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If this isn't the straw that breaks the camel's back, there is never going to be one. Google needs to be broken up. They own the browser market. They own the

If this isn't the straw that breaks the camel's back, there is never going to be one. Google needs to be broken up. They own the browser market. They own the web (through Adwords). They own Search. They own mobile. They own most of the video sharing market with 2.5 billion monthly annual users. They own a good chunk of email with 1.2 billion monthly annual users. They have amassed an incomprehensible amount of power and influence over humanity and they have proven repeatedly that they are willing to use that power to the detriment of humanity and to entrench themselves further. Google needs to be broken up.

px43 3y ago
Google broke itself up in 2015. What are you even asking for here? Chrome and Android are open source, and there are several forks of both thriving in the ecosystem. Yeah it would be cool if there was a decent open source alternative to GMail and Drive, but no one else seems to have figured out how to get the incentives right for something like that.
- troupo 3y ago
  That "incentive" for Google is "80% of our revenue comes from ads". Google's open source projects are open in name only.
  - px43 3y ago
    > Google's open source projects are open in name only. The link at the top of the page is pointing to the GitHub repo, where you can see literally over a million contributions from thousands of people working at hundreds of companies: https://github.com/chromium/chromium/commits/main https://github.com/chromium/chromium/commits/main I've worked on both Chrome and Android (Chromium and AOSP) professionally, and never worked at Google.
    - jsjohnst 3y ago
      You and GP both can be right depending on definition used for “open source”.
    - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
      There is the OSS vs FOSS distinction which may have been unwittingly invoked. Certainly there is nothing “free” about Chromium except its price. Google is not about to switch to a fork for Chrome and any changes to Chromium which are not approved by Google are unlikely to be in any release builds.
    - troupo 3y ago
      Well, true :) What I should've written is that: yes, they are open source, but there's no way to influence the direction they are going. These projects are 100% Google-run, and very few (if any) decisions are public. For most projects there's also a significant proprietary part in the actual final product
- BlargMcLarg 3y ago
  It's not the lack of open source, it's ease of use. Alternatives exist, but no company is going to run a charity case for you to store tons of data for free. Mail in particular is commonly known to be a hassle which has nothing to do with Gmail the software, as much as Gmail the provider.
- alistairSH 3y ago
  Google broke itself up in 2015. What are you even asking for here? No, it didn't, it restructured itself into Alphabet, with many subsidiaries. But, all the core businesses are still under that umbrella organization, with most web-related businesses remaining inside the current Google entity. A forced divestment of the browser business might help. Same for the productivity products.
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    What browser “business”? Chrome makes no money. Don’t you think they are going to fund themselves the same way that Firefox does - via Google ads? No one has paid for a browser in almost 3 decades and even then few did.
    - jsjohnst 3y ago
      > No one has paid for a browser in almost 3 decades and even then few did. Considering NCSA Mosaic’s initial release was just 30 years ago this year and it’s considered the first browser, think you might be using a bit of hyperbole there? Twenty years would’ve been more accurate.
      - xp84 3y ago
        MSIE was free, 28 years ago in late 1995, and while Netscape did take 5 years to follow suit, by 1998 Netscape was not in a healthy position because of the free competition.
        scarface_74 3y ago
        And to a first approximation. No one paid for Netscape then. I first downloaded it free in 1996 from their ftp server.
      - bradleyy 3y ago
        As someone who worked in this space at the time (Webmaster at Spry, Inc. in 1994), and we sold a web browser in the 1994-ish timeframe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBox, no, saying "almost 3 decades" isn't hyperbolic at all. 29 years is close enough.
- goffer 3y ago
  Say that to Huawei.
scarface_74 3y ago
[flagged]
- LikelyABurner 3y ago
  Wait until your bank requires you to use it to pay your bills and tax preparation websites require it to pay for taxes.
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    I’m sure they are all going to block iOS users from using their services.
    - beanjuiceII 3y ago
      iOS already implemented this stuff
      - kmeisthax 3y ago
        Not only did iOS implement this, but everyone either sleep-walked on it, or worse, praised it, because Apple sold it as a CAPTCHA bypass instead of a DRM scheme: https://mastodon.delroth.net/@delroth/110775677023220850 https://mastodon.delroth.net/@delroth/110775677023220850
        martimarkov 3y ago
        How is PrivacyPass related to iOS?
        kmeisthax 3y ago
        PrivacyPass is an extension that lets you pre-solve CloudFlare CAPTCHAs if you're on a VPN. However, that was too frustrating, so CloudFlare partnered with Apple to integrate PrivacyPass into Safari. How did they do this? Simple: iOS provides cryptographic attestation that your browser isn't a bot and isn't hacked, and CloudFlare takes that as your CAPTCHA solution. This works exactly the same way that Google proposes Web Environment Integrity work.
coldpie 3y ago
> Google needs to be broken up. To make it explicit: the only way this happens is by Americans voting for it. The FTC has been more active on anti-trust issues in the past two years than at any time in the past 30. That's a direct result of the 2020 election. Elections matter.
- soumyadeb 3y ago
  Citation? FTC against Google doesn't produce much results on Google (kind of an irony :)) Have seen FTC going against Amazon because the FTC chair had published prior work against Amazon's practices. Not defending Amazon but FB/Google are a much bigger threat than Amazon.
  - coldpie 3y ago
