the market so strongly that others can't really have a chance to prosper, the EU will step in.
American antitrust law is grounded in harm to consumers. The US regulators won't go after a successful ad company because other ad companies say it's too hard to compete with them; it'll go after them if consumers say "We don't have any choice but to do business with X, and X's prices are too high / X is too exclusive / X is only doing business with us in market sector A if we agree to use them also for market sector B."
That additional bar to regulation means the EU may very well have cause to act before the US does if Google is big enough to muscle around other ad agencies and set the terms by which they can exist, even if they do exist.
I recommend you look into it a bit more if you haven’t - there are buyside and sell side competitors, but google massively controls both markets, which it uses to grow both businesses.
For example, the justice department found slides from a project that favored its buyside customers when running supposedly impartial auctions on the sell side - in layman’s terms, brazenly fucking over their competitors. Allegedly.
The best part is of course that the google engineers named it “project bernanke” after the Fed chairman, since they thought of it like QE, I.e. “giving out free money” to people who used their buyside products. I’m still not sure if that was a criticism of QE or if they’re honestly that submerged in the Google Kool-Aid…
All of that is small potatoes to the main way in which google is a monopoly though: they run the only ad exchange. Trust me, it helps. Facebook spent many billions trying to stand up a competitor and ultimately gave up, which should tell you how valuable that privilege is
There are real questions about how much authority the EU has over an American entity. Can the EU only regulate activities in the EU or does it have global jurisdiction?
On one hand, if Google simply restructured, spun off or sold its EU ad business the competitive landscape wouldn't change that much. I'm not sure whether a new European competitor could ever become a peer to Google if it could only compete in the EU market because of the network effects in the ad business.
Alternatively, the EU having global jurisdiction would have even bigger issue. With that precedent, could Japan or Australia regulate European businesses? Also how would the EU enforce rules outside of its geography? How complaint would the US court system be in enforcing European decisions?
> Alternatively, the EU having global jurisdiction would have even bigger issue. With that precedent, could Japan or Australia regulate European businesses?
That's already what the USA does to global companies operating inside the US. That's exactly how Cuba has been under a blockade from the US, for example...
With sanctions the US can declare that third parties must choose between doing business with the US and Cuba / ZTE. Because of it's large economy the US would be confident that most of those parties would choose to choose the US over the company / small country.
Antitrust enforcement is many ways more difficult than sanctions enforcement because third parties must be compelled in 'how' rather than 'whether' they do business with a company.
Even the US would've struggled to break up ZTE / Huawei etc into smaller companies across every jurisdiction for antitrust. Doing so in China would've obviously been impossible but even enforcing this in the Gulf States & South Korea would've stretched the limits of US power.
When it comes down to it - it's the same thing with the EU - they can decree that Google be broken apart or stop doing business in the union. Or pay a massive fine based on global profit or exit the union.
The goal of antitrust is to make markets more competitive.
If Google left the EU entirely there’d be even fewer competitors in the digital ads space. Depending on the segment Google’s market share would likely go to Bing, Facebook or TikTok.
The EU wants to increase the market competition, but frustratingly antitrust enforcement may not be effective and might even go in the opposite direction.
>If Google left the EU entirely there’d be even fewer competitors in the digital ads space.
This may be true in the very short term, but leaving a big hole in the market like that creates an opportunity for new players that would have otherwise avoided the space because it was controlled by a monopoly.
GDPR aside, the EU doesn't generally assert global jurisdiction. If Google does what they want for EU only, that should be fine with EU anti-trust. Microsoft typically only markets anti-trust compliant products in the relevant jurisdictions; no browser ballot or missing media player in the US.
Of course, if Google only makes the change in the EU, it doesn't much change the landscape outside of the EU. Although there's a chance for better competition in the EU to give another player a foothold, which then helps them gain usage elsewhere (perhaps from global customers who like the results in Europe and try it globally)
I'll applaud the first large US company that leaves the EU market entirely and makes a claim of non-jurisdiction. It's overdue. In fact, I don't think they have to go that far. Other countries are free to block internet services or sanction their own citizens for using them.
It should not follow that placing a service on the web makes you subject to the jurisdiction of anyone who chooses to use it.
Why should it not? If you're providing a service (presumably for profit), shouldn't you be bound by rules other commercial service providers have to follow in that jurisdiction as well? If not, you'd be at a massive advantage.
It's not being provided in that jurisdiction. If you are hosted/domiciled in a country foreign users are entering another jurisdiction when they access the service.
Another way to look at it is that customer is sending money to another jurisdiction.
Countries can and do pass laws about whom their citizens can trade with. It seems like that is a better route than inventing jurisdiction over foreign companies.
These rulings for a company of Google's stature/importance are always funny to me. How quickly would public opinion change if Google decided to just shut off their service in the EU for a day?
Monopolistic breakups that serve the public's best interest are one thing. But how many people actually care that Google might represent a monopoly? Does it actually affect people negatively if the result is a positive online user experience? The world runs on Google and forcing that to change seems like a step backwards at first glance.
> How quickly would public opinion change if Google decided to just shut off their service in the EU for a day?
Always this same old tune. Do you realize how outlandish and naive it is to even suggest that? Google is fighting tooth and nail to make sure that EU laws are laxist. You know why? Because they know that they will have to comply, in the end. The market is just too big to let go of.
And I don't think you're making the point you think you're making. If a single company can suspend its services and upheave the whole population's life, then it's a ripe for getting antitrust rulings.
My point, though, is where do we draw the line between antitrust enforcement because it serves the public's best interest, and enforcement that results in a net negative experience?
I don't know the perfect answer to the question "At what point does a company need to be broken up, to protect the liberty of our citizens?", but I would wager it's somewhere on the near side of "when the mere suggestion that the company could shut down for 24 hours would cause unthinkable chaos".
I think that if a monopoly is necessary to serve the public's interest, as you're suggesting Google is, then it needs to be a public utility, like water or electricity.
But I think that's wrong about Google (except maybe for search). None of the services they're offering are unique, it's all tech commodities. They're just entrenched due to decades of anticompetitive behavior and incompetent regulators, and if they were broken up/destroyed, other companies would easily be able to offer the same services at a higher quality, and it would be a net positive to society overall.
If Google ads gets broken up, it may be easier for a competitor to actually compete against any Google property. Imagine trying to win a bidding war against Google, much less on their own bidding platform.
I don't think either one of those points are true. The result of unregulated Google is most definitely not a positive online experience, it's rampant tracking and hoarding of information, both of which have had very real negative real world consequences. Similarly, the world does not "run on Google", what does that even mean? Gmail is but one email provider out of many. Google search is the largest player in the space, but their technological edge is slimming by the day.
Civilians have been bombed in Ukraine based on gathered and clustered geodata. Stalkers have bought their victims' data online and gone to their houses. Foreign intelligence agencies have blackmailed government officials based on their online activities. You can find an absurd number of examples for all of these and more.
The government is already listening to all your phone calls and reading all your text messages. There's likely very little in there they don't already have.
You didn't answer the question. Does the government (any government, for that matter) having access to all that information sound like a positive consequence to you?
I would love to see Google leaving Europe. I bet within a few weeks proper maybe even better replacements appear in Europe. Maybe even one of mine :)
Google is an ad company. None of its services are critical to maintain a stable society. I would even argue that Europe would be better of without the American tech giants.
Europe would return to the dark ages if all American tech companies pulled out overnight. But it is a humorous thought that the only way there can be European alternatives is if there are no American companies to compete against. What is it about Europe that puts it so far behind the US and Asia in innovation?
>None of its services are critical to maintain a stable society.
> What is it about Europe that puts it so far behind the US and Asia in innovation?
The US barely produces enough illegal drugs for its own market. If all illegal drug manufacturers cut off the supply lines to the US, the illegal drug trade in the US would tank overnight. What is it about the US that puts it so far behind South American countries in innovation?
You're comparing your populace to drug addicts? Ok then.
Producing (recreational) drugs isn't innovation. Drugs don't improve your daily life. Absence of them doesn't make life resemble that of the 1900s. They don't increase productivity allowing you to achieve more with your life. And most importantly, the number of people consuming recreational drugs from SA is a rounding error. Every single person in Europe consumes some type of software created by American companies, directly or indirectly.
They're comparing drug producers to peddlers of surveillance capitalism.
Surveillance doesn't improve your daily life. Absence of surveillance doesn't make life resemble that of the 1900s. Surveillance doesn't increase productivity. And most importantly, the number of people not subject to surveillance is a rounding error. Every single person in Europe is subject to some type of surveillance crafted by American companies, directly or indirectly.
Cocaine and other illegal stimulants certainly increase productivity to some extent.
The point I'm making isn't that US software is inherently harmful (nor would I make that argument for every drug that is illegal in the US, though) but that the situation is comparable in that US software and business conduct found to be in violation in the EU is harder to prosecute than the same software and conduct from EU companies. The "innovation" US companies take advantage of is getting to grow their products and companies and a less regulated market before taking advantage of the slow reaction time of the legal systems of foreign markets they enter fully-formed (whereas companies local to those market would get nipped in the bud if they tried to build the same kind of business there).
This should be self-evident when the reason we're even talking about this is that the EU is taking actions against US companies that it would have already taken against any EU company trying the same (e.g. consider the Ireland tax loophole used by non-EU companies in the EU or the circus around trying to game the GDPR and privacy laws).
In short: the innovative advantage of Silicon Valley is that it allowed tech startups to build products that would have been blatantly illegal in Europe and then enter the European market with sufficient political and financial capital to squash any existing competition and bite the legal fines until legislation was able to catch up with what they were doing. This is consistent with recent "disruptions" like Airbnb innovating zoning law violations, Uber innovating taxi service regulation violations, Crypto innovating financial product regulation violations and AI innovating copyright violations.
Android is open source. Maps, Search, Gmail and Docs have competitors that are already being used. Not sure if Youtube is necessary to maintain a stable society...
That's true only for a very narrow definition of "tech". If I were to redefine "tech" to only include Formula-1 racing teams and constructors, then suddenly none of the top tech companies are from the US.
Am I right to assume you have never heard of companies like ASML, Spotify, Booking.com, Just Eat (takeaway.com), or Adyen?
And finally, large US companies use their capital to buy out European firms to keep pretending that all "tech" is home-grown. Skype, Nokia, ARM, NXP, SkyScanner, Shazam and Minecraft all started out in Europe.
> I would love to see Google leaving Europe. I bet within a few weeks proper maybe even better replacements appear in Europe. Maybe even one of mine :)
Big words, but then I google your github and apparently you are planning to substitute biggest search engine, mobile OS and email service with 3dbriks[0], that, hilariously, "works best in _Google_ Chrome"? Come on now, there are multitude of reasons why European tech is not competitive and "evil American corps monopolized everything and won't let us in" is not the main one.
Allowing a giant supercorperation to exist is generally not in the interest of the public.
Google has been using the incomparable amount of money they have in many ways that do not serve the interests of anyone but themselves.
Allowing one company to own the most visited websites, the most used browser, the most used advertising tools + marketplace, half of the mobile market and much more has not really brought us a lot of good.
Their search service quality has decreased massively in recent years. Google searches for products are basically useless as all of the results are SEO optimized AI compiled listicles with amazon ref links, you can basically only find relevant info by adding "reddit" to the end of your search.
Saying "see how you do without google for a day" is the same as saying "see how you would do without electricity for a day". They have worked very hard to become infrastructure, rather than a service.
The difference is that LVMH-type products are irrelevant to 98% of the population, and have a highly questionable impact to the top 2%.
De Beers had an iconic monopoly on diamonds for over a century, but as far as I know the only time a major government really went after them was for colluding over industrial diamonds, which are actually important.
Ensuring that jewelry diamonds and checkered handbags are available at a competitive price would be an awful use of government resources, not least because the inflated price is the point of those products.
Luxottica (but only after the 2018 merger with their main competitor) would be a much better example.
The commenter explains why that is and instead of reacting to his argument you are implying that it is just Europens who want to regulzte Americans while it is clearly not the case.
Not every monopoly is created equal and if you can not acknowledge that you are not arguing in good faith.
Edit: also I am looking into De Beers a bit more and it seems the EU has made steps to improve competition in the past.
Also if you want to argue that LVMH is a monopoly and that it has a bad impact, go ahead. I just think that since this is HN it is natural that most people do not feel the impact and do not really care. I do not know exactly how monopolistic they are and what the bad impact of that is but feel free to enlighten me.
The luxury goods market is not infrastructure.
Not to say they shouldn't be broken up, but google is owning the roads you drive on, your car, everyone else's car and every parking space.
The scale of the issue is just MUCH worse.
Its not good that if you want the expensive child labor clothes, you have little choice but to buy from LVMH, but like, you can get other clothes.
If you want to rid yourself of googles influence in your life, you have to abandon basically every tech item you own and live in the woods.
Neither is Google. If Google said they're going to disappear in 30 days, the world will move on and every single one of their services will be replaced.
If a power company suddenly shuts down and after the logistics nightmare that follows, they get replaced, they are still infrastructure.
If just a few products that google make go offline for only a few hours, the economic damage that causes is in the hundreds of millions at least.
Just because googles services could feasibly be replaced, it does not mean they are not infrastructure.
Ok, so you're basically saying that Google should be regulated because they're like infrastructure - even though they can be replaced given a few months. There are good to great alternatives for every Google product.
Yet, it's ok for Europe to ignore their own monopolies.
This is just moving the goal post. A monopoly is a monopoly.
What about ASML? They're a monopoly for EUV machines, which power our modern tech economy. That should be "infrastructure" enough right? Why isn't Europe looking at them?
>How quickly would public opinion change if Google decided to just shut off their service in the EU for a day?
That is not easy, some Google products are paid or Google offered clear terms , they can't brick my phone and break all the contracts they have with different companies because a petty reason.
Even say the free YouTube, I do not pay Google but there are Romanian companies that pay google to put ads in my face, so those are contracts and money involved here.
So what could they stop? Some free charity services maybe?
this is about the ad business not gmail etc. monopolies are not a good thing that’s why we have these laws in the first place. monopolies prevent innovation for example. in the ads case monopoly means 1 company decides what ads are good and what ads are not good which affects society
> How quickly would public opinion change if Google decided to just shut off their service in the EU for a day?
Very quickly - against Google.
The fact that European citizens have critical business ties to Google (from GSuite to YT partners) is a sword that cuts both ways.
It means the EU can't simply shut Google down on a whim; but it also means that Google can't just throw a tantrum and put up a black page saying "we are PROTESTING because your EVIL GOVERNMENT wants to OPPRESS US by asking us to PAY TAXES and ALLOW COMPETITION". Businesses wouldn't stick around to wait for the next time they got randomly locked out of GMail and GDrive.
(Not that Google has given the slightest hint of having considered such a move, unlike, say, Meta.)
