Google should be broken up like the US did with AT&T. I suspect a Biden administration will interfere with this process and save them from being broken up.
AT&T you had no choice on your carrier or what you could even plug into the phone line. There are multiple app stores for android devices and you don’t even need an App Store to install an app on an Android device.
Using at&t is a very bad example to use against google because under at&t consumers had 0 choice. AT&T used this monopoly to raise prices and limit choice. Google doesn’t even charge for android.
Technically true but practically irrelevant in terms of consumer impact. The number of Android devices in the US without Google services is easily a rounding error. ~100% of the Android handsets in the US have Google's software preinstalled.
This is a fair point, yet I don't think it's good to disparage what's technically true here.
There are people attempting to take advantage of the fact that Android remains free and open source, and they need support. Perhaps I should have included that in my comment above.
It's not obvious to me that a legal solution would be better.
I think Google's bundled services cements their grip on AOSP more than it supports it being independent. All Android handset OEMs basically have no choice to install Google services because AOSP isn't mass marketable on its own, and nobody can really compete with Google's combination of Play/Gmail/YouTube/Chrome/search. Once you have a Google account, you get funneled into these other services, and it makes it difficult for any other services to gain traction. If we want AOSP to truly be free, then it has to be useable outside of the Google ecosystem.
Android is like a club with free drinks, but Google Services are the $150 cover charge.
It's not impossible to execute: You order them to do it, and it's on them to develop anything necessary to make it happen. And yes, that might entail having to split up Google accounts into different accounts for different services, uncoupling products, removing exclusive integrations, and in the end, the consumer will benefit.
I was at Netflix when we decided to undertake splitting DVD and Streaming. We had chosen to make that change, and had high motivation to do it. It still took about seven years to finish that task.
Google is even more entangled than Netflix was. I suspect it would take them at least a decade to execute a split like that.
It's likely such an order would include a deadline for compliance and a cost for noncompliance after that. I suspect that it would happen faster than you think.
Furthermore, companies like Facebook have actually made a point to deeply integrate otherwise disparate products (Instagram), solely to later claim it'd be "too hard" to spin them off if the court orders them to.
The simple answer is to continue to fine them until they accomplish the task: If a company goes bankrupt trying to comply with the court, perhaps they shouldn't have violated the law so flagrantly in the first place.
I think people are too hesitant to admit that companies that violate the law should be eligible for the "death penalty". It's absolutely fine for a very bad company to explode and die once brought to court.
I'm sure it would include a deadline. My point is the government's deadline would surely be unreasonable.
> I think people are too hesitant to admit that companies that violate the law should be eligible for the "death penalty".
I don't believe in the death penalty for people, and I don't believe in it for companies either. I certainly think that companies get away with too much, and that their leadership should be more personally accountable for fragrant violations of the law. But death is too extreme a punishment.
But at the same time it's the limited liability that allows for innovation. Companies would take far fewer risks, both good and bad, if the people running them were personally liable.
I am pretty against the death penalty for people too. But corporations are particularly immoral, and I feel that if anything, we should be vastly more comfortable executing companies than people.
I think personal accountability for CEOs and executives would help a lot. A CEO who knew an illegal business move might land them in jail would be much more hesitant to do it than a CEO that knew that move might cost investors some stock value.
But I also think a company's behavior can be endemic and cultural, and that perhaps rather than trying to turn them around, we should just "execute" them. Shut down operations, auction off property to pay any debtors and assist employees with the transition elsewhere.
One of the things I think about with Big Tech is that they are incredibly overvalued on their "too big to fail" status... that and the current reality that their illegal gains won't be meaningfully seized. If a company could be "executed" for it's misdeeds, investors would need to be real about the value of "rulebreaker" type companies, and the additional risk they carry. We'd not be in the situation we are now, where the crimes of Google and it's executives keep racking up... but so is it's stock price.
I don't buy the claim that we need to limit liability in order to foster innovation, because our limited regulation has led these companies to squander so much innovation, it's insane. For every innovative thing one of these tech companies has done, it's killed dozens or hundreds of startups that were doing something more innovative and not focused on circling the wagons around their core stock value.
Even if Google (or Facebook) are split into pieces many people will still do social logins, so no different accounts for different services. I don't do social login and I don't like the very idea of centralizing authentication and profile managment (probably also some of authorization) but I also don't think that there is any legal ground to forbid it.
That actually will likely be a short-term solution if companies are forced to unbundle.
Say Google is required to sell Chrome and/or Android. Problem is, billion people's Google accounts are signed into those devices. Solution is, you replace the "Google account" on an Android device with an "Android account" that uses Google auth for login. Then, if a user wants after that point, they can detach that, set different credentials, whatever.
The breakup of AT&T killed the most productive industrial research center of all time: Bell Labs.
South Korea seems to be totally fine with Samsung running the majority of the economy, monopolies — when controlled through regulation — are not always a net negative for society.