    Citation for what, increased anti-trust activity from the FTC over the last two years? Sure, here's one article: > Private equity deals and transactions in the healthcare and technology sectors continue to attract heightened antitrust scrutiny... > The US agencies have also demonstrated an increased interest in challenging vertical transactions. > In January 2022, for example, the FTC sued to block Lockheed Martin's US$4.4 billion proposed acquisition of Aerojet, which the parties subsequently abandoned. > Increased enforcement, combined with the agencies' reluctance to approve remedies, has created an uncertain environment where commercial parties should be increasingly prepared to litigate mergers. > The ramping up of antitrust enforcement in 2022... https://www.whitecase.com/insight-our-thinking/us-ma-fy-2022-antitrust-scrutiny-intensifies https://www.whitecase.com/insight-our-thinking/us-ma-fy-2022... Here's another: > Since 2020, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) have filed multiple lawsuits against major tech companies... > "The agencies have started laying the foundations for a more interventionist stance over the last two years, and this year is when we'll start to see some of those efforts come to fruition -- or be stopped in their tracks by the courts," Kass said. https://www.techtarget.com/searchcio/news/252528606/FTC-pushes-antitrust-enforcement-power-heading-into-2023 https://www.techtarget.com/searchcio/news/252528606/FTC-push... I'm sure you can find more.
    - 3y ago
ChatGTP 3y ago
Don't forget, increasingly transport, you won't be able to get a taxi in SF soon without being monitored / tracked by Google.
- hellojesus 3y ago
  How so? Are they requiring request of taxis via a site with Google analytics?
  - xnx 3y ago
    I think they're alluding to Waymo. I feel much better about Google tracking my taxi rides than I do with Uber, Lyft, random taxi company, my cell phone company, etc.
mardifoufs 3y ago
Why should the US break up an asset like Google? Would be completely self defeating. This isn't like standard oil or at&t, that mostly had influence and market share inside the US. It would basically be handing power to foreign competitors who would pounce at the opportunity And I'm not American so it's not even some sort of patriotic comment. If Europe , or anywhere else, had a Google sized Behemoth, they wouldn't mess with it no matter how "anti tech" they might seem now. If anything they are anti tech because they don't want foreign big tech to have massive influence over them. You'd bet they wouldn't cripple big tech if they were European. On the other hand, as long as they are American that massive power is a feature, not a bug for the US government. The reaction to Tiktok is a good example of how nationalism/geopolitics shape the reaction to big tech, which is why google is probably safe.
- lacrimacida 3y ago
  One thing comes to mind: antitrust! It happened to Microsoft as well!!
  - bagacrap 3y ago
    ...and Microsoft has more power than Google at the moment
    - asadotzler 3y ago
      But anti-trust stalled Microsoft's efforts at a critical time and allowed Firefox and Safari (like Gecko) to restore a standards-based web from an IE-based web. It's not a cure all but it worked. IE had 95% marketshare in 2002 and Firefox took a third of that from them in a few years thanks to anti-trust and the consent decree it forced on MS.
      - bagacrap 3y ago
        Chrome has nowhere near 95% market share so it would be hard to make the same case against them. Given that it's open-source and anyone can roll and distribute a tweaked version of Chromium (and many have, notably Microsoft), it's really hard to see an argument here that Google is acting anti-competitively. If anything it's very pro-competitive to give away your secret sauce to your competitors. Just because their browser is more popular than you would like, and you don't like a feature they're adding, doesn't mean a judge is going to stop them from adding it.
threatofrain 3y ago
What would it mean for Chrome to be spun-off into a separate business? How would it survive?
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  Google Ads and Search would have to pay Chrome for search placement. Just like they do to Mozilla right now.
- rolph 3y ago
  ideally, it wouldnt survive.
  - ketzo 3y ago
    the ideal scenario is that 65% of users' favorite browser is no longer available? why is that ideal?
    - flangola7 3y ago
      It's ideal that monolithic spyware dies.
pndy 3y ago
That would be a desirable action but look what happen in the end of 90s to Microsoft. It was about to be broken up and in the very end it didn't. They become dormant and polite only to strike back some 10 years ago with Windows 10, its telemetry, ads and cloud services which are being pushed onto users whether they like or not. And somehow, no regulators decided to step in to clean up this company's behavior - everyone seems to be ok with what MS is doing. Whether it's the US or EU. I take that the business and lobbing goes extremely well in both markets. And because of this, I don't believe that the US is able to break Google or the other flagship companies despite of reasons existing for such action.
nologic01 3y ago
> Google needs to be broken up. Not going to happen. Rationally there should be broad political consensus about cutting Google back to size: from rabid libertarians worshiping the miraculous abundance generated by "competition and free markets" to bleeding-heart socialists keen on pushing back corporate power as the root of all evil. Alas, these political categories no longer have any meaning. The US political system has mutated into something else (the messenger being a horned man) which will probably require some time to properly characterize and name using terminology that is appropriate to use in good company. So the fate of Google will be more shaped by actions of external entities than as part of US regulatory efforts. Powerful countries that antagonize the US are simply degoogling and creating their own copycat panopticons. The question is what will be the course of action of powerful countries that are alies of the US (i.e. Europe and a few others). Will they accept that their digital society will be feudal in nature because the broken US political system cannot deliver on even basic responsibilities?
- Dracophoenix 3y ago
  > Will they accept that their digital society will be feudal in nature because the broken US political system cannot deliver on even basic responsibilities? The Germans, British, Australians and French are also attempting to build their own panopticons.

