My belief is: legislation needs to either make it just as hard to merge two companies as it is to unmerge them, or make it just as easy to unmerge two companies as it is to merge them.
It's insane to me that for how often companies merge and cause competition issues, we effectively never see the opposite happen. I know there's a ceremonial approval for merging two companies (at least in the US), but it's just impossible to undo or prevent the damage.
This point of view has more to do with your information diet than it does with reality. Companies un-merge and spin out all the time, for many reasons. Mergers and acquisitions are more interesting because they are often associated with a growth story. We like success.
Aswath Damodaran, who teaches corporate finance at NYU Stern, has a bunch of great talks and content about this where he discusses how companies should act their age. When older companies that are no longer paying dividends are moving into a divestiture phase, they restructure and split up. What we are seeing with some of these big tech companies is that they are transitioning from an exciting growth story into an extractive dividend story in a way that's becoming harmful to consumers. That's why we're talking about breaking them up, and thats the line their management will have to walk if they want to maximize the value of the firm to shareholders through the decline.
I don't necessarily disagree, but in practice it's never as easy. Combing ingredients for a cake is always easier than separating them back out. Getting married is easier than getting divorced. It almost feels like some kind of fundamental law.
Splitting a large company is already done to shed and transfer liabilities. Divisional Merger Tactic / Texas Two Step. [0] [1] Keep the yoke and drop the albumen with time and patience.
You can bet that if the board of directors could show that unscrambling the omelet would result in greater shareholder value produced, it would suddenly be really easy to do...
I’m advocating for controlling the damage. The way I said it is cutesy, not literal.
I intended it to point out that it’s too easy to merge companies together but it’s effectively impossible to stop someone from becoming anticompetitive without a real consequence.
If we can’t make it easier to rip them apart then we shouldn’t be so slap-happy about approving them in the first place.
Yes, this is obviously the ask: why doesn't government unmix the omelet. Your very body unscrambles the omelet and makes you. It's what intelligent things do when they are moving agency into the proper places.
what is the purpose of regulation except to resist entropy in such strategic places?
That’s one half. The other, more interesting half, recognizes that unscrambling the egg is difficult, so we must take more precautions before scrambling it in the first place.
No, they're advocating for more scrutiny of whether the omelet is going to be very bad for everyone who isn't part of the omelet (yes, this metaphor is weird, but I didn't introduce it)
Undoing mistakes is usually difficult and costly, but still worth doing on the road to not making the mistake again. Grandfathering in the subversion of the economy and our democracy is worth fighting.
> or make it just as easy to unmerge two companies as it is to merge them.
[Disclaimer: I work at Google, all words my own and not representative of anyone, etc.]
There's no such thing. Let's stick to software since it's what HN knows best, but it's a universal truth.
Merging two companies: you take the two sides and they keep running. You probably need some extra accounting work to make sure the mandatory reports from each side get combined, but that's all you have to do.
Splitting two companies: oof. If you split ChildCo out of ParentCo:
* You need to hire all the roles that weren't part of that organization before (HR, legal, compliance, etc.)
* You need to register this new entity in all the countries it operates and/or has employees in
* Technologically it's somewhere between messy and impossible. Now you no longer have Google's build stack or monorepo. You have to rewrite everything. You can't just move some VMs to a cloud provider of choice
But what are you trying to say about the greater argument? The parent had two parts to it - make merging as difficult as unmerging, or make unmerging as easy as merging. While you're right that the wiggle room for making unmerging a lot easier is very constrained, this doesn't say anything about the feasibility of the other part of the 'or' and the actual argument they're putting forward. Unless you're trying to extrapolate this to saying that both these changes are impossible, it just comes off as being pedantic.
I suspect a large majority of the issues you brought up with splitting can be addressed by legislation.
Off the top of my head, something along the lines of having a mandatory period of time where the company being acquired must be kept separate enough that the merger can be dissolved in a timely manner should it be deemed necessary. How long that window should be would be up for debate but personally I'd argue the window should scale somehow based on things like the valuations of each company involved, headcounts, and maybe even competitive landscape.
An example would be requiring both companies to perform a pre-merger assessment to determine positions/roles, technology use and regulatory requirements that must be maintained for a clean separation and creating a plan that gets filed with the relevant agencies to be used if/when the merger needs dissolving. If the time comes that they need to dissolve the merger but they don't maintain that separation, they still have to do it and you slap a fine on them equal to some percentage of that mergers cost to be paid by the parent company.
Hell, that idea alone would accomplish both making it harder to merge and easier to dissolve the merger.
I disagree with your premise that I shouldn’t express concern/opinions or point out problems with things that affect me simply because I’m not a trained expert in that thing.
> Technologically it's somewhere between messy and impossible. Now you no longer have Google's build stack or monorepo. You have to rewrite everything. You can't just move some VMs to a cloud provider of choice
You could give a copy to both successors. Probably would want to excise some of the repo on both sides, but build tools for sure would be fine to have a second copy. There's no need to rewrite everything, especially if Parent and Child are barred by court decree from entering overlapping businesses.
For things that really need a single corporate owner, you could potentially spin that off as well and have both successors contract from that one or depending on the terms of separation have a joint partnership.
Hosting would be messy, yes. But somehow the tech world outside google manages to run systems without Google tools. It would be an adjustment, potentially a large adjustment and take a lot of hours.
> You need to hire all the roles that weren't part of that organization before (HR, legal, compliance, etc.)
> You need to register this new entity in all the countries it operates and/or has employees in
This costs money, people, and time, but it's straight forward. HR and legal would likely need some additional people, but likely you assign the people who work with the spinoff business to the spin off corporation and then back fill as needed.
I have less sympathy for Facebook/Meta. Zuckerberg is on record as saying IG can hurt us. The Whatsapp co-founder Acton saying "it's time. delete Facebook". The fact Zuckerberg's engineers were apparently specifically asked to merge the backends to make them harder to break up. I have very little sympathy for that specifically. I'm not thrilled with a lot of the things Google has done with (say) Youtube - people LOST THEIR ACCOUNTS because of forcing the link to Google+ - but I don't think it's in the same league
Chrome is one of those nebulous areas. If they're dictating web standards they deserve at least an antitrust glance
My experience is that "split" companies are often split only at the superficial financial level and the behind-the-scenes engineering systems are never actually decoupled, you just have a services agreement where the new company pays the old company to continue providing software. Or vice versa. It's usually pretty ugly and expensive and not the clean win for competition you are thinking about.
> Google’s ad tech business brought in $30 billion last year, or about 8 percent of the revenue for its parent company, Alphabet. Its ad tech revenue has declined for 16 straight quarters, and analysts estimate it accounts for less than 1 percent of the company’s profit...
“This is a business no one cares about"
Can someone closer to GOOG explain this? The phrase "ad tech" seems to have a very specific meaning here. Does this 1% include all advertising around the Web? Basically all ad revenue outside of Google's own properties? The number is surprisingly low.
