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 swapped most people from google into DDG without telling, most would hardly notice, I venture. Mapping is different.
Perhaps, though I am dubious (when it comes to things like searching for business open hours or street view).
However it’s not like choosing which restaurant to go to. They just type their search in the Google browser textbox and use the same search engine they’ve always used, the default. They’d need to encounter a failed search and think to try another, only to find that probably doesn’t work either.
I think Apple could catch up.
Big tech needs far stricter regulations but I don’t think people would like the internet very much if Google was forced to sell off services like YouTube. Nobody else is offering unlimited free hosting, discoverability, promotion, and bandwidth for video content and nobody ever will again. If the chromium project was sold off to some other shitty tech company, do you really think they’d keep the open source ‘ungoogled’ version readily available for everyone? A Google breakup would just mean that other tech companies like Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, etc get more powerful.
If there’s an appetite for breakups why not start with the companies that control our food and news
There’s also how much of a pain that would be for the end user. Would I have to create new accounts for all their services? That would be a mess.
It’s not 2010, video streaming isn’t unprofitable anymore and Youtube doesn’t have a monopoly on it. Chromium is open source, and as far as I’m concerned, Google has been actively making it worse with their efforts to fill it with ads.
More breakups do sound good, though.
God I hope it ends up splitting off Chrome. I think Google has done a great job with Chrome. But the recent Manifest v3 makes it clear they’re going to greatly degrade their users’ experience for Google’s bottom line. And they’re using their market dominance to do it.
What does that even look like as a business model, though? There’s an expectation now that you don’t pay for web browsers. What would a standalone Chrome, Inc. look like?
Something very close to Mozilla in my opinion. They’d have the browser as their core product, a few more apps as a logical extension of that (maybe a mail client like Thubderbird), perhaps Chrome Inc would inherit google’s office suite? That would be a breath of fresh air. Maybe revive a few of Google’s killed ventures that seemed more than promising.
Best news I’ve heard all day! Break up Meta, too, while you’re at it!
Amazon.
Disney, Bayer, Unilever
Walmart, Kroger, Safeway (the latter two are in the midst of merging as well)
NY Post
Going to need a much better source than this.
Thanks.
Justice Department officials are considering what remedies to ask a federal judge to order against the search giant, said three people with knowledge of the deliberations involving the agency and state attorneys general who helped to bring the case. They are discussing various proposals, including breaking off parts of Google, such as its Chrome browser or Android smartphone operating system, two of the people said.
…
Last week’s ruling that Google was a monopolist was a landmark antitrust decision, raising serious questions about the power of tech giants in the modern internet era. Apple, Amazon and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, also face antitrust cases. Google is scheduled to go to trial in another antitrust case — this one over ad technology — next month. Any remedies in Google’s search case are likely to reverberate and influence that broader landscape.
TIL, the ruling might actually carry some consequences. I guess we’ll see where this takes us.
Do it! Then, do every single major conglomerate they’ve allowed to form over the last 30 years
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
Do you think they’d do Apple?
A human can live their whole life without ever interacting with an Apple product by mistake. I’m not sure about that for android/google/adsense/maps/youtube. It takes a deliberate effort to avoid these guys and I’m still not completely free from it. Slightly easier but still a minefield with Microsoft and FB, especially in niche areas.
That’s what I like to hear!
Alphabet soup
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.
Kagi is kicking their ass.
really? Is it growing that fast? I expected it would remain more niche than Linux, particularly if you need a subscription.
Oh I just mean in terms of product quality. It’s gonna take forever to even teach people they can change search engines.
Almost as hard as picking a lemmy server :D
Who?
Intel is a near monopoly and it controls the physical hardware that runs the entire universe with the exception of mobile devices and embedded.
If you’re going to break anyone up that’s who I would go for first but because of the pipe dream of making computer chips in 'Murica these idiot politicians keep propping up Intel’s Wall Street investors while its employees get fucked over.
At the very least the x86 duopoly has to end. It’s not only legal but kept the way it is because of legal contracts. The courts need to declare them void because their enforcement leads to to the violation of antitrust laws.
How is this related?
Don’t stop with them
Crush corporations, swiftly and without fanfare rebuild capitalism with worker co-ops, seize the means of production without all that stagnation and failure that usually follows.
rebuild capitalism
Replace, yes?