px43 3y ago

Google broke itself up in 2015. What are you even asking for here? Chrome and Android are open source, and there are several forks of both thriving in the ecosystem. Yeah it would be cool if there was a decent open source alternative to GMail and Drive, but no one else seems to have figured out how to get the incentives right for something like that.

troupo 3y ago
That "incentive" for Google is "80% of our revenue comes from ads". Google's open source projects are open in name only.
- px43 3y ago
  > Google's open source projects are open in name only. The link at the top of the page is pointing to the GitHub repo, where you can see literally over a million contributions from thousands of people working at hundreds of companies: https://github.com/chromium/chromium/commits/main https://github.com/chromium/chromium/commits/main I've worked on both Chrome and Android (Chromium and AOSP) professionally, and never worked at Google.
  - jsjohnst 3y ago
    You and GP both can be right depending on definition used for “open source”.
  - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
    There is the OSS vs FOSS distinction which may have been unwittingly invoked. Certainly there is nothing “free” about Chromium except its price. Google is not about to switch to a fork for Chrome and any changes to Chromium which are not approved by Google are unlikely to be in any release builds.
  - troupo 3y ago
    Well, true :) What I should've written is that: yes, they are open source, but there's no way to influence the direction they are going. These projects are 100% Google-run, and very few (if any) decisions are public. For most projects there's also a significant proprietary part in the actual final product
BlargMcLarg 3y ago
It's not the lack of open source, it's ease of use. Alternatives exist, but no company is going to run a charity case for you to store tons of data for free. Mail in particular is commonly known to be a hassle which has nothing to do with Gmail the software, as much as Gmail the provider.
alistairSH 3y ago
Google broke itself up in 2015. What are you even asking for here? No, it didn't, it restructured itself into Alphabet, with many subsidiaries. But, all the core businesses are still under that umbrella organization, with most web-related businesses remaining inside the current Google entity. A forced divestment of the browser business might help. Same for the productivity products.
- scarface_74 3y ago
  What browser “business”? Chrome makes no money. Don’t you think they are going to fund themselves the same way that Firefox does - via Google ads? No one has paid for a browser in almost 3 decades and even then few did.
  - jsjohnst 3y ago
    > No one has paid for a browser in almost 3 decades and even then few did. Considering NCSA Mosaic’s initial release was just 30 years ago this year and it’s considered the first browser, think you might be using a bit of hyperbole there? Twenty years would’ve been more accurate.
    - xp84 3y ago
      MSIE was free, 28 years ago in late 1995, and while Netscape did take 5 years to follow suit, by 1998 Netscape was not in a healthy position because of the free competition.
      - scarface_74 3y ago
        And to a first approximation. No one paid for Netscape then. I first downloaded it free in 1996 from their ftp server.
    - bradleyy 3y ago
      As someone who worked in this space at the time (Webmaster at Spry, Inc. in 1994), and we sold a web browser in the 1994-ish timeframe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBox, no, saying "almost 3 decades" isn't hyperbolic at all. 29 years is close enough.
goffer 3y ago
Say that to Huawei.

