DOJ Indicates It's Considering Google Breakup Following Monopoly Ruling (cnbc.com) 97
In a new 32-page filing (PDF), the Department of Justice indicated that it was considering a possible breakup of Google as an antitrust remedy for its search and advertising monopoly. The remedies necessary to "prevent and restrain monopoly maintenance could include contract requirements and prohibitions; non-discrimination product requirements; data and interoperability requirements; and structural requirements," the department said in the filing. CNBC reports: The DOJ also said it was "considering behavioral and structural remedies that would prevent Google from using products such as Chrome, Play, and Android to advantage Google search and Google search-related products and features -- including emerging search access points and features, such as artificial intelligence -- over rivals or new entrants."
Additionally, the DOJ suggested limiting or prohibiting default agreements and "other revenue-sharing arrangements related to search and search-related products." That would include Google's search position agreements with Apple's iPhone and Samsung devices -- deals that cost the company billions of dollars a year in payouts. The agency suggested one way to do this is requiring a "choice screen," which could allow users to pick from other search engines. Such remedies would end "Google's control of distribution today" and ensure "Google cannot control the distribution of tomorrow."
Additionally, the DOJ suggested limiting or prohibiting default agreements and "other revenue-sharing arrangements related to search and search-related products." That would include Google's search position agreements with Apple's iPhone and Samsung devices -- deals that cost the company billions of dollars a year in payouts. The agency suggested one way to do this is requiring a "choice screen," which could allow users to pick from other search engines. Such remedies would end "Google's control of distribution today" and ensure "Google cannot control the distribution of tomorrow."
Or something else.. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd be happy if they forbade Google from infecting each and every damned website (framework).
At least I have every affilited site blocked by default through eMatrix on Pale Moon, and I was a Google search fan in the beginning.
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Because the root cause of all those problems is wealth inequality and nobody is interested in doing anything about it. In fact, when covid hit we decided to make it worse.
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Because the root cause of all those problems is wealth inequality and nobody is interested in doing anything about it. In fact, when covid hit we decided to make it worse.
That decision wasn't made in real time. That decision was made in the 1980s, when our government gave up the pretense, at Ronald Reagan's insistence, of serving the people and instead decided that the best way to run a society is to hand ALL the money to the wealthy and the corporations and their benevolence would take care of the people. COVID's massive wealth-redistribution, by handing newly printed money to absolutely everyone, but making sure the vast majority went to already wealthy individuals and cor
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Because the root cause of all those problems is wealth inequality
Is it though?
I'm concerned about poverty and low standards of living. But I couldn't care less if someone makes more money than me or has more accumulated wealth. That's not a "problem." I care about equal rights and equal opportunity, I don't care about people having an equal amount of wealth. In other words, I don't assume that the mere existence of an upper wealthy class is the cause of homelessness, inflation or economic stagnation.
I would also challenge the premise that there is a such thing as "too mu
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Wealth allows/restricts opportunity.
First-tier opportunity is control over one's time. The majority don't have that so have the opportunity to enslave themselves to the will of others - if lucky.
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I don't assume that the mere existence of an upper wealthy class is the cause of homelessness, inflation or economic stagnation.
Where do you think they get their money?
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Whoever taught you life was fair did you a disservice. If your jealous of folks with money, work harder make more for yourself.
Most rich folks simply got lucky. Here's what happens when a rich person tries becoming rich again. After 10 months he made $64,000 and had to stop for health reasons. https://www.snopes.com/news/20... [snopes.com]
Ask all the illegal laborers putting on roofs in Florida in August about hard work.
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Well, one BIG problems here is...they are fucking here ILLEGALLY, so they don't or shouldn't get the same perks of being a citizen, and they do have to keep low profile to not get deported, etc.
They often can't speak the language....etc....and by definition they are criminals, as they crossed over illegally.
Go back home and try to do it the right way.
Re:Or something else.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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This is true, but I don't think it's a viable "punishment" since Google doesn't profit from making Chrome/Chromium, and could spin off Chrome and then just come out with a new browser still built on Chromium.
How I'd approach this is have the DOJ transfer the entire chromium project from Google to a non-profit company that isn't under Google's control. Likewise transfer the Android software to another company under the same rules.
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Re: Or something else.. (Score:3)
Not really. If Chromium was given away to something like the Apache Foundation then Microsoft, Google, Opera, etc. would be incentivized to contribute code and money but they would not be able to inject nefarious bullshit.
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would be incentivized to contribute code and money but they would not be able to inject nefarious bullshit.