Google owns Google Ad Manager (the tool third-party website and app publishers like NyTimes use to show ads on their properties), Google Ads (the place advertisers like Nike go to run ad campaigns across both Google properties and also these third party sites), and AdX the ad exchange that runs the auction that sits between Ad Manager and Google Ads.
The lawsuit is specifically about googles ownership of the auction and the ownership of the relationship on either side of the auction. The AdX auction also contains demand (ads from places besides google ads) and inventory (ad slots outside of ad manager). Website publishers allege that Google uses this ownership to artificially deflate the value of ads on third party websites.
On page numbered 60, you can see the Disaggregated Revenues.
The $30B quote seems to be referencing "Google Network" revenues declining from $31B in 2023 to $30B in 2025. "Google Network" is grouped with "YouTube ads" and "Google Search & other" to comprise the "Google advertising" category of revenues which increased from $238B in 2023 to $295B in 2025.
So yea, "ad tech" does not represent the whole of Google's advertising revenue.
The money is nbd, but it's much more important to Google (same as it would be for any of the other tech giants) to keep a certain streak going - 42 years now and counting since the government forced a large or important company to do anything even resembling breaking up. A loss here would serve as precedent (either legally, or at minimum in people's emotions) that you CAN force a divestiture. If Google can be forced to divest this business, why not Chrome, YouTube, or Android? Why can't Apple be forced to divest the App Store business, or Amazon be forced to divest AWS?
By "ad tech" they apparently mean AdX, the part of Google that used to monetize the old open third-party Internet we used to have. (That old Internet that Google itself killed in favor of their walled-garden ecosystem.)
Classic capitalism move. It’s not directly making much profit therefore it’s not important! When something that gives you outsized influence or control.. sometimes you would lose money just to control.
Something can be unprofitable but still extremely valuable. These companies are playing strategy games at the geopolitical level and money is not the only resource they want to accumulate to win the game…
I haven't been in ads there in, like, over a decade and some but I believe what was under threat here was specifically Google's ad exchange network. Basically third party bidding for space in Google's display ad network. Basically a part of the business which sells excess "inventory" and which is a much smaller part of their ad business than AdWords and AdSense. Or whatever they call these things now.
I used to work in AdX (and AdMeld that Google acquired) but not since 2014 or so. I believe the AdMeld acquisition itself was one of the things under the microscope here.
Ok I have some existing comments I'd love to quote[3] on this sad, sad day for the world, but in the meantime: yes, you are 100% correct that this is small compared to their money printer, and yes, this is "all advertising around the web", including many Google first-party publishers like the homescreen of the Google Search app. This is called Display Advertising, as opposed to Search Advertising.
Its still a massive business that they make way too high of a margin on through some truly brazen monopoly tactics[1], so the takeaway there is fundamentally twofold:
1. Google's money printer is so much bigger than one can really even fathom. When you're searching, you have intentionality already; for this reason search ads are less like a new type of billboard, and more like a technology that replaces the racks at Macy's every time you walk in, depending on who bid the most for you in particular based on what you're there to buy.
One consequence we don't think about enough is the crazy levels of innovation that Google has gifted the world for free, from Gmail to Google Maps to Android (all problematic in various ways, sure, but still incredibly expensive products to make that we get for free). They don't do that because they're some weird company who likes giving away stuff -- they do that because that's rational behavior when you own a money printer.
2. Display ads are becoming more and more desparate as our online culture spurns them more and more. It's perhaps not obvious that this business is why they care about gathering your data -- specifically, because personalized Display Ads on the internet are so relatively inneffective at this point that they need the boost.
I'm honestly guessing that Sundar is sad about this decision, TBH; splitting off the whole "buy side" of their display ads business would win them pity for the next few decades from regulators, and it's just so clearly doomed, IMHO. Ads increase, blockers increase, paywalls increase, scrapers increase, ads increase, on and on...
e.g., to pull a random old quote:
Meanwhile, the economic engine that powers the long tail of the open internet — Google AdSense — has been quietly shrinking. The “Google Network” (which includes AdSense and AdMob) once represented around 20% of Alphabet’s revenue. At this pace, by the end of 2026, it could be less than 5%, with AdSense (web) potentially representing half of that. In Q3 2024, for example, Google Network revenues declined to about $7.7 billion — less than 8% of Alphabet’s $76.7 billion total revenue — continuing a steady multiyear slide.[2]
TL;DR: On Google's brand new, gorgeous Ads campus right up against the San Francisco Bay, giant signs were put up with "Powering the free and open internet," apparently an old informal motto from the AdSense days. I just can't help but think about that sign, today. I wonder what the people working there feel, now that it's mostly just powering the scammy mobile gaming market.
[1]: Super basically, , they've spent insane sums of money to stay as the middle man for the split-second auctions that determine what to put on the Macy's shelves. This makes them some money directly, but it makes them way more money by unfairly propping up their own advertising companies, which are competetive customers of Google's own marketplace.[3] The details get boring, but I think it's obvious why running a fundamentally-opaque auction in which you are a participant creates perverse incentives.
Technically they run the automated marketplace that lives below the marketplaces that the advertisers and publishers work with directly, if that makes more sense.
You may be surprised to learn that the US corporate tax (yes, that one, the main one we already have and everyone pays) was originally introduced in 1909 specifically as an antitrust measure, to clip the wings of US Steel and Standard Oil.
Of course the best laid taxes always get abused or turn into something else entirely.
There is a reference to this in For Whom the Bell Tolls:
“ Robert Jordan, wiping out the stew bowl with bread, explained how the income tax and inheritance tax worked. 'But the big estates remain. Also, there are taxes on the land,' he said.
'But surely the big proprietors and the rich will make a revolution against such taxes. Such taxes appear to me to be revolutionary. They will revolt against the government when they see that they are threatened, exactly as the fascists have done here,' Primitivo said.”
They lost in court, and were found to be a Monopoly. The solution is they tell the court, "sorry we will stop abusing our behaviour now", and then it's just all good?
The judge was appointed by Clinton, so they've been in their role for decades now. It seems unlikely that someone who has served that long in her position would rule based on making the child in the White House happy.
Also worth a shoutout is the fact that Google also got off scott free for their main monopoly case (the "will they have to sell Chrome?" headlines from a while back). I won't pretend to have even a vague idea of why exactly both rulings (sentencings?) came down so leniently, but it does seem even more unlikely that any sort of executive branch interference was at play.
To the contrary, the entire DOJ understands that FAANG and the three-letter-agencies are one revolving door. Any judge that attempts to defang Google's data collection may well run afoul of the American surveillance system, which this administration will fight tooth and nail to defend.
Not very different from how federal protectionism keeps Apple's App Store centralized despite trillions of dollars in ostensible market damage. Anyone trying to loosen America's grip on software distribution is crossing an ugly national security line that we're all too ashamed to admit exists.
Isnt that updated by some national database and google just pulls that data? Apparently Apple Maps will also get it in a few days, since they get the data from them as well.
Yes. We had the same comments about Gulf of America.
Edit: I don't know that there's an actual database served up by the US Gov, but governments control the naming of these things within their own jurisdictions. All of the big mapping products have the ability to serve up different names based on where you're viewing from.
