You essentially outline why it should be broken up.
I'm not convinced making the ad tech sector more competitive would prompt that outcome but, "It would disrupt mature products" isn't a compelling argument to allow the existence of a monopoly.
Google is a monopoly, they exert monopoly power and enjoy monopoly pricing.
I think the more likely outcome would be more dynamic products under smaller bannerheads.
Have you started seeing browser embedded ads in Chrome ? It replacing competitor ads with it's own ? Rewriting referral links ? Pushing compromised extensions from "third parties" to siphon data they legally can't. Right now it's just there to cover Googles market position - it doesn't need to make a profit, if it had to make a profit and it couldn't do exclusive search default deal I guarantee you it will get ugly - like those scam search bars in IE in 2000s.
They don't need to embed ads into the browser if the websitet that the user will load are already loaded with google ads. They also don't need to replace competitor ads with google ads if there is no meaningful market share by any competitor.
Why should they siphon data to a third parties when they themselves want the data, and its a competitive advantage to keep that data for themselves.
What we are seeing is chrome becoming the new IE where alternatives browsers are not longer allowed on the internet. "You’re using a web browser that is not supported. In order to use [Insert website], please download Chrome for the best experience. Download Chrome here!". (https://www.datanyze.com/browser-support/ie/index.html)
This is my point - Chrome isn't there to play dirty, it's there so competitors can't. But if it had to make money without Google all that BS would get bundled in the browser.
Manifest v3 being tied to ads is a fantasy fiction. This is no proof of it and ample evidence it is a good security move which other browsers did first. Is apple doing similar things with Safari for nefarious reasons?
They aren't competing with a raised bar, they are competing with a bar that can only be passed if you already have a massive presence in an unrelated area. You can not compete with an entrenched existing player when they are giving their things away for "free", subsidized by a massive ad tax. This entrenchment is tailor-made to make competition infeasible.
This is illegal for a reason. It does NOT benefit consumers to make it impossible for anybody to compete with you. This is anti-competitive, not competition.
But it's things a company could do to try to squeeze the lemon a bit more. Something which they have more incentive to so if they don't have a large, and fairly stable revenue stream from elsewhere.
After all there's a reason people here care about PiHole and such, because ISP's are doing such shenanigans. Or TV makers peeking at pixels so they can phone home to report on what you're watching.
It's not the max yet. You could find yourself dealing with the same kind of dark pattern exploitation as you're dealing with in restaurant checkout experiences this day, around the preservation of your own data. I hope you have backups for yourself if you want to keep these docs and photos!
> You could find yourself dealing with the same kind of dark pattern exploitation as you're dealing with in restaurant checkout experiences this day, around the preservation of your own data.
When it comes to Google, we already find ourselves dealing with worse.
Or for someone finally to solve the micropayment problem. I don't mind paying the 53 cents it costs google to provide me their services per month with 30 or 40% margin. But I refuse to subscribe for close to zero value services for 10 or 20 dollar a month.
I have been hearing some version of this refrain since Mosaic was invented. "Make the web suck so that someone solves this problem" is just going to result in the web sucking.
Well sending bytes and creating them costs money. Someone has to pay them. So it is either ads or payments. The money it costs are close to zero, so we need a way to pay close to zero, that is easy if we don't want ads.
Thank you for concisely expressing the core justification for micropayments. I have many arguments for why it's possible to implement, but I've never found a good way to describe why it's necessary before.
Maybe we'll get something from Mozilla eventually - but I'm not holding my breath. I suspect it'll only happen if there's a massive awareness campaign that produces a demand signal for it in the general public (as opposed to just tech nerds).
Have you been paying attention to the current US administration? Whatever your opinion of them I don’t think anyone could reasonably say they’re doing things carefully and thoughtfully.
Disagree. They’re not doing everything carefully and thoughtfully, but some things they are. Just because you disagree with it doesn’t mean it isn’t careful and thoughtful. What’s going on with immigration for instance has been in the planning phases for years.
And while Trump may set tariffs based on his mood at any given moment, this case isn’t a whim. I think a lot of thought is being given to what to do about Google. We may or may not like the results, but that doesn’t mean it was slapdash.
