The same will happen when Google loses its ad revenue. Google is an ad company. By opening up all its trade secret data, it loses its advantage. That will make it lose its core revenue. The end result will be Google collapsing entirely within a few years. Then those component parts people are talking about "opening up" will be gone too.
Here's a small number of things that will die when Google dies. Can you imagine how the world will be affected when these go away?
- Google Maps
- Google Mail
- Google Drive
- Google Docs
- Google Groups
- Google Forms
- Google Cloud
- Google OAuth
- Google Search
- Google Analytics
- Chrome
- Android
- Android Auto
- Fitbit
- Google Fi
- Google Fiber
- Google Flights
- Google Translate
- Google Pay
- Waymo
Apple has no alternative for much of the Business-focused products, so that will take considerable time for companies to adopt alternatives. But in the meantime, the world will become pretty broken for a lot of companies that depend on these tools. This will affect many more people than just Google's direct users. The whole web will shrink, and huge swaths of the worldwide economy will disappear. Businesses closing, lost jobs, shrinking economies, lack of services.
There are plenty of parties who want to see Google lose or take part of its businesses. But if it's not done extremely carefully, there's a very large stack of dominoes that are poised to fall.
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.
That is why the banks should have been broken up into smaller banks long before we reached that point, and it is why Google should have been broken up long ago. The only way to prevent the situation you describe is to never allow any single entity to become so important to so many people.
It's like planting a tree. The best time to break up a big company is twenty years ago (before it became so big). The second-best time is now.
Some of the services you mentioned are already very irrelevant:
* Fitbit -- no explanation necessary
* Google translate -- I don't know about if people use their APIs, but for me personally, I have not used translate for a few years. ChatGPT has been my go-to.
* Google Pay -- it has a smaller market share than Samsung Pay.
Then next tiers of services -- they are doing ok but there are plenty of competitors in the field:
* Gmail, Drive, Docs, Groups, Forms, Cloud, Flights, Fi
I even use some of them, but I really don't care if they go away.
Life gets a bit more difficult if Maps, Chrome and Android are gone all of a sudden. Maybe we'll be back to using Garmin. Heck, I love the idea that everybody uses Nokia, Bing or Garmin for navigation, and we actually have a decent website -- like the Yelp or Zagar in the old days -- for restaurant reviews. I still see "#1 Rated Zagat" stickers from near two decades ago at many restaurants.
Anyway, personally, for the vast majority of the things listed here, I don't see them going away being a bad thing that would even affect as many people as you think.
The world would change, but I think quite a bit less than you seem to think. To put it another way, the world was undeniably changed by Google, but the change has been done, and they're no longer necessary to keep the biggest changes from reverting. (I'd be more worried about SBCL development if google flights' backend couldn't find a new home -- the product itself has tons of competition + just going directly to airlines.)
In actual reality, of course, these things don't disappear overnight, making the pain of switching much, much less for businesses and individuals heavily dependent on some of these things. Even if "google collapsing within a few years" was likely (they have something like a third or more of annual operating expenses saved as cash on hand), a few years is more than enough time. If a business can migrate off of Salesforce or SAP (it can be expensive and time consuming but you can do it!), it can migrate off these.
Better late than never.
The problem with monopolies is that a company like Google, by dominating one space (be it Maps tech or Advertising marketshare), it can use that as a moat to start dominating other areas, even at a loss (which is what it has done starting from Google Search which it never really monetized as a business but instead jumped into advertising even though it was set up because founders hated online ads).
It's tricky to stop this from the get go, because you want to encourage investment into different markets from established companies.
Free markets are known not to be able to stop this, which is why we've got anti-monopoly laws all around the world.
Most of the services you listed above are hardly best in class, and giving them away for free is basically scraps off of the table. The ones which are best in class like Waymo have a good shot at being commercially successful on their own.
It often kills competition. Absent cross subsidies from the gusher of ad money, maybe Opera, Firefox, Garmin would have a chance to compete again in the browser and GPS world. Maybe Chinese companies that develop entry-level Docs alternatives (Lark) would enter the Docs market more favorably.
The alternative is not that all of Google's services stop existing, but that competition gets restored on a more even playing field.
I can see most of these being reasonable standalone businesses. And if they can't be they'll die and get replaced by one that is better.
What we're getting, in many of these cases, is an inferior product that drove out better competitors through Google search integration.
No, they are not, by historical standard. When the Standard Oil Trust was broken up in 1911, it controlled nearly 80% of gasoline market in the US and kept prices too low, so no one could enter the market.
Exxon, Mobile, Chevron, Texaco, Amoco, Gulf oil, and 30 other oil companies emerged. Today only 4 are still around, because anti-trust enforcement has been guted by both parties since WWII. Google babies will merge and raise, yet again.
