Comment by globular-toast

2 days ago

Monopolies are bad for us. It's as simple as that really.

> It does feel a bit like being punished for success.

Nobody is being punished. Punishment would be like "you're going to prison because the thing you started turned into a monopoly". That's not what is happening. It's more like "whoops, you created a monopoly, time to reset, but you get to keep everything you reaped so far".

Why are monopolies bad? In general, monopolies are bad because they can leverage their power in ways that are worse for consumers - ie they make the usual market functions break down. (If the market continued to work correctly, consumers would be able to switch to a competitor)

There are many cases where we like monopolies because it's more efficient to only have one entity do a thing (eg build infrastructure)

It's useful to correctly punish illegal things monopolies do, but in this case, google has created a browser that is good! Better than alternatives!

If you spin that browser off, it will need to figure out how to monetize. It will get worse due to that monetization effort.

Google has other services that would be competitive without Google: drive, YouTube are easy examples.

If we made them spin off Gmail just because Google is too big, that doesn't make sense! Gmail is useful to Google in its current form, but there's no way it's pulling in significant profit (possibly as part of drive - I'm not certain).

You can't just pick a company you don't like and attack it with a hatchet. That's worse for consumers than the thing you're attacking, and the number one rule here should be for regulators to make things better, not worse!