> The world runs on Google and forcing that to change seems like a step backwards at first glance.
"Well we have a dominant position, it would be a shame if that were to change" isn't a great defence when you're being specifically accused of abusing your dominant position.
There is a rich history of monopolistic practices throughout history that gave rise to antitrust laws. "Does it actually affect people negatively if the result is a positive online user experience" could just as easily be from the playbook of Microsoft, AT&T, De Beers Group...
If you had read the EC statement, you would have understood this pertains to AdX, Google Ads, and DFP products whereby Google raises prices and stifles any competition: a good example of a negative online user experience.
I think that's why they're trying to go about it in a way that still allows Google to provide the search.
As for the benefit, when Google and Facebook jack up the prices of ads, it's probably increasing the prices of many things you buy on the internet.
Just as an example, I recently tried to run an ad on Google. There are no competitors in this space at all. It cost me > 1-2 USD per click. 10-15 years ago I also tried to run an ad on Google. When there were no competitors, you could have the ad for something like 0,04 USD per click.
The quality of google's search results going downhill is for me one of the signs that (as all monopols eventually) at some point they stop being a net positive for the society.
> The world runs on Google
Until it doesn't. No individual and no company is indispensable.
> Does it actually affect people negatively if the result is a positive online user experience?
More and more the positive experience is disputable. Both for users (result quality keeps falling) and advertisers (they're the ad exchange that matters).
> The world runs on Google and forcing that to change seems like a step backwards at first glance.
That's the monopoly part. There's more candidates who will get increased use if Google's search-ad feedback loop goes away. Every time someone too big to fail is finally broken up, we get a small step backwards... ideally we get a big step towards as a result.
> How quickly would public opinion change if Google decided to just shut off their service in the EU for a day?
Reframed: If you disrupt customers to avoid complying with local law, customers will perceive YOU to be the problem at least as much as local regulations.
I believe this is a REALLY dangerous move with very little upside and enormous risk for the company under almost any circumstances, which is probably the reason that companies almost NEVER do this.
>Reframed: If you disrupt customers to avoid complying with local law, customers will perceive YOU to be the problem at least as much as local regulations
Is this actually true in practice? Anecdotally Italians seeemed pretty annoyed they coudldn't use chatgpt for a while.
> I disagree. I think this sets a bad precedence. Who's next? Apple?
Yes please. If we want healthy competitive markets, we need smaller companies that actually _COMPETE_ and their products can be mixed and matched so the customers vote with their wallets and not CEOs with their lobbying checks.
Employees, shareholders, lobbyists, "researchers" who write academic "studies" favoring the company for money, nonprofit orgs which are principally funded by donations in exchange for political support, politicians whose kids work for big tech companies. (Only reason the US didn't pass regulation against tech recently is likely that Chuck Schumer's kids work for big tech and he just... never put the vote on the schedule...)
The only reason Google has survived today while operating as pretty much a criminal enterprise is because they spread a massive amount of money to the pockets of influential people.
They think that Google doesn't have enough competition right? So they want to regulate their markets.
But as we know, Google's entire business is hugely threatened by LLMs. Over time, all companies die and get outcompeted. Google won't be any different. You don't have to regulate.
I don't think this is a very healthy approach. This is similar to saying that we shouldn't regulate what chemicals companies put into food because eventually the companies die and it won't be a problem. We want things to get better now, not in some abstract far away future.
That I a think this is going to eventually come to a political head and be resolved with a treaty rather than EU courts because Google's (and Facebook with the end of the data sharing agreement) redress is going to be appealing to the US.
US tech companies have a very strong narrative right now that the EU's privacy and antitrust regulations are in effect, even if not intentional, a money extraction scheme. The EU has sued Google now 7 times under this statute as well as multiple times targeting Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple.
It's getting really hard to argue that they're not just going after the deepest (foreign) pockets with laws that are vague enough you could make a case against any medium sized tech company.
The EU fined Luxottica $125 million and explicitly allowed them to merge with Essilor.
That's a good point, but falls apart under a closer look. I'd argue luxury goods are by definition a completely separate market where the same rules simply don't apply; something as essential (not in the classic economic sense of starving without them, but in the practical sense that pretty much everyone uses it practically on a daily basis) as search, online ads, etc. should be regulated entirely differently. The impact and importance of impact is entirely different.
If there's anything to break up in terms of European companies, that'd be Alstom which are top 2 in rail transportation (but whose competition from China is growing rapidly so their global position is under threat), which btw wasn't allowed to merge with Siemens. Can't really think of another sane example.
Assiming this happened, and it worked as expected, the result would be:
* more ads, as competition drives down prices
* worse ads as cheaper adds don't need to be as relevant but do need to be more eye catching / shocking to compete for attention.
* less money to pay for the services ad revenue cover, so maybe you have to pay for gmail or get more spam etc
People seem to miss that "Competition" is not an ends in itself. Neither is lower prices. Human well-being should be. Under that model, google should be a regulated monopoly with enforced higher ad prices. That would mean better services, and fewer, better ads.
The only counter argument to this is that higher ad costs would mean (slightly) higher product costs. But we already live in that world...
worse ads as cheaper adds don't need to be as relevant but do need to be more eye catching / shocking to compete for attention.
That's exactly what happened already — because of Google.
Before Google AdSense, web sites used to be able to select high-quality ads from reputable advertising companies. You could get $100+ CPM for some campaigns from TribalFusion.
Then AdSense appeared, and drove CPM rates into pennies, which is why web sites are so loaded with advertising now.
You used to be able to make a good living running a high quality web site that served one ad per page. I know, because I did it for years. Google destroyed all of that. I won't cry if someone else does it to Google.
So will having 3 different, competing, ad senses driving the price down further help? Or would driving prices UP and guaranteeing a bigger cut for sites be better? :)
Definitely makes sense to force them to split between buy and sell side of the ad market. Ad exchange definitely is one aspect of that, but I get the impression there's a lot more than that in terms of "playing both sides." The lines have become very blurry.
It's been over a decade since I worked in ads, though, so I'm no expert. I did spend a short period of time on the Google AdX team after they bought the company I worked at (AdMeld) and sunk it. Itself a whole topic of anti-trust discussion.
Currently they can serve up ads for every possible search query typed or inject any number of ads surrounding every page you visit, so my grandma can barely use her phone without touching an ad.
The split Google "Services" part can still contract other ad networks for revenue, including AdSense if competitive. They just won't be able to bundle.
I think people underestimate how deeply intertwined Google's services and apps are.
I don't think a split off "Google Services" could survive. Google's fabric is designed to run Google's apps and vice versa. You can't just cram some other company's software into Google's core fabric and you can't just run AdSense on someone else's cloud. ETA: this is partially because of historical accretion and path dependence, but also because offering services at Google scale and reliability is a legitimately hard, abstraction-breaking problem; most fabrics aren't architected for the fault-tolerance and scaling that Google's fabric is (did you really isolate concerns? Are you sure your backing-store is eventually-consistent lock-free?), and most software isn't designed to run on a fault-tolerant, high-reliability fabric (what does your UI do if half the database is missing for ten minutes? Did you break your storage down into a NoSQL database with massive data denormalization because space is almost free, or are you using a relational database with heavy cross-lookup constraints that require high availability? Are your RPCs doctored with enough data to make for useful full-service traces, or do your microservices just spit JSON at each other?).
(Source: was there; I saw enough acquisitions go sideways to know how actually hard it is to reshape software from the outside world to fit Google's way of doing computing).
That sounds like a problem for Google to solve, not the public. "We setup our business so that it's too difficult to comply with the law" isn't an excuse in any context.
"The US failed to break up a monopoly that to this day stifles competition and prevents effective capitalism by making itself to complicated to regulate, so lets keep making the same mistakes"
Does modern MS stifle competition and prevent effective capitalism? I don't think I've heard anyone beat that drum and get a band marching behind it in years.
This is the same Microsoft that's seen its desktop market share slowly erode since 2013, right? The one holding 1.9% of smartphone marketshare? The one so impossible to regulate that the FTC is regulating it right now (https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/12/...)?
> Does modern MS stifle competition and prevent effective capitalism?
Of course they do, and anyone who is confused by their marketing into thinking otherwise is just plain blind. The last someone "beat that drum" was none other than the british competition regulator aka CMA not _two months ago_, which among maaany other things literally complained Microsoft was still using their monopoly power to prevent gaming on desktop Linux. Stay classy, MS.
> We found that the Microsoft Cloud Remedy had several shortcomings: [..] Microsoft would not have to supply Activision’s full range of games to providers that may decide to operate using a non-Windows PC operating system (eg Linux)
Ironically, I already predicted that the EC would likely bend over and accept MS's ridiculous proposal, but we would never know since the CMA rejecting it first would leave the EC in a untenable position. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35772912
I guess it is not as untenable as I thought, and the EC believes it can just throw shit towards the CMA until they get away with it. I also have my confirmation on whether the EC would be stupid enough to accept the deal.
Anyway, you cannot disagree with the fact that MS still _tried_ to stifle Linux, which is the point (and the part that I'm quoting). And arguably both as server and as a desktop OS.
Sure, back in the day. And they don't go out of their way to support it in the modern era.
...but this goes back to the US interpretation of "monopoly practice" vs. the European interpretation. Where was the consumer harm? How does MS "stifle" an OS that you can just pick up from a CD, floppy disk, or the Internet and drop on a machine you own?
History seems to have shown "You can't." In general, the biggest hindrance to Linux desktop adoption is the Linux UX (and for games, the experience of building one with the libraries available on Linux [https://utopixel.games/en/blog/building-outer-wonders-for-li...]), not anything Microsoft (or Apple, for that matter) have done to it.
"Back in the day" is stretching it since MS did this 2 months ago. With the same strategy they used to kill Be decades ago, which obviously works.
It's irrelevant what you think about Linux UX. It is just fact that MS is worried enough that _to this day_ they are using their monopoly position to stifle non-Windows OSes ( desktop AND server) every frigging time they can. Same way they have doing continuously for decades.
And also despite the fact their marketing dept says that "MS loves Linux" and the armchair analysts say that MS makes money from Linux servers.
Are you talking about Be as in Be Incorporated? With the BeBox and BeOS?
They settled a lawsuit with Microsoft, but Be didn't fail because of anything Microsoft did any more than it failed because of anything Apple did. Nobody wanted yet another operating system to write code against. Be failed for the same reason that Plan 9 hasn't caught fire and served as a meaningful alternative to the Linux ecosystem; when your architecture is too far divorced from the existing ecosystems after the ecosystems grow sufficiently large, it doesn't matter if your solution is slightly better... Developers don't want to invest the time starting over.
Monopoly protection is a lot of things, but it isn't a mechanism for somebody to try and compete with DC power for long distance transmission when the world has already wired up AC.
Again, it's irrelevant what your opinion of the competition is. I'm just pointing that _they are_ abusing their dominant position to stiffle the competition, as recently as 2 months ago, and using the same tactiques they have been using since forever.
"The competition sucks" has never been an argument _at all_ in any antitrust case and never will, by definition.
"Competition is a ruthless process. A firm that reduces cost and expands sales injures rivals--sometimes fatally." ~ Ball Mem'l Hosp., Inc. v. Mut. Hosp. Ins., Inc., 784 F.2d 1325, 1338 (7th Cir. 1986) (Easterbrook, J.)., sourced from the DOJ website. (https://www.justice.gov/archives/atr/competition-and-monopol...). Also worth noting on that page: "At its core, section 2 makes it illegal to acquire or maintain monopoly power through improper means." Monopoly itself is not illegal in the US system; consumer harm is. This differs from the European interpretation.
... but yes, "Your honor, the competition is just too bad at this to compete" is an antitrust defense as a result. At least in the US system.
Your conclusion does not really follow from what you are quoting. Can you quote a case where "the competition sucks" was actually and succesfully used as a defense in the US?
I don't disagree with anything you quoted -- it is abuse of a dominant position that is illegal (even in my country at the very least, which last time I checked was in the EU). Just note that it doesn't really matter if you got your monopoly because "the competition sucked" or not, just the fact that you have a dominant position, and you abused it. So I disagree with the conclusion.
And let it be clear that all of this is an off-topic, since again the point was that MS is still using the same anti-competitive strategies they were using decades ago, to this day.
> Your conclusion does not really follow from what you are quoting.
Sorry, I should have been more clear. Emphasis mine: "At its core, section 2 makes it illegal to acquire or maintain monopoly power through improper means." The American system recognizes the notion of proper monopoly; if one company is doing something very well and every other company lacks the tools or skill to do as well, that is not actionable. Using market dominance is also not, by itself, actionable ("Competition is a ruthless process" &c). What the US does consider actionable is consumer harm... undercutting your opponents' prices because you can isn't actionable by itself ("Hey, look at all that competition lowering prices! Consumers love low prices!"), but undercutting them unsustainably and then jacking the price later when you grind them out of business is.
But you're right that we're having a two-ships-passing-in-the-night discussion on the topic now, because Europe takes a very different view upon this (protection of the marketplace, in the European history of antitrust, is protecting the right to make a living competing, not the consumers' right not to be screwed). Much of what I'm saying is in the American mindset, and reasonable people can disagree because reasonable people can come from different philsophical backgrounds on what constitutes protection-worthy antitrust behavior.
(Linux, as example, in the American system it's hard to make the argument that MS being unwilling to spend the money to port software they own to another OS is consumer harm. It can be made though; I believe that's one of the reasons the FCC was blocking the MS / Activision merger. But it's right on the edge of a defendable argument, because the counter-argument is "Who cares if Word doesn't run on Ubuntu distros if OpenOffice is right there?").
Of course. It controls 90% + of the global PC desktop OS market. Every single business runs on Windows, and a tiny fraction on Apple. It's a classic monopoly, kin of like when US Steel had some refineries and technically competed with Standard Oil in the oil industry, but only on paper, and mostly served to create the illusion of competition.
Keeping in mind that the law wasn't that when the tech stack was built.
It would certainly be a problem for Google to solve, but one should note that legally requiring this of the company would be tantamount to legally requiring Google to shut down (which in the long run would harm user privacy because the company would almost certainly be replaced by an ecosystem of companies that care far less about privacy than Google does, and a gaggle of unrelated firms running hither and thither with user data is harder to regulate than one megacorp). There are better ways to serve the public interest here.
Most of the value of Google is the services it provides (search and ads, and indeed cloud, which is a separate product and not just "Google's internal fabric exposed") on its internal fabric.
Splitting out "Google Services" from ads or search creates a company with one customer (or two, if we've split out ads and search) that is basically in no market position to get more customers because Google's internal fabric is not a "cloud offering" (source: I was listening in when the company decided to offer Google Cloud and not make that "just the bare metal we run everything on;" Google's internal bare metal is too developer-hostile to the common way things are done outside Google to be a viable product).
Meanwhile, search and ads would be in a place where there was only one "cloud" company in the world they could run their product on.