Even further, if your business is coupled entirely to the continued existence of a single corporation, or if the totality of your economy is entirely coupled to the continued existence of a single corporation, we have a word for that: a monopoly. As far as I know, permitting the existence of monopolies is broadly agreed upon by experts to be a bad idea for many reasons, the least of which is the stifling of viable alternatives. The most severe is that it threatens the legitimacy of the entire government through regulatory capture and, at root, there is no organization that I think is actually "too big to fail" except the actual government.
Breaking up Google creates short-term disruptions and penalizes those that let the market even get to the point that the FTC and DOJ needed to intervene (I'm looking at you Mozilla). Everyone, including those now dependent on Google, is benefited in the longterm.
Also we don't need a hypothetic situation: Google already kill off a fair chunk of their tools and services, and alternatives rapidly come to fill their place.
Google's position largely exists because loss leaders tied against leveraging network effects – and as others have noted, many of their services are piss poor.
Google's loss won't be Apple's benefit in any meaningful way, the masses are with Google because it's free, and that's precisely what Apple isn't, and there isn't a great overlap in their services.
As a counterpoint I don't think the government's case is the right approach, they should be establishing the rules of the game at the legislative level, everyone needs to be affected by the potential changes, Google didn't form in a vacuum.
DOJ is in the wrong when trying to open up search and ad, it should simply split Google up in the way I mentioned earlier. Search and advertising should be their own completely independent company. Mostly everyone wins that way: Competitors, the public , shareholders (one product line won't sink the rest, no "all your eggs in one basket" situation) and even majority shareholders.
- OpenStreetMap, MapLibre
- GMX, ProtonMail, Tutanota
- Nextcloud, Seafile
- Collabora, Etherpad, CryptPad
- Discourse, Flarum
- LimeSurvey Framaforms
- Nextcloud, OpenStack, Hetzner, OVHcloud, Wix
- Keycloak, Gluu, eduID, SAML2, OAUTH
- Qwant, DuckDuckGo
- Matomo, Plausible Analytics
- Firefox, Brave
- LineageOS, /e/ OS
- OpenAuto, AGL (Automotive Grade Linux)
- Open Health, Gadgetbridge
- Fairphone, Various MVNOs (Mobile Virtual Network Operators)
- Community Fiber Networks, Local ISPs (various)
- Skyscanner, Kiwi.com, Amadeus
- LibreTranslate, Apertium, Mistral
- CB, Swish, Klarna, SumUp, Revolut (UK)
- EasyMile, Navya, Aurora, Apriv, BMW, Daimler, Renault, Volvo, VW, Oxbotica, ZenuityI 100% admit everything above has value and has decreased friction for interconecting people and internet services but the idea is that should one corporation control everything listed there?
And IMO no. Microsoft had the same for them in the 90's and while I can see a rush into Microsoft and Apple Ecosystems, it will also give a window for new companies, new people to create products to fill in the gaps created by google being forced to spin off it's ecosystem.
Start by splitting Google into two identical, full-stack companies, each with all the core products. A year later, split them again. Over time, you get 4 or 8 Googles competing across the board.
Employees could be assigned algorithmically to avoid chaos. This feels more like cell division than amputation—preserving the synergies while creating competition.
They could join up and finance Android development, and presumably Android Auto too.
Yes, there would be a disruption, a consortium likely isn't going to work as efficiently as google did, but it won't be Android's death.
Google Drive has competitors (Dropbox, OneDrive), so it to be possible to operate without sponsorship from other business units.
And so son...
Really the only things that I'd worry about are Google Search, Maps and Gmail, as they don't seem like they would work if they weren't free to use and I don't see a way to monetize them. It might be interesting to also put Google Maps under the same umbrella as Android, so it could be jointly owned by the phone manufacturers who ultimately benefit from its existence. Gmail could surely survive for quite a few years by optimizing their costs like crazy and burning Workspace profits.
The rest of the things you listed have existing competition, so it could probably survive and if not, alternatives exist.
I think there are better options than you suggest.
The whole doc suite can be had from Microsoft. Maybe folks need to ten bucks a month for something that used to be free, but it’s not like we fundamentally lose capabilities.
This is a completely different order of magnitude than banks going under, where people were impacted to the tune of thousands or millions of dollars when they lost their homes.
The monopoly is possibly self-defeating at this point. Maybe the reason for the Google graveyard is that too big to fail has somehow turned into too big to succeed.
Even if that were to be true and comes to pass then who is to blame? Clearly both Google and Government and its regulators who let Google get out of hand and allowed it to violate monopoly laws for so long when it's been obvious for years.
OK, what's to be done? You can't allow the law to continue to be violated especially now that everybody knows that it has been—if you do then you are giving all and sundry carte blanche to ignore laws as they see fit. That's a recipe for the break down of law and order.
If the Government legislates to give Google exemptions or some form of special privilege then it's not only further entrenching Google's monopoly but also further weakening democracy by favoring the rich and powerful (they'd be further privileged).
Now let's assume some compromise or whitewashing where Google is restructured or bits sold off without strong financial sanctions/fines etc.—ones that actually hurt shareholders' stocks significantly then no one will be happy. Google won't be happy because its already optimized its business structure for maximum income and a restructure would reduce revenues, and those who've been hurt would claim it was too little too late and they'd cry foul.