Let’s just choose our words carefully for now or the people with the money will get spooked and pay the people with the missiles to start blowing things up.
I’m already on a list.
I’m trying to make things easier for my own FBI agent, we’ve been through a lot together.
Will cooperatives really be able to offer good services or will they become corrupt sooner or later?
History says corrupt…
Can’t predict the future but a system like this could be better than our current state of affairs where we already suffer user-hostile services and corrupt action all concentrated in a few private companies to which we have no alternatives.
If cooperatives were a more prevalent structure, there would likely be more of them since the power incentives to consolidate are lessened, but not eliminated. Because there would be more competition in the marketplace, there would be more incentives to provide good products and services. We can assume that underperforming cooperatives would generally be less successful.
Also, with more participants in the marketplace and greater decision-making by members, less power would be concentrated in the hands of the owners and managers. While that’s not a guarantee against corruption, limiting power concentration lessens the impact of any individual’s corrupt actions and provides opportunity for others not to have to do business with them. Compare to the current state of Google’s leadership directing so much of the company’s efforts not toward providing service but toward manipulating people and markets to squeeze more money out of them.
There are, however, things we likely would lose out on with a more cooperative-based economy. For one, while there would be more incentive for co-ops to produce higher quality products and services, they would probably spend less effort on the “high polish” (for lack of a better way to say it) that attracts marginal customer/user growth. In other words, things would work better but probably be less pretty.
Another potential drawback is in economies of scale. Theoretically, market-dominant and tightly integrated companies can produce more for less while every piece of the puzzle just fits together. I don’t see this as a very compelling argument since the efficiency gains don’t usually benefit anyone but the owners, with excess profit directed not to increased quality but to marketing and manipulation. Since cooperatives would be less able to build up their own “walled gardens,” interoperability may be more incentivized and this drawback may be mitigated.
Really, though, anything has got to be better than having so many smart people working toward finding new ways to squeeze money out of us rather than doing something actually productive.
Another potential drawback is in economies of scale. Theoretically, market-dominant and tightly integrated companies can produce more for less while every piece of the puzzle just fits together.
Personally, I have a pet theory that economies of scale fall start working backwards once a company reaches a certain size because so many employees become so disconnected from the actual activity that makes the company money that 1. Various management types try to do good but instead accidentally impede the money making process, 2. Various inefficies emerge just due to the sheer number of people involved and miscommunications are amplified 3. You reach a scale where lots of B2B products (especially SAAS products) start making sense, but B2B generally charges you a premium for the convenience compared to doing it in house, so the cost benefit can quickly get out of whack while lock-in and corporate intertia makes it harder and harder to change
PBMs/healthcare conglomerating needs to be looked at as a top priority
And this Kroger Albertsons thing needs to be stopped for good
I don’t hold my breath until they really do it.
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.
No, Amazon next.
How would the US JD break up a Swiss corp?
Instead of invading Africa to control people and steal resources, the usa could kick Nestle out of their plantations.
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.
Yeah, I thought Google was so cool around 2004. Now I can’t wait for them to become irrelevant. I need to stop using “googling” as a verb…
I worry what a broken up Adobe would do to workflows. One of the reasons I can do what I do is because Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects and Premiere all work with each other.
Now if we want to save Behance and Frame.io, substance, Mixamo, etc, I am all for that.
I don’t know how deeply their different programs integrate with each other (I don’t do video or illustration seriously) but one would hope that it might encourage them to adopt more open standards and formats. For example, in my photography workflow I can import and catalogue a RAW image with Shotwell, which passes it through to my RAW developer (Rawtherapee), which in turn passes it through to my raster editor (GIMP). These programs are all developed separately from each other by people with much less resources than Adobe, so I think it’s a matter of choice rather than a technical limitation.
It would depend on the actual file formats. For example I can import a live after effects file into premiere and all the updates I make will apear on premiere’s timeline, without needing to render out. The same goes for bringing photoshop or illustrator files into After Effects. I guess we’d just have to rely more on third party plugins that connect these programs like Overlord
Good luck, I’m all for it, but good luck
A tiny bandaid on the capitalism that’s literally destroying the planet.
Yeah! Let’s get some real disaster in here! Let’s hit those 100+ million dead marxist numbers! You sad ugly tankie.
