Comment by asdfman123

There are certainly some short term consumer gains to be made in decoupling the oppressive monopoly of android, payments, chromium, search, and ads. If Google wants to send their search experience to shit that should probably be their right to mismanage, but the ramming home of Manifest v3 and Google Play Protect in the interest of nobody is beyond the pale.

Monopolies lead to no competition, leading to reduced innovation, economic stagnation, consolidation of wealth and power. That directly harms the American people and if left unchecked other countries may actually start to get ahead, especially if they maintain a fair market environment within their own country and ban American monopolies.

If the concern is that people will start using Baidu search, then the solution should be to ban Baidu search. It shouldn't be to let some monopolies run rampant with the hopes that other countries will never be able to compete, while forgetting that free market economy is what made America

The main benefit of having US monopolies is the spying capabilities that it enables. No other country ever had such a global surveillance network.

For the average American, both the efficient parts of monopolies (reduced redundancy which means fewer well-paying jobs) as well as the inefficient parts (reduced competition, higher prices, reduced standards of living) are net negatives. The political influence inherent to monopolies are also a negative effect on democracy, whereas foreign monopolies tend to have a harder time maintaining political influence.

This is the same commentary we had around the time of the ATT break up, and it all worked out fine.

I care more about how it affects consumers.

Does upholding monopolies help Americans at all? Do not conflate the ballooning wealth of billionaires with any kind of improvement in your material conditions.

who care, corporations are not national, they will discard their host when they find it convenient

As an American there is nothing I would love to see more than Google broken up into a thousand pieces and their stock reduced to negative amounts to atone for all the damage wrought upon the web in the past two decades.

On the other hand, keeping all eggs in one basket, which is Google, in this case, is unlikely to make it more competent against oversea competition anyway.

>does breaking up the search monopoly help America or up and comers?

Big companies tend to calcify. We can see that in FAMANG's products. Big companies can also remove any direct competition in multiple ways that smaller companies can't:

  1. Bankrupt them through frivolous litigation.
  2. Buy them.
  3. Lower their prices so new competitors who don't have economies of scale can't be price competitive.
  4. Propose legislative regulation that they can afford but smaller competitors can't.
  5. Pay for negative news articles to be written against their competition (FUD).
  6. Poach their talent.

I'm sure there's more. Anyhow, monopoly status generally leads to stagnation not innovation.

Let's not turn into game-theory bros here. Despite the nationalist, pie-dividing rhetoric the billionaires are foisting upon us, it remains favorable to grow the pie with competitive markets.

Who does preventing abusive behaviour benefit? Those currently being abused.

But doesn't that make room for someone else to come in and be abusive? Yes and we have the tools to prevent that, if necessary.