Yes, government has to take much of the blame but so do shareholders and Google executives. If little is done and there are no penalties that actually hurt the pocket of the perpetrators to a significant extent then it'll be back business as usual in short order. We need strong penalties to set an example to the world that violating the law won't be tolerated.
I'm not a Google shareholder but if I were I'd be selling my shares just in case.
Now with that in mind give me your solutions.
Almost all of these products are subpar garbage that would never survive in a competitive world. Almost none of them have done anything different or interesting or new for over a decade.
All these products do is use the search monopoly to take away the opportunity for us to have good versions of them.
Even if that were to be true and comes to pass then who is to blame? Clearly both Google and Government and its regulators who let Google get out of hand and allowed it to violate monopoly laws for so long when it's been obvious for years.
OK, what's to be done? You can't allow the law to continue to be violated especially now that everybody knows that it has been—if you do then you are giving all and sundry carte blanche to ignore laws as they see fit. That's a recipe for the break down of law and order.
If the Government legislates to give Google exemptions or some form of special privilege then it's not only further entrenching Google's monopoly but also further weakening democracy by favoring the rich and powerful (they'd be further privileged).
Now let's assume some compromise or whitewashing where Google is restructured or bits sold off without strong financial sanctions/fines etc.—ones that actually hurt shareholders' stocks significantly then no one will be happy. Google won't be happy because its already optimized its business for maximum income and a restructure of any significant size would reduce revenues, and those who've been hurt by Google's monopoly would claim it was too little too late and they'd cry foul.
Yes, Government has to take much of the blame but so do shareholders and Google executives. If little is done and there are no penalties that actually hurt the pockets of the perpetrators to a significant extent then it'll be back business as usual in short order. We need strong penalties to set an example to the world that violating the law won't be tolerated. Perhaps the dominoes have to fall to right things.
I'm not a Google shareholder but if I were I'd be selling my shares just in case.
Now with that in mind give me your solutions.
Google is exactly the monopoly we need less of. These arguments for it are uninformed. You don't need any of these products. In fact, when Google is out of the way it opens the door for new and better options. Google's products aren't great. They're good enough. And they're only good enough to keep users in the platform to continue to siphon off user data and serve as a conduit for their true business: ads.
The lesson that we should have learned from 2008 is that businesses should never be allowed to reach that kind of size. Google should have been prohibited from the M&A that created such a behemoth.
The upshoot is if they are independent, they will be forced to compete fairly with other services. Which, does increase competition and choice.
To you the only implied solution is to just let Google eating all the money in the market?
Most of the products on your list are products that are or can be profitable on their own and have profitable competitors. Google could be broken up and Apple wouldn’t just take over the world as you assert.
Google wouldn’t just magically go out of business just because of the scenario you describe. They’d still command a huge part of ad spend because they’re a huge brand name. Even if competitors get a much-deserved leg up, it would take a whole lot of sustained momentum to unseat them.
Today I hear often people asking me "What's your Gmail" and that is fucking dangerous!
I dispute that. Google Docs/Drive/Mail are supported by enterprise subscriptions. Android Auto is also a commercial product that can live off license fees. Fi/Fiber/Pay/Waymo are also not free services, and can survive on their own.
Free GMail/Forms/Groups/Translate can probably survive off ad revenue that they can get from third parties. They are pretty trivial expenses at this point.
Android and Chrome are the main projects at risk.
And you’re just naming random services most of which are already paid products like Google Cloud.
It's already too late, Google is already a monopolistic beast.
Waiting even more will only make things much worst with the a.i revolution.
If Waymo cannot make the case that it should exist or be funded by itself, then it’s just not viable. Kill it.
>In the best case, killing these will force consumers to move to Apple
Then Apple will be broken up.
How many potentially world dominating mega-corps are there? Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, Musk-corps, OpenAI, Nvidia...
It seems like any reasonable rejigging of things would require attacks on multiple sources of monopoly. And any other attack on a given player is just going to strengthening other players.
Breaking Google's stranglehold on how people access the Internet sounds pretty good.
Firefox would need to find a better deal than being slowly choked out by Google in exchange for the "it's not antitrust if we pay these guys while we do it" money.
Maybe they can finally double down on ad-freedom as their PR rather than keeping it at arm's length and letting Brave take the credit.
From your list, I (+family, circle of friends and most non-StartUp businesses) only use Android so yes, I can imagine a life without these.
Bring it on.
The existence of none of those services depend on Google, and Google's cross subsidisation distorts the environment dreadfully
Worse it puts Google at the centre of so many data flows, and now we realise we do not want a single index of all data, it is positively destructive
Good riddance Google.
Maps? Switch to the many alternatives. Android? Now that they've got hardware remote attestation all of the "openness" has been lost so it's become nothing but a worse version of iOS. Only the loss of gmail would be painful and the suffering would not last long.
