Americans have allowed the rich to become too wealthy. The kind of power that comes with billions of dollars just doesnt work with justice or democracy.
It also doesn't work when the media is either striving to uphold the status quo that got us here or actively going out of its way to try and make things worse.
> Americans have allowed the rich to become too wealthy.
This consistently happens in a very specific way. A corporation that dominates a concentrated market becomes excessively large, which makes its early shareholders billionaires.
In other words, if you want to change this, you need to enforce antitrust laws and break up large corporations.
> enforce antitrust laws and break up large corporations
agreed, but there is a problem when a corporation becomes strategically important to a country; now the incentive is to protect it all costs (though ironically too-big-to-fail can also be a strategic/security issue!)
> The government doesn't have to win an antitrust trial in order to create competition. As the saying goes, "the process is the punishment."
Regardless of what you think of Google or this case specifically, this is an argument for authoritarianism: that it is legitimate for the government to "punish" any company at will, based only on them falling into political disfavor.
> ... the only punishment Google would have to bear from this trial would come after the government won its case, when the judge decided on a punishment (the term of art is "remedy") for Google.
Yes, this is called the rule of law. Punishment comes through the courts, after a guilty verdict. The government has to actually win the argument as to what remedies would be proportionate under the law. In this case the judge didn't buy it. It's fine to disagree with his reasoning (or with the law), but the fantasizing about extrajudicial punishment here is frankly un-American.
> One of the facts established in the verdict was that Google had been slipping Apple more than $20b/year in exchange for which, Apple forbore from making a competing search engine.
Didn't Apple say that 1) they weren't interested in being in the Search Engine business 2) (in testimony) Google was by far the best search engine that they were going to use anyway ?
Certainly, $20B/Y weighs on the scale, but knowing Apple's negotiation tactics they could also have used their weight to do what they wanted anyhow and get paid handsomely for it (<waggle waggle> "if you don't pay us we might start using other defaults and you'll lose that lucrative iOS market")
My point is, while Google is clearly at fault in this whole situation, it's not quite as moustache-twirling evil as Doctorow paints it.
I agree that the remedy sucks, but I am just not following the logic about private data? I'm totally willing to believe Cory is correct here, but I just need some more do the dots connected :/. I think the premise is that, if we want to have a competitor to Google Search--which I do not think was even the correct goal here, but seems to be what people were trying to optimize for :/--you would need to do something effectively impossible: you need to catch up to Google's search index operation, as, as a user, if I'm going to use a search engine, I'm going to use the one with the most data in it, lest I am just wasting my time. (I appreciate that for a minority of users they might have other things they are optimizing for, but that's always going to be a minority of users, and isn't going to really change Google's ridiculous market power.)
And so, if you have that goal--and I will again stress that I don't even think that is the correct primary goal to have at this point, due to Google having effectively taken control of the only browser that matters and being in control of the only video site that matters--breaking apart Google into a bunch of tiny companies along the obvious lines (Android, YouTube, Maps, Gmail, or even Chrome) wouldn't fix the situation, as that isn't going to suddenly allow anyone to create a viable competitor to Google search, as Google Search would still exist, it would still always continue to have more data indexed off the web than anyone else... forever.
You thereby have two options: you can try to destroy Google Search and make it so that no one has a search engine as good as Google--at least for a while--or you can figure out how to break up Google Search itself. The former is maybe a good outcome, but it is not only unrealistic, it isn't necessarily helpful in any external sense, which is where I get really confused about Cory's point here: the thing Google is searching over isn't my private data... it's my public data. Yes: they know a lot about my private data, and it could be cool to have that deleted, but that's kind of besides the point, as it has very little to do with Google Search; people aren't searching for my private data, and Google Search is going to find losing all of my private data as, at best, a minor inconvenience.
What you need to do, thereby, is figure out how to break up the Google Search product into parts, to separate the wholesale part of the business from the retail part of the business, whether by making it into two separate companies or putting restrictions on the combined whole to offer both services separately... and, it sounds like that is what they are going to try? Now, I don't know if this is going to work--as it might be extremely painful or confusing to actually build a useful search engine accessing Google's catalog--but it certainly isn't as if I have a better idea for how to create a competitor to Google Search.
(Again, though: I'm not sold on the idea that the actual problem with Google is that we don't have a competitor to Google Search. Hell: as of recently, my usage of Google Search has plummeted, as I've replaced most of the things I used to use Google for with various uses of large language models... and, yet, I still find Google to be too powerful in a way that distorts markets and should require some kind of antitrust intervention. :/ Maybe, then, the premise is that Cory feels that we should have tried to fix some other problem? But, he's saying that this result is itself a privacy breach... while simultaneously saying Google is going to skirt the benefit by redacting data so hard that they end up in court? I don't get it.)