Everybody making their own build would just patch in the nefarious stuff on top. It's not like Edge isn't built on Chromium.
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DOJ...make them sell of YouTube!!!
It would be nice to free everyone from the Google grip there and it would be perfectly able to survive without Google....
Maybe we'd get less censorship and treat the creators a bit better by going back to sharing more of the revenue with them, etc.
Geez, you can get a strike if you just sneeze wrong on a video...
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Google search still works just fine without Javascript. They've never required turning it on - Presumably for accessibility reasons.
Re:Or something else.. (Score:5, Interesting)
What Google really needs is to split the search and advertising "business" from each other.
The reason so many websites can not survive on advertising revenue is because Google values ads on those sites as nearly worthless unless they're like the top-10 websites, information they only know from the search. Same with searching video and images.
So the most logical fix to this is to break off the entire advertisement business and force Google to be a client to that spun off service.
As for "search monopoly", there is no changing peoples behavior. Either Google's search quality has to be eroded (from crap like AI generated content) or competitors like Bing and Yandex need to actually be treated as primary businesses, which they aren't. Yandex is basically a lost cause now.
Duckduckgo doesn't actually power it's own services, which is why I didn't include it, but that might a viable remedy for the DOJ to consider, transferring some of Google's search IP to Duck Duck Go to help them drive their own search.
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What Google really needs is to split the search and advertising "business" from each other.
That's impossible, because there is no money in search. It's something they give away to draw you to the ads.
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The Google search website would still need ads and 'sponsored results,' but the fact that google also dominates ad placement on every other site on the internet (except for a few mammoth ones like Facebook) is another issue.
This is the key question. Does Google Ads have a huge technological advantage over competitors that leads to its market dominance? If not, why and how does Google dominate? That's the direction to determine if Google is exercising monopoly power beyond simply having a better product. Are there product typing, anti-competitive incentives, or handshake agreements to limit competition?
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Google's ad division can already serve ads on anyone's website, not just Google's. There's no reason a spun off search portion wouldn't work the same way, becoming a partner selling ad space on its own search results.
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This is the problem with breaking up Google. There is no money in ANY of the services they offer -except as a vehicle to draw in eyeballs for the advertising business.
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The reason everyone uses Google frameworks is that there are no better alternatives. If they did actually forbid it (unlikely), websites would just replace it with some half-arsed clone.
At least with the Google ones they are easy to block if you want to.
Insane Breakup ... (Score:2, Insightful)
Split it into the parts that make money and the ones that don't ... yeh that'll work just fine ...
Re:Insane Breakup ... (Score:5, Insightful)
> Split it into the parts that make money and the ones that don't ... yeh that'll work just fine ...
That seems to be the point.
Nobody can compete if their "competition" can lose money all day long forever.
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And how will those engineers get paid, exactly?
If they're good salesmen, VCs will pay to be the money behind what they hope is the next big growth opportunity.
So how would remains survive? (Score:1)
One of the main reasons all the google/alphabet properties work at all is because there are a lot of not profitable parts that mine a lot of data on people's preferences, which in turn are fed into the search engine that allows for more accurate personalized tuning of search results. Which is where bulk of money that google earns comes from.
What would happen to a lot of them if you fracture this structure? How much worse would google search get? Would it still even be a good search to use, especially consid
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That's actually an interesting idea, but it would open a hell of a can of worms with sales of personal data.
At least when it's in Google's hands, it's fairly secure from random buyers. Google doesn't sell this data or access to it, it only sells access to targeting based on data*.
*Government access being the obvious exception.
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The whole point of it being internal is to be able to claim that they "don't sell your information." Nobody likes it when you have to rephrase it even if it means the same thing.
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How much worse would google search get?
Google still does search? Who knew?
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How much worse would google search get?
Google still does search? Who knew?
Not really. They only pretend to.
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Google still does search? Who knew?
Not really. They only pretend to.
Well they organize the advertisers for us. Probably not based on relevance...
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Google still does search? Who knew?
Not really. They only pretend to.
Well they organize the advertisers for us. Probably not based on relevance...
No Idea. I have not used Google search in ages. Or any Google "services", really.
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While they are at it ... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Let us Google gets it as they so richly deserve, and then those others are next.
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I would posit that Google is one of the WORST if not THE worst.
Google, by controlling search results, YouTube video, etc....have such a control over what information people are fed now has so much power and control over information, that they can sway elections, public opinion....how governments react and run to satisfy just a very few powerful folks there in charge.
This is too much power in one place....when they can move opinions and actions of whole countries.