Let it happen.
> In the best case, killing these will force consumers to move to Apple.
Break Apple up too. Don't forget about Meta and Amazon and all the others.
> Apple has no alternative for much of the Business-focused products, so that will take considerable time for companies to adopt alternatives.
Not a big deal. Adapt or go out of business. Better yet, price it in by adapting ahead of time: ditch Google now.
Moving to Proton Mail with my own domain was much easier than I'd anticipated. It's great.
> The whole web will shrink
Welp. Sounds like the web is gonna go back to its roots. Sign me up.
> huge swaths of the worldwide economy will disappear
This distorted economy that rewards total nonsense just because it attracts attention?
Let it disappear.
Things are just too screwed up and I don't think they're ever gonna be fixed unless something biblical happens. This might just be it.
google is killing that themselves.
- Google Fi - Google Fiber - Google Flights - Google Translate - Google Pay
won't miss these
Who's gonna tell him?
Not because they're not a monopoly in ads. No no no. They want us to believe they're a good monopolist that can't be broken up because they're giving us so many good things. Don't let it sway you for a second that Google is proven to hinder competition and raise ad prices.
I don't buy it.
My even bigger worry is actually the effects on privacy, security, and people's data. I'm very curious what other companies people would trust more with their data.
Google, as a search provider, has billions of eyeballs a day. They will still have ad revenue from that. Their basic business model of surveillance capitalism is intact.
It just says they can’t control both sides of the ad market. If history is any lesson (the AT&T breakup specifically), divesting ad would create a more competitive ad market and Google the search engine would make more money by playing multiple suppliers against each other, fostering competition.
From a principles perspective, if feels like too severe of a remedy and I don’t support it. But “if AT&T is broken up nobody will ever be able to make a phone call again” is too extreme to take seriously. Money follows value. Google has plenty of value outside of its monopoly position.
If they happen to disappear tomorrow it would cause a minor disruption in the markets, but the world would quickly adjust, and smaller companies would have a chance at competing. Until a new monopoly pops up, and governments are "forced" to break them up again. The circle of capitalism.
If Android goes away, I am not sure who is there to pick up The OS of the world, not IOS, certainly, but who?
All else, good riddance. More competition will make better products.
Look outside. Competitors to _all_ of those product segments exist, there is a huge amount of untapped value waiting to be provided to consumers! They’re limping along, because there is a monopoly in the market distorting prices to maintain their market share.
“But just think: wherever will you get high quality oil if not for Standard! Think of the global economy!”
How many were developed by Google; how many were Google acquisitions.
These "arguments" are so weak, so desperate, they only expose Google's culpability even further. Silicon Valley routinely obfuscates, misdirects and even lies under oath. It's difficult to make convincing arguments absent any credibility.
- Google Mail - I dumped gmail after Google google'd GDomains and sold it to squarespace so I moved to proton
- Google Drive - lol, this is a literal multibillion industry with dropbox, box.com, etc
- Google Docs - lol, maybe high schoolers will finally use paper and pencil now? either way proton docs looks promising and perheps a new competitor will take the space
- Google Groups - email listservs are still a thing, use that
- Google Forms - this seems like a serious loss but surely there will be another competitor
- Google Cloud - there are better ways to do on prem now, either way you can use AWS or Azure
- Google OAuth - ok this one will be a big loss but also people need to get it together that google isnt mail.
- Google Search - this product has been going through a collapse since pre covid give me a break
- Google Analytics - lol
- Chrome - web standards have been cannibalized by google already so like who cares at this point. just switch to Firefox
- Android - another major loss but it still suffers from fragmentation, hopefully Chinese competitors fill the void?
- Android Auto - lol
- Fitbit - lol didn't they just release an update where you cant export your data anymore
- Google Fi - another MVNO that may die out? I mean cricket is still good right?
- Google Fiber - a genuine loss and hope they will be treated with care but probably not given the large legacy telcos that will acquire it
- Google Flights - another major loss? but even as someone who loves flying it is becoming an untenable situation given the current regime in the White House and ATCs getting knocked out
- Google Translate - another major loss but this can be solved with LLMs
- Google Pay - lol
- Waymo - lolIf monopoly is attained over such segment failure of those products and services is less bad outcome.
What a shame.
Opens popcorn, unfolds garden chair
etc.
Power and Responsibility - those must be 2 sides of the same coin, or very very bad things happen.
The mindset of 'too big to fail', i.e. if things go badly wrong there, government must bail it out for the sake of avoiding seriously deleterious effects on the wider populace, more or less nixes out the responsibility part of the chain there, at least for 'the company' as a whole. At least, the way bailouts have so far been done with banks, which is basically: Give em money, _possibly_ require some sacrifices amongst the board or c-level execs, but the company continues effectively independently.
And, wouldn'tcha know it, bad things happen when you do that.