The worst thing about Google is that they discovered the ad-model and created an entire generation that is entitled to free tools and services on the internet. People who think Gmail, drive, sheets, translate, Gemini, YouTube, search, android, etc., etc. are all inherently free services that Google is greedily slapping ads on.
Google is a monster because people so heavily favor the ad-model over paying for things.
Kagi wonderful, but paying for search? Lol that shit is free!
I basically agree with the post and it's similar to what I was saying in comments on another post a few days ago. Trying to impose piecemeal conditions on monopolists is more trouble than it's worth. They should just be forcibly dismantled.
There's a deeper problem with the way antitrust seems to work, though: it doesn't adequately deter prohibited acts, because in many cases the penalty is just that the bad actor has to stop doing what they were doing. This is a pervasive feature of punishment in "white collar crime" and civil suits for various kinds of regulatory violations. It's like, if you engaged in anticompetitive practices, the punishment is you have to stop doing that, and yeah maybe you pay a fine, but the biggest worst thing that can happen is they take away your monopoly after you've gotten the benefits of using it for a while.
We need to take the approach that everything derived from anticompetitive practices is ill-gotten gains. If you were a monopoly, everything you did as a monopoly is tainted and the proper remedy is a total rollback in all your gains since the beginning of your anticompetitive acts, plus penalties on top of that. This includes penalties against the individuals who directed and enabled the illegal practices (e.g., a personal fine against Sundar Pichai of several hundred million dollars).
What this means is that if Google has held a browser monopoly since, say, 2010, the punishment needs to be that they wind up worse off now than they would have been had they done the right thing and voluntarily taken pro-competitive actions at all times from 2010 until now. Everything they've gained from their monopolistic practices, every success they've built on that, every penny they've earned, every piece of IP they've glommed onto, every scrap of data they've collected --- all of it is forfeit. It may be that certain specific areas could be shown to be sufficiently insulated from the monopolistic practices to avoid such treatment, but the burden of proof is on Google to show that; the assumption should be that everything they accomplished with their monopoly power is poisoned by that wrong.
The penalties need to be so brutal that companies will bend over backwards to avoid becoming monopolies. As long as the penalties can be treated as just a cost of doing business, companies will continue to cheat.
"But second, because Judge Amit Mehta decided that the Google case should be shrouded in mystery, suppressing the publication of key exhibits and banning phones, cameras and laptops from the courtroom, with the effect that virtually no one even noticed that the most important antitrust case in tech history, a genuine trial of the century, was underway:
I feel that the remedy at the end of the trial was really just unworkable.
If you want to break up google, you should break it into workable coherent profitable business units like youtube, maps and geo, search, adsense, android, google cloud (including email) or some combination of the above.
I think it makes little sense to sell off their loss leading platforms that don’t make up coherent business units.
> And if you're waiting for Europe to jump in and act where America won't, don't hold your breath. EU Commission sources leaked to Reuters that the EU is going to drop its multi-billion euro fine against Google because they don't want to make Trump angry:
20 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 39.5 ms ] threadThis consistently happens in a very specific way. A corporation that dominates a concentrated market becomes excessively large, which makes its early shareholders billionaires.
In other words, if you want to change this, you need to enforce antitrust laws and break up large corporations.
It is a sin to be poor
There being poor, is the sin of the rich
Sure, the easiest way you can do that is to move to Europe and petition its regulators to further tighten the screws. They might actually listen.
Regardless of what you think of Google or this case specifically, this is an argument for authoritarianism: that it is legitimate for the government to "punish" any company at will, based only on them falling into political disfavor.
> ... the only punishment Google would have to bear from this trial would come after the government won its case, when the judge decided on a punishment (the term of art is "remedy") for Google.
Yes, this is called the rule of law. Punishment comes through the courts, after a guilty verdict. The government has to actually win the argument as to what remedies would be proportionate under the law. In this case the judge didn't buy it. It's fine to disagree with his reasoning (or with the law), but the fantasizing about extrajudicial punishment here is frankly un-American.
"Google has stolen every fact about our lives, in service to propping up a monopoly that lets it steal our money, too."
I still have all the facts about my life and I don't think any money has been stolen. I get that this is rhetorical, but he's gone over the edge here.
Didn't Apple say that 1) they weren't interested in being in the Search Engine business 2) (in testimony) Google was by far the best search engine that they were going to use anyway ?
Certainly, $20B/Y weighs on the scale, but knowing Apple's negotiation tactics they could also have used their weight to do what they wanted anyhow and get paid handsomely for it (<waggle waggle> "if you don't pay us we might start using other defaults and you'll lose that lucrative iOS market")
My point is, while Google is clearly at fault in this whole situation, it's not quite as moustache-twirling evil as Doctorow paints it.