Re: While they are at it ... (Score:3)
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You buy 4 pair of shoes from Amazon, keep the pair that fits, and return the other three. Seems insane to me as well, but thats the new shopping model in a lot of places. And, if it saves you from driving for hours, it might even be better for the environment.
No, because a lot of the stuff that's ordered from Amazon but then returned for refund is simply discarded, because it's less cost effective to discard it than to repackage it and sell it as new.
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How is consuming 4 times the materials for one product environmentally friendly?
It's a known truth that returned Amazon products mostly end up as landfill. It's entirely possible to go from raw materials to la
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There are several such companies, and basically every large retailer is a part of one of them
These same stores have eliminated all but the few most common/profitable sizes from their retail stores and have signs everywhere saying "more sizes available online." They are imploding their entire business model and blaming the consumer.
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To be fair the issue in the UK isn't all down to Amazon. It's often local councils pricing businesses out with high rents, and making parking difficult and expensive. It also doesn't help that most of the UK is clone towns - same shitty shops as everywhere else, no reason to there over anywhere else, and those shops they do have rarely have what you want anyway.
Re:While they are at it ... (Score:5, Insightful)
There are worse monopolies than Google. Microsoft is one, and Amazon has been largely responsible for the demise of countless smaller businesses, both brick-and-mortar and on-line. In the UK, town high streets that have been there for centuries are shuttering up, affecting the economic and social geography in ways that are not good. I now need to spend half a day driving in order to buy a pair of shoes, because I won't buy them or most other clothing without trying them for size first. Thanks to Amazon.
The UK is in it's current predicament due to Brexit, not Amazon. A lot of the big box retailers are still doing quite well, especially the supermarket sector. If anything, stores like John Lewis are the architects of their own demise by limiting what I can buy and trying to funnel me into the products they want me to buy. Amazon is trying to do this too, hence I tend to search for the brand's store, I.E. Samsung or Neutrogena, rather than rely on Amazons search. M&S seems to be doing well because it's taken a lot of it's product lines online and leveraged it's network of smaller stores for pickup. So I don't have to go into the town centre to order some M&S socks, I get them delivered to the M&S Simply Food around the corner and pick up some milk and M&S shortbread whilst I'm there, in fact their food range is pretty much the only thing they're not selling online.
Brexit is hurting the UK in a lot of it's traditionally strong sectors, finance, tech, manufacturing.. Not really in retail.
Full Disclosure, this is not an ad for M&S (their shortbread is nice though), shop wherever the fuck you like.
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There are worse monopolies than Google. Microsoft is one...
Given it's 2024 and not the 1990s, how exactly is Microsoft a worse monopoly than Google?
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...how exactly is Microsoft a worse monopoly than Google?
Microsoft literally owns the keys to nearly every computer sold because of its operating system monopoly. It leveraged its operating system monopoly to get another monopoly on motherboard firmware, which is a lateral move from its power in the 1990's. All other PC operating system makers must get a blessing from Microsoft to even exist. I would argue that Microsoft's power today exceeds its power from the 1990's.
Google's terrible, but Microsoft is far worse.
Worse.... (Score:3)
The Republicans have beef with Google (Score:1)
Facebook's solution was a metric fuck ton of people to manually review the content since automatic review systems couldn't tell the difference between Republican politicians and neonazi extremists (look it
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Amazon has been largely responsible for the demise of countless smaller businesses, both brick-and-mortar and on-line.
While there may be valid arguments for this, I'll offer that it does make it easier to get things local stores don't carry and reduces the need to have to buy things from several different places, either brick-and-mortar or online. I'd rather have one Amazon account than at 10 different on-line places... Also, any complaint against Amazon could be made about eBay, which would have a larger role if Amazon was out of the picture, and Walmart. Personally, I often try to buy things locally first, even not a
Re: While they are at it ... (Score:2)
Sure, there are more that need dismantled. The problem is: each one is a massive, years long legal fight.
I would like to see an objective standard that is automatically applied. Maybe base it on global turnover of a business plus all subsidiaries. Exceed a certain threshold, and you must divest or split into smaller units. No court case, no discussion.
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Me, "Which companies exhibit the most monopolistic behavior?"
ChatGPT-4o mini, "Monopolistic behavior can be observed in various industries, and several companies have been scrutinized for their market dominance and practices that may stifle competition. Some of the companies often cited in discussions about monopolistic behavior include:
Amazon: Criticized for its market power in e-commerce, its treatment of third-party sellers, and its impact on small businesses.
Won't the ad part just grow massive again? (Score:2)
What's to stop the most profitable part from just remaking all the same services again?