"Too big to fail" is, to me anyway, all I need to hear. If that's true: Kill that company. Right now. And do a governmental post mortem on how government could have failed so badly as to have just let it happen without writing out laws and regulations to stop it. Too big to fail is a really, really bad thing to ever happen. The only thing that should ever be too big to fail is the government itself. Where there certainly _is_ a balance between power and responsibility: If government fucks up badly enough, very bad things happen to what it represents, namely, the people.
Therefore then, if the consequences are indeed as gigantic as you say they are, then there are only two options:
1. Bite the bullet, split up google, suffer the consequences, and then find ways to break up any other companies that are 'too big to fail', and find out ways to write laws to avoid it from happening again.
2. Government writes some laws to eminent-domain it, so that it becomes part of government, so that bailouts can be done without breaking the balance between power and responbility.
Of course, given the current political climate in the US, that will never happen. But logic dictates that it should.
At any rate: Yeah, it's going to hurt. And it should be done.
Your final 3 paragraphs are missing the mark entirely. They just do not make any logical sense.
If google gets completely asploded by law, you think they all move to apple and apple will turn itself into a monopoly? After it just saw government make a meal out of google? That seems epically stupid, but then a judge just more or less literally called Tim Cook epically stupid for deciding to just flaunt a court judgement, so, sure, let's say Tim Cook did not learn his lesson and remains blind to this. Then.. government will make a meal of apple just the same. Once the first 'tech company too big to fail breaking monopoly laws gets thrown through a meat grinder' has concluded, the meat grinder is built and functional, so (threatening to) toss apple through it is easy at that point, relatively speaking.
I also think you're underestimating the viability of the web and the pernicious brokenness of where we are at today. If google ads just collapses overnight, however will people find stores? That's your argument? That it will simply be impossible to find the online presence of some store or other? I.. doubt that.
A whole company will just disappear because gmail failed? Proton costs 3.50 a seat a month, and that's just to make the point that the most gold plated alternative I know about does not seem like a company killer. Everything google does has an alternative. If a company cannot deal with the fallout of inventorying the services that it uses and making a decision on which alternative to employ plus the costs associated with updating their employees and policies to deal with it, that company was operating on a highly risky precipice already, if the margins are that low. Something was going to unbalance that company and it would fall into the abyss sooner rather than later. Might as well be this.
That gives users the impression that other providers are unreliable, and further bolsters their monopoly.
Apart from all of the illegal things, it's just bad that it exists.
Then AT&T was shut down and Bell Labs went away.
If we take your argument seriously then AT&T shouldn’t have been dismantled. But it was a good thing AT&T was dismantled. It helped lead to the modern internet.
By your logic all Rockefeller had to do in the early 20th century was set up a lab to do basic research and then Standard Oil wouldn’t have been broken up.
Monopolies should be broken up. This is true regardless of any basic research that they fund.
Without Google the researchers who invented the Transformers model might have launched their own startup instead of sitting on the technology for 5 years while it's mismanaged at a big company. We would have had LLMs in 2018 not 2022.
They came up with Transformers back in 2014 and sat on it for a decade until somebody else (OpenAI) forced their hand?
Nevertheless anti-Trust law exists because of the belief that monopolies should not exist and that it is the governments function to dismantle monopolies. The consequence of that is that corporations who can freely spend hundreds of millions on basic research will be dismantled as well, as happened with AT&T, and the funding for the basic research will cease.
>YC is arguing that their incentive for funding that basic research should be taken away in order to spur innovation?
No. That is the stance of the government. YC is arguing that the remedies the government is seeking are appropriate.
one could argue that transformers are nothing without attention layer, which was not invented at google.
Ma Bell is arguing that Bell labs has been a fountain of knowledge everyone admires and has contributed tremendously to the advancement of telecommunication systems.
Sounds great to me! Wish they had been broken up before that happened.
OpenAI is the reason for the current AI boom. Google wasn't productizing anything and didn't put any of this stuff out in the open. Where was their productization of the transformer?
If anything, it should show that Google malinvests. Maybe none of it would have seen the light of day. Only now that they've been threatened are they building products.
Google has two interlocked monopolies, one is the search index and the other is their advertising service. We often joked that if Google reasonable and non-discriminatory priced access to their index, both to themselves and to others, AND they allowed someone to put what ever ads they wanted on those results. That change the landscape dramatically.
Google would carve out their crawler/indexer/ranker business and sell access to themselves and others which would allow that business an income that did NOT go back to the parent company (had to be disbursed inside as capex or opex for the business).
Then front ends would have a good shot, DDG for example could front the index with the value proposition of privacy. Someone else could front the index with a value proposition of no-ads ever. A third party might front that index attuned to specific use cases like literature search.
It would be a very different world.
Also, I love this bit: "[Google's] search results are of the best quality among its advertising-driven peers." I can just feel the breath of the guy who jumped in to say "wait, you can't just admit that Google's results are better than Kagi's! You need to add some sorta qualifier there that doesn't apply to us."
It makes sense to break that out so everyone has access to the same dataset at FRAND pricing.
