On the charge of just wanting to break up big companies because they're big, I plead not guilty on the virtue of this not being a crime. The whole point of breaking up large companies is because their size renders them unaccountable quazi-governments. To properly regulate them requires making the government even bigger with ever-more-complicated regulatory apparatus, compliance departments, administrative rulemaking, and "special understandings" (read: giving up) for the largest players.
I'll put it to you another way: if you want smaller government, you need smaller corporations, too.
> There was no alternative to Google search because no one had built a better product for reasons that have nothing to do with anticompetitive behavior.
I would first argue that Google's unparalleled superiority in search is overblown. For one, there's ads in it. As Google's founders themselves stated, ads are a perverse incentive to ruin the search experience in favor of advertisers and I can point to several examples[0] in which this happened.
There are paid search engines that do not have advertising (e.g. Kagi) but they themselves have complained about the struggle that is competing with Google. For example, on iOS, there's only five default search engine options, there's no way to add a different search engine as default, and Google pays $$$ to Apple to be set to the default and for that search engine option to be buried in Settings. I don't see how that isn't anticompetitive.
On a technical level, Google has a supracompetitive advantage, too. A lot of websites have restrictive policies that forbid scraping except for Google and Bing. This means only those search engines can actually return results for those sites.
[0] Product ads in web search, every programming search query giving you four or five ads before the actual StackOverflow answer you're interested in, image search becoming a glorified product search with actual functionality being removed, Gemini
The whole point of breaking up large companies is because their size renders them unaccountable quazi-governments.
Unaccountable to who? I can think of plenty “almost monopolies” that no longer exist or are former shells which would infer they were accountable - at least to the customer.
But the more important question is - how big is too big? Is it the same for every company? If not, who decides? How do you measure it?
If it’s not objective criteria, it becomes a “I know it when I see it” where subjective variables result in a company in the crosshairs. So in the end, the government picking winners and losers.
That's how a lot of laws work. There's always an element of subjectivity. Is that guy a murderer? Well, did he intend to kill the victim or was it an accident? The court is supposed to decide whether he intended to, using the available facts, but nobody involved can read minds so it's really a guess.
If you didn't want to be convicted of murder, you wouldn't walk right up to the line of what constitutes murder. You'd stay far away from that line on the legal side. Same for companies, if the system is doing its job.
I'll put it to you another way: if you want smaller government, you need smaller corporations, too.
> There was no alternative to Google search because no one had built a better product for reasons that have nothing to do with anticompetitive behavior.
I would first argue that Google's unparalleled superiority in search is overblown. For one, there's ads in it. As Google's founders themselves stated, ads are a perverse incentive to ruin the search experience in favor of advertisers and I can point to several examples[0] in which this happened.
There are paid search engines that do not have advertising (e.g. Kagi) but they themselves have complained about the struggle that is competing with Google. For example, on iOS, there's only five default search engine options, there's no way to add a different search engine as default, and Google pays $$$ to Apple to be set to the default and for that search engine option to be buried in Settings. I don't see how that isn't anticompetitive.
On a technical level, Google has a supracompetitive advantage, too. A lot of websites have restrictive policies that forbid scraping except for Google and Bing. This means only those search engines can actually return results for those sites.
[0] Product ads in web search, every programming search query giving you four or five ads before the actual StackOverflow answer you're interested in, image search becoming a glorified product search with actual functionality being removed, Gemini