For all its money, I don't believe Google could afford to re-tool their products to work on someone else's cloud, so once the "Services" company foundered for being unable to compete / having a monoculture of customers, the ads and search companies would die for lack of vendor offering the one bespoke cloud model they can run on.
I'm sorry, but Google has already dealt with this issue, and they can deal with it again. Quota is a thing there, and they already have process for billing and managing access to Google resources by entities which are quasi-internal because during the "Alphabet" transition many things that were formerly internal -- such as the e.g. "Access & Energy PA", which became "Access", mostly Fiber ... which I happened to work at the time -- became quasi-external, and they started having to pay Google-proper for Borg usage, etc.
It's not impossible at all for Google to set up process, billing, and data access boundaries. They just naturally have an interest in avoiding this completely. Which is exactly the point -- right now their ads products in particular have way too much insight into both the buy and sell side of the equation, and Google has gone out of its way to dominate the entire ad supply chain using this knowledge.
Forcing an infrastructure separation and an organizational separation for the ads businesses there would do a lot of good for the market as a whole.
And not sure we should care too much about how Google does out of it. They're swimming in ad revenues.
Good point. I was thinking about this through the lens of how Google looks when doing an acquisition and under-valuing the fact that these spin-offs would be already-constructed Google-shaped offerings.
Still, it sets up a monoculture of service fabrics those products can run on where the division between orgs is, at best, paper-thin; at worst, search or ads dies and takes services with it (or vice-versa) because without several eng-decades neither of those sub-companies are kitted to act as an independent company.
>EU is “concerned that Google has made it harder for rival online advertising services to compete in the so-called ad tech stack.”
There are plenty of competitors in the ad tech space. China created TikTok. Korea created KaoKaoTalk. Even Japan created Line. Meanwhile, the EU, for all it's antitrust regulation, hasn't created anything substantial. Perhaps, it's the burdensome regulation that's the problem.
Europe creates a high amount of regulation. The startup industry gets completely stifled and unable to compete with US nor China. So all they do now is add more regulation.
well, not questioning that the market makers are not encouraged to make the market "fair", they wants to make the market "favorable" for its own people but i see a difference between companies that sell luxury goods (not relevant for humanity) and companies that permeates every single aspect of your life, mostly in sublte and sketchy ways, selling data of people that don't even know they generate.
One of my friends works for a European adtech company. Unlike the companies I mentioned above, they don't do anything except manage online ads for brands. After iOS and Android enhanced their privacy settings, they lost a substantial portion of their business. I'm guessing that this is the type of business that the EU is trying to protect.
99% of the people don't care. That's why there are 2.1 billion people on Facebook.
Without surveillance capitalism, prices for services would go up or would cease to be free.
The ad-driven business model is a legitimate one.
I assume that you use a free service from Google/Facebook/Microsoft? So you must not care about surveillance capitalism either. At least not care enough.
> I assume that you use a free service from Google/Facebook/Microsoft? So you must not care about surveillance capitalism either. At least not care enough.
This happens exactly because there is no competition and hence antitrust is needed. I don't want to be using services from Google/Facebook/Microsoft but there's no competition and then I end up using their services even when trying to avoid it as most as possible...
If the prices for services would go up without surveillance capitalism so be it, that's the real price, I want to choose to pay for it, not be coerced into giving them my data for their "free" services. I don't have that option right now, nor anyone else, why are you against freedom of choice?
It was a search engine developed by an ex Google exec. It had no ads, no tracking. It required a subscription to use. Most people who used it said the search results were great.
Yes, I did. And I subscribe to Kagi right now (since Nov/2022) after Neeva, and will keep trying to find paid search solutions if Kagi ever goes belly up.
Please don't cross into personal attack and please avoid tit-for-tat spats on HN, regardless of how bad someone's comments are or you feel they are. We're trying for just the opposite here.
Please don't cross into personal attack and please avoid tit-for-tat spats on HN, regardless of how bad someone's comments are or you feel they are. We're trying for just the opposite here.
Neeva, founded by a former Google exec, built a search engine that had no ads and no tracking. No surveillance capital. They just shut down because no one wanted to pay for it - hence the idea that 99% don't care about surveillance capital enough.
The point is that it had no "surveillance capitalism". It failed because no one cares about that enough - proving that people prefer free with data mining/ads over subscriptions for many internet products.
Except it literally had an exact connection to my identity and they had the data to do what they wanted to 4 years down the line when investors demanded more returns.
Just…no. This is giving me vibes of the FBI “secure” phones. Fuck that.
These businesses earn billions from customers that are gladly paying for their services, because they get value out of it.
You call the business "illegitimate", but there are literally millions of paying customers that disagree with you, and they put their money where their mouth is. A lot of money.
Today I learned that most people on HN does not understand basic economics. Or maybe they do but their comments are clouded by their hatred of big tech. Not referring to you brap.
I'd be happy to pay 250€ a year for an OS that I actually own and control. I'd be happy to also pay that amount to browse without being spied on. I'm actually worth less as a target for advertisement. These products not existing is just a failure of the market and maybe of our education, which is why it is important for governments to step in at that point.
>I'd be happy to pay 250€ a year for an OS that I actually own and control.
That's cool. And do you think many people will also happily pay 250€ every year? Do you think enough people care so make this a profitable business? And if so, why isn't there one yet? If there is, why aren't you a happy paying customer?
>I'd be happy to also pay that amount to browse without being spied on.
Same question.
>These products not existing is just a failure of the market
Is it? Or is the market simply responding to (lack of) demand?
It seems to me that many people on HN forget that we're just part of a very small bubble, a niche. We're a tiny target segment, we're not very good at paying for things, and frankly we make pretty shitty customers for various of other reasons. Instead of admitting that we're not that valuable to businesses, we project our own desires onto others, and when we don't get what we want because it's not profitable, we expect the government to step in and force someone else pay for it.
Google will rather split up the internet by pulling out of Europe than follow this. And isn't ads the only profitable business Google has? If they sell it, there Google search, Gmail etc couldn't exist.
If Google's ad business was split from the rest, it would mean the ad business having to pay the search engine business and other Google businesses to advertise on them.
EMEA is Google's second largest market, and it's not even close for competition. There is no way Google would be willing to cut revenue by $90 billion annually. It would be corporate suicide. The single greatest loss event of investor capital in history.
They'll comply, just like Apple will comply with the DMA. They have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders. Unlike the U.S., E.U lawmakers can't be bought.
I'm curious if you're so naive to believe that or if you were trolling and wrote that with a straight face. Because cronies like Ursula Von Der Leyen would like to disagree with you.
if EU lawmakers could be bought in the same way US ones can, there is absolutely no way that GDPR or the DMA would have been enacted. this isn't to say that they are completely unbuyable, but look at how much the companies affected had to lose. literally tens of billions in some cases. there's evidence online that they were pumping money into any channel possible to try and stop the DMA, but they failed
If US lawmakers could be bought the same way that EU ones can, there is absolutely no way that they would have increased the corporate tax rate from 19% to 25%.
You are including an entire continent and countries like UK, UAE, Saudi for coming up with this revenue number for EU. Also my guess would be that profit margin will be much lower than US due to all the regulations like GDPR.
Google's overall ad revenue is 4x greater than EU total revenue. It will definitely loose EU business than it will loose ads business. But yeah there are always legal loophole in things like this and likely it could keep both.
Breaking out the ad business doesn't mean selling it, it means creating red tape through layers of indirection between the ad business and the rest of the company. In essence, this would be no different than the split between Alphabet and Google (or Waymo, even): https://www.kamilfranek.com/what-companies-alphabet-google-o...
"Pulling out" would be a massive blow to Google's revenue and shareholder value, even compared to the massive costs of restructuring the business to comply with the breakup. It would be economical suicide and career suicide for the CEO.
As expected, the comments here seem generally in support of such a move. But, it is really unclear to me how such a move would improve my life or the lives of most typical users. Genuinely open to having it explained to me.
> The EU has previously found Google guilty of “systematically favoring” its own shopping comparison service, abusing its Android market dominance by bundling its search engine and Chrome apps, and preventing AdSense customers from accepting advertising from rival search engines.
The sites you frequent are more likely to stick around if they have more revenue options, and we all benefit from competition in the search and browser markets lest we wind up with IE6 all over again.
Online store sells great products. But nobody knows about them.
Online store buys ads on Google to tell people about their products. People click the ads, and buy the products so the store can scale up and lower their per unit cost. Everyone are happy.
Now fast forward a decade. Google drop their "do no evil" motto and jack up ad prices. Online store now pays 10 times as much for their ads and have to raise prices to cover the costs. Google shareholders are happy, everyone else loses - it doesn't matter if they click ads or not, the prices are higher for everyone.
>Now fast forward a decade. Google drop their "do no evil" motto and jack up ad prices. Online store now pays 10 times as much for their ads and have to raise prices to cover the costs.
This is just not true and not how Google's ads work.
Google has a bidding system. You don't have to pay their prices if your ads aren't profitable. You can pull out. You can go somewhere else. You can try other forms of marketing. You can make a better product, better landing page, better messaging so you can convert more users per click.
Your company is essentially competing with other companies for the click. If the price 10x, it's because other companies are willing to pay 10x more. If other companies are willing to pay more for the ads, then your product/business/marketing isn't as good as theirs.
Don’t worry. There’s a hack to get around paying for publicity and that’s to be an obnoxious troll. You can get rich on social media by being deliberately offensive.
Come on Facebook is right there. Google is a $200bn ad company, Facebook is a $130bn ad company. You don't even have to change your marketing strategy at all, both companies will happily swallow all your dollars to make ads.
You can make a case that replacing Google with a bunch of bespoke ad vectors isn't a real alternative because they don't have Google's reach but Facebook does.
In the same way the EU GDPR cookie banners made your life worse and barely changed any practices. These are highly complex companies and trying to simplify them into a couple laws is why communism failed. Breaking a big company will create a hundreds of companies with more shady practices, tax evasion, etc... that will be harder to control.
And am not saying don't do it... because this liberate the potential from one big hand to multiple ones. I am just answering your question whether this is a positive or not.
How is your life better with having Standard Oil broke up in 1911? We didn't get to see the counterfactual of Rockefeller strangling the oil industry by 1920.
Big tech though has gone beyond the definition of a monopoly. We didn't breakup Standard Oil because we were worried about them taking over the garment industry too.
I imagine we already pay for big tech dearly as a society but we can't run reality a 1000 times over to see the alternatives. We basically run the Windows 11 version of society and since we can't actually have a different experience we conclude "hey this Windows 11 society isn't that bad, how would any of this improve my Windows 11 life?".
If we could actually see the alternate paths this would be the biggest political issue in democracies by a mile. Instead we have big tech controlling what people see and read almost entirely so of course this is no big deal. Big tech told me so!
"The Commission is concerned that Google’s allegedly intentional conducts aimed at giving [Google’s ad exchange] AdX a competitive advantage and may have foreclosed rival ad exchanges."
So the goal is for there to be more competition among advertisers?
That might help ad purchasers (ie. mostly corporations), but consumers are still going to be screwed as this does nothing to stop the spying and advertising that are worst scourges that Google has imposed upon the world.
Competition is good. Fracturing the market means it's harder for any one actor to have all the information, and encourages the industry to look for other models.
The EU already made multiple attempts to get that under control, notably first with the Cookie Law and later with GDPR. The problem is that those have mechanism that allow the user to accept tracking, and Google does its best to get website owners to make their user agree by any means nessesary. In analytics there's some competition, and I can run self-hosted cookieless Maomo or plausibly.io if I want to get actionable insights without having the user opt-out of privacy protections. In advertising there's much less competition, and thus little in the way of privacy-friendly options. Forcing more competion might solve this.
- the so-called “cookie law” is not limited to cookies (see ePrivacy article 5(3) for more information, it's actually any technique allowing to store or retrieve information from a user's terminal);
- ePrivacy exists since 2002 (so, decades);
- any kind of tracking allowing to identify unique users will require consent, cookies or not.
> Browser fingerprinting and countless other techniques can and are being used as well.
Those work, but Google has publicly committed not to use them for ad targeting. Hence all their work on privacy sandbox (attempting to preserve as much of the economic effects of cross-site tracking while fixing the privacy leak).
1: Publicly saying one thing and then turning out to have been doing something different when someone blows the whistle or it comes out in a lawsuit would be far more damaging to them than just not making the commitment. (Also, I worked at Google until a little over a year ago and if we'd been using fingerprinting for ad targeting I would have seen it.)
"Publicly saying one thing and then turning out to have been doing something different when someone blows the whistle or it comes out in a lawsuit would be far more damaging to them than just not making the commitment."
If they did it would be far from the first or even the millionth time a company has said one thing and done another... even when it's ostensibly illegal, immoral, or merely bad PR. Most of them get away with it too, or get just a slap on the wrist if they're ever caught.
The people responsible usually suffer no personal consequences, and just go on to get cushy jobs in other companies if they're ever fired, or have enough "fuck you money" to not even ever worrying about having a job for the rest of their life. That's assuming there are actual professional consequences, where there often aren't.. some even get away with getting huge bonuses while they drag their companies through the gutter and in to the ground.
Yeah this is an article about antitrust. Bringing up data collection is about as relevant as criticizing the commission for not tackling their carbon footprint. Antitrust and stronger data protections can coexist :)
Of course that’s all just deck chairs on the titanic. We need to make Display advertising illegal world-wide…
>Approximately 86% of online display advertising space in the U.S. is boughtand sold in real-time on electronic trading venues, which the industry calls “advertising exchanges.” With intermediaries that route buy and sell orders, the structure of the ad market is similar to the structure of electronically traded financial markets. In advertising, a single company, Alphabet (“Google”), simultaneously operates the leading trading venue, as well as the leading intermediaries that buyers and sellers go through to trade. At the same time, Google itself is one of the largest sellers of ad space globally. This Article explains how Google dominates advertising markets by engaging in conduct that lawmakers prohibit in other electronic trading markets: Google’s exchange shares superior trading information and speed with the Google-owned intermediaries, Google steers buy and sell orders to its exchange and websites (Search & YouTube), and Google abuses its access to inside information. In the market for electronically traded equities, we require exchanges to provide traders with fair access to data and speed, we identify and manage intermediary conflicts of interest, and we requiretrading disclosures to help police the market. Because ads now trade on electronic trading venues too, should we borrow these three competition principles to protect the integrity of advertising?
And microsoft is walking scot free. They can happily control operating systems, office tools, a slice of search, ides, ads within their os, are allowed to buy large game makers and soon ai. As a bare minimum they should be forced greater compatibility with running their software on linux and ideally be banned from doing ads, ai and gamedev.
Microsoft gets a free pass because they're a 1-stop shop for governments and companies running offices. A walled garden is useful when non-technical people have to keep information somewhat securely.
