Comment by pclmulqdq
1 year ago
The problem is an ads company owning a web browser, OS, and search engine, and using that control over how users interact with the internet to outcompete everyone else. You left out Google's raison d'etre from your statement.
MS and Apple have the same thing, they're just less successful. Just a browser and an OS was previously seen as antitrust (and it looks like MS is being anti-competitive in this space still). Just a browser and a search engine can allow anti-competitive behavior. Or just a search engine and an ads platform...
The problem is the anti-competitive behavior. Businesses are generally rational actors, so clearly our system isn't working. It's unclear what the boundaries are until years in court, and even then it only applies to a single company.
MS and Apple aren't companies who sell ads. MS and Apple are companies who sell tech products. Everyone analogizing the current situation with Google to Microsoft in 1999 is missing the core of the facts here. The Apple/Epic Games antitrust suits are much more similar to MS in 1999, but Google's antitrust issues are very different.
Google's product isn't its software, it's the attention of its users. Having this large and this dominant of a software/data platform attached to a company that sells attention is anti-competitive in the attention market.
MS does sell ads, they have an advertising platform.
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A few years ago, one of the bigger points from the apple earnings was that its first party ads platform 10x'ed (or wtv, can't remember the number) its revenue after apple implemented "do not track" app changes.
The US never did anything about Microsoft owning a browser. There was never a browser choice screen in the US and Microsoft was never forced to sell Windows without a browser.
That is not what is happening. I use Android, Chrome, and Google Search because the alternatives are quite poor. All of those things work better with alternatives than any competition. Android is the most open mobile OS, Chrome is the most open and non-coercive browser, Google Search works great with all other OS's and browsers.
It doesn't matter why you use any of this software. What matters is what it does to the ads market. This is not 1999 and this is not Microsoft. Google's product isn't software. It's the attention of its users.
Google's share of my attention is negligible to the point of barely existing when compared to HN, X, YouTube(yes I know, but I see no adds because I have premium), podcasts, audiobooks and many other things. Even Facebook probably takes more attention and I barely use it.
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Isn't "monopolies suppress competition" one of the classic reasons people think they should be broken up? I'm not saying you have to agree with that theory, but just observing a current lack of competition doesn't by itself seem like an argument against breakup.
Google is not suppressing competition. There are plenty of competing browsers and search engines, they all suck. On the Mobile OS side there is less but substantially more robust competition, even though I, personally, hate iOS. So breaking Google up because of a theoretical problem that is refuted by reality is nonsensible.
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And we are already seeing that people are moving to both ChatGPT and perplexity for search. No one is forced to download Chrome or use Google for search.
Why is an ads company owning a browser any different than a phone company (Apple) or an operating system vendor?