Seems like something that should be user-configurable (like DNS servers). While the recent annoying renamings have drawn attention to the issue, landmark names have basically always been political.
I have been wondering this as well. I cannot imagine having this be autoupdated without review from a centralized database is a good idea. This is a process that needs to be frangible and have some friction in it.
In this day and age, GPS mapping tools have major implications for societal function, safety, economics, national security, healthcare, etc. I'm struggling to think of an industry where a sudden absence/subtle changes of named GPS mapping data would not have an effect.
If everyone relied on the same data base which could push changes to the map in the pocket of every resident of a nation that would be the first thing I would think to hack. Probably easier than actually jamming or spoofing GPS/GNSS over a huge area.
To all the people pissed about the "Lake America" stuff: why in the actual fuck do you want Google of all organizations to be arbiter of geographical info, instead of federal institutions that are (at least nominally) operated under democratic principles?
Don't you understand the horror of what you're suggesting: "I want Google to impose it's own personal value judgments over the government's."
Yes, I think it's incredibly stupid, 3rd grader childlike to call this "Lake America". But the problem is not Google, the problem is the ass hats we (collectively, even if not you/me personally) voted for. The problem is especially with our Congressional reps who have just neutered themselves in service to this stupidity. And I get it, our federal institutions have definitely showed their frailty lately, but I can't fathom then why people think the proper solution is to give more decision-making authority to Google.
I do wonder how many people that criticize the renaming, were criticizing Obama when he rename Mt McKinley. What are the principles here? Or is it just names I like vs names I don't like.
Yeah it's meaningless to fight. Except not really. If the powers that be are corrupt we can simply keep calling it Lake Ontario across the board, and use the difference to find who is or isn't on my side on that issue.
The only people calling it Gulf of America or Lake America are hardcore MAGATs in my social circle. Even former Trump voters in my social circle are annoyed and not using the new names. So it's an effective way to figure out who is or isn't going along with the Administration today.
Democracy works best as a diffuse institution and is more than just voting. People are supposed to have rights and power themselves and I want them to try to make things better (whether I agree with them or not) and "corporations" are just groups of people. Needing to just go with the government, especially on something so clearly within their rights, is counter to the ideals of the system.
I can understand Google somewhat here (if I was running a business I wouldn't be happy wading into a political issue like this) but the idea that they are above criticism for just falling in line still doesn't resonate with me.
As much as I love when people pretend Trump is the first government official to ever rename something, there is no evidence this had any impact on the court's decision.
While I lament another monopolistic tech giant yet again dodging the most meaningful regulatory consequences of their actions, the more useful meta-question is how these behomoths are now so reliably skirting major enforcement like break-ups. It's not that judges have gone soft or just that the current admin is nerfing enforcement (though they are), this trend goes back much further.
The biggest factor is that tech giants now 'pre-game' major anti-trust relevant actions through an internal compliance team staffed by former regulators. The result is the slam dunk smoking guns of 20 years ago are rare. Today's monopolists artfully push right up to the line between "red-handed" and "arguable". Then take measures to fuzz that line and kick up clouds of plausible deniability in the record. Imagine how hard it would be to convict an embezzler who was carefully coached during the crime by expert former prosecutors and forensic accountants.
The United States government is fractured and can't get its act together. No one has a credible plan to solve this. Electing your preferred president doesn't solve a broken Senate and other structural problems. The presidency is likely to keep bouncing between parties that care as much (if not more) about undoing the previous four years as they do sketching out a coherent plan for the future four.
How is wielding this weapon against our most innovative companies going to help the United States compete at scale against China? Scale is sort of required to do so.
So if the government isn't going to be in the business of massive capex investment (the kind China subsidizes) well then you need massive private companies.
The American peoples response to a future dictated by the terms of Chinese hegemony is break up the centers of American innovation? What do you think is keeping the capex cost manageable if it's not the government? How does Google work if you take away its cash cow?
So many of you (I assume despite the complaining that > 99% of HN readers can afford it) need to just pay the $20 or whatever for YouTube premium if it's so terrible and get over yourselves. The tax your children will have to pay if the United States is reduced to a second rate power will be far greater. What's with people wanting free access to services and simultaneously offended by ads? I don't like them either but I understand it would be silly to think they should be free. They can be regulated or reformed in many ways, but the government should be highly restrained about cleaving apart companies. Just remember the powers you give the government today the next government will inherit, and it is not so easy for a party to maintain power for more than eight years. Meanwhile China is operating on government initiatives and sustained strategy on a timeline that spans decades. Companies need to be able to match this horizon without fear of whatever the new normal in Washington is every four years. The trend for the United States is not looking good.
A theory behind busting trusts is that monopolies stifle innovation, and thus growth, in the long term. When it comes to "competing with China" (which, to be naive, I'm not sure the meaning of), many nationally competing firms will have a better result for future consumers than if there were a single "national champion."
I will watch this. Generally I think you raise a fair concern, and I appreciate the shade of nuance.
By "compete with China" I mean at least have parity of competition with China in the essential technologies of the future, rather than falling behind into some sort of obsolence or inability to shape the global economy we all on the whole benefit from. If China becomes the dominant economic hegemon without a viable American competitive check, I think the world (and certainly Americans) will be worse off.
Meanwhile, a balanced competition between the US and China I think will benefit almost everyone on the planet, for reasons likely not that unlike what I expect Lina Khan will say in that video. There is no perfect solution, so I will look forward to hearing more of her perspective on this issue, thanks.
> Meanwhile China is operating on government initiatives
china fosters intense internal competition though; they don't just create and then subsidize some monopoly... avoiding breaking up mono/oligopolies feels the opposite (and a loosing strategy long-term imo)
It is a good and important point. But again this is paired with vast amounts of public investment. So to focus on the government's prevention of single sources of power (that which could eventually threaten the primacy of the Chinese central government itself) obscures the issue.
In the United States we don't have the same reliability of public initiative. That's the point I'm making. Therefore, in such a context breaking up and weakening the companies that do makes us competitive doesn't strike me as a good strategy. And I wish more people would acknowledge that tradeoff in their anti "big tech" rhetoric.
> How is wielding this weapon against our most innovative companies going to help the United States compete at scale against China? Scale is sort of required to do so.
Meta and Google gobble up an absolutely gobsmacking duopolist's share of western world's economy each year.
Meanwhile, two other American companies without monopolies are ahead of them in the frontier model race.
I believe this question rests on a few faulty assumptions of the state of the AI race. Including the value of any particular snapshot in time when it comes to judgements about "who is ahead". And also failing to mention Google is an investor in at least one of the "two companies" I believe you are specifying.
If you think Google (or any large firm) is going to be by necessity be a loser in the AI race relative to smaller firms, you should go ahead and explain why you think that is.
The $22M ballroom donation was a pretty sweet deal.
https://patriot.university/knowledge-base/organizations/org-...