My heart just wants Google to burn to the ground, but my brain says this is the more reasonable approach.
Why not also require Apple to split off only the phone and messaging part of its iPhone, Meta to split off only the user feed data, and for the U.S. federal government to run only out of Washington D.C.?
This isn’t the breakup of AT&T in the early 1980s where you could say all the equipment and wiring just now belongs to separate entities. (It wasn’t that simple, but it wasn’t like trying to extract an organ.)
I think people have to understand that and know that what they’re doing is killing Google, and it was already on its way into mind-numbed enterprise territory.
Dawn of a new era in Search: Balancing innovation, competition, and public good - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41393475 - Aug 2024 (79 comments)
They argue that the search index is an essential facility, and per their link "The essential facilities doctrine attacks a form of exclusionary conduct by which an undertaking controls the conditions of access to an asset forming a ‘bottleneck’ for rivals to compete".
But unlike physical locations where bridges/ports can be built, the ability to crawl the internet is not excludable by Google.
They do argue that the web is not friendly to new crawlers, but what Kagi wants is not just the raw index itself, but also all the serving/ranking built on top of it so that they do not have to re-engineer it themselves.
It's also worth noting that Bing exists, and presumably has it's own index of the web and no evidence has been presented that the raw index content itself is the reason that Bing is not competitive.
I also don't think crawling the Web is the hard part. It's extraordinarily easy to do it badly [1] but what's the solution here? To have a bunch of wannabe search engines crawl Google's index instead?
I've thought about this and I wonder if trying to replicate a general purpose search engine here is the right approach or not. Might it not be easier to target a particular vertical, at least to start with? I refuse to believe Google cannot be bested in every single vertical or that the scale of the job can't be segmented to some degree.
[1]: https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/06/16/the-perfect-web-spider...
If it's teh latter, its a neat way to ask a company to sell their users data to a third party because any kind of ranking comes via aggregation of users' actions. Without involving any user consent at all.
If I give you only one reasonable option and you choose that, is that selection? What if this one option distinguished others?
They have indeed invested tons in r&d, but with excessively little results. Besides web search it's tough to see succeses that Google didn't buy their way into. Gmail, maps, ... maybe?
I'm really glad that YC brought this against Google but it should be clear that YC also enabled them. It's a lie that YC is independent from Google as it partners and promotes their engineers and Big Tech allies. They see the writing on the wall and their lawyers see this as a hedge against lawsuits against them. "We didn't cause this mess, see look! We're trying to help!" YC also doesn't serve American startups at all and their entrepreneurs strongly favors California or India.
Unlike Microsoft's antitrust case of the 90s, Google seems much less anti-competitive by nature. Sure, they have unprecedented scale in search... but even that hegemony is being threatened by others in AI.
If anything, going after Google with a DoJ kludgel will cause a servere freeze on startup M&A across all of FAANG. With IPO windows (mostly) closed, this removes the biggest exit dynamic the startup ecosystem has at its disposal. This is not a good thing from my perspective, and would seem counter to YC's interests.
Someone steelman this for me...?
Startups ideally should compete on merit, not on whether they are eventually allowed access to Google’s platforms or get acquired. Startups can still exit via IPO, PE acquisition, cross-industry buyers or M&A.
From this POV, Google’s control over the adtech stack may be seen as gatekeeping digital advertising, which many YC companies rely on.
It seems much less, but I don't believe it is much less anticompetitive. We're talking about the search market specifically in this case, and the government has presented strong evidence that Google is:
* Using its position in other markets (browser, mobile) to ensure that others can't compete in search.
* Paying the major other vendors in those markets (browser, mobile) enormous sums of money to ensure that ~100% of the market share in both markets is used to prop up their lead in search.
Both of these things are pretty blatantly anticompetitive: they're competing not primarily based on the quality of their product offering but instead based on their pre-existing revenue streams and their leads in other markets.
The use money and Google Play services to hinder competition.
Not really less anti-competitive.
At every company I've been at, half the dependencies came from big tech, and more than half of those were built and maintained by google. bazel, kubernetes, test frameworks, tensorflow, etc. these are just the big ones. There are a lot of smaller libraries from google that we've used too, and more still that aren't owned by google but they invest a lot of engineering time into.
I don't know what the right answer is to the google of today, but the cavalier assumption that google has simply leveraged a monopoly in search to build everything else it has doesn't add up to me.
Heck, they can't even be bothered to fund a single developer to help their hardware run Linux.
10-20 years ago Google was amazing. Their products were great. We all wanted them.
And now, we have pretty much exactly those products. Almost nothing has improved in 10+ years. That's exactly the behavior of a monopoly.
Their products are now aggressively hostile to users and their interests. Like Chrome trying to kill of ad blockers.
Google now sits on what is now a low quality outdated product forever using their market power to keep everyone else out.
That's why we have antitrust laws. To kill Googles.
Similar action happened against Microsoft Windows around 2000, just as the rise of web-based apps (online email, google docs, etc) largely made the underlying operating system less relevant to how people use their computers and apps.