> What's going on with immigration for instance has been in the planning phases for years.
Then how do they still manage to mistakenly deport the wrong people and have to cover it with a smoke screen of lies? If this is what their "careful and thoughtful" planning looks like, I'd hate to see what their recklessness looks like, because it all looks like the same level of shit show from my angle.
No matter how well you plan to deport 1 million illegal immigrants you will get some of them wrong. Being deliberate does not mean being inerrant. Much of what they are doing now Miller has been talking about for many years.
It’s always a mistake to assume that people are stupid or incompetent just because you don’t believe in what they are doing. It looks reckless to you because that’s what most of the media in the country tells you, if you had a different Information diet, it would not. That’s why I intentionally read sources slanted in the other direction.
Epistemology has never been harder than it is right now
"You essentially outline why it should be broken up."
No, they didn't. They explained why breaking Google up would kill all of those "free" services.
"Google is a monopoly, they exert monopoly power and enjoy monopoly pricing."
No, they aren't. There are a multitude of other ad platforms available for anyone to use. Google has no power to stop them. "Most desirable service" does not constitute a monopoly in an open market. Monopolies can only be created by government dictate, like old AT&T or modern cable companies.
> Monopolies can only be created by government dictate, like old AT&T or modern cable companies.
By virtually every definition I can find, a monopoly is a an entity that functions as the sole, or effectively the primary, provider of a good or service in some market. That seems to perfectly describe Google’s position wrt web-based advertising. Do other ad-platforms exist? Absolutely. Do they exhibit the kind of market dominance or control that Google does? Nowhere close.
> Google has no power to stop them.
Fact? I’d argue that Google’s sheer size and dominance means they don’t need to stop them. Potential competitors simply don’t stand a chance given Google’s size, number of resources, and reach. Explain how that’s not a significant factor into Google “power to stop” a potential rival?
Monopoly does not mean what you apparently think it means. It doesn't matter that competition ostensibly exists. What matters is that anticompetitive behavior is stifling that competition.
It's not a binary. By distilling the entire concept to a dualist perspective, you have evaporated most of the concept itself.
Sorry but you’re starting with a very poor definition of monopoly. If you define things incorrectly, you can make any point logical but the definition (and point) are still wrong.
This case is about their search monopoly. There is another case pending about their ad monopoly.
And also: breaking everything else off of the ad company is the obvious answer to the ad monopoly. Every other part of Google exists to feed its advertising monopoly and maintain its edge there.
there's externalities with ads. one is that the more ads i see, the harder i ignore them. i would expect consumer attention to work like roads, where charging more to use it is balanced out by the appeal of less traffic
it's not clear to me that an ad monopoly makes products cost more, even without getting into ads distracting the whole workforce
Not sure how it is these days, but back around y2k my buddy and I would hunt down Superbowl ads on the internet cause they were usually quite funny (and not aired here in Norway).
That's a fair point. If we saw a downward trend in google search usage in the last year or two, it might support your theory.
Whether AI and search are similar enough to call them competitors, at least right now, is highly debatable. I don't know about other people, but I for one have definitely not started asking chatbots questions instead of looking for informed, human-authored content.
EDIT: Note that I mean downward trend in total, not the percentages shown by statcounter. Statcounter does have a separate chatbot page though, if you're interested in that. Still doesn't answer your totally valid question of how many people are chatting instead of searching, though. Maybe Google or ChatGPT could tell us :)
1. In terms of US monopoly status, the USA chart would be more relevant than worldwide (also tangential but is Baidu really that weak in China or is there just no data?)
2. Google certainly has a stranglehold on mobile search (unsurprising given that both Apple and Android use Google search). In USA desktops Bing still isn't that strong, but it is 10% and not very low single digits. It makes sense to me that search volume has moved to mobile. It's super convenient to search quick things on phones wherever you happen to be vs finding a computer. But if for example a remedy was to essentially ban Google from Apple's mobile devices then it would really move the chart quickly given Apple's dominance in US mobile marketshare.
3. The biggest issue is those are percentages and not volumes. If search becomes irrelevant because people switch to other modalities it's not going to appear as a decline in these charts.
I would also add that search has already moved elsewhere.