Google's search and ad dominance on the other hand are less convenient for governments.
The EU has brought several antitrust cases against Microsoft regarding Windows and Office and succeeded, and recently fined them for anti-competitive behavior on video calling software.
I agree they should be forced to offer office on Linux. It is one of the things that really keeps Linux down for normal people.
Why should they not be able to offer ads in their own products though? I don't like ads but I do not immediataly see the issue. I think they should absolutly be allowed to do AI but things like only allowing bing chat in Edge should be banned. The amount of pushing they do is clearly not OK. And same for google they should not be allowed to push chrome on you when you go to gmail or google in a non chrome browser
Didn't get the memo that both the UK and now US are blocking the Activision purchase?
>As a bare minimum they should be forced greater compatibility with running their software on linux
They do where it makes sense? PWA seems to be the main route they are taking, Office is slowly being migrated to PWA, Outlook is the first application being converted and is already available for testing by end users on Windows for now. It's sad because it's losing native functionality in exchange for PWA :(
Otherwise native desktop apps are already a difficult endeavor for anyone, Linux is an absolute fucking nightmare when it comes to packaging for everyone's NIH distro and I say that as a maintainer of a popular OSS package ;)
>ads within their os
The "ads" within their OS are only for upselling their own products. They are hardly ads and both Apple, Google and every other company does it. But somehow it's a problem if Microsoft throws a banner telling you trying OneDrive.
EU just in the last month launched an antitrust probe into Microsoft's preferential licensing of their software (like Windows, SQL Server) when run on Azure compared to running it on other clouds. Probes aren't guaranteed to turn into enforcement, but Microsoft is certainly not able to act without scrutiny.
Microsoft is currently under investigated for using software licensing to prop up Azure.
> The crux of the issue relates to a 2019 licensing change enacted by Microsoft, effectively making it more expensive to run Microsoft’s omnipresent enterprise software on rival cloud services. Fast-forward to last year’s snowballing antitrust legal challenges, and Microsoft revealed it was making some changes designed to make “bringing workloads and licenses to partners’ clouds easier,” which it did to an extent — with the notable exceptions of so-called “listed providers” that include AWS, Google, and Alibaba.
So in effect, Microsoft is kinda making it easier for companies to run Microsoft software on non-Azure clouds, but only if they’re not using Microsoft’s main rivals’ infrastructure.
Microsoft at least sells real products that should be designed, produced and supported. Google sells, figuratively speaking, air, and redirects the profits to "own the world" by crushing the competition in other areas. Google undoubtedly has some decent products as well (Android, Google Workspace) but this is a drop in the ocean.
Adtech (helping sellers surface advertising to buyers) should be cleanly split from tech provision (selling IT products and services to buyers).
Further, the adtech business should be highly regulated, with the collection of data and profiling of individuals based on online behavior ideally prohibited. Digital ads are probably unavoidable, but should really just revert to be like the TV and newspaper ads of old.
Surveillance capitalism cannot be reformed, it must be banned. The "market" has malfunctioned big time and produced a monster.
There is nothing workable about the status quo. It holds back potentially tremendous potential and value, even just using conventional, monetary, yardsticks.
There is no way you can rollout next-gen "AI" and deeply impactful innovations around e.g., finance while the well is poisoned by this commingling of unsavory business models with legitimate pursuits.
Tweedledum and Tweedledee until regulators, politicians but also economic actors and the public wake up and smell the coffee.
Each "bet" in Alphabet needs to be broken. Each business unit within Google needs to be broken.
Same with Apple. Break that up to between services and hardware. Force them to open up their new silicon. Why can't other companies use the H1 or H2 chips for their headphones? why are we letting Apple have the competitive advantage? Open up the App Store and force new payment methods.
Microsoft also needs to be broken up. force them to sell their OpenAI stake and separate Office, Windows, Azure and Xbox.
Once we're done with that we need to break up Adobe (artistic tools and stock assets need to be separate), Uber (Eats and Driving again need be separate) and others as well.
moving away from tech, we need to break up these luxury conglomerates to spur more innovation in the fashion industry as well. same for food conglomerates such as Nestle and consumer goods like Unilever.
we've only begun the Great Breaking.
and while we're at it, we need to put a end to the madness of corporate greed and institute strict profit limits and tax the rest. when you really use your big brain - you'll realize nothing is more anti-competitive than excessive profits! money is power and profit is money, and no company need have power similar to the government. those profits are ultimately what are used to acquire more companies and begin their treacherous anti-competitive practices.
break the companies up and lock up the execs for being complicit in literal criminal activity. you show me a BigCo with profit and I'll show you criminal activity.
Any companies that aren't Apple or Microsoft that compete with Google do not have healthy competition at all. What are you talking about?
Google uses www.google.com, the most popular website in the world, to push Chrome. Chrome, the most popular browser in the world, uses www.google.com as the default search engine. Google controls the largest ad marketplace and analytics tool, so they use Chrome to harm the ad landscape to stifle ad-tech competitors (third party cookies) and completely hinder the development of ad blocking software (FLoC and web bundles). Google uses Android, the most popular mobile operating system in the world, to push Google services and has Chrome as the default browser.
Anti-trust regulation must step in when a company uses its market dominance in one area to gain an advantage in another. Here, we have an entire feedback loop. We haven't had competent regulation of markets since the early 1900s.
Google needs to divest Doubleclick and Chrome. This is completely untenable.
> use Chrome to harm the ad landscape to stifle ad-tech competitors (third party cookies)
As in, Chrome is removing third-party cookie support to hurt their ad-tech competitors? How do you square this with Safari kicking off third-party cookie removal, Firefox following close behind, and Chrome being last?
> completely hinder the development of ad blocking software (FLoC and web bundles)
Neither FLoC nor web bundles impact ad blockers, though? Both can trivially be blocked, and don't introduce new capabilities that strengthen ad blocking circumvention relative to ad blocking. (With FLoC I'm not sure what you mean here, since this isn't an argument I've seen before. With web bundles I was the main person pushing this in Google Ads before I left a year ago, and while adblocker-circumvention is something Brave claimed it never made much sense: https://www.jefftk.com/p/webbundles-and-url-randomization).
I.. I know you’re joking but I love 90% of that. I need a hacker news alternative for people like me. Or perhaps just people that look at the state of the world and think maybe, just maybe, something’s rotten in the states of Delaware and Ireland…
The funny thing is that breaking up these giants would create more corporations, hence more highly-compensated execs, and also more value for the equity investors (this is less intuitive, but I think that's what typically happens).
Google operates an exchange for a digital asset, is a major vendor/trader of said asset on that exchange and operates an algorithmic trading platform to enable people to buy and sell on that exchange. On top of that the algorithmic trades are a "black box" with no audit trail, and no public insight into how it operates.
If that sounds familiar, think illegal crypto exchanges...
Obviously "ads" are not "securities", but when you take that along with the monopolistic position Google have between businesses and consumers online, the status quo is not sustainable. The EU is absolutely right to suggest breaking Google up, it should not be allowed to operate as an exchange, broker-dealer, and clearing agency.
Google have systematically taken control away from advertisers over the last ten years, it used to be that we would have deep control and insight into our campaigns. Now, it's all purely algorithmic, you put money in, and they promise to send you customers, with very little control from you.
Something important I want to draw attention to though, there is obviously much to complain about with Google tracking visitors/consumers, but their tracking and "spying" on businesses using the platform is also incredibly deep. In order to advertise effectively with Google Ads, you now need to provide them with full sales figures from your checkout process. They want to feed the "algorithm" with your revenue numbers, not just from sales resulting from ad clicks, but all your sales. Google have amassed the most incredible insight into any and all businesses online. They know exactly how much you are making, how competitive you are compared to your competition, and how much they can squeeze out of you. They are in the position to design the "algorithm" to maximise their take as they can see your figures.
So to finish, they operate a monopolistic exchange, as broker-dealer, clearing agency, and algorithmic trader, at the same time as having full visibility of your books. To me that should clearly be illegal.
Crypto is much more transparent than Google Ads due to the fact that most of them at least have a public blockchain. Is there any way to know if Google Ads purchasing isn’t a giant Ponzi of ads? Is there any way to verify they aren’t bidding up the auctions and that any of it is based on reality and competition at all?
Crypto also has price discovery through shorting and selling. How would one short a Google Ad or sell one in their marketplace? There’s only one supplier and it’s “trust me bro” for the price discovery. I think it will be very funny if the past decade or so was not only based on a foundation of sand caused by zero interest rates, but also an ad ponzi from the tech giants. We sent our best and brightest not to the moon or to cure cancer, but to find new ways to keep that ad ponzi going.
Holy cow. People are comparing Google to crypto exchanges now.
Blockchains are public, yes. But the entities behind them are completely and utterly cryptic and centralized. Most of them operate out of Cayman Islands/Bahamas, etc.
Well, yeah. At least I can read the smart contract and audit transactions on the blockchain, if we are talking about decentralized exchanges. Google is faaaaaaaaaar less transparent. As in, not transparent at all.
Yes, being able to read smart contracts and audit transactions on the blockchain is how everyone knew FTX stealing customer funds from years ago. Oh wait.
There are a huge number of ways crypto exchanges pull of scams without anyone noticing including straight up transferring customer funds to their own accounts, wash trading, trading against their own customers, having timely "maintenance" that lead to automatic liquidations, listing securities, taking bribes to list and promote a shitcoin, and the list goes on and on.
FTX drained $8 billion of customer funds over its lifetime without anyone noticing on chain until its sudden collapse.
> Yes, being able to read smart contracts and audit transactions on the blockchain is how everyone knew FTX stealing customer funds from years ago.
Yes in fact! Anyone who looked into it knew. Maybe Wall Street and VCs were duped, but the crypto industry itself saw the train wreck coming from a mile away and distanced themselves from the start. That's why when the inevitable happened, the mainstream were pumping out articles about FTX disproportionately to its importance -- they were the ones that got played.
> There are a huge number of ways crypto exchanges pull of scams
There are a huge number of ways Google pulls off scams too. That's what this entire thread is about and the reason for the European Commission's complaint. Hence the comparison.
FTX's schemes were only exposed AFTER they couldn't handle withdrawals.
Anyone who follows crypto closely knows that every crypto exchange is crooked. Even crypto bros will tell you that. I can say that Binance is shady and likely stealing from their customers and I'll more likely to be correct than not. Saying FTX was shady before they were exposed was not a bold statement.
You're right about Binance, but the same wouldn't be true about Fidelity, Coinbase, Kraken, etc. People with an axe to grind about crypto like to pretend the industry is homogeneous and always complain about the likes of FTX and Binance (who are in the news a lot for reasons you'd expect), but conveniently never have anything to say about the exchanges with a good track record that people actually use and trust.
Of course FTX was doing shady stuff. Every crypto exchange does it. You can find examples of crypto exchanges doing shady stuff everywhere.
But no one figured out that FTX was 100% scam, moved billions from their customers, commingled funds with Alameda until after the collapse. This is despite being on the blockchain.
My point is that the transparency of blockchains does not matter for crypto exchanges. They have a million ways to scam their customers without being noticed on chain.
Yes, that's where the saying "not your keys, not your coin" comes from. But that's another deep rabbit hole.
Since this thread is about Google (don't forget), what's the equivalent of "not your keys" for Google ads? That's why it's an apt comparison, and the subject of the EU's complaint.
>> Yes, being able to read smart contracts and audit transactions on the blockchain is how everyone knew FTX stealing customer funds from years ago.
> Yes in fact!
Your first link is someone saying "I told you so", but there's no mention of reading smart contracts or auditing blockchain transactions. Instead it's something like, SBF seemed very fishy to him. Ex, "if you actually listened to him speak, it was obvious that he was a bumbling idiot who didn’t really grasp the industry he was supposed to be a domain expert in." Your second link is an example of someone doing something similar, again without using anything on-chain.
> the crypto industry itself saw the train wreck coming from a mile away and distanced themselves from the start
This is a pretty hard claim to support, and two people who said "this looks suspicious" isn't much evidence in that direction. When I talked to crypto people pre-2022-11 they were generally positive on FTX (but crypto is large and diverse and this is also saying very little).
My memory of general sentiment is different, but again you can't prove something like that. As far as hard data, all I can think to offer is this breakdown of FTX's creditors by country, compiled from the bankruptcy filing.
The Reddit link is analysis of public information, but the gist of that comment thread seems to be "Alameda is buying, I'm going to buy too" and not "evidence of improper FTX/Alameda separation".
With the customer distribution, how much of this is downstream from the crypto industry avoiding high-regulation countries? The biggest two are the Caymans (22%) and the Virgin Islands (11%) -- how many of those people are really Americans?
1. You're right, that link isn't relevant on second look. I do remember a specific thread but I could be misremembering and my google skills are failing me (or maybe the subreddit has gone private?) I'll concede the point.
2. They could be, but if an American retail trader sets up an offshore company to do their trading with to avoid regulation, you're not a regular joe anymore, you should know what you're getting yourself into and I don't have a lot of sympathy.
Google the company is less shady than most crypto companies, but Google's market place for ads is a lot more shady than crypto exchanges.
Not only is Google on each side of the trade, there is also zero transparency to other participants and it has been proven in this lawsuit that Google is using back doors in their exchange to give their own tools (DoubleClick / Google DV360) access to data that other market participants don't have.
Frankly, their ad marketplace is a lot worse than even the shadiest crypto marketplaces.
If you don't want to send your money to the Bahamas, you have the choice as a consumer to use a regulated US-based exchange instead. You don't have to be ultra-savvy to read wikipedia and learn about a company before doing business with them.
With Google, you're spending money in a completely opaque marketplace with 0 visibility or transparency, and no choice as a consumer to mitigate that.
Both operate(d) notionally firewalled US-based exchanges to serve US customers. For FTX we already know this was a pure sham and they lost basically all the FTX.US money as well, and the SEC has alleged that Binance is doing exactly the same.
So your point is after you read wikipedia, it's possible to ignore the information you learned there and find some other rationalisation to send your money away? Yes, that is possible, you got me.
Imagine if a supermarket not only sold goods but also controlled all supply chains, decided on the prices of every product, and owned the only transportation system in town. All the while, it keeps track of every item you've ever bought or looked at, and how much you're willing to spend on groceries. The supermarket then uses this data to influence product pricing, availability, and transportation routes...And it's the only supermarket in town...
Really? I found it more accurate in most cases. I wonder if there is a difference based on location. I am in California. Also maybe years ago it was not as good as Google, maybe it got better since then?
probably a little of all the reasons you named, plus some others.
most likely it was just a shallow bait for apple fan's as i too use apple maps almost exclusively for some years now and found it more than capable for my navigation needs.
It works alright, but it is absolutely terrible for discovery, e.g. finding places to eat/things to do. If you already know where you want to go, it's usually pretty good.