"$22 million ballroom contribution — the largest single documented amount from any corporate donor — arising from a lawsuit settlement over YouTube’s content moderation decision to suspend Trump post-January 6. Settlement filed September 29, 2025, in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California (Trump v. YouTube, LLC et al.)."
Why would they be subjected to anti-trust? There's a robust competition from AMD and Intel, and NVidia is not using any obviously illegal competition tricks.
Idk how you're defining "robust competition", but NVIDIA and CUDA definitely rule the GPU computing space right now, at least judging from a biased sample of what I read online. Those who experienced computing in the 1990s and 2000s know of the harmful effects that result when proprietary tech stacks become de facto monopolies. Think Adobe Flash, think Microsoft's "embrace/extend/extinguish" strategy. Perhaps antitrust law needs rework if it can't deal with this kind of monopoly.
> Google’s ad tech business brought in $30 billion last year, or about 8 percent of the revenue for its parent company, Alphabet. Its ad tech revenue has declined for 16 straight quarters, and analysts estimate it accounts for less than 1 percent of the company’s profit... “This is a business no one cares about"
Uhhh, what? What kind of colorful accounting is this that they're pulling off?
This isn't for the whole of Google's ad business. Just its ad exchange and I think parts of DFP; basically just mechanisms for auctioning off excess display ad inventory.
Thanks. I was trying to figure out exactly what's in scope here. I'd love to get a broad breakdown or a big pie chart that goes to this level of granularity so I can see where this sits within its other 'non-Google-property' ad businesses.
You’re partly right. It’s indeed mostly about AdX but also because Google owns all three sides of the equation (publisher-side via AdSense (and to a lesser extent DFP), AdX, and buy-side via Google Ads)
The US judges lack courage here. This means they help Google power through with its de-facto monopoly.
This is, interestingly, also against capitalism, since now you no longer have a truly free market; no real competition. It is just one giant blob contorlling (almost) everything. Every blind one sees how Google controls WAY too much. Youtube is part of Google too. It is a cash cow that excludes competitors.
This isn't a matter of courage. They're doing what they want to do. Clinton's deregulation, especially of telecommunications, is what lead to our horrible present (he appointed this judge.) The judges that Obama appointed literally don't believe that antitrust should exist.
who is to say that it is great. what makes it so, why is that valuable. Is doing more good than harm. that there is even some inherent value in a "great institution". A bunch of smaller companies would probably be better economically and be more innovative.
Appropriate last name. So any institution that lies, cheats, and steals their way to top is absolved of all wrongdoing just because they got to the top?
I kinda somewhat reluctantly agree with you, and I think other commenters are missing the point that breaking up Google may allow non-US competitors to rise up and take Google's place on the world stage. Thus, breaking them up is not in the national interest of the US.
If Alphabet allows a non-US competitor to replace them, isn't it their fault for failing to compete? The threat of replacement is supposed to be what motivates Alphabet to innovate.
It could also be argued that allowing Alphabet to sustain anticompetitive damages is exactly what creates the opportunity for them to be replaced. Alternatives to AdSense and YouTube can only succeed in America if Alphabet rests on their laurels and is artificially defended from natural price competition.
As long as there are many competitors, that's better than a monopoly, even if some of the competitors are foreign. Powerful monopolists restricting our freedoms is not in the interest of Americans long-term.
So because Google monopolizes on a big enough scale, suddenly they are too important to break up? I would argue that if any single company is big enough to where if it were to break up it would be "against the national interest," then it is too big and must be broken up.
"long history of prevailing in court" is another way of saying "Google isn't being punished as much as they deserve"
> Their job isn't to make people happy.
Sure, but I think we can all agree the US legal system very, very, very rarely issues any ruling that materially punishes a corporation. Even the worst of the worst typically get off very easy.
What an incredible miscarriage of justice. Make enough money and pay off enough politicians, and you can pretty much shoot people on the street in broad daylight.
It's the modern "Never argue with a man who buys ink by the barrel". I think it's why outdoor advertising is so rife. It's hard to fight something when you rely on it to keep your position.
Just to make sure I'm understanding, you're saying that Google payed someone (presumably Trump), who then went and convinced a Clinton appointed judge who has ruled against Trump in the past to give the case to Google?
I wonder if it would help to revoke patents that help google maintain its monopoly, assuming that's the case and it's doable by a judge/congress/someone?
What exactly is the nature of its monopoly that moots competition? I was of understanding that it's more than just ads on google search results, isn't it?
I have no proof, but this just figures. It's entirely plausible that google gave some heavy-duty major dark money campaign donations and have used the return on their investment to avoid being broken up. Maybe I'm just cynical and the corporations and ultra-wealthy wouldn't really do anything like that all the time. They are ultra-greedy, though.
> Sergey Brin ($154 billion), the co-founder of Alphabet and seventh-richest man in the world, joined Musk, Bezos and others in being seated behind Trump during the swearing-in.
You aren't cynical. Big tech absolutely bent the knee and are now wearing red kneepads.
Slightly tangential thought:
My belief is: legislation needs to either make it just as hard to merge two companies as it is to unmerge them, or make it just as easy to unmerge two companies as it is to merge them.
It's insane to me that for how often companies merge and cause competition issues, we effectively never see the opposite happen. I know there's a ceremonial approval for merging two companies (at least in the US), but it's just impossible to undo or prevent the damage.
This point of view has more to do with your information diet than it does with reality. Companies un-merge and spin out all the time, for many reasons. Mergers and acquisitions are more interesting because they are often associated with a growth story. We like success.
Aswath Damodaran, who teaches corporate finance at NYU Stern, has a bunch of great talks and content about this where he discusses how companies should act their age. When older companies that are no longer paying dividends are moving into a divestiture phase, they restructure and split up. What we are seeing with some of these big tech companies is that they are transitioning from an exciting growth story into an extractive dividend story in a way that's becoming harmful to consumers. That's why we're talking about breaking them up, and thats the line their management will have to walk if they want to maximize the value of the firm to shareholders through the decline.
I don't necessarily disagree, but in practice it's never as easy. Combing ingredients for a cake is always easier than separating them back out. Getting married is easier than getting divorced. It almost feels like some kind of fundamental law.
You're basically advocating for unscrambling the omelet to be easier. Should be obvious why it's harder to unmix than it is to mix.
Splitting a large company is already done to shed and transfer liabilities. Divisional Merger Tactic / Texas Two Step. [0] [1] Keep the yoke and drop the albumen with time and patience.
[0] https://batesonlaw.com/divisional-merger-tactic-how-liabilit...
[1] https://www.creditandcollectionnews.com/u-s-supreme-court-de...
You can bet that if the board of directors could show that unscrambling the omelet would result in greater shareholder value produced, it would suddenly be really easy to do...
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I’m advocating for controlling the damage. The way I said it is cutesy, not literal.
I intended it to point out that it’s too easy to merge companies together but it’s effectively impossible to stop someone from becoming anticompetitive without a real consequence.
If we can’t make it easier to rip them apart then we shouldn’t be so slap-happy about approving them in the first place.
Why skip this part ?