scarface_74 3y ago

[flagged]

LikelyABurner 3y ago
Wait until your bank requires you to use it to pay your bills and tax preparation websites require it to pay for taxes.
- scarface_74 3y ago
  I’m sure they are all going to block iOS users from using their services.
  - beanjuiceII 3y ago
    iOS already implemented this stuff
    - kmeisthax 3y ago
      Not only did iOS implement this, but everyone either sleep-walked on it, or worse, praised it, because Apple sold it as a CAPTCHA bypass instead of a DRM scheme: https://mastodon.delroth.net/@delroth/110775677023220850 https://mastodon.delroth.net/@delroth/110775677023220850
      - martimarkov 3y ago
        How is PrivacyPass related to iOS?
        kmeisthax 3y ago
        PrivacyPass is an extension that lets you pre-solve CloudFlare CAPTCHAs if you're on a VPN. However, that was too frustrating, so CloudFlare partnered with Apple to integrate PrivacyPass into Safari. How did they do this? Simple: iOS provides cryptographic attestation that your browser isn't a bot and isn't hacked, and CloudFlare takes that as your CAPTCHA solution. This works exactly the same way that Google proposes Web Environment Integrity work.

coldpie 3y ago

> Google needs to be broken up. To make it explicit: the only way this happens is by Americans voting for it. The FTC has been more active on anti-trust issues in the past two years than at any time in the past 30. That's a direct result of the 2020 election. Elections matter.

soumyadeb 3y ago
Citation? FTC against Google doesn't produce much results on Google (kind of an irony :)) Have seen FTC going against Amazon because the FTC chair had published prior work against Amazon's practices. Not defending Amazon but FB/Google are a much bigger threat than Amazon.
- coldpie 3y ago
  Citation for what, increased anti-trust activity from the FTC over the last two years? Sure, here's one article: > Private equity deals and transactions in the healthcare and technology sectors continue to attract heightened antitrust scrutiny... > The US agencies have also demonstrated an increased interest in challenging vertical transactions. > In January 2022, for example, the FTC sued to block Lockheed Martin's US$4.4 billion proposed acquisition of Aerojet, which the parties subsequently abandoned. > Increased enforcement, combined with the agencies' reluctance to approve remedies, has created an uncertain environment where commercial parties should be increasingly prepared to litigate mergers. > The ramping up of antitrust enforcement in 2022... https://www.whitecase.com/insight-our-thinking/us-ma-fy-2022-antitrust-scrutiny-intensifies https://www.whitecase.com/insight-our-thinking/us-ma-fy-2022... Here's another: > Since 2020, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) have filed multiple lawsuits against major tech companies... > "The agencies have started laying the foundations for a more interventionist stance over the last two years, and this year is when we'll start to see some of those efforts come to fruition -- or be stopped in their tracks by the courts," Kass said. https://www.techtarget.com/searchcio/news/252528606/FTC-pushes-antitrust-enforcement-power-heading-into-2023 https://www.techtarget.com/searchcio/news/252528606/FTC-push... I'm sure you can find more.
  - 3y ago