Additionally, to view any reviews you have to download Yelp
living completely offline is becoming increasingly challangeing thou. and going online to do anything becomes increasingly difficult w/o coming in touch with google in any way.
Google deserves a lot of recent criticism but at the same time I think they provide an important counterbalance to Apple and Microsoft. I especially don’t want to see Android go away as the only competitor to iOS.
Nobody suggested killing Android (and they couldn't do it in the first place even if they wanted to). It's about adds. I hope this is a step towards seeing adds for what most of them are: lies, propaganda, manipulation, and a pointless arms race that distracts efforts from improving products.
In general, I expect this to go nowhere, of course. However, the fact that the EU can dare suggest such things fills me with hope. Sure, it's due to Europe having pretty much no stake in these technologies and waging a small trade war with the US, but that still means that apparently the cost of lobbying the process is high for the likes of Google.
This is where I stand, I operate some ad accounts but the amount of control and insight taken away with each update is really noticeable. Really interesting is that I actually get zero input on how much I pay on each day. You give a budget for the day but I don’t have a lot of control over it unless I micromanage the thing. It’s crazy and I hope the EU will go hard on Google.
Edit
So more about payments. It used to be I could just give a lump sum and let Google Ads play until there is no more budget.
Not anymore, and -I don’t have a choice-. You can only use a bank account which you give Google Ads control over, and if you forget to set end dates, the thing will keep on rolling. For me it’s another dark pattern build in. For some big clients no big deal probably, I just want to point out there is not a lot of control or choice.
In a project I maintain on billing and payments[1], I had a link to Google Ads API. It was documenting how they had hard-limit budget, with notions like "capped actuals" and "monthly with rollover". The explanation was quite good so I keep it around to explain the concept, and why it was perfect for customers to avoid any surprises.
Then the URL[2] 404'd and the API disappeared. I couldn't find any references to a "BillingCap". I wondered why[3].
Now it makes sense: they got rid of budgets as you explained above. Everything's seems to be obfuscated behind a quite opaque Proposals/Deals[4] data structure now.
Thank you, this has been insightful! Sometimes it’s hard to make a report that makes sense. For instance when having to deal with conversion lag I had to deal with this week. https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/9347141
To expand your point further, in any given market that has online sales, if even one entity gives them CPA targets, they have a damn good idea how much a new customer is worth in that market.
At that point, google has no motivation to ever sell you clicks or impressions below that value, as they already know how much each click they send is worth to you.
Once you have two players in the market, you are basically haggling with google over 1-2-3% differences in your bidding, and google is switching you from position 1 and position 2 in the search results.
On top of that, google sales people are basically employed to come to you and say: "Look, on this keyword your competitor is bidding 2% more than you. You should optimise for it and pay the same".
This sounds like a good game until you realise if everyone is optimising properly, the only winner here is google.
No one really has any leverage here except google, and they can squeeze everyone as hard as you are willing to squeeze your margins.
I've seen multiple markets over the last few years where google ads are basically break even for the entire industry. This is absolutely insane, but it's what an aggregator does.
> The Commission preliminarily finds that, in this particular case, a behavioural remedy is likely to be ineffective to prevent the risk that Google continues such self-preferencing conducts or engages in new ones. Google is active on both sides of the market with its publisher ad server and with its ad buying tools and holds a dominant position on both ends. Furthermore, it operates the largest ad exchange. This leads to a situation of inherent conflicts of interest for Google. The Commission's preliminary view is therefore that only the mandatory divestment by Google of part of its services would address its competition concerns.
> Ad exchanges are driven by a simple demand and supply mechanism. Publishers want to sell ad space on their website to the highest bidder and advertisers want to buy ad units that provide good visibility. This is where an ad exchange comes into the picture.
> This digital marketplace is part of the programmatic advertising ecosystem and is powered by real-time bidding (RTB) technology. It connects advertisers on a demand-side platform (DSP) with publishers on a supply-side platform (SSP).
Google purchased DoubleClick in 2008 which is the largest such. The problem here is, the SSP is also Google -- Google Search most importantly, YouTube as well.
There is more! They also run an ad server. To quote again
> an ad server is to ads what WordPress is to content
So an advertiser loads their ad into Google ad server for serving the ad then participates at a Google exchange to bid on the price of the ad. This gives Google an astounding amount of insight, fairly similar to insider trading which absolutely should not be allowed.
So, they could be forced to spin out the ad server and the ad exchange.
In my opinion the main reason the Soviet economy collapsed (apart from outside pressure), was the state owned sector wide monopolies.
It is also in the webs own nature to nurture monopolies for two seemingly contradictory reasons:
1.) Switching to a competitor is just a few clicks away. Moving everyone to the one that provides the most for free (dumping laws ignored as per usual).
2.) Switching to a competitor is hard, because all my social contacts use :thisService:. (now that the competition is dead, you turn the screw on the user: enact subscriptions, censor information, selling of private data, increase ad noise, etc.).
Not breaking up monopolies will inevitably lead to the same result - people will be exploited to the point of real harm and will eventually revolt.
If forced to breaking up Google should stop giving free services in EU including OS, Browser, Map, Search and any other free service.
And charge EU users for each of these services which are top or only one in respective categories.
These services are free due to Ad business which is best and can make money to fund other free services.
Let EU pay for crappy services built by their own mediocre companies like Nokia which can't compete in market so force regulations.
What is EU doing to to curb European monopolies ? Oh wait there are not many....
cause they can't innovate and compete. Easy to be complain than build something to compete.
European companies are also going to be regulated.
They don’t have many monopolies because they have a completely different way of approaching business and their position in society. Also when it happens, they get split apart way way before you hear about it.
I wonder if the internet is naturally predisposed towards monopolies, or the culture of tech companies predisposes them to monopolistic behavior.
Let's look at similar industries. Better integration and data allows you to sell your product better, and more sales allows for more data and $$ needed for integration. No reason this vicious cycle only applies to internet companies.
Why didn't Ford buy up petrol stations in the US which could only serve Ford cars ? Market consolidation would let them negotiate a lower petrol price for all Ford cars and customers would struggle to switch without the same petrol-network or low-prices. Tesla is clearly demonstrating this as a car company with tech culture. They tried a 'super charger' monopoly thing, were nearly successful, but the presence of existing competitors made it difficult to pull it off. But Ford at its peak would've likely gotten away with it.
Tech companies are in an extortionate relationship, and the scale imbalance between their average customer (a 10 people mini-shop) and Google is so massive, that Google can afford to bleed many customers in the effort to find the maximally aggressive deal in the negotiation. How much can we get away with before we start bleeding customers, is a question that Google likely knows the answer to better than anymore.
Which brings me to why I think tech heads towards monopolies. It is "competence at scale". Every monopoly can expand vertically or extort data from their customers. But scaling vertically means more employees, more communication friction and inevitable mediocrity through IBM-ization of your company. More data is also not useful unless you can actually do anything useful with it.
That's where tech comes in. Tech companies can scale up vertically with products without needing as much human overhead, reducing the aforementioned friction. And most importantly, tech companies figured out how to actually make use of the data. It also helps that tech data collection usually involves clicking a checkbox and not sending thousands of foot-soldiers to take industry wide sensor measurements.
I came full circle as I wrote this comment, because I've just had an epiphany : "what is a tech company"?
Zillow, WeWork, Doordash etc. are on their surface, a light digital layer on a traditional company. I always wondered why they were considered tech companies. Target has a website and so does my landlord, but they aren't tech companies. In fact, the exact traits that lead to a culture obsessed with becoming a natural monopoly that define a tech company. A tech company has nothing to do with software, other than the fact that it has to do with data.
The cultural obsession with finding efficiencies vertically (control e2e) and horizontally (scale), inevitably turning into a gatekeeping monopoly is the core characteristic that defines a tech company. Both require a ton of easy data, and only that, is why tech companies write software. Software companies aren't always tech companies. But tech companies are forced to be Software companies. I've just realized that WeWork was in fact a legitimate tech company because it was a landlord obsessed with vertical and horizontal efficiencies. That's it.
Recently I learned that single brand can be divided between multiple owners and as they compete the brand competes with itself. I heard of an example of fast food restaurant brand for which that was the case.
Maybe we should do that more often when any brand grows too big?
Too late, too little. Google must be split up at least into search, YouTube, android, ads, map and news. That would help foster some competition in these markets.
360 comments
[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 300 ms ] threadThe breaking up of monopolies used to be in the toolbox of American antitrust policies, back when America enforced antitrust legislation on its own companies.
A great book about that era is "Goliath" by Matt Stoller.
Not to discredit the rest of what you're saying, because it is true the EU has jurisdiction and that anti-trust is a lost art in many places in the world. Still, saying Google Ireland 'alone' is a bit funny when Google (like all multinationals) is known to take advantage of Ireland's tax laws to funnel as much of their EU business through.
Whatever money Google is making in Ireland isn't just what they're making from the Irish market, it's also from whatever they're making everywhere else in the EU who's origins are ambiguous enough to not be attached to any single country.
https://9to5google.com/2020/03/02/google-dublin-coronavirus/
If they weren't already in the country for accounting purposes, they might choose different locations for offices.
€50bln is still a huge amount, but based on the phrasing of that comment you'd assume we were talking about figures well over €1t!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_flash_crash#Evidence_of_m...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meng_Wanzhou
China then "co-incidentally" arrested 2 Canadians.
The whole thing is a shit show and it would be better for everyone if countries were more reasonable and agreed to avoid a "race to the bottom"
and also just to be clear, I think this is equally bad when everyone does it
The US Justice Department sued Google in 2020 and is asking for pretty much the same disinvestment for pretty much the same reasons. The EU is trailing the US by two years here.
I'm eagerly awaiting the trove of patriotic comments which will undoubtedly follow the posting of such an article and will most likely entirely miss the point as usual.
While true, 2.5 years later there is still no action. In that same time period, the E.U. released the largest anti-monopoly technology law in its history, the Digital Markets Act. This will take effect near the end of the year and impact all major tech companies. I think it's clear that U.S. antitrust is ineffective at present.
Previous attempts to nationalize companies have not, as far as I know, been a shining success?
Only 1/2 /s there...
Not all nationalization is uncompensated, even in the real world. Further, you can imagine very fair ways, long term, to nationalize companies by e.g. requiring them to pay a wealth tax in the form of equity.
> civil asset forfeiture: enables a government to seize property and other assets belonging to persons suspected of committing a crime
The suggestion being that being wildly successful should be a crime.
You do not want your government to basically have a permanent monopoly on everything. This just gives power to authoritarian to rise.
Personally, I suspect that the 20 companies each at 1% GDP will out perform the 20% company in most or even all markets. (Setting aside the issue of relative GDP between nations.)
Often, the bazaar is more effective than the cathedral.
What’s the monopoly here? There are tons of successful ad companies.
EU antitrust law is grounded in harm to companies. If there are many companies, but one has sewn up the market so strongly that others can't really have a chance to prosper, the EU will step in.
American antitrust law is grounded in harm to consumers. The US regulators won't go after a successful ad company because other ad companies say it's too hard to compete with them; it'll go after them if consumers say "We don't have any choice but to do business with X, and X's prices are too high / X is too exclusive / X is only doing business with us in market sector A if we agree to use them also for market sector B."
That additional bar to regulation means the EU may very well have cause to act before the US does if Google is big enough to muscle around other ad agencies and set the terms by which they can exist, even if they do exist.
For example, the justice department found slides from a project that favored its buyside customers when running supposedly impartial auctions on the sell side - in layman’s terms, brazenly fucking over their competitors. Allegedly.
The best part is of course that the google engineers named it “project bernanke” after the Fed chairman, since they thought of it like QE, I.e. “giving out free money” to people who used their buyside products. I’m still not sure if that was a criticism of QE or if they’re honestly that submerged in the Google Kool-Aid…
All of that is small potatoes to the main way in which google is a monopoly though: they run the only ad exchange. Trust me, it helps. Facebook spent many billions trying to stand up a competitor and ultimately gave up, which should tell you how valuable that privilege is
On one hand, if Google simply restructured, spun off or sold its EU ad business the competitive landscape wouldn't change that much. I'm not sure whether a new European competitor could ever become a peer to Google if it could only compete in the EU market because of the network effects in the ad business.
Alternatively, the EU having global jurisdiction would have even bigger issue. With that precedent, could Japan or Australia regulate European businesses? Also how would the EU enforce rules outside of its geography? How complaint would the US court system be in enforcing European decisions?
The only reason they speak about Google is because Google does business in the EU.
That's already what the USA does to global companies operating inside the US. That's exactly how Cuba has been under a blockade from the US, for example...
With sanctions the US can declare that third parties must choose between doing business with the US and Cuba / ZTE. Because of it's large economy the US would be confident that most of those parties would choose to choose the US over the company / small country.
Antitrust enforcement is many ways more difficult than sanctions enforcement because third parties must be compelled in 'how' rather than 'whether' they do business with a company.
Even the US would've struggled to break up ZTE / Huawei etc into smaller companies across every jurisdiction for antitrust. Doing so in China would've obviously been impossible but even enforcing this in the Gulf States & South Korea would've stretched the limits of US power.
If Google left the EU entirely there’d be even fewer competitors in the digital ads space. Depending on the segment Google’s market share would likely go to Bing, Facebook or TikTok.
The EU wants to increase the market competition, but frustratingly antitrust enforcement may not be effective and might even go in the opposite direction.
This may be true in the very short term, but leaving a big hole in the market like that creates an opportunity for new players that would have otherwise avoided the space because it was controlled by a monopoly.
I don't follow your argument.
Of course, if Google only makes the change in the EU, it doesn't much change the landscape outside of the EU. Although there's a chance for better competition in the EU to give another player a foothold, which then helps them gain usage elsewhere (perhaps from global customers who like the results in Europe and try it globally)
It should not follow that placing a service on the web makes you subject to the jurisdiction of anyone who chooses to use it.
Countries can and do pass laws about whom their citizens can trade with. It seems like that is a better route than inventing jurisdiction over foreign companies.
But more seriously, please, this is not Reddit. Don't write such low effort, useless comments.
Monopolistic breakups that serve the public's best interest are one thing. But how many people actually care that Google might represent a monopoly? Does it actually affect people negatively if the result is a positive online user experience? The world runs on Google and forcing that to change seems like a step backwards at first glance.
This will no doubt impact things like android etc.
Always this same old tune. Do you realize how outlandish and naive it is to even suggest that? Google is fighting tooth and nail to make sure that EU laws are laxist. You know why? Because they know that they will have to comply, in the end. The market is just too big to let go of.
And I don't think you're making the point you think you're making. If a single company can suspend its services and upheave the whole population's life, then it's a ripe for getting antitrust rulings.
But I think that's wrong about Google (except maybe for search). None of the services they're offering are unique, it's all tech commodities. They're just entrenched due to decades of anticompetitive behavior and incompetent regulators, and if they were broken up/destroyed, other companies would easily be able to offer the same services at a higher quality, and it would be a net positive to society overall.