> legislation needs to either make it just as hard to merge two companies as it is to unmerge them
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Yes, this is obviously the ask: why doesn't government unmix the omelet. Your very body unscrambles the omelet and makes you. It's what intelligent things do when they are moving agency into the proper places.
what is the purpose of regulation except to resist entropy in such strategic places?
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That’s one half. The other, more interesting half, recognizes that unscrambling the egg is difficult, so we must take more precautions before scrambling it in the first place.
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No, they're advocating for more scrutiny of whether the omelet is going to be very bad for everyone who isn't part of the omelet (yes, this metaphor is weird, but I didn't introduce it)
I don't think it's particularly unusual for a company to spin off another company?
large corporations spin off divisions into separate companies all the time
Undoing mistakes is usually difficult and costly, but still worth doing on the road to not making the mistake again. Grandfathering in the subversion of the economy and our democracy is worth fighting.
Eh, thats a bit of a False analogy. spinning off a division of a company is easier than fully integrating another.
PE companies do it all the time.
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> or make it just as easy to unmerge two companies as it is to merge them.
[Disclaimer: I work at Google, all words my own and not representative of anyone, etc.]
There's no such thing. Let's stick to software since it's what HN knows best, but it's a universal truth.
Merging two companies: you take the two sides and they keep running. You probably need some extra accounting work to make sure the mandatory reports from each side get combined, but that's all you have to do.
Splitting two companies: oof. If you split ChildCo out of ParentCo:
* You need to hire all the roles that weren't part of that organization before (HR, legal, compliance, etc.)
* You need to register this new entity in all the countries it operates and/or has employees in
* Technologically it's somewhere between messy and impossible. Now you no longer have Google's build stack or monorepo. You have to rewrite everything. You can't just move some VMs to a cloud provider of choice
But what are you trying to say about the greater argument? The parent had two parts to it - make merging as difficult as unmerging, or make unmerging as easy as merging. While you're right that the wiggle room for making unmerging a lot easier is very constrained, this doesn't say anything about the feasibility of the other part of the 'or' and the actual argument they're putting forward. Unless you're trying to extrapolate this to saying that both these changes are impossible, it just comes off as being pedantic.
I suspect a large majority of the issues you brought up with splitting can be addressed by legislation.
Off the top of my head, something along the lines of having a mandatory period of time where the company being acquired must be kept separate enough that the merger can be dissolved in a timely manner should it be deemed necessary. How long that window should be would be up for debate but personally I'd argue the window should scale somehow based on things like the valuations of each company involved, headcounts, and maybe even competitive landscape.
An example would be requiring both companies to perform a pre-merger assessment to determine positions/roles, technology use and regulatory requirements that must be maintained for a clean separation and creating a plan that gets filed with the relevant agencies to be used if/when the merger needs dissolving. If the time comes that they need to dissolve the merger but they don't maintain that separation, they still have to do it and you slap a fine on them equal to some percentage of that mergers cost to be paid by the parent company.
Hell, that idea alone would accomplish both making it harder to merge and easier to dissolve the merger.
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I disagree with your premise that I shouldn’t express concern/opinions or point out problems with things that affect me simply because I’m not a trained expert in that thing.
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> Technologically it's somewhere between messy and impossible. Now you no longer have Google's build stack or monorepo. You have to rewrite everything. You can't just move some VMs to a cloud provider of choice
You could give a copy to both successors. Probably would want to excise some of the repo on both sides, but build tools for sure would be fine to have a second copy. There's no need to rewrite everything, especially if Parent and Child are barred by court decree from entering overlapping businesses.
For things that really need a single corporate owner, you could potentially spin that off as well and have both successors contract from that one or depending on the terms of separation have a joint partnership.
Hosting would be messy, yes. But somehow the tech world outside google manages to run systems without Google tools. It would be an adjustment, potentially a large adjustment and take a lot of hours.
> You need to hire all the roles that weren't part of that organization before (HR, legal, compliance, etc.)
> You need to register this new entity in all the countries it operates and/or has employees in
This costs money, people, and time, but it's straight forward. HR and legal would likely need some additional people, but likely you assign the people who work with the spinoff business to the spin off corporation and then back fill as needed.
> There's no such thing.
Spinning off companies happens all the time.
I worked at HP in 2015 during it's split into Inc and HPE.
I then worked at FireEye during it's split.
Fun times.
This is far from impossible, and happens all the time when, for example, a company spins off a subsidiary, or any number of other situations.
It's hard isn't really a blocker, it's just saying 'this isn't convenient for us', which is why it would have to be forced by legislation.
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I have less sympathy for Facebook/Meta. Zuckerberg is on record as saying IG can hurt us. The Whatsapp co-founder Acton saying "it's time. delete Facebook". The fact Zuckerberg's engineers were apparently specifically asked to merge the backends to make them harder to break up. I have very little sympathy for that specifically. I'm not thrilled with a lot of the things Google has done with (say) Youtube - people LOST THEIR ACCOUNTS because of forcing the link to Google+ - but I don't think it's in the same league
Chrome is one of those nebulous areas. If they're dictating web standards they deserve at least an antitrust glance
And yet, Bell was split.
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We stopped this in the 1950s with a 90% federal income tax bracket. CEOs could not make more thab the equivalent of 5mil a year in 2026 dollars.
No CEO wanted to merge when it would turn two 5mil a year jobs into one 5mil a year job. Cutting taxes on the rich enabled profiteering by CEOs.
My experience is that "split" companies are often split only at the superficial financial level and the behind-the-scenes engineering systems are never actually decoupled, you just have a services agreement where the new company pays the old company to continue providing software. Or vice versa. It's usually pretty ugly and expensive and not the clean win for competition you are thinking about.
> Google’s ad tech business brought in $30 billion last year, or about 8 percent of the revenue for its parent company, Alphabet. Its ad tech revenue has declined for 16 straight quarters, and analysts estimate it accounts for less than 1 percent of the company’s profit... “This is a business no one cares about"
Can someone closer to GOOG explain this? The phrase "ad tech" seems to have a very specific meaning here. Does this 1% include all advertising around the Web? Basically all ad revenue outside of Google's own properties? The number is surprisingly low.
Google owns Google Ad Manager (the tool third-party website and app publishers like NyTimes use to show ads on their properties), Google Ads (the place advertisers like Nike go to run ad campaigns across both Google properties and also these third party sites), and AdX the ad exchange that runs the auction that sits between Ad Manager and Google Ads.
The lawsuit is specifically about googles ownership of the auction and the ownership of the relationship on either side of the auction. The AdX auction also contains demand (ads from places besides google ads) and inventory (ad slots outside of ad manager). Website publishers allege that Google uses this ownership to artificially deflate the value of ads on third party websites.
You don't need to be closer to GOOGL to look at their 10-K.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204426...
On page numbered 60, you can see the Disaggregated Revenues.
The $30B quote seems to be referencing "Google Network" revenues declining from $31B in 2023 to $30B in 2025. "Google Network" is grouped with "YouTube ads" and "Google Search & other" to comprise the "Google advertising" category of revenues which increased from $238B in 2023 to $295B in 2025.