Less and less people are using search engines to shop, ex:Amazon makes >$57B a year from search ads, but also look at Temu and Shein which are mostly glorified product search platforms.
No one is searching for "funny videos" when you can just open Instagram and Tiktok.
The only real unique thing that search engines can do is queries that are not directly commercial (e.g. education, information seeking, etc.) and competition is insanely intense (w/ ChatGPT, Perplexity, etc) there.
Honestly, I haven't used either of ChatGPT or Perplexity seriously. They haven't performed particularly well when I tested them and dun-dun-dun in my uses Gemini has been growing on me. And another odd thing at the moment is that Google's search has somehow become better at giving me the results I'm looking for and DDG is giving a lot of annoying crap.
Basically when I search for API of a specific function or package docs on DDG I end up with page after page of people blogging about using them and the actual docs don't show up. So I add "!g" and the same crap is there, but the link to reference will be somewhere among the first page of results (although Goggle usually has a link to an old stale version of the docs).
Do you have specific examples of this behavior that I can look into? Also, curious if you've tried our Assist function (comes up automatically for some searches or click Assist under search box) or duck.ai for stuff like that?
> You essentially outline why it should be broken up.
I disagree:
1) My wife and I have a FREE Gmail account we use for home and other combined interests.
2) We watch all our streaming (movies, docs, etc.) and TV (Tablo TV DVR for free OTA) using FREE Chrome on Linux laptops in our LR, MBR and one for ambiance that runs all day between the kitchen and LR visible across both rooms showing relaxing aquarium and bird videos. We pay for YouTube Premium and Amazon Prime which we watch on Chrome and Netflix is free with T-Mobile. All courtesy of Chrome and Linux. Chrome is the leading browser. We don't want Edge as our main browser, even though it uses Chrome underneath it, like Windows 11 (which we also don't use) is loaded with Microsoftie crap and garbage.
3) We have individual FREE Gmail accounts for our individual interests.
4) I have my own FREE YouTube account for tech videos.
5) We use only FREE Google Maps, the other map services suck in comparison.
6) We pay $2 a month for Google Drive because it works well (although there is still no Linux client) it works well in the browser (any browser). Amazon's deal for uploading files doesn't work as fluently, tried it. Microsoft OneDrive works OK but only for large single compressed files in my experience, it gets confused with small files and especially borks .git folders.
7) Google Search, even in the age of AI (or what we are all calling "AI") is still the best search engine.
8) There is no way I will ever use an iPhone. Microsoft got out of the phone market which is great since the only thing I can't stand more than Apple products like Mac (which I am forced to use at work because our COO is a die hard Apple fanboy).. is Windows. That leaves Android which has worked extremely well and is technically FREE except the two biggest vendors are Google and Samsung and in this case, Google sucks because we've had several Google phones and a tablet and all quit working too soon, became useless too soon or batteries failed too soon and Samsung is even worse than Microsoft at loading crap and garbage on their phones.
9) We pay for everything with FREE Google Pay, it works extremely well and doesn't cost us a dime to use.
Windows, the crap that it is, is the monopoly which is incredible because the OS sucks but not as bad as Mac. We should all be using Linux laptops and desktops.
For offering best in class services people want to use? It feels like the people who want a Google breakup simply have something to gain from it. It's not obvious the average consumer will benefit.
The average consumer now sees mostly ads above the fold. Also, lots of internal stuff like this coming out. Not sure how this is meant to benefit the consumer aside from "they have to love what we deign to give them."
Have you tried Firefox recently? It's been my favorite for a decade or so. Now that chrome has crippled its extension API, it's objectively better.
I'm not convinced that any of these would change for the worse. Maybe we will start using more content and services that aren't made by Google. That sounds good to me. Of course, the overall situation will be improved the most by breaking up Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon, too.
The fact that you and I are happily using Linux is great evidence that software made collaboratively is better than software made competitively.
I'm not convinced making the ad tech sector more competitive would prompt that outcome but, "It would disrupt mature products" isn't a compelling argument to allow the existence of a monopoly.
Google is a monopoly, they exert monopoly power and enjoy monopoly pricing.
I think the more likely outcome would be more dynamic products under smaller bannerheads.