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It's the other way around: the unprofitable parts (search, browser, OS) would remake the profitable parts (advertising). An advertising company has no chance of making a popular search engine. The profitable parts of Google are super easy to do and nothing special, it's just that they only work when you have the reach that the very complex unprofitable parts provide.
Anyway, I suppose a solution would be to explicitly forbid the company from re-entering the advertising market. Not an elegant solution but not
breakup Apple too (Score:2)
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I suspect you know but I'll remind you.
Apple does not have a majority of the phone and tablet and laptop market, as Microsoft (tablet & laptop OS), Google (phone/tablet OS) and Samsung (phone/tablet hardware) do.
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next time read it more carefully, i did NOT say phones, tablets and laptops, i said iphones, ipads and mac
That's not a monopoly. It's like saying that Ford Motor Company has a monopoly on Fords, or Bose has a monopoly on Bose headphones.
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And Tesla has a monopoly on the model 3, X, Y, S and Cybertruck.
In fact: surprise! Lots of companies have monopolies on the products they manufacture and sell.
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Where does it stop? (Score:1)
I mean if you do that, why not also this?
"The DOJ also said it was "considering behavioral and structural remedies that would prevent Walmart from using its vast network of stores to advantage products such as its mobile phone service, etc."
Oh wait, half of you probably would want that.
(And the other half would be just scratching their heads, unable to connect the dots between 1. the satisfying takedown of Google and 2. the extension of that thinking to everything and everyone else.)
Alphabet?? (Score:1)
Re: Alphabet?? (Score:2)
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Elon? Is that you?
The Dark Maga in you I sense.
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Bro, google's search results are shit now and I believe its because google's monopoly on the advertising revenue stream is choking out all of the content providers that would have provided good search results for them. They are killing the internet with this shit and it needs to stop.
Happy Breaksgiving, everyone! Google Google! (Score:2)
"It's the biggest company ever; should we, the agency in charge of breaking up big companies, break it up?"
"No! We're only supposed to break up companies that don't have any competitors."
"Does Google HAVE competitors?"
"Sure it does!
"Like who?"
"Well, for starters, it competes with all life on Earth! Plus, like, DuckDuckGo."
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Search engines are like utility poles. They have a natural monopoly because there is a limit to how much crawling badly-coded low-traffic sites can handle. So like utility poles, they should be forced to offer their crawling data in bulk to competitors for a nominal fee.
It would make competition massively simpler. And they would be making a modest profit on enabling access even if their own search business failed.
MEanwhile (Score:3)
No one is really forcing you to use Google. You have the option of not interacting with them.
The same way I have the option of not interacting with FAcebook..or X..or..
oh...no. I don't. Because every website operator embeds shit from everyone. I absolutely do not consent to X having anything on me; but sadly they probably do because the others of other websites force it upon me.
Oh...please tell me why this domain typo is resulting in an ISP search page rather than an error?
If they're going to break Google up over this type of stuff; well then Apple is getting a little too big. Please tell me why my technology company should also be my bank? This is not Google playing Wallet...Apple has it's own fucking credit card.
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You seem to be unaware how a working market is maintained. At least you regurgitate the same invalid and stupid "arguments" that always get dragged out by the nil wits in these cases.
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No one is really forcing you to use Google. You have the option of not interacting with them.
oh...no. I don't. Because every website operator embeds shit from everyone.
Alphabet Inc. / Google is indeed embedded at the vast majority of places. I cannot even suggest a library purchase due to it being on a reCAPTICA forum. https://policies.google.com/te... [google.com]
What a juxtaposition on /. (Score:2)
Monopoly breakups are economic rocket fuel. (Score:3)
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True. Huge businesses are extremely "fuel" efficient. But they charge gas guzzler prices because nobody can compete at their efficiency level. It's how money gets concentrated at the top of the economy and leads to ever more mergers.
\o/ (Score:1)
Better act quickly before Google gets big enough to decide to break up the DOJ monopoly!
Multiple companies needed (Score:2)
1. advertising
2. search
3. youtube
4. everything else
This is as awesome as any ruling in the EU (Score:1)
If it's BIG, SUCCESSFUL, and AMERICAN, then kill it kill it kill it.
The US DoJ is now taking on the role of EU regulators and going after BIG [something, but whatever it is it's BIG].
Google has innovation. They have the products. They make the best cellphones, have the best search engine, and can find me a WAP near me for $25 (Wal Mart TP Link it turns out) in ONE search. They find me restaurants, make reservations, and even make appointments to change the oil in the car.
SURELY a company with products an