So yea, "ad tech" does not represent the whole of Google's advertising revenue.
If it is a business no one cares about, then why has Google been fighting this?
The money is nbd, but it's much more important to Google (same as it would be for any of the other tech giants) to keep a certain streak going - 42 years now and counting since the government forced a large or important company to do anything even resembling breaking up. A loss here would serve as precedent (either legally, or at minimum in people's emotions) that you CAN force a divestiture. If Google can be forced to divest this business, why not Chrome, YouTube, or Android? Why can't Apple be forced to divest the App Store business, or Amazon be forced to divest AWS?
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Great question. The adtech is what rigs the auctions for their moneymaker, the ads.
If they no longer own the adtech then their ad revenue suffers greatly.
By "ad tech" they apparently mean AdX, the part of Google that used to monetize the old open third-party Internet we used to have. (That old Internet that Google itself killed in favor of their walled-garden ecosystem.)
Classic capitalism move. It’s not directly making much profit therefore it’s not important! When something that gives you outsized influence or control.. sometimes you would lose money just to control.
Something can be unprofitable but still extremely valuable. These companies are playing strategy games at the geopolitical level and money is not the only resource they want to accumulate to win the game…
I haven't been in ads there in, like, over a decade and some but I believe what was under threat here was specifically Google's ad exchange network. Basically third party bidding for space in Google's display ad network. Basically a part of the business which sells excess "inventory" and which is a much smaller part of their ad business than AdWords and AdSense. Or whatever they call these things now.
I used to work in AdX (and AdMeld that Google acquired) but not since 2014 or so. I believe the AdMeld acquisition itself was one of the things under the microscope here.
Ok I have some existing comments I'd love to quote[3] on this sad, sad day for the world, but in the meantime: yes, you are 100% correct that this is small compared to their money printer, and yes, this is "all advertising around the web", including many Google first-party publishers like the homescreen of the Google Search app. This is called Display Advertising, as opposed to Search Advertising.
Its still a massive business that they make way too high of a margin on through some truly brazen monopoly tactics[1], so the takeaway there is fundamentally twofold:
1. Google's money printer is so much bigger than one can really even fathom. When you're searching, you have intentionality already; for this reason search ads are less like a new type of billboard, and more like a technology that replaces the racks at Macy's every time you walk in, depending on who bid the most for you in particular based on what you're there to buy.
One consequence we don't think about enough is the crazy levels of innovation that Google has gifted the world for free, from Gmail to Google Maps to Android (all problematic in various ways, sure, but still incredibly expensive products to make that we get for free). They don't do that because they're some weird company who likes giving away stuff -- they do that because that's rational behavior when you own a money printer.
2. Display ads are becoming more and more desparate as our online culture spurns them more and more. It's perhaps not obvious that this business is why they care about gathering your data -- specifically, because personalized Display Ads on the internet are so relatively inneffective at this point that they need the boost.
I'm honestly guessing that Sundar is sad about this decision, TBH; splitting off the whole "buy side" of their display ads business would win them pity for the next few decades from regulators, and it's just so clearly doomed, IMHO. Ads increase, blockers increase, paywalls increase, scrapers increase, ads increase, on and on...
e.g., to pull a random old quote:
TL;DR: On Google's brand new, gorgeous Ads campus right up against the San Francisco Bay, giant signs were put up with "Powering the free and open internet," apparently an old informal motto from the AdSense days. I just can't help but think about that sign, today. I wonder what the people working there feel, now that it's mostly just powering the scammy mobile gaming market.
[1]: Super basically, , they've spent insane sums of money to stay as the middle man for the split-second auctions that determine what to put on the Macy's shelves. This makes them some money directly, but it makes them way more money by unfairly propping up their own advertising companies, which are competetive customers of Google's own marketplace.[3] The details get boring, but I think it's obvious why running a fundamentally-opaque auction in which you are a participant creates perverse incentives.
Technically they run the automated marketplace that lives below the marketplaces that the advertisers and publishers work with directly, if that makes more sense.
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41501491
For clarity: I'm just some fool, and there is absolutely 0 inside information I can/would share in any of the above.
We should just progressively tax monopolies. Companies will break themselves up to compete, no decade long DOJ case needed.
Yes, this, and we need to have this progressive tax be over the company's total assets, including subsidiaries.
Why assets and not existing antitrust metrics like market share? Assuming market share is reasonably defined
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You may be surprised to learn that the US corporate tax (yes, that one, the main one we already have and everyone pays) was originally introduced in 1909 specifically as an antitrust measure, to clip the wings of US Steel and Standard Oil.
Of course the best laid taxes always get abused or turn into something else entirely.
There is a reference to this in For Whom the Bell Tolls:
“ Robert Jordan, wiping out the stew bowl with bread, explained how the income tax and inheritance tax worked. 'But the big estates remain. Also, there are taxes on the land,' he said.
'But surely the big proprietors and the rich will make a revolution against such taxes. Such taxes appear to me to be revolutionary. They will revolt against the government when they see that they are threatened, exactly as the fascists have done here,' Primitivo said.”
They lost in court, and were found to be a Monopoly. The solution is they tell the court, "sorry we will stop abusing our behaviour now", and then it's just all good?
all the "donations" are working, hence this. same with the meta case too.
> its ad tech business
now there's the euphemism of the day. Alphabet derives 75% of their revenue from Ads. It is their business.
The article seems to distingish ads from ad tech, stating ads bring in a lot of revenue, but ad tech not. Kinda confused about what the difference is.
I agree it doesn't make sense. How are they supposed to make money from ads without ad tech? They're intimately intertwined.
That "Lake America" is doing a hell of a lot of work for Google
The judge was appointed by Clinton, so they've been in their role for decades now. It seems unlikely that someone who has served that long in her position would rule based on making the child in the White House happy.
Also worth a shoutout is the fact that Google also got off scott free for their main monopoly case (the "will they have to sell Chrome?" headlines from a while back). I won't pretend to have even a vague idea of why exactly both rulings (sentencings?) came down so leniently, but it does seem even more unlikely that any sort of executive branch interference was at play.
we got rick grimes over here walking into atlanta
To the contrary, the entire DOJ understands that FAANG and the three-letter-agencies are one revolving door. Any judge that attempts to defang Google's data collection may well run afoul of the American surveillance system, which this administration will fight tooth and nail to defend.
Not very different from how federal protectionism keeps Apple's App Store centralized despite trillions of dollars in ostensible market damage. Anyone trying to loosen America's grip on software distribution is crossing an ugly national security line that we're all too ashamed to admit exists.
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Isnt that updated by some national database and google just pulls that data? Apparently Apple Maps will also get it in a few days, since they get the data from them as well.
Yes. We had the same comments about Gulf of America.
Edit: I don't know that there's an actual database served up by the US Gov, but governments control the naming of these things within their own jurisdictions. All of the big mapping products have the ability to serve up different names based on where you're viewing from.
And Apple just renamed: https://apnews.com/article/apple-lake-ontario-america-google...
