If Google started ranking sites that use AdSense higher than other sites, you could probably prove that in court fairly easily — your lawyers would make them hand over their ranking code during discovery, and it would say `if (usesAdSense) score++`, and you'd win.
But if they made (are making) subtle web platform changes via their control of the browsing platform that hurt competitors and help Google, that's extremely difficult to prove. Look at third-party cookies, for example.
This first one is about dominant market position by paying for placement on all surfaces (iPhone, Firefox, etc.) plus chrome. So splitting off chrome and android make sense in the context of the suit.
On the other hand, Google would argue that Doubleclick is Google, and everything else Google does is just to create channels for ads, and acquire data for ad targeting and pricing.
I believe that this will happen though, at some point in the next few years.
I'm not from the US, but it seems to me like the companies you mention stay in their respective market and don't try to destroy competition in other markets, like Walmart is a supermarket chain, UnitedHealth is just health insurance, Exxon just deals with gas, JPMorgan Chase is just a bank, etc...,
meanwhile Google operated YouTube, Chrome, Gmail and other services at significant losses for years up until the point where they basically have monopoly in those areas because the competition couldn't keep up with Google's free products, and now when the competition is destroyed, they are destroying these free services with increased pricing or ads, neither of which were there while they still had competition in those spheres...
If the feds kneecap US companies, it's not going to make the next generation of US companies stronger, just cede influence to worse jurisdictions.
It "works" in China where the government just stomps their feet if companies misbehave too much and everyone complies instantly or get replaced.
Edit: s/Amazon/Jeff Bezos/g?
We have megacorps in EU too, Airbus and Lidl comes to mind, though I don't think Lidl operates anything but their main business outside of Germany, in Sweden we have Lidl grocery stores however.
The common argument for breaking up monopolies is to provide more competition in the key area, since monopolies tend to focus efforts on things that don't benefit the consumer (like buying out smaller companies to stop them existing).
From that view, monopolies don't really benefit the US, if anything it stops the US market functioning competitively, and eventually running themselves into the ground.
I guess the other view is that "somebody is going to have a monopoly so why shouldn't it be my country?", but I'd say that ignores the fact that you can just curb other non-competitive behaviour fron foreign countries, like the EU has been trying to do with Apple and Google.
If other countries are doing something to advantage themselves relative to that, there’s tariffs or other ways to relevel the playing field.
Worked pretty well when they broke AT&T and not only got an extremely innovative lab full of small projects, but also kickstarted the internet era.
Smaller companies are faster, more agile, and hungry for success. This breeds market competition, spurring innovation and rendering better products for the consumer. The Amazons and Googles and Microsofts of the world have largely outlived their purpose and only exist to hoover up money in their cornered markets rather than innovate.
There's no reason why there can't be international co-operation on this subject.
Amazon (the retailer portion) and AWS, and probably their logistics wing
How does Chrome make income? Isn't it basically developed at a loss, but it makes money for Google's other business units?
The owner of Android could do the same. There is a long history of OS licensed to phone manufacturers. The incentive for manufacturers to keep using a common OS is probably much bigger than keep installing Chrome: nobody wants to sell phones without apps and nobody wants to pay developers to develop four or five versions of the same app. Think about home banking or games. Web apps might be enough and I very welcome that, but they are not enough for everything especially on low specs devices.
They developed Chrome because their business was web based and they wanted a solid platform for their apps.
And we all benefited from that stable platform. And it's mostly open source in Chromium. And they are paying Mozilla to stay in the game - an arms length, independent implementation of standards.
I think its wrong to suggest what they should have done is build an entire walled garden like Apple has done.
Update: I think the important part of your statement was "too keep out competition." I don't see how developing and giving away Chrome is stifling the browser market.
I can see how paying other people to make Google search default might stifling the search market, but that has nothing to do with Chrome.
Force Google to charge money for the service, or to pay a portion of imputed stolen revenue to competitors. But Chrome itself is not a viable business without the huge fountain of money that is search ads.
Something tells me a product that can garner billions of dollars will do just fine if sliced away. If Google gives firefox $500million to be the default search at 5% user share, they should pay Chrome $20 billion for the same privilege.
The true damage that should be done is to separate Gmail + workspaces, Maps, Youtube, GCP, Android, and Search as their own separate entities then undo the DoubleClick merger.
That would be true justice.
- ecom (amazon?)
- AI (openai?)
"Similarly, Google would be prevented from pressuring its partners to use Google search or AI services over the competition."
The other alternative would be paying for search, in which case everyone would just leave for another search engine the next day.
Which is honestly why I have so much calling google search a monopoly. The switching cost is comically cheap and easy. You could cut out Google search within the next 5 minutes from the rest of your life.
"Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users...we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.
Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious."
Buying Chromium is a more interesting proposition, but you can't really "buy" it (aside from the trademark, infrastructure, domains) because the codebase isn't Google's to sell. Would the web coalesce around the new owners just because they inherit the CI and the repo?
It’s good to have a diversified portfolio of skills, and if Chrome should be sold and not sustainable, there is the possibility that the rollout of new features to the web will feel like an Internet Explorer era malaise. The web may very well become a mostly frozen platform; warts and all.
I’m also not interested in following the inevitable JavaScript framework attempts to overcome this. At least this time, we have Web Components, WASM, and Canvas, making polyfilling almost anything theoretically possible.
[0] https://www.justice.gov/atr/case/us-and-plaintiff-states-v-g...
How would you feel if Google shut down Chrome, and created an app called the Google Application Platform. (GAP). The GAP would be the only place you could use Search, Workspace, YouTube, Maps, and every other google website.
What would you think if Google just abandoned the open web entirely.
The artificial price point for GMail, GDocs, GMeet has killed so much competition.
Try pricing something against this insane dumping price Google sets - there is no TAM, the M does not payback enough to justify the effort.
The cross-financing with Ads would finally stop and fair pricing would come.
It literally led to the creation of Office 365 and broke open a market that had been closed to competition in the face of an unbreakable Microsoft Monopoly for decades! That sounds ridiculous on its face. Of all the product areas to complain about Google having a monopoly, you picked the office suite!?
HN tends strongly to one side of this argument, but really this is trending towards a "Google Derangement Syndrome" kind of analysis.
Office is Microsofts bread and butter, for Google its a side project that disrupts Microsofts business model.
> It literally led to the creation of Office 365 and broke open a market that had been closed to competition in the face of an unbreakable Microsoft Monopoly for decades
Both can be true at the same time. For example Tmobile and Sprint merging led to even more pressure on any new or existing networks that were/are not in the top 4. But it also led to increased competition with Verizon and AT&T.
Now, with Google as the entrenched incumbent in so many different spaces, what's good for the web is not necessarily good for Google anymore.
All developers I know build pretty much exclusively on Chrome desktop wise.
There's only one model that can work long-term here: collective ownership. The closest model is probably the Wikimedia Foundation. Firefox and the Mozilla Foundation are here, obviously, but they've tried to act like a corporation with rising costs and lower earnings going over years. The money Google pays them is basically poison.
Linux has survived and thrived with something analagous to this but it's also dependent to an unsettling degree on one person (Linus Torvalds). I realize his power has decentralized over the years (intentionally, by Linus) but there's still the constnat risk of a schism.
Google and Chrome is just one small part of the problem. Apple's Safari monopoly on iOS is also a problem. Browsers really need to be a common good.
I suspect none of this will happen. Even though these efforts began in the Biden administration, I suspect this will now become a shakedown. This administration will look to Google to fall in line and kiss the ring. That is now the cost of doing business.
The only difference between Chrome without Google and Chromium is the name and logo. You lose all integration with Google services like sync, suggestions, etc.
You'd be stuck with only the captives that can't switch because they're using older appliances with Chrome baked in.
Look, I hate how dominant Chrome is. It’s basically a glorified data vacuum for Google—and it’s only getting worse. But at the end of the day, people choose to use Chrome, and I don’t see why Google shouldn’t be allowed to own and develop it. There are still plenty of other browsers people can switch to.
Now, what’s actually dangerous is the growing trend of sites blocking non-Google search engines from indexing their content. That’s a real issue—and it’s escalating fast. Selling Chrome won’t do a damn thing to fix that.
Besides, no other company has the budget or incentive to maintain Chrome at the level Google does. If they’re forced to give it up, then what? A half-baked, underfunded mess? A fragmented ecosystem? None of this feels like a win.
... unless your goal is to have Elon be able to pick up a new browser to go along with Twitter and TickTock.
Alas, very people put that high a value on their privacy.
That said, even well intentioned distros that don't sell your data will have some privacy issues, inherited from upstreams.
People complain about whataboutism, but the Apple versus almost any other 'monopoly' is insane. You can switch browsers within the next 30s, you can't install an app from a third party vendor ever on iOS. [1]
[1] Yes I know you can pay $100 a year, and then compile your own/open source apps weekly and move them to your device. No this is not a reasonable solution.
Google on the other hand have a monolithic market share in a number of key markets. There's really no competition to them in search or video for instance, whereby they command extremely dominant market share.
Apple on the other hand do not dominate any markets, they just have a locked down product. Pretty similar to luxury cars, Nintendo, and other companies that think their customers value the integration over an open ecosystem.
Let's be real, this administration is just doing stock manipulations and looting the public purse while running a media circus to distract people.