So I read this as the dominant player can monopolize a market while it's relevant without an issue, and once the market starts to move on, the antitrust lawsuits come in to "make the market more competitive" at a time when that era is mostly over.
And trying to regulate early (as with the last administration's AI legislation that is now being repealed) we can see that only hindsight is 20/20, and regulating too early can kill a market. My conclusion is to just let the best product win, and even dominate for a while as this is part of the market cycle, and when a better product/platform comes along the market will move to it.
AIs are using search indices more and more. Google has the largest, and there is risk of Google using its monopoly in search (in particular their index) to give themselves an unfair advantage in the nascent AI market.
Paid competitors cannot compete because people won't pay. People want the death of Google because people hate ads and tracking.
Ultimately it is an everyone loses situation. No one is going to fly in a replace Google without either 1.) Charging a monthly sub or 2.) Invasive (yet most profitable) ad tracking.
This is exactly why youtube stands alone too. What company looks at youtube's userbase and says "Yes, I want to cater to people who despise subscriptions and block ads". Exactly what vid.me did in 2017, which everyone celebrated until the went bankrupt.
We are already seeing a transition.
This is lead by the fact that paying online is much easier than 10 years ago.
And the fact that we are slowly being conaiditoned to paying for online services.
> Paid competitors cannot compete because people won't pay.
Seems to me they're different groups of people. Otherwise, if people hate ads, why don't they pay?
I don't agree it's an everyone loses situation. Enough people don't mind or prefer the ads based ecosystem for it to continue.
IMO, more sophisticated ad blockers (I.e real control over one's devices) used by more people, would make the ad tech ecosystem a lot less profitable. After all, ads only work when you can control what the other person sees.
https://maps.apple.com/unsupported
"Your current browser isn't supported"
I thought OK, how many people use Firefox on Linux. So I went to their site in this browser, Chrome (most popular browser in the world on the most popular Linux Desktop OS, Ubuntu)...same error.
Every site I visit in Chrome (and Edge when I use it for the few sites I use it for) works on Linux.
Apple should be the target of breaking up. Why isn't Y Combinator and the U.S. going after them?
That remains to be seen. The fear is that Google can leverage its large search index to produce better LLM experiences and win in that market too.
You mean kills potentially successful tech companies of the future by acquiring startups to cement their dominance.
I get why people on this site are in love with the idea of building an unsustainable, money-losing business where the only path to success is being acquired by a tech giant. It's like winning the lottery! But it helps nobody, it hurts your customers/users, and it hurts innovation. It's also stupid, as a successful tech company could potentially grow as big as the giants you're courting (ESPECIALLY now that the FTC has started finally doing its job). Why else do you think they're spending so much money to acquire you? It's easier on the ego to call it an "acquihire", but the truth is that they're just paying a maintenance tax on their monopoly.
Every time people complain about how detrimental big tech is to society, it ultimately comes down to this sad strategy.
And it's ridiculous to act like (a) you are forced to go through Google to access the 'market' and (b) that this is somehow unusual or untoward. They are an advertising company and not the only one.
Many of the comments are about how great Google's products are (or aren't). But the case is about anti-competitive behavior. Personally, I hate how a bulk of the internet now consists of surveillance. All this amazing tech brilliance.. resting on a foundation that's about getting us to buy more junk. I will be happy if this lawsuit reduces that (even a little bit).
Now antitrust means punishing companies that are too good. Their product is too superior. Even though Windows, the most used computer OS, literally defaults bing search but consumers change it to google. They are choosing to use google. We're going to punish the company that makes a product so good users don't want to use other products. They clearly have choice. There is no switching cost to what search engine you use. Its sad when companies who can't make a product people that people't don't want to use instead to use regulatory capture to prevent real competition in the search engine market. Just make a better product.
This isn’t about search, it’s about their ad monopoly. They are not being punished for search or related products. I’m actually not sure how breaking out the search index helps in this situation. I would think splitting out off-Google advertising is the more obvious break and one that would benefit humanity. (Ad networks can die in a fire.)
De facto you don't have any choice but using ms and Google these days. Whatever you loose in doing so (if not money, then privacy)
That is a problem and constitutes a macro risk - and henceforth should be handled.
Monopoly is probably the closet describing term.
Is there anything he could have done to avoid this outcome? In a way that Google shareholders would have found acceptable?
Or was this outcome inevitable?
NO? Yeah. I thought so as well
Then the outcome was inevitable.
By having search monopolies, they've gamified paying for placement above your competitor's trademarks. Rather than spend on engineering or lowering costs, you have to pay to defend your brand.
There are thousands of ways these monopolies are horrible for the consumer, for small business, and for innovation.
These companies force their way into new markets, kill the sustainable incumbents by give away services sustained on unrelated business unit profit, then raise rates once the field has been salted and acquired. Amazon is a grocery store, primary care doctor, home electronics company, and James Bond.