I have enjoyed the benefits of information theory, fiber optics, lasers, UNIX, the transistor, and many other things which came out at Bell Labs.
Industrial research which operates on the 5-10 year needs stable recurring revenue and reassurances that the company will still be around to reap the benefits of said research. Monopolies provide the environment for this research to take place. I think the proper way to mitigate the harm done to the consumer by the monopoly is to closely regulate the monopoly. For example, the fee structure for AT&T’s long distance rates was regulated to not exceed certain levels which were deemed to be acceptable. Customers payed a reasonable price for long distance rates, AT&T had a stable income, and there was no threat of their business being upended so they were willing to take on long term research to improve their margins on the fixed long distance prices.
Yes, consumers could have been paying less for long distance rates, but where would society be today without Bell Labs? I think the harm AT&T inflicted upon their customers is heavily outweighed by the engineering and scientific progress they achieved.
Biden during his tenure along with Obama displayed a propensity to utilize the "heavy hand of government" approach whenever necessary, in part due to the lame duck Congress, but nonetheless, the precedent has been set. If anything, we have evidence to believe he will intervene wherever he can.
What would that look like? Phone companies make some sense because they have to serve certain geographic regions which can't compete or collude with each other. Google serves the world, of which the US population is only 5%. Do you think the US government is going to split up Google such that "South American Google" is totally independent and brings back no revenue to the US? Same with "European Google"?
Or you you want it split up by US region? Maybe "US-East Google" gets to make money from Europe, "US-West Google" gets to make money from Asian countries, and "US-Texas Google" gets to make money from services provided to South America?
Is the goal to cripple Google so hard that companies like Baidu and Yandex can overtake the search market globally? Is that why the US congress should split up Google?
The only people who have a rational argument for another Google split up are governments of non-US regions that are financially invested in competing services.
Alphabet and Google is not really a split in the sense people are talking about.
Typically when people say Google should be split up they mean different parts of Google should split. Google has search, ads, Youtube, Gmail, cloud, Android, etc. These parts would be split into different companies. Some parts "go together" like search and ads so they may be allowed to be one company, but YouTube and Search don't go together so they would be separate companies.
But YouTube and ads do go together. Gmail would also presumably have to be Gmail and ads if it wasn't operated for data to feed to the ads engine. I could see Android becoming a product for carriers without ads, cloud doesn't need ads, how would Chrome operate as its own business without ads? Firefox is just paid for by Google search, would Chrome be the same, and would that be different enough to satisfy a breakup? Would you just split the ads team and data among multiple new companies and tell them they arnt allowed to talk to each other anymore?
YouTube could buy ads from a source which isn't Google. It's not immediately obvious that YouTube which uses full video ads is best served by getting ads from a company that focuses on text ads (Google) or banner ads (Google's DoubleClick).
Gmail could charge for account features like Yahoo mail and Fastmail do.
Android could be legitimately open source, like Linux is. Or they could sell carrier specific distributions, which is something carriers are doing themselves right now but badly.
Chrome would need to operate under the aegis of some company, but that needn't be the same company that runs Google search and Google ads. If that were the case, their abusive ad experiences code may actually be good and not merely reflect a desire to destroy ad companies that aren't Google's DoubleClick. Chrome could also then allow browser login integration into other companies. I'd prefer of Chrome integrated with my Apple accounts, not my Google accounts for example.
Ads itself could be split into two companies---Google search ads (which may or may no be owned by Google search), and DoubleClick which was its own company to begin with before Google bought them.
I was just providing an example of the different products vs a geographical split. How things actually are split would be up in the air.
Of course YouTube would need ads. My point was that YouTube doesn't need to be in the same company as search, not that YouTube doesn't need ads. The ad network would likely need to be split into the new companies that are formed so all the parts that need their own ad network could have it.
Chrome likely could not survive on its own unless search paid for it like they do with Firefox. I am not sure all the products/services that Google has and their individual ability to survive without Google. That is something that would need to be determined by the people involved with a breakup.
A geographic split of Google doesn't make sense. The right thing to do is to take each of the areas where Google is a monopoly and break them out, and prevent the broken up pieces from providing overlapping services (at least for 20/30/50 years).
I would break out at least:
Ad network
Web search
Operating systems
And put everything else in a separate company. That would contain their other consumer services (gmail, finance, docs), whatever g-suite is called now, cloud services (until they shut down), their internet balloons and what not and maybe Waymo.
You can allow the baby-Gs to contract with each other (web search needs an ad network), but require the terms to be public and frand; maybe with some sort of second source requirements.
This doesn't eliminate any of the monopolies, but it eliminates the use of one monopoly to entrench another.
I am not the person who said they should be split up.
I am pointing out that they haven't currently been split up at all. They are still a part of the same company.
Most people who have proposed a splitting up Google have obviously not suggested splitting it on geographical lines, because most of them understand how the internet works. Typically, the suggestions have been to split on product line -- not unlike how Alphabet has internally organized their divisions.