If Google ads gets broken up, it may be easier for a competitor to actually compete against any Google property. Imagine trying to win a bidding war against Google, much less on their own bidding platform.
Namely? I can’t imagine any real world consequences that aren’t positives? I am better served for my preferences?
The public is _currently_ getting a good experience, why enforce our laws?
Oh no, they're evil now, and the only option, and they're entrenched. How could we have ever foreseen this!
>None of its services are critical to maintain a stable society.
Except Android, Maps, Search, Gmail, YouTube, Docs...
The US barely produces enough illegal drugs for its own market. If all illegal drug manufacturers cut off the supply lines to the US, the illegal drug trade in the US would tank overnight. What is it about the US that puts it so far behind South American countries in innovation?
Producing (recreational) drugs isn't innovation. Drugs don't improve your daily life. Absence of them doesn't make life resemble that of the 1900s. They don't increase productivity allowing you to achieve more with your life. And most importantly, the number of people consuming recreational drugs from SA is a rounding error. Every single person in Europe consumes some type of software created by American companies, directly or indirectly.
Surveillance doesn't improve your daily life. Absence of surveillance doesn't make life resemble that of the 1900s. Surveillance doesn't increase productivity. And most importantly, the number of people not subject to surveillance is a rounding error. Every single person in Europe is subject to some type of surveillance crafted by American companies, directly or indirectly.
The point I'm making isn't that US software is inherently harmful (nor would I make that argument for every drug that is illegal in the US, though) but that the situation is comparable in that US software and business conduct found to be in violation in the EU is harder to prosecute than the same software and conduct from EU companies. The "innovation" US companies take advantage of is getting to grow their products and companies and a less regulated market before taking advantage of the slow reaction time of the legal systems of foreign markets they enter fully-formed (whereas companies local to those market would get nipped in the bud if they tried to build the same kind of business there).
This should be self-evident when the reason we're even talking about this is that the EU is taking actions against US companies that it would have already taken against any EU company trying the same (e.g. consider the Ireland tax loophole used by non-EU companies in the EU or the circus around trying to game the GDPR and privacy laws).
In short: the innovative advantage of Silicon Valley is that it allowed tech startups to build products that would have been blatantly illegal in Europe and then enter the European market with sufficient political and financial capital to squash any existing competition and bite the legal fines until legislation was able to catch up with what they were doing. This is consistent with recent "disruptions" like Airbnb innovating zoning law violations, Uber innovating taxi service regulation violations, Crypto innovating financial product regulation violations and AI innovating copyright violations.
Maybe governments that act in the interest of the population? Predatory capitalism isn't regarded as highly in Europe.
>Except Android, Maps, Search, Gmail, YouTube, Docs...
Android is open source. Maps, Search, Gmail and Docs have competitors that are already being used. Not sure if Youtube is necessary to maintain a stable society...
How far behind is Europe?
Am I right to assume you have never heard of companies like ASML, Spotify, Booking.com, Just Eat (takeaway.com), or Adyen?
And finally, large US companies use their capital to buy out European firms to keep pretending that all "tech" is home-grown. Skype, Nokia, ARM, NXP, SkyScanner, Shazam and Minecraft all started out in Europe.
There is absolutely no way that would happen
Big words, but then I google your github and apparently you are planning to substitute biggest search engine, mobile OS and email service with 3dbriks[0], that, hilariously, "works best in _Google_ Chrome"? Come on now, there are multitude of reasons why European tech is not competitive and "evil American corps monopolized everything and won't let us in" is not the main one.
[0]: https://github.com/holoduke/3dbricks
It would rather prove the point that they're a monopoly that needs breaking up.
It's in google's best interest not to highlight how much power they have with their current monopoly.
De Beers had an iconic monopoly on diamonds for over a century, but as far as I know the only time a major government really went after them was for colluding over industrial diamonds, which are actually important.
Ensuring that jewelry diamonds and checkered handbags are available at a competitive price would be an awful use of government resources, not least because the inflated price is the point of those products.
Luxottica (but only after the 2018 merger with their main competitor) would be a much better example.
Not every monopoly is created equal and if you can not acknowledge that you are not arguing in good faith.
Edit: also I am looking into De Beers a bit more and it seems the EU has made steps to improve competition in the past.
Also if you want to argue that LVMH is a monopoly and that it has a bad impact, go ahead. I just think that since this is HN it is natural that most people do not feel the impact and do not really care. I do not know exactly how monopolistic they are and what the bad impact of that is but feel free to enlighten me.
To some people, Google is more important. To others, LVHM is more important.
There are a ton of people who depend on the luxury goods industry. LVHM itself is a $500 billion company.
I know plenty of people who go crazy for luxury handbags, clothing, jewelry but could careless about which search engine to use.
Yet, it's ok for Europe to ignore their own monopolies.
This is just moving the goal post. A monopoly is a monopoly.
What about ASML? They're a monopoly for EUV machines, which power our modern tech economy. That should be "infrastructure" enough right? Why isn't Europe looking at them?
That is not easy, some Google products are paid or Google offered clear terms , they can't brick my phone and break all the contracts they have with different companies because a petty reason.
Even say the free YouTube, I do not pay Google but there are Romanian companies that pay google to put ads in my face, so those are contracts and money involved here.
So what could they stop? Some free charity services maybe?
Very quickly - against Google.
The fact that European citizens have critical business ties to Google (from GSuite to YT partners) is a sword that cuts both ways.
It means the EU can't simply shut Google down on a whim; but it also means that Google can't just throw a tantrum and put up a black page saying "we are PROTESTING because your EVIL GOVERNMENT wants to OPPRESS US by asking us to PAY TAXES and ALLOW COMPETITION". Businesses wouldn't stick around to wait for the next time they got randomly locked out of GMail and GDrive.
(Not that Google has given the slightest hint of having considered such a move, unlike, say, Meta.)
> The world runs on Google and forcing that to change seems like a step backwards at first glance.
"Well we have a dominant position, it would be a shame if that were to change" isn't a great defence when you're being specifically accused of abusing your dominant position.
Even if that were true, it's beside the point.
If another US company were able to successfully compete without Google's domination of the market then the grounds for enforcement fall away.
If you had read the EC statement, you would have understood this pertains to AdX, Google Ads, and DFP products whereby Google raises prices and stifles any competition: a good example of a negative online user experience.
As for the benefit, when Google and Facebook jack up the prices of ads, it's probably increasing the prices of many things you buy on the internet.
Just as an example, I recently tried to run an ad on Google. There are no competitors in this space at all. It cost me > 1-2 USD per click. 10-15 years ago I also tried to run an ad on Google. When there were no competitors, you could have the ad for something like 0,04 USD per click.
> The world runs on Google
Until it doesn't. No individual and no company is indispensable.
Agreed. That's why another company or multiple companies will outcompete Google. I don't see a reason Europe needs to break Google up.
More and more the positive experience is disputable. Both for users (result quality keeps falling) and advertisers (they're the ad exchange that matters).
> The world runs on Google and forcing that to change seems like a step backwards at first glance.
That's the monopoly part. There's more candidates who will get increased use if Google's search-ad feedback loop goes away. Every time someone too big to fail is finally broken up, we get a small step backwards... ideally we get a big step towards as a result.
Reframed: If you disrupt customers to avoid complying with local law, customers will perceive YOU to be the problem at least as much as local regulations.
I believe this is a REALLY dangerous move with very little upside and enormous risk for the company under almost any circumstances, which is probably the reason that companies almost NEVER do this.
Is this actually true in practice? Anecdotally Italians seeemed pretty annoyed they coudldn't use chatgpt for a while.
There needs to be some formal process in which countries can vote/object to these things.
Breaking up Google has ramifications for the entire world. Europe should not abuse this sort of power.
I don't see Europe breaking up Luxottica, LVHM, De Beers Group.
Please.
Yes please. If we want healthy competitive markets, we need smaller companies that actually _COMPETE_ and their products can be mixed and matched so the customers vote with their wallets and not CEOs with their lobbying checks.
I genuinely can't tell if this is a shitpost or not, because yes absolutely we should target Apple and M$ as well.
The only reason Google has survived today while operating as pretty much a criminal enterprise is because they spread a massive amount of money to the pockets of influential people.
But as we know, Google's entire business is hugely threatened by LLMs. Over time, all companies die and get outcompeted. Google won't be any different. You don't have to regulate.
It's easy to penalize foreign companies because it's not your country's income that's affected.
US tech companies have a very strong narrative right now that the EU's privacy and antitrust regulations are in effect, even if not intentional, a money extraction scheme. The EU has sued Google now 7 times under this statute as well as multiple times targeting Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple.
It's getting really hard to argue that they're not just going after the deepest (foreign) pockets with laws that are vague enough you could make a case against any medium sized tech company.
The EU fined Luxottica $125 million and explicitly allowed them to merge with Essilor.
If there's anything to break up in terms of European companies, that'd be Alstom which are top 2 in rail transportation (but whose competition from China is growing rapidly so their global position is under threat), which btw wasn't allowed to merge with Siemens. Can't really think of another sane example.
* more ads, as competition drives down prices
* worse ads as cheaper adds don't need to be as relevant but do need to be more eye catching / shocking to compete for attention.
* less money to pay for the services ad revenue cover, so maybe you have to pay for gmail or get more spam etc
People seem to miss that "Competition" is not an ends in itself. Neither is lower prices. Human well-being should be. Under that model, google should be a regulated monopoly with enforced higher ad prices. That would mean better services, and fewer, better ads.
The only counter argument to this is that higher ad costs would mean (slightly) higher product costs. But we already live in that world...
more ads, as competition drives down prices
worse ads as cheaper adds don't need to be as relevant but do need to be more eye catching / shocking to compete for attention.
That's exactly what happened already — because of Google.
Before Google AdSense, web sites used to be able to select high-quality ads from reputable advertising companies. You could get $100+ CPM for some campaigns from TribalFusion.
Then AdSense appeared, and drove CPM rates into pennies, which is why web sites are so loaded with advertising now.
You used to be able to make a good living running a high quality web site that served one ad per page. I know, because I did it for years. Google destroyed all of that. I won't cry if someone else does it to Google.
It's been over a decade since I worked in ads, though, so I'm no expert. I did spend a short period of time on the Google AdX team after they bought the company I worked at (AdMeld) and sunk it. Itself a whole topic of anti-trust discussion.
Currently they can serve up ads for every possible search query typed or inject any number of ads surrounding every page you visit, so my grandma can barely use her phone without touching an ad.
I don't think a split off "Google Services" could survive. Google's fabric is designed to run Google's apps and vice versa. You can't just cram some other company's software into Google's core fabric and you can't just run AdSense on someone else's cloud. ETA: this is partially because of historical accretion and path dependence, but also because offering services at Google scale and reliability is a legitimately hard, abstraction-breaking problem; most fabrics aren't architected for the fault-tolerance and scaling that Google's fabric is (did you really isolate concerns? Are you sure your backing-store is eventually-consistent lock-free?), and most software isn't designed to run on a fault-tolerant, high-reliability fabric (what does your UI do if half the database is missing for ten minutes? Did you break your storage down into a NoSQL database with massive data denormalization because space is almost free, or are you using a relational database with heavy cross-lookup constraints that require high availability? Are your RPCs doctored with enough data to make for useful full-service traces, or do your microservices just spit JSON at each other?).
(Source: was there; I saw enough acquisitions go sideways to know how actually hard it is to reshape software from the outside world to fit Google's way of doing computing).
This is the same Microsoft that's seen its desktop market share slowly erode since 2013, right? The one holding 1.9% of smartphone marketshare? The one so impossible to regulate that the FTC is regulating it right now (https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/12/...)?
Of course they do, and anyone who is confused by their marketing into thinking otherwise is just plain blind. The last someone "beat that drum" was none other than the british competition regulator aka CMA not _two months ago_, which among maaany other things literally complained Microsoft was still using their monopoly power to prevent gaming on desktop Linux. Stay classy, MS.
> We found that the Microsoft Cloud Remedy had several shortcomings: [..] Microsoft would not have to supply Activision’s full range of games to providers that may decide to operate using a non-Windows PC operating system (eg Linux)
https://gamerant.com/cma-overstated-microsoft-cloud-gaming-s...
I guess it is not as untenable as I thought, and the EC believes it can just throw shit towards the CMA until they get away with it. I also have my confirmation on whether the EC would be stupid enough to accept the deal.
Anyway, you cannot disagree with the fact that MS still _tried_ to stifle Linux, which is the point (and the part that I'm quoting). And arguably both as server and as a desktop OS.
...but this goes back to the US interpretation of "monopoly practice" vs. the European interpretation. Where was the consumer harm? How does MS "stifle" an OS that you can just pick up from a CD, floppy disk, or the Internet and drop on a machine you own?
History seems to have shown "You can't." In general, the biggest hindrance to Linux desktop adoption is the Linux UX (and for games, the experience of building one with the libraries available on Linux [https://utopixel.games/en/blog/building-outer-wonders-for-li...]), not anything Microsoft (or Apple, for that matter) have done to it.
It's irrelevant what you think about Linux UX. It is just fact that MS is worried enough that _to this day_ they are using their monopoly position to stifle non-Windows OSes ( desktop AND server) every frigging time they can. Same way they have doing continuously for decades.
And also despite the fact their marketing dept says that "MS loves Linux" and the armchair analysts say that MS makes money from Linux servers.
They settled a lawsuit with Microsoft, but Be didn't fail because of anything Microsoft did any more than it failed because of anything Apple did. Nobody wanted yet another operating system to write code against. Be failed for the same reason that Plan 9 hasn't caught fire and served as a meaningful alternative to the Linux ecosystem; when your architecture is too far divorced from the existing ecosystems after the ecosystems grow sufficiently large, it doesn't matter if your solution is slightly better... Developers don't want to invest the time starting over.
Monopoly protection is a lot of things, but it isn't a mechanism for somebody to try and compete with DC power for long distance transmission when the world has already wired up AC.
"The competition sucks" has never been an argument _at all_ in any antitrust case and never will, by definition.
... but yes, "Your honor, the competition is just too bad at this to compete" is an antitrust defense as a result. At least in the US system.
I don't disagree with anything you quoted -- it is abuse of a dominant position that is illegal (even in my country at the very least, which last time I checked was in the EU). Just note that it doesn't really matter if you got your monopoly because "the competition sucked" or not, just the fact that you have a dominant position, and you abused it. So I disagree with the conclusion.
And let it be clear that all of this is an off-topic, since again the point was that MS is still using the same anti-competitive strategies they were using decades ago, to this day.