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https://www.reuters.com/world/us/apple-maps-changes-name-lak...
Apple updated it yesterday. If I were Google I'd turn down that refresh rate and let someone else take the bad PR next time
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Seems like something that should be user-configurable (like DNS servers). While the recent annoying renamings have drawn attention to the issue, landmark names have basically always been political.
I have been wondering this as well. I cannot imagine having this be autoupdated without review from a centralized database is a good idea. This is a process that needs to be frangible and have some friction in it.
In this day and age, GPS mapping tools have major implications for societal function, safety, economics, national security, healthcare, etc. I'm struggling to think of an industry where a sudden absence/subtle changes of named GPS mapping data would not have an effect.
If everyone relied on the same data base which could push changes to the map in the pocket of every resident of a nation that would be the first thing I would think to hack. Probably easier than actually jamming or spoofing GPS/GNSS over a huge area.
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To all the people pissed about the "Lake America" stuff: why in the actual fuck do you want Google of all organizations to be arbiter of geographical info, instead of federal institutions that are (at least nominally) operated under democratic principles?
Don't you understand the horror of what you're suggesting: "I want Google to impose it's own personal value judgments over the government's."
Yes, I think it's incredibly stupid, 3rd grader childlike to call this "Lake America". But the problem is not Google, the problem is the ass hats we (collectively, even if not you/me personally) voted for. The problem is especially with our Congressional reps who have just neutered themselves in service to this stupidity. And I get it, our federal institutions have definitely showed their frailty lately, but I can't fathom then why people think the proper solution is to give more decision-making authority to Google.
I do wonder how many people that criticize the renaming, were criticizing Obama when he rename Mt McKinley. What are the principles here? Or is it just names I like vs names I don't like.
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Yeah it's meaningless to fight. Except not really. If the powers that be are corrupt we can simply keep calling it Lake Ontario across the board, and use the difference to find who is or isn't on my side on that issue.
The only people calling it Gulf of America or Lake America are hardcore MAGATs in my social circle. Even former Trump voters in my social circle are annoyed and not using the new names. So it's an effective way to figure out who is or isn't going along with the Administration today.
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Democracy works best as a diffuse institution and is more than just voting. People are supposed to have rights and power themselves and I want them to try to make things better (whether I agree with them or not) and "corporations" are just groups of people. Needing to just go with the government, especially on something so clearly within their rights, is counter to the ideals of the system.
I can understand Google somewhat here (if I was running a business I wouldn't be happy wading into a political issue like this) but the idea that they are above criticism for just falling in line still doesn't resonate with me.
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You mean by Judge Leonie M. Brinkema who was appointed by Clinton and has ruled against Trump policies/agenda regularly?
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As much as I love when people pretend Trump is the first government official to ever rename something, there is no evidence this had any impact on the court's decision.
While I lament another monopolistic tech giant yet again dodging the most meaningful regulatory consequences of their actions, the more useful meta-question is how these behomoths are now so reliably skirting major enforcement like break-ups. It's not that judges have gone soft or just that the current admin is nerfing enforcement (though they are), this trend goes back much further.
The biggest factor is that tech giants now 'pre-game' major anti-trust relevant actions through an internal compliance team staffed by former regulators. The result is the slam dunk smoking guns of 20 years ago are rare. Today's monopolists artfully push right up to the line between "red-handed" and "arguable". Then take measures to fuzz that line and kick up clouds of plausible deniability in the record. Imagine how hard it would be to convict an embezzler who was carefully coached during the crime by expert former prosecutors and forensic accountants.
More information on the specific remedies in the USDOJ announcement: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/department-justice-wins-signi...
Sounds like it's not nothing, but also not much.
> said Attorney General Pamela Bondi.
That must have been in drafts for a while.
This is from last year (and a different trial).
The United States government is fractured and can't get its act together. No one has a credible plan to solve this. Electing your preferred president doesn't solve a broken Senate and other structural problems. The presidency is likely to keep bouncing between parties that care as much (if not more) about undoing the previous four years as they do sketching out a coherent plan for the future four.
How is wielding this weapon against our most innovative companies going to help the United States compete at scale against China? Scale is sort of required to do so.
So if the government isn't going to be in the business of massive capex investment (the kind China subsidizes) well then you need massive private companies.
The American peoples response to a future dictated by the terms of Chinese hegemony is break up the centers of American innovation? What do you think is keeping the capex cost manageable if it's not the government? How does Google work if you take away its cash cow?
So many of you (I assume despite the complaining that > 99% of HN readers can afford it) need to just pay the $20 or whatever for YouTube premium if it's so terrible and get over yourselves. The tax your children will have to pay if the United States is reduced to a second rate power will be far greater. What's with people wanting free access to services and simultaneously offended by ads? I don't like them either but I understand it would be silly to think they should be free. They can be regulated or reformed in many ways, but the government should be highly restrained about cleaving apart companies. Just remember the powers you give the government today the next government will inherit, and it is not so easy for a party to maintain power for more than eight years. Meanwhile China is operating on government initiatives and sustained strategy on a timeline that spans decades. Companies need to be able to match this horizon without fear of whatever the new normal in Washington is every four years. The trend for the United States is not looking good.
A theory behind busting trusts is that monopolies stifle innovation, and thus growth, in the long term. When it comes to "competing with China" (which, to be naive, I'm not sure the meaning of), many nationally competing firms will have a better result for future consumers than if there were a single "national champion."
Here is an hour long video where Lina Khan makes this point to the Council on Foreign Relations much more cogently than I can: https://www.youtube.com/live/L_QaZk5iJOA?is=rk192CuSIBHLemsi
I will watch this. Generally I think you raise a fair concern, and I appreciate the shade of nuance.
By "compete with China" I mean at least have parity of competition with China in the essential technologies of the future, rather than falling behind into some sort of obsolence or inability to shape the global economy we all on the whole benefit from. If China becomes the dominant economic hegemon without a viable American competitive check, I think the world (and certainly Americans) will be worse off.
Meanwhile, a balanced competition between the US and China I think will benefit almost everyone on the planet, for reasons likely not that unlike what I expect Lina Khan will say in that video. There is no perfect solution, so I will look forward to hearing more of her perspective on this issue, thanks.
china fosters intense internal competition though; they don't just create and then subsidize some monopoly... avoiding breaking up mono/oligopolies feels the opposite (and a loosing strategy long-term imo)
It is a good and important point. But again this is paired with vast amounts of public investment. So to focus on the government's prevention of single sources of power (that which could eventually threaten the primacy of the Chinese central government itself) obscures the issue.
In the United States we don't have the same reliability of public initiative. That's the point I'm making. Therefore, in such a context breaking up and weakening the companies that do makes us competitive doesn't strike me as a good strategy. And I wish more people would acknowledge that tradeoff in their anti "big tech" rhetoric.
> How is wielding this weapon against our most innovative companies going to help the United States compete at scale against China? Scale is sort of required to do so.
Meta and Google gobble up an absolutely gobsmacking duopolist's share of western world's economy each year.
