Do it! Then, do every single major conglomerate they've allowed to form over the last 30 years
this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2024
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Antitrust comes in waves in the US. First, it's a free for all to let the tech develop freely...then you see the horrors and a time of antitrust kicks in. This would be the 4th wave since the Sherman Act. Let's hope it's a good one.
Interesting! Go ooooonnnn 😍
That's all I had, I'm not an expert, but I hope they go after FB and microsoft too (in case that makes you feel randy like that other guy in the comments) :P
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invest in Sherman Antitrust Act memes now
Unless Savannah is some girl he knows, not sure this lands. Savannah, GA wasn't really ever ravaged in the Civil War or anything.
Atlanta's the one that got leveled.
Like that is what you point out, and not the fact they got the wrong Sherman pictured lol. John Sherman ≠ William Tecumseh Sherman
Here you go. Right guy.
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How about we start restricting how many businesses a company is allowed to buy out in a year. Maybe allow like 1-2 mergers a year. There no reason we should allow one company to buy everyone and then kill their products and services leaving the consumers holding the bag that will no longer function because the server is gone.
I would say even one a year would be too much.
That unless the business has failed and is no longer operating, for a merger and acquisition to occur they would have to petition the courts for permission first.
Imagine the shit that Microsoft and Google and Adobe and Amazon would be doing if they had to start their companies from scratch and compete against the already extant players in the field?
It would create so many jobs, and create an excess of consumer choice opportunity, lowering prices and fighting against inflation far more than a couple of percentage points on the interest rate index ever would.
I'm tired of only being offered incredibly overpriced very shitty low quality options in every single category.
We don't need $100,000 cars. We need $5,000 cars.
We don't need $1,000,000 homes, we need $25,000 homes that anyone in America who works a full-time job regardless of if they're slinging fries at McDonald's or digging ditches can afford.
We don't need $100 a week grocery bills. We need $5 a week grocery bills.
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One thing that I've always found interesting is that silicon valley has a common start up strategy that is basically: do well enough to get bought buy your bigger competition. Basically, be a threat so your VCs can cash in when a Google, Facebook, etc buys you.
I'm other words, Silicon Valley has a start up culture that feeds an anticompetitive/anti-trust ecosystem. No one complains because they are all making money. It's the users who slowly suffer and we end up were we are not with 5 companies running the modern web and Internet infrastructure.
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Maybe if all their shadiness hadn't been allowed in the first place they wouldn't have been able to become a monopoly.
But please, I beg of you, do Adobe next.
I remember the days of google being a cool startup that had just made news releasing gmail with a whopping 1GB of storage making everyone go crazy for the invites. It's a strange feeling.
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Hell, do all the "to big to fail" megacorps.
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Do it do it do it do it do it do it...
Smash them with a hammer. Google should not exist as it is. Not for decades.
Break up AdSense, chrome, search, android, shatter them all into separate companies that can stop selling out literally every waking aspect of life as their sole business model.
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Best news I've heard all day! Break up Meta, too, while you're at it!
Don't 'break it up', nationalize it, and do the same with all these other giant corporations.
Profits could support UBI instead of encouraging billionaires.
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Separate the search engine from anything that stinks of advertising so it can return to what it’s supposed to do: return the most relevant results.
Because even appending udm=14 only gets rid of promoted links and in-page advertising, it does f**k-all to correct manipulated search results.
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Not sure how that would work...
I'm old enough to remember the breakup of Ma Bell and the way that worked was the creation of a bunch of regional telecom services, that's not going to work on the Internet.
I guess they could mandate spinning off Android, but that's not really the problem addressed in the antitrust case, is it?
Maybe split the AdWords side from the Search Engine side?
I'd guess it would be a vertical breakup rather than horizontal: separate android, cloud, youtube, search, chrome, ads...depending on how aggressive they want to be.