And so, if you have that goal--and I will again stress that I don't even think that is the correct primary goal to have at this point, due to Google having effectively taken control of the only browser that matters and being in control of the only video site that matters--breaking apart Google into a bunch of tiny companies along the obvious lines (Android, YouTube, Maps, Gmail, or even Chrome) wouldn't fix the situation, as that isn't going to suddenly allow anyone to create a viable competitor to Google search, as Google Search would still exist, it would still always continue to have more data indexed off the web than anyone else... forever.
You thereby have two options: you can try to destroy Google Search and make it so that no one has a search engine as good as Google--at least for a while--or you can figure out how to break up Google Search itself. The former is maybe a good outcome, but it is not only unrealistic, it isn't necessarily helpful in any external sense, which is where I get really confused about Cory's point here: the thing Google is searching over isn't my private data... it's my public data. Yes: they know a lot about my private data, and it could be cool to have that deleted, but that's kind of besides the point, as it has very little to do with Google Search; people aren't searching for my private data, and Google Search is going to find losing all of my private data as, at best, a minor inconvenience.
What you need to do, thereby, is figure out how to break up the Google Search product into parts, to separate the wholesale part of the business from the retail part of the business, whether by making it into two separate companies or putting restrictions on the combined whole to offer both services separately... and, it sounds like that is what they are going to try? Now, I don't know if this is going to work--as it might be extremely painful or confusing to actually build a useful search engine accessing Google's catalog--but it certainly isn't as if I have a better idea for how to create a competitor to Google Search.
(Again, though: I'm not sold on the idea that the actual problem with Google is that we don't have a competitor to Google Search. Hell: as of recently, my usage of Google Search has plummeted, as I've replaced most of the things I used to use Google for with various uses of large language models... and, yet, I still find Google to be too powerful in a way that distorts markets and should require some kind of antitrust intervention. :/ Maybe, then, the premise is that Cory feels that we should have tried to fix some other problem? But, he's saying that this result is itself a privacy breach... while simultaneously saying Google is going to skirt the benefit by redacting data so hard that they end up in court? I don't get it.)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/02/technology/google-search-...
> Judge Mehta was s...
Google is a monster because people so heavily favor the ad-model over paying for things.
Kagi wonderful, but paying for search? Lol that shit is free!
There's a deeper problem with the way antitrust seems to work, though: it doesn't adequately deter prohibited acts, because in many cases the penalty is just that the bad actor has to stop doing what they were doing. This is a pervasive feature of punishment in "white collar crime" and civil suits for various kinds of regulatory violations. It's like, if you engaged in anticompetitive practices, the punishment is you have to stop doing that, and yeah maybe you pay a fine, but the biggest worst thing that can happen is they take away your monopoly after you've gotten the benefits of using it for a while.
We need to take the approach that everything derived from anticompetitive practices is ill-gotten gains. If you were a monopoly, everything you did as a monopoly is tainted and the proper remedy is a total rollback in all your gains since the beginning of your anticompetitive acts, plus penalties on top of that. This includes penalties against the individuals who directed and enabled the illegal practices (e.g., a personal fine against Sundar Pichai of several hundred million dollars).
What this means is that if Google has held a browser monopoly since, say, 2010, the punishment needs to be that they wind up worse off now than they would have been had they done the right thing and voluntarily taken pro-competitive actions at all times from 2010 until now. Everything they've gained from their monopolistic practices, every success they've built on that, every penny they've earned, every piece of IP they've glommed onto, every scrap of data they've collected --- all of it is forfeit. It may be that certain specific areas could be shown to be sufficiently insulated from the monopolistic practices to avoid such treatment, but the burden of proof is on Google to show that; the assumption should be that everything they accomplished with their monopoly power is poisoned by that wrong.
The penalties need to be so brutal that companies will bend over backwards to avoid becoming monopolies. As long as the penalties can be treated as just a cost of doing business, companies will continue to cheat.
https://www.promarket.org/2023/10/27/google-monopolizes-judi...
But Judge Mehta turned his courtroom into a Star Chamber, a black hole whence no embarrassing information about Google's wicked deeds could emerge."
I did submit the Order to HN for discusssion
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45109044
People read the Opinion, but probably no one read the Order that accompanied it
It seems the limited redactions in the Opinion somehow makes up for the trial's lack of transparency
Nor was Google ever sanctioned for its past discovery violations
The remedies hearing transcripts should be released to the public
If you want to break up google, you should break it into workable coherent profitable business units like youtube, maps and geo, search, adsense, android, google cloud (including email) or some combination of the above.
I think it makes little sense to sell off their loss leading platforms that don’t make up coherent business units.
Well no. Europe just confirmed it yesterday.