Meanwhile, two other American companies without monopolies are ahead of them in the frontier model race.
Why do you think that is?
I believe this question rests on a few faulty assumptions of the state of the AI race. Including the value of any particular snapshot in time when it comes to judgements about "who is ahead". And also failing to mention Google is an investor in at least one of the "two companies" I believe you are specifying.
If you think Google (or any large firm) is going to be by necessity be a loser in the AI race relative to smaller firms, you should go ahead and explain why you think that is.
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The $22M ballroom donation was a pretty sweet deal.
https://patriot.university/knowledge-base/organizations/org-... "$22 million ballroom contribution — the largest single documented amount from any corporate donor — arising from a lawsuit settlement over YouTube’s content moderation decision to suspend Trump post-January 6. Settlement filed September 29, 2025, in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California (Trump v. YouTube, LLC et al.)."
Good.
> Google used anticompetitive tactics to maintain and extend its monopolies in search and search advertising.
Arguably tangential, but for how long more will Nvidia and CUDA avoid the US anti-trust?
Why would they be subjected to anti-trust? There's a robust competition from AMD and Intel, and NVidia is not using any obviously illegal competition tricks.
Idk how you're defining "robust competition", but NVIDIA and CUDA definitely rule the GPU computing space right now, at least judging from a biased sample of what I read online. Those who experienced computing in the 1990s and 2000s know of the harmful effects that result when proprietary tech stacks become de facto monopolies. Think Adobe Flash, think Microsoft's "embrace/extend/extinguish" strategy. Perhaps antitrust law needs rework if it can't deal with this kind of monopoly.
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> Google’s ad tech business brought in $30 billion last year, or about 8 percent of the revenue for its parent company, Alphabet. Its ad tech revenue has declined for 16 straight quarters, and analysts estimate it accounts for less than 1 percent of the company’s profit... “This is a business no one cares about"
Uhhh, what? What kind of colorful accounting is this that they're pulling off?
This isn't for the whole of Google's ad business. Just its ad exchange and I think parts of DFP; basically just mechanisms for auctioning off excess display ad inventory.
Thanks. I was trying to figure out exactly what's in scope here. I'd love to get a broad breakdown or a big pie chart that goes to this level of granularity so I can see where this sits within its other 'non-Google-property' ad businesses.
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You’re partly right. It’s indeed mostly about AdX but also because Google owns all three sides of the equation (publisher-side via AdSense (and to a lesser extent DFP), AdX, and buy-side via Google Ads)
https://archive.is/rlAbY
Non-paywalled link
The US judges lack courage here. This means they help Google power through with its de-facto monopoly.
This is, interestingly, also against capitalism, since now you no longer have a truly free market; no real competition. It is just one giant blob contorlling (almost) everything. Every blind one sees how Google controls WAY too much. Youtube is part of Google too. It is a cash cow that excludes competitors.
This isn't a matter of courage. They're doing what they want to do. Clinton's deregulation, especially of telecommunications, is what lead to our horrible present (he appointed this judge.) The judges that Obama appointed literally don't believe that antitrust should exist.
yea, a lot of people claiming "but its a clinton judge" dont really get this i think...
twenty billion walkin out the court buildin woo woo!
So, essentially, a nothing burger.
As usual.
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> a great US institution
So, too big to fail, but to small to be a monopoly that abuses it's power?
I'm more on your side than most but surely you don't think zero antitrust enforcement is best for our country?
who is to say that it is great. what makes it so, why is that valuable. Is doing more good than harm. that there is even some inherent value in a "great institution". A bunch of smaller companies would probably be better economically and be more innovative.
Ah yes, the great US institution of ad tech. Mass privacy intrusion in the service of selling clicks for a nickel.
Stalin wishes he had this much reach
> colincowardly
Appropriate last name. So any institution that lies, cheats, and steals their way to top is absolved of all wrongdoing just because they got to the top?
I kinda somewhat reluctantly agree with you, and I think other commenters are missing the point that breaking up Google may allow non-US competitors to rise up and take Google's place on the world stage. Thus, breaking them up is not in the national interest of the US.
If Alphabet allows a non-US competitor to replace them, isn't it their fault for failing to compete? The threat of replacement is supposed to be what motivates Alphabet to innovate.
It could also be argued that allowing Alphabet to sustain anticompetitive damages is exactly what creates the opportunity for them to be replaced. Alternatives to AdSense and YouTube can only succeed in America if Alphabet rests on their laurels and is artificially defended from natural price competition.
As long as there are many competitors, that's better than a monopoly, even if some of the competitors are foreign. Powerful monopolists restricting our freedoms is not in the interest of Americans long-term.
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Capitalism requires some level of regulation to avoid eating itself.
Bring back Ma Bell and Standard Oil they were great US institutions!
Standard Oil was sued for keeping low prices thanks to vertical integration prompting the classic quip about antitrust litigation.
Companies like modern Google should not be permissible in the even firster place.
So because Google monopolizes on a big enough scale, suddenly they are too important to break up? I would argue that if any single company is big enough to where if it were to break up it would be "against the national interest," then it is too big and must be broken up.
what shocker . google has a long history of prevailing in court
The ACLU has a long history of prevailing in court, as does the NRA.
Courts should regularly issue rulings you don't like. Their job isn't to make people happy.
"long history of prevailing in court" is another way of saying "Google isn't being punished as much as they deserve"
> Their job isn't to make people happy.
Sure, but I think we can all agree the US legal system very, very, very rarely issues any ruling that materially punishes a corporation. Even the worst of the worst typically get off very easy.
Do you disagree with that?
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What an incredible miscarriage of justice. Make enough money and pay off enough politicians, and you can pretty much shoot people on the street in broad daylight.
Assuming you read the ruling, what do you disagree with the judge on?
What politicians were paid off to make a judge in a lifelong position who has served for decades rule in Google's favor?
What ruling? It isn't released yet. We have declining to breakup, based on behavioral remedies, and zero details.
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It's the modern "Never argue with a man who buys ink by the barrel". I think it's why outdoor advertising is so rife. It's hard to fight something when you rely on it to keep your position.
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Just to make sure I'm understanding, you're saying that Google payed someone (presumably Trump), who then went and convinced a Clinton appointed judge who has ruled against Trump in the past to give the case to Google?
Is that actually what you think?
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I wonder if it would help to revoke patents that help google maintain its monopoly, assuming that's the case and it's doable by a judge/congress/someone?
What exactly is the nature of its monopoly that moots competition? I was of understanding that it's more than just ads on google search results, isn't it?
I have no proof, but this just figures. It's entirely plausible that google gave some heavy-duty major dark money campaign donations and have used the return on their investment to avoid being broken up. Maybe I'm just cynical and the corporations and ultra-wealthy wouldn't really do anything like that all the time. They are ultra-greedy, though.
> Sergey Brin ($154 billion), the co-founder of Alphabet and seventh-richest man in the world, joined Musk, Bezos and others in being seated behind Trump during the swearing-in.
You aren't cynical. Big tech absolutely bent the knee and are now wearing red kneepads.