Sorry, I should have been more clear. Emphasis mine: "At its core, section 2 makes it illegal to acquire or maintain monopoly power through improper means." The American system recognizes the notion of proper monopoly; if one company is doing something very well and every other company lacks the tools or skill to do as well, that is not actionable. Using market dominance is also not, by itself, actionable ("Competition is a ruthless process" &c). What the US does consider actionable is consumer harm... undercutting your opponents' prices because you can isn't actionable by itself ("Hey, look at all that competition lowering prices! Consumers love low prices!"), but undercutting them unsustainably and then jacking the price later when you grind them out of business is.
But you're right that we're having a two-ships-passing-in-the-night discussion on the topic now, because Europe takes a very different view upon this (protection of the marketplace, in the European history of antitrust, is protecting the right to make a living competing, not the consumers' right not to be screwed). Much of what I'm saying is in the American mindset, and reasonable people can disagree because reasonable people can come from different philsophical backgrounds on what constitutes protection-worthy antitrust behavior.
(Linux, as example, in the American system it's hard to make the argument that MS being unwilling to spend the money to port software they own to another OS is consumer harm. It can be made though; I believe that's one of the reasons the FCC was blocking the MS / Activision merger. But it's right on the edge of a defendable argument, because the counter-argument is "Who cares if Word doesn't run on Ubuntu distros if OpenOffice is right there?").
It would certainly be a problem for Google to solve, but one should note that legally requiring this of the company would be tantamount to legally requiring Google to shut down (which in the long run would harm user privacy because the company would almost certainly be replaced by an ecosystem of companies that care far less about privacy than Google does, and a gaggle of unrelated firms running hither and thither with user data is harder to regulate than one megacorp). There are better ways to serve the public interest here.
What a leap in logic. Care to elaborate? That assertion is insane and the rest of the comment hinges on that.
Splitting out "Google Services" from ads or search creates a company with one customer (or two, if we've split out ads and search) that is basically in no market position to get more customers because Google's internal fabric is not a "cloud offering" (source: I was listening in when the company decided to offer Google Cloud and not make that "just the bare metal we run everything on;" Google's internal bare metal is too developer-hostile to the common way things are done outside Google to be a viable product).
Meanwhile, search and ads would be in a place where there was only one "cloud" company in the world they could run their product on.
For all its money, I don't believe Google could afford to re-tool their products to work on someone else's cloud, so once the "Services" company foundered for being unable to compete / having a monoculture of customers, the ads and search companies would die for lack of vendor offering the one bespoke cloud model they can run on.
It's not impossible at all for Google to set up process, billing, and data access boundaries. They just naturally have an interest in avoiding this completely. Which is exactly the point -- right now their ads products in particular have way too much insight into both the buy and sell side of the equation, and Google has gone out of its way to dominate the entire ad supply chain using this knowledge.
Forcing an infrastructure separation and an organizational separation for the ads businesses there would do a lot of good for the market as a whole.
And not sure we should care too much about how Google does out of it. They're swimming in ad revenues.
Still, it sets up a monoculture of service fabrics those products can run on where the division between orgs is, at best, paper-thin; at worst, search or ads dies and takes services with it (or vice-versa) because without several eng-decades neither of those sub-companies are kitted to act as an independent company.
There are plenty of competitors in the ad tech space. China created TikTok. Korea created KaoKaoTalk. Even Japan created Line. Meanwhile, the EU, for all it's antitrust regulation, hasn't created anything substantial. Perhaps, it's the burdensome regulation that's the problem.
Europe creates a high amount of regulation. The startup industry gets completely stifled and unable to compete with US nor China. So all they do now is add more regulation.
ASML is a funny one too, the EU gets to "have it", but the US gets to use sanctions to control it.
Without surveillance capitalism, prices for services would go up or would cease to be free.
The ad-driven business model is a legitimate one.
I assume that you use a free service from Google/Facebook/Microsoft? So you must not care about surveillance capitalism either. At least not care enough.
This happens exactly because there is no competition and hence antitrust is needed. I don't want to be using services from Google/Facebook/Microsoft but there's no competition and then I end up using their services even when trying to avoid it as most as possible...
If the prices for services would go up without surveillance capitalism so be it, that's the real price, I want to choose to pay for it, not be coerced into giving them my data for their "free" services. I don't have that option right now, nor anyone else, why are you against freedom of choice?
It was a search engine developed by an ex Google exec. It had no ads, no tracking. It required a subscription to use. Most people who used it said the search results were great.
It shut down because no one wanted to pay for it.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
People do care. They just don't have much, if any, choice.
Neeva, founded by a former Google exec, built a search engine that had no ads and no tracking. No surveillance capital. They just shut down because no one wanted to pay for it - hence the idea that 99% don't care about surveillance capital enough.
Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-65671468
2. It's literally just a claim. I have no way of verifying the claim. Them asking me to pay for it makes it more sus.
3. I use searx already. Which I can confirm isn’t “spying” on me because it has nothing to tie me to my IRL identity.
4. It was a Bing reseller. I don’t care for Bing resellers.
You say that like there aren’t numerous other competitors in the space: DuckDuckGo, Kagi, Brave, searx, qwant, startpage, etc, etc.
These services provide both paid and ad based models.
Neeva failed because of its own issues. I am in their target market and I had never even heard of them until they shut down.
Starting any business is extremely challenging, one failing doesn’t imply there was no market.
Just…no. This is giving me vibes of the FBI “secure” phones. Fuck that.
That's cool. And do you think many people will also happily pay 250€ every year? Do you think enough people care so make this a profitable business? And if so, why isn't there one yet? If there is, why aren't you a happy paying customer?
>I'd be happy to also pay that amount to browse without being spied on.
Same question.
>These products not existing is just a failure of the market
Is it? Or is the market simply responding to (lack of) demand?
It seems to me that many people on HN forget that we're just part of a very small bubble, a niche. We're a tiny target segment, we're not very good at paying for things, and frankly we make pretty shitty customers for various of other reasons. Instead of admitting that we're not that valuable to businesses, we project our own desires onto others, and when we don't get what we want because it's not profitable, we expect the government to step in and force someone else pay for it.
To be fair, this article does a very poor job of explaining by conflating "Google's ad business" with AdX.
Citation needed.
They'll comply, just like Apple will comply with the DMA. They have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders. Unlike the U.S., E.U lawmakers can't be bought.
I'm curious if you're so naive to believe that or if you were trolling and wrote that with a straight face. Because cronies like Ursula Von Der Leyen would like to disagree with you.
/s
Google's overall ad revenue is 4x greater than EU total revenue. It will definitely loose EU business than it will loose ads business. But yeah there are always legal loophole in things like this and likely it could keep both.
My sides.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qatar_corruption_scandal_at_th...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/23/world/europe/schroder-ger...
"Pulling out" would be a massive blow to Google's revenue and shareholder value, even compared to the massive costs of restructuring the business to comply with the breakup. It would be economical suicide and career suicide for the CEO.
The sites you frequent are more likely to stick around if they have more revenue options, and we all benefit from competition in the search and browser markets lest we wind up with IE6 all over again.
This one makes sense to me and is pretty tangible.
Online store buys ads on Google to tell people about their products. People click the ads, and buy the products so the store can scale up and lower their per unit cost. Everyone are happy.
Now fast forward a decade. Google drop their "do no evil" motto and jack up ad prices. Online store now pays 10 times as much for their ads and have to raise prices to cover the costs. Google shareholders are happy, everyone else loses - it doesn't matter if they click ads or not, the prices are higher for everyone.
This is just not true and not how Google's ads work.
Google has a bidding system. You don't have to pay their prices if your ads aren't profitable. You can pull out. You can go somewhere else. You can try other forms of marketing. You can make a better product, better landing page, better messaging so you can convert more users per click.
Your company is essentially competing with other companies for the click. If the price 10x, it's because other companies are willing to pay 10x more. If other companies are willing to pay more for the ads, then your product/business/marketing isn't as good as theirs.
Or maybe you just don't have as much venture capital to burn.
Do we really want to live in a world that overwhelmingly rewards whoever is prepared to spend the most on publicity?
(How's Citizens United been working out?)
What does this have to do with the post you're replying to? I would suggest starting a new HN post if you want to talk about VC cash.
Yeah, right.
You can make a case that replacing Google with a bunch of bespoke ad vectors isn't a real alternative because they don't have Google's reach but Facebook does.
Raising prices is evil? Does this hypothetical online store never raise prices?
And am not saying don't do it... because this liberate the potential from one big hand to multiple ones. I am just answering your question whether this is a positive or not.
How is your life better with having Standard Oil broke up in 1911? We didn't get to see the counterfactual of Rockefeller strangling the oil industry by 1920.
Big tech though has gone beyond the definition of a monopoly. We didn't breakup Standard Oil because we were worried about them taking over the garment industry too.
I imagine we already pay for big tech dearly as a society but we can't run reality a 1000 times over to see the alternatives. We basically run the Windows 11 version of society and since we can't actually have a different experience we conclude "hey this Windows 11 society isn't that bad, how would any of this improve my Windows 11 life?".
If we could actually see the alternate paths this would be the biggest political issue in democracies by a mile. Instead we have big tech controlling what people see and read almost entirely so of course this is no big deal. Big tech told me so!
So the goal is for there to be more competition among advertisers?
That might help ad purchasers (ie. mostly corporations), but consumers are still going to be screwed as this does nothing to stop the spying and advertising that are worst scourges that Google has imposed upon the world.
Unless the information is impossible to collect in the first place, it will be collected, traded, and consolidated.
Browser fingerprinting and countless other techniques can and are being used as well.
The outrage over cookies is quaint, and only demonstrates that people who freak out over them don't understand modern tracking technology at all.
- the so-called “cookie law” is not limited to cookies (see ePrivacy article 5(3) for more information, it's actually any technique allowing to store or retrieve information from a user's terminal);
- ePrivacy exists since 2002 (so, decades);
- any kind of tracking allowing to identify unique users will require consent, cookies or not.
Those work, but Google has publicly committed not to use them for ad targeting. Hence all their work on privacy sandbox (attempting to preserve as much of the economic effects of cross-site tracking while fixing the privacy leak).
1 - Why would I trust anything Google says?
2 - What else could they use that information for apart from ad targeting that they're not telling us about?
2: Detecting fraud and abuse, which is generally interpreted as not requiring consent under the GDPR (though I think that may not be correct: https://www.jefftk.com/p/can-ads-be-gdpr-compliant).
If they did it would be far from the first or even the millionth time a company has said one thing and done another... even when it's ostensibly illegal, immoral, or merely bad PR. Most of them get away with it too, or get just a slap on the wrist if they're ever caught.
The people responsible usually suffer no personal consequences, and just go on to get cushy jobs in other companies if they're ever fired, or have enough "fuck you money" to not even ever worrying about having a job for the rest of their life. That's assuming there are actual professional consequences, where there often aren't.. some even get away with getting huge bonuses while they drag their companies through the gutter and in to the ground.
Any form of user tracking without opt in is not permitted.
Of course that’s all just deck chairs on the titanic. We need to make Display advertising illegal world-wide…
>Approximately 86% of online display advertising space in the U.S. is boughtand sold in real-time on electronic trading venues, which the industry calls “advertising exchanges.” With intermediaries that route buy and sell orders, the structure of the ad market is similar to the structure of electronically traded financial markets. In advertising, a single company, Alphabet (“Google”), simultaneously operates the leading trading venue, as well as the leading intermediaries that buyers and sellers go through to trade. At the same time, Google itself is one of the largest sellers of ad space globally. This Article explains how Google dominates advertising markets by engaging in conduct that lawmakers prohibit in other electronic trading markets: Google’s exchange shares superior trading information and speed with the Google-owned intermediaries, Google steers buy and sell orders to its exchange and websites (Search & YouTube), and Google abuses its access to inside information. In the market for electronically traded equities, we require exchanges to provide traders with fair access to data and speed, we identify and manage intermediary conflicts of interest, and we requiretrading disclosures to help police the market. Because ads now trade on electronic trading venues too, should we borrow these three competition principles to protect the integrity of advertising?
Google Is Dominating Hidden Market With No Rules https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/21/opinion/google-monopoly-r...
Then do Luxottica and then Anheuser-Busch InBev!
Google's search and ad dominance on the other hand are less convenient for governments.
Why should they not be able to offer ads in their own products though? I don't like ads but I do not immediataly see the issue. I think they should absolutly be allowed to do AI but things like only allowing bing chat in Edge should be banned. The amount of pushing they do is clearly not OK. And same for google they should not be allowed to push chrome on you when you go to gmail or google in a non chrome browser
They created web version
ideally you want clean separation of business models and competition with each of the business models.
overbearing conglomerates are not the way forward for the tech industry.
Didn't get the memo that both the UK and now US are blocking the Activision purchase?
>As a bare minimum they should be forced greater compatibility with running their software on linux
They do where it makes sense? PWA seems to be the main route they are taking, Office is slowly being migrated to PWA, Outlook is the first application being converted and is already available for testing by end users on Windows for now. It's sad because it's losing native functionality in exchange for PWA :(
Otherwise native desktop apps are already a difficult endeavor for anyone, Linux is an absolute fucking nightmare when it comes to packaging for everyone's NIH distro and I say that as a maintainer of a popular OSS package ;)
>ads within their os
The "ads" within their OS are only for upselling their own products. They are hardly ads and both Apple, Google and every other company does it. But somehow it's a problem if Microsoft throws a banner telling you trying OneDrive.
Jetbrains IDEs?
Google docs?
Theres shitton of viable alternatives except maybe for Excel
Microsoft is currently under investigated for using software licensing to prop up Azure.
> The crux of the issue relates to a 2019 licensing change enacted by Microsoft, effectively making it more expensive to run Microsoft’s omnipresent enterprise software on rival cloud services. Fast-forward to last year’s snowballing antitrust legal challenges, and Microsoft revealed it was making some changes designed to make “bringing workloads and licenses to partners’ clouds easier,” which it did to an extent — with the notable exceptions of so-called “listed providers” that include AWS, Google, and Alibaba.
So in effect, Microsoft is kinda making it easier for companies to run Microsoft software on non-Azure clouds, but only if they’re not using Microsoft’s main rivals’ infrastructure.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/20/microsoft-kickstarts-settl...
Further, the adtech business should be highly regulated, with the collection of data and profiling of individuals based on online behavior ideally prohibited. Digital ads are probably unavoidable, but should really just revert to be like the TV and newspaper ads of old.
Surveillance capitalism cannot be reformed, it must be banned. The "market" has malfunctioned big time and produced a monster.
There is nothing workable about the status quo. It holds back potentially tremendous potential and value, even just using conventional, monetary, yardsticks.
There is no way you can rollout next-gen "AI" and deeply impactful innovations around e.g., finance while the well is poisoned by this commingling of unsavory business models with legitimate pursuits.
Tweedledum and Tweedledee until regulators, politicians but also economic actors and the public wake up and smell the coffee.