ChatGTP 3y ago

Don't forget, increasingly transport, you won't be able to get a taxi in SF soon without being monitored / tracked by Google.

hellojesus 3y ago
How so? Are they requiring request of taxis via a site with Google analytics?
- xnx 3y ago
  I think they're alluding to Waymo. I feel much better about Google tracking my taxi rides than I do with Uber, Lyft, random taxi company, my cell phone company, etc.

mardifoufs 3y ago

Why should the US break up an asset like Google? Would be completely self defeating. This isn't like standard oil or at&t, that mostly had influence and market share inside the US. It would basically be handing power to foreign competitors who would pounce at the opportunity And I'm not American so it's not even some sort of patriotic comment. If Europe , or anywhere else, had a Google sized Behemoth, they wouldn't mess with it no matter how "anti tech" they might seem now. If anything they are anti tech because they don't want foreign big tech to have massive influence over them. You'd bet they wouldn't cripple big tech if they were European. On the other hand, as long as they are American that massive power is a feature, not a bug for the US government. The reaction to Tiktok is a good example of how nationalism/geopolitics shape the reaction to big tech, which is why google is probably safe.

lacrimacida 3y ago
One thing comes to mind: antitrust! It happened to Microsoft as well!!
- bagacrap 3y ago
  ...and Microsoft has more power than Google at the moment
  - asadotzler 3y ago
    But anti-trust stalled Microsoft's efforts at a critical time and allowed Firefox and Safari (like Gecko) to restore a standards-based web from an IE-based web. It's not a cure all but it worked. IE had 95% marketshare in 2002 and Firefox took a third of that from them in a few years thanks to anti-trust and the consent decree it forced on MS.
    - bagacrap 3y ago
      Chrome has nowhere near 95% market share so it would be hard to make the same case against them. Given that it's open-source and anyone can roll and distribute a tweaked version of Chromium (and many have, notably Microsoft), it's really hard to see an argument here that Google is acting anti-competitively. If anything it's very pro-competitive to give away your secret sauce to your competitors. Just because their browser is more popular than you would like, and you don't like a feature they're adding, doesn't mean a judge is going to stop them from adding it.

threatofrain 3y ago

What would it mean for Chrome to be spun-off into a separate business? How would it survive?

cmrdporcupine 3y ago
Google Ads and Search would have to pay Chrome for search placement. Just like they do to Mozilla right now.
rolph 3y ago
ideally, it wouldnt survive.
- ketzo 3y ago
  the ideal scenario is that 65% of users' favorite browser is no longer available? why is that ideal?
  - flangola7 3y ago
    It's ideal that monolithic spyware dies.

pndy 3y ago

That would be a desirable action but look what happen in the end of 90s to Microsoft. It was about to be broken up and in the very end it didn't. They become dormant and polite only to strike back some 10 years ago with Windows 10, its telemetry, ads and cloud services which are being pushed onto users whether they like or not. And somehow, no regulators decided to step in to clean up this company's behavior - everyone seems to be ok with what MS is doing. Whether it's the US or EU. I take that the business and lobbing goes extremely well in both markets. And because of this, I don't believe that the US is able to break Google or the other flagship companies despite of reasons existing for such action.

nologic01 3y ago

> Google needs to be broken up. Not going to happen. Rationally there should be broad political consensus about cutting Google back to size: from rabid libertarians worshiping the miraculous abundance generated by "competition and free markets" to bleeding-heart socialists keen on pushing back corporate power as the root of all evil. Alas, these political categories no longer have any meaning. The US political system has mutated into something else (the messenger being a horned man) which will probably require some time to properly characterize and name using terminology that is appropriate to use in good company. So the fate of Google will be more shaped by actions of external entities than as part of US regulatory efforts. Powerful countries that antagonize the US are simply degoogling and creating their own copycat panopticons. The question is what will be the course of action of powerful countries that are alies of the US (i.e. Europe and a few others). Will they accept that their digital society will be feudal in nature because the broken US political system cannot deliver on even basic responsibilities?

Dracophoenix 3y ago
> Will they accept that their digital society will be feudal in nature because the broken US political system cannot deliver on even basic responsibilities? The Germans, British, Australians and French are also attempting to build their own panopticons.