But if they've only been found to monopolize search, how does that remedy the search monopoly? Presumably the new separate Google Search company would still have a search monopoly.
without search and their abuse of that monopoly, google wouldn't have dominant positions or massive market shares that many of their other properties (products, services, software, etc) have.
Because that search monopoly allows them to boost their other products above all others. It’s not an impartial search result anymore. There is a financial incentive to favor their own products.
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I think each of these needs to be handled in separate ways. For example, search could continue to be a conglomeration that includes maps, mail and possibly cloud. Android can just be split very easily into a separate company and same for Youtube, since that would basically be another Netflix or whatever.
Ads, in my opinion, is the most important one though. That absolutely has to be shattered into thousands of tiny pieces, all of which need to be forced to compete with each other, for the benefit of all internet companies anywhere. It would be a massive boon to companies everywhere and would provide an opportunity for lots of innovation in the advertising space, ie. trying ads that are less intrusive or ones that are cheaper because they don't rely on tracking information.
And another thing I think people need to understand about search is that building the search engine is not the hard part - the hard part is figuring out how to pay for it. Search is really expensive - crawling websites, indexing, fighting spam abuse. That's what really makes Google successful - the fact that they coupled it with advertising so that they could cover all the expenses that come with managing a search engine. That's much more important than the quality of the results, in my opinion.
And as for Chrome: well, personally I think that monopoly has been the most damaging to the internet as a whole. I would love to see it managed as part of a non-profit consortium. There should not be any profit motive whatsoever in building a web browser. If you want a profit motive, build a website - the browser should just be the tool to get to your profit model, not the profit model itself. And therefore it should be developed by multiple interest groups, not just one advertising company.
Anyway, I know this is all an impossible fantasy. Nothing in the world is done because it's right or wrong, it's done because it serves whoever holds the most power. But if there were a just world, this is what I think it would look like.
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I so want this to happen, but at the same time I'm scared that Samsung or whoever will buy AOSP and enshittify it completely
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A dog that barks doesn't bite.
"Considering" means they want to get something from Google in exchange for not breaking it up.
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Will this work out for consumers if other tech giants like Apple, Microsoft, or Amazon, etc. aren't also broken up simultaneously? Won't Google's assets just get sucked up into another existing monopoly and we'll be right back where we were but with one less choice than before?
I'm genuinely curious.
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Now break up Coca-Cola, those tax dodging fucks.
coca-cola, apple, windows, amazon...
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Fully support the action, don't know how the timing works...
Best case, you only start to basically outline what this looks like before the election. Worst case, you enliven the complacent, left-centrist billionaires to vigorously join in with the perpetually batshit right wing billionaires to get trump in to "live to fight another day" with the reasoning of, "we need to save ourselves first, then we'll deal with trump when he goes full fascist" and then they either won't be able to or won't care to because they won't want to upset their share price.
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Will the old method of breaking up a company work enough on modern tech companies? Will the 2nd best map software ever catch up in market share?
If you switched most people from google into DDG without telling, most would hardly notice, I venture. Mapping is different.
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If they forced them to split Waze off and make it independent again it probably could, it's probably the only non default app I see people use regularly
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PBMs/healthcare conglomerating needs to be looked at as a top priority
And this Kroger Albertsons thing needs to be stopped for good
So they're breaking up Google but giving Intel more free money after it cut 15k jobs?
Google also cut 12000 jobs in Jan 2023, but it does not have an AMD or Nvidia to kick its ass in search when it fucks up.
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It would probably do Google a world of good, depending on what gets split or spun off. A lot of Google products have unrealized potential that’s hamstrung by poor leadership and privacy issues. Maybe at least some of their products will be able to thrive on their own.
A tiny bandaid on the capitalism that's literally destroying the planet.
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The people here who 1) think a breakup of Google will actually happen, and 2) think that a paid subscription model for a search engine have all been spending too much time in their Linux bubble.
If Google did this, everyone would just switch to Bing, or open AI's new thing they are making. The general public will not be on board with that.
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