Each "bet" in Alphabet needs to be broken. Each business unit within Google needs to be broken.
Same with Apple. Break that up to between services and hardware. Force them to open up their new silicon. Why can't other companies use the H1 or H2 chips for their headphones? why are we letting Apple have the competitive advantage? Open up the App Store and force new payment methods.
Microsoft also needs to be broken up. force them to sell their OpenAI stake and separate Office, Windows, Azure and Xbox.
Once we're done with that we need to break up Adobe (artistic tools and stock assets need to be separate), Uber (Eats and Driving again need be separate) and others as well.
moving away from tech, we need to break up these luxury conglomerates to spur more innovation in the fashion industry as well. same for food conglomerates such as Nestle and consumer goods like Unilever.
we've only begun the Great Breaking.
and while we're at it, we need to put a end to the madness of corporate greed and institute strict profit limits and tax the rest. when you really use your big brain - you'll realize nothing is more anti-competitive than excessive profits! money is power and profit is money, and no company need have power similar to the government. those profits are ultimately what are used to acquire more companies and begin their treacherous anti-competitive practices.
break the companies up and lock up the execs for being complicit in literal criminal activity. you show me a BigCo with profit and I'll show you criminal activity.
/sarcasm
Google uses www.google.com, the most popular website in the world, to push Chrome. Chrome, the most popular browser in the world, uses www.google.com as the default search engine. Google controls the largest ad marketplace and analytics tool, so they use Chrome to harm the ad landscape to stifle ad-tech competitors (third party cookies) and completely hinder the development of ad blocking software (FLoC and web bundles). Google uses Android, the most popular mobile operating system in the world, to push Google services and has Chrome as the default browser.
Anti-trust regulation must step in when a company uses its market dominance in one area to gain an advantage in another. Here, we have an entire feedback loop. We haven't had competent regulation of markets since the early 1900s.
Google needs to divest Doubleclick and Chrome. This is completely untenable.
As in, Chrome is removing third-party cookie support to hurt their ad-tech competitors? How do you square this with Safari kicking off third-party cookie removal, Firefox following close behind, and Chrome being last?
> completely hinder the development of ad blocking software (FLoC and web bundles)
Neither FLoC nor web bundles impact ad blockers, though? Both can trivially be blocked, and don't introduce new capabilities that strengthen ad blocking circumvention relative to ad blocking. (With FLoC I'm not sure what you mean here, since this isn't an argument I've seen before. With web bundles I was the main person pushing this in Google Ads before I left a year ago, and while adblocker-circumvention is something Brave claimed it never made much sense: https://www.jefftk.com/p/webbundles-and-url-randomization).
If that sounds familiar, think illegal crypto exchanges...
Obviously "ads" are not "securities", but when you take that along with the monopolistic position Google have between businesses and consumers online, the status quo is not sustainable. The EU is absolutely right to suggest breaking Google up, it should not be allowed to operate as an exchange, broker-dealer, and clearing agency.
Google have systematically taken control away from advertisers over the last ten years, it used to be that we would have deep control and insight into our campaigns. Now, it's all purely algorithmic, you put money in, and they promise to send you customers, with very little control from you.
Something important I want to draw attention to though, there is obviously much to complain about with Google tracking visitors/consumers, but their tracking and "spying" on businesses using the platform is also incredibly deep. In order to advertise effectively with Google Ads, you now need to provide them with full sales figures from your checkout process. They want to feed the "algorithm" with your revenue numbers, not just from sales resulting from ad clicks, but all your sales. Google have amassed the most incredible insight into any and all businesses online. They know exactly how much you are making, how competitive you are compared to your competition, and how much they can squeeze out of you. They are in the position to design the "algorithm" to maximise their take as they can see your figures.
So to finish, they operate a monopolistic exchange, as broker-dealer, clearing agency, and algorithmic trader, at the same time as having full visibility of your books. To me that should clearly be illegal.
Crypto also has price discovery through shorting and selling. How would one short a Google Ad or sell one in their marketplace? There’s only one supplier and it’s “trust me bro” for the price discovery. I think it will be very funny if the past decade or so was not only based on a foundation of sand caused by zero interest rates, but also an ad ponzi from the tech giants. We sent our best and brightest not to the moon or to cure cancer, but to find new ways to keep that ad ponzi going.
https://www.adexchanger.com/commerce/meet-performance-max-th...
Blockchains are public, yes. But the entities behind them are completely and utterly cryptic and centralized. Most of them operate out of Cayman Islands/Bahamas, etc.
Comparing Google to crypto exchanges is insane.
There are a huge number of ways crypto exchanges pull of scams without anyone noticing including straight up transferring customer funds to their own accounts, wash trading, trading against their own customers, having timely "maintenance" that lead to automatic liquidations, listing securities, taking bribes to list and promote a shitcoin, and the list goes on and on.
FTX drained $8 billion of customer funds over its lifetime without anyone noticing on chain until its sudden collapse.
Yes in fact! Anyone who looked into it knew. Maybe Wall Street and VCs were duped, but the crypto industry itself saw the train wreck coming from a mile away and distanced themselves from the start. That's why when the inevitable happened, the mainstream were pumping out articles about FTX disproportionately to its importance -- they were the ones that got played.
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/the-collapse-of-ftx-was...
https://twitter.com/BitcoinIsSaving/status/15396053464692531...
> There are a huge number of ways crypto exchanges pull of scams
There are a huge number of ways Google pulls off scams too. That's what this entire thread is about and the reason for the European Commission's complaint. Hence the comparison.
FTX's schemes were only exposed AFTER they couldn't handle withdrawals.
Anyone who follows crypto closely knows that every crypto exchange is crooked. Even crypto bros will tell you that. I can say that Binance is shady and likely stealing from their customers and I'll more likely to be correct than not. Saying FTX was shady before they were exposed was not a bold statement.
https://old.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/cj5ovr/ftx_... (2019)
https://old.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/m6b53a/sbf_... (2021)
You're right about Binance, but the same wouldn't be true about Fidelity, Coinbase, Kraken, etc. People with an axe to grind about crypto like to pretend the industry is homogeneous and always complain about the likes of FTX and Binance (who are in the news a lot for reasons you'd expect), but conveniently never have anything to say about the exchanges with a good track record that people actually use and trust.
But no one figured out that FTX was 100% scam, moved billions from their customers, commingled funds with Alameda until after the collapse. This is despite being on the blockchain.
My point is that the transparency of blockchains does not matter for crypto exchanges. They have a million ways to scam their customers without being noticed on chain.
Since this thread is about Google (don't forget), what's the equivalent of "not your keys" for Google ads? That's why it's an apt comparison, and the subject of the EU's complaint.
> Yes in fact!
Your first link is someone saying "I told you so", but there's no mention of reading smart contracts or auditing blockchain transactions. Instead it's something like, SBF seemed very fishy to him. Ex, "if you actually listened to him speak, it was obvious that he was a bumbling idiot who didn’t really grasp the industry he was supposed to be a domain expert in." Your second link is an example of someone doing something similar, again without using anything on-chain.
> the crypto industry itself saw the train wreck coming from a mile away and distanced themselves from the start
This is a pretty hard claim to support, and two people who said "this looks suspicious" isn't much evidence in that direction. When I talked to crypto people pre-2022-11 they were generally positive on FTX (but crypto is large and diverse and this is also saying very little).
Here is someone using blockchain analysis in 2021 https://old.reddit.com/r/solana/comments/qs3hb5/alameda_buyi...
My memory of general sentiment is different, but again you can't prove something like that. As far as hard data, all I can think to offer is this breakdown of FTX's creditors by country, compiled from the bankruptcy filing.
https://nitter.net/pic/orig/media%2FFiMwSncXEIMlb70.png
The creditors are 2% USA customers, 93% offshore customers, 5% unknown. The USA did not trust FTX at all.
With the customer distribution, how much of this is downstream from the crypto industry avoiding high-regulation countries? The biggest two are the Caymans (22%) and the Virgin Islands (11%) -- how many of those people are really Americans?
2. They could be, but if an American retail trader sets up an offshore company to do their trading with to avoid regulation, you're not a regular joe anymore, you should know what you're getting yourself into and I don't have a lot of sympathy.
Not only is Google on each side of the trade, there is also zero transparency to other participants and it has been proven in this lawsuit that Google is using back doors in their exchange to give their own tools (DoubleClick / Google DV360) access to data that other market participants don't have.
Frankly, their ad marketplace is a lot worse than even the shadiest crypto marketplaces.
With Google, you're spending money in a completely opaque marketplace with 0 visibility or transparency, and no choice as a consumer to mitigate that.
Writing this from a yet to be un-googled Pixel phone...
Apple Maps sucks, there's nothing near as good as YouTube, and I don't want to move hundreds of email accounts off of gmail.
Really? I found it more accurate in most cases. I wonder if there is a difference based on location. I am in California. Also maybe years ago it was not as good as Google, maybe it got better since then?
most likely it was just a shallow bait for apple fan's as i too use apple maps almost exclusively for some years now and found it more than capable for my navigation needs.
Additionally, to view any reviews you have to download Yelp
Breaking up a monopoly is always good, it will give us consumers more choice. Gives them less power of politicians.
Plus Android is open source so I think you got nothing to worry about.
In general, I expect this to go nowhere, of course. However, the fact that the EU can dare suggest such things fills me with hope. Sure, it's due to Europe having pretty much no stake in these technologies and waging a small trade war with the US, but that still means that apparently the cost of lobbying the process is high for the likes of Google.
Edit So more about payments. It used to be I could just give a lump sum and let Google Ads play until there is no more budget.
Not anymore, and -I don’t have a choice-. You can only use a bank account which you give Google Ads control over, and if you forget to set end dates, the thing will keep on rolling. For me it’s another dark pattern build in. For some big clients no big deal probably, I just want to point out there is not a lot of control or choice.
Then the URL[2] 404'd and the API disappeared. I couldn't find any references to a "BillingCap". I wondered why[3].
Now it makes sense: they got rid of budgets as you explained above. Everything's seems to be obfuscated behind a quite opaque Proposals/Deals[4] data structure now.
[1]: https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-billing
[2]: https://developers.google.com/ad-manager/api/reference/v2019...
[3]: https://twitter.com/kdeldycke/status/1625409998225285121
[4]: https://developers.google.com/authorized-buyers/apis/guides/...
At that point, google has no motivation to ever sell you clicks or impressions below that value, as they already know how much each click they send is worth to you.
Once you have two players in the market, you are basically haggling with google over 1-2-3% differences in your bidding, and google is switching you from position 1 and position 2 in the search results.
On top of that, google sales people are basically employed to come to you and say: "Look, on this keyword your competitor is bidding 2% more than you. You should optimise for it and pay the same". This sounds like a good game until you realise if everyone is optimising properly, the only winner here is google.
No one really has any leverage here except google, and they can squeeze everyone as hard as you are willing to squeeze your margins.
I've seen multiple markets over the last few years where google ads are basically break even for the entire industry. This is absolutely insane, but it's what an aggregator does.
Regulation: the big must interoperate with the small, and stable in time.
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_23_...
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How would this work, in practice?
> Ad exchanges are driven by a simple demand and supply mechanism. Publishers want to sell ad space on their website to the highest bidder and advertisers want to buy ad units that provide good visibility. This is where an ad exchange comes into the picture.
> This digital marketplace is part of the programmatic advertising ecosystem and is powered by real-time bidding (RTB) technology. It connects advertisers on a demand-side platform (DSP) with publishers on a supply-side platform (SSP).
Google purchased DoubleClick in 2008 which is the largest such. The problem here is, the SSP is also Google -- Google Search most importantly, YouTube as well.
There is more! They also run an ad server. To quote again
> an ad server is to ads what WordPress is to content
So an advertiser loads their ad into Google ad server for serving the ad then participates at a Google exchange to bid on the price of the ad. This gives Google an astounding amount of insight, fairly similar to insider trading which absolutely should not be allowed.
So, they could be forced to spin out the ad server and the ad exchange.
Interesting how China's model with multiple state owned entities competing against each other compares with the Soviet model.
However China is practically a capitalist country now. Chinese SOEs make up less of the Chinese GDP than Italian SOEs make up in the Italian GDP.
What is EU doing to to curb European monopolies ? Oh wait there are not many.... cause they can't innovate and compete. Easy to be complain than build something to compete.
Anyway https://twitter.com/clothildegouj/status/1668561531435470850
European companies are also going to be regulated.
They don’t have many monopolies because they have a completely different way of approaching business and their position in society. Also when it happens, they get split apart way way before you hear about it.
Let's look at similar industries. Better integration and data allows you to sell your product better, and more sales allows for more data and $$ needed for integration. No reason this vicious cycle only applies to internet companies.
Why didn't Ford buy up petrol stations in the US which could only serve Ford cars ? Market consolidation would let them negotiate a lower petrol price for all Ford cars and customers would struggle to switch without the same petrol-network or low-prices. Tesla is clearly demonstrating this as a car company with tech culture. They tried a 'super charger' monopoly thing, were nearly successful, but the presence of existing competitors made it difficult to pull it off. But Ford at its peak would've likely gotten away with it.
Tech companies are in an extortionate relationship, and the scale imbalance between their average customer (a 10 people mini-shop) and Google is so massive, that Google can afford to bleed many customers in the effort to find the maximally aggressive deal in the negotiation. How much can we get away with before we start bleeding customers, is a question that Google likely knows the answer to better than anymore.
Which brings me to why I think tech heads towards monopolies. It is "competence at scale". Every monopoly can expand vertically or extort data from their customers. But scaling vertically means more employees, more communication friction and inevitable mediocrity through IBM-ization of your company. More data is also not useful unless you can actually do anything useful with it.
That's where tech comes in. Tech companies can scale up vertically with products without needing as much human overhead, reducing the aforementioned friction. And most importantly, tech companies figured out how to actually make use of the data. It also helps that tech data collection usually involves clicking a checkbox and not sending thousands of foot-soldiers to take industry wide sensor measurements.
I came full circle as I wrote this comment, because I've just had an epiphany : "what is a tech company"?
Zillow, WeWork, Doordash etc. are on their surface, a light digital layer on a traditional company. I always wondered why they were considered tech companies. Target has a website and so does my landlord, but they aren't tech companies. In fact, the exact traits that lead to a culture obsessed with becoming a natural monopoly that define a tech company. A tech company has nothing to do with software, other than the fact that it has to do with data.
The cultural obsession with finding efficiencies vertically (control e2e) and horizontally (scale), inevitably turning into a gatekeeping monopoly is the core characteristic that defines a tech company. Both require a ton of easy data, and only that, is why tech companies write software. Software companies aren't always tech companies. But tech companies are forced to be Software companies. I've just realized that WeWork was in fact a legitimate tech company because it was a landlord obsessed with vertical and horizontal efficiencies. That's it.
Maybe we should do that more often when any brand grows too big?