Why should Amazon get free advertising for their films on their web storefront, plastered on the side of their delivery vans, emblazoned on their packaging, when competing studios have to spend millions on marketing? To top it off, they're outsourcing the film crew labor to Eastern Europe where there are no crew safety laws and are putting American film workers out of business.
And the current price pressure on your salary is directly a result of their market power. They don't have to fear you starting a company that can impact their profits anymore.
These companies should all be dismantled. Large companies should be exposed to evolutionary pressures, but because of monopoly they become invasive species and dominate entire ecosystems. Regulation is the path to healthy competition and innovation.
In particular, if the legal authorities start to unwind Google, I actually think Chrome and Android are more important to wall off or spin out than anything advertising or AI related.
I always thought the point of the government breaking up monopolies was to prevent anti-competitive behaviour, not simply to punish companies for being too successful.
If we want to talk about what's best for the economy and startups, there's a bunch of large companies that could be broken up for the benefit of society, but not sure that's entirely fair either.
Behavioral remedies where the government gets involved with google’s business and maintains ongoing control to ensure they behave.
Structural remedies where the government separates the company into parts and then-crucially-leaves them alone for the most part.
The “ideal” solution is to magically stop Google from being anticompetitive but that is unrealistic.
The realistic solution is to split Google apart and kneecap its data flywheel to force it to compete.
If you had told me in early 2000s that google would absolutely dominate all of these fields And it would be allowed to continue for decades, I wouldn't believe you.
I'm a free market guy, I believe some small gov is nessasary to regulate monopolies, protect constitutional rights etc, but multi-monopolies- I can't believe are allowed to exist under such a large beaurocratic superstate with left or right in power.
How about no. If I must I'd really rather just Google than some fly by night companies having that access. Not to mention it'd be easier to block too.
1. Why YC cares
- VC “kill-zone.” YC says Google’s decade of default-search contracts (Apple, carriers, OEMs) froze half of all U.S. search queries, scaring investors away from search/AI startups.
- AI inflection point. Generative/query-based/agentic AI could disrupt search—but only if newcomers can reach users and train on data Google hoards. Without action, Google will “pull the ladder up” again.
2. What YC wants the court to order
- Open index & dataset access. Force Google to license its search index + anonymized click/embedding data on fair, reasonable terms so rivals can build ranking stacks + AI models.
- No self-preferencing in AI results. Google can’t boost Gemini-style tools or demote rivals. No exclusive AI-training corpora access either.
- Ban pay-to-play defaults. Outlaw “billions to be the default” (search, voice, browser, OS, car). No payments for choice-screen placement.
- Anti-circumvention & retaliation guardrails. Independent monitoring, fast dispute resolution, steep fines, and—if Google cheats—possible Android spinoff.
3. Historical playbook YC cites
- 1956 AT&T consent decree opened Bell Labs patents → semiconductor boom.
- 2001 Microsoft browser decree → Firefox, Chrome, Google itself.
- 2023–24 Nvidia-Arm block → both companies exploded in AI.
- YC says same pattern can unlock “the next Stripe/Airbnb—but for search/AI.”
4. Why HN should care
- Open Index ≈ ultimate dev API. Lets you build retrieval-augmented AI agents without a nation-state’s crawl budget.
- Distribution shake-up. Killing default deals revives mobile/browser competition; could birth real alt-search on phones.
- VC signal. YC telling a judge “give us a level field and we’ll bankroll challengers” means real capital is ready.
- Policy trend. Regulators now want to pre-wire markets (index access, AI data parity, Android contingency) before the next moat forms.
5. Bottom line: This isn’t about a fine. It’s about cracking open the data + distribution bottlenecks that froze search since 2009. If Judge Mehta adopts YC/DOJ’s plan, the door opens for real search/AI innovation—and VCs are ready to sprint through it.
This part reads like a suggestion to loosen anti-competitive/antitrust law.
I don't trust YC very much, but I do trust they want a share of the pie. And they're not wrong that Google has monopolized and stagnated search. I think you're reading too much into that sentence?
As a user it's preposterous that any kind of data generated by me is anonymized (or not) and effectively sold to a third party. First party usage is kind of understandable. What YC and the govt is asking is that Google should be forced to do exactly that? Sell some data points about me generated by my interactions without my consent. That too it seems for no fee. Without even asking for the permission from the users. What kind of clown world are we living in? I dont care if its anonymized.
Presumably, if that data is so useful, why dont all of these companies lining up to pay the users?Take permission from the users, pay them, and then use whatever they want. Data is only useful in the aggregate, pay ln the aggregate too for whatever revenue and market cap they reach. Doing it without the user consent in 2025 is weird.
Because users are lining up to give away their data.
The Pentagon.
If you wanted to know how your keywords were performing you had to use Google Analytics.
Googles ad platform and analytics are difficult to avoid. Even with browser extensions, dns blocking, and aggressive firewall rules, this is virtually impossible to avoid. I am shocked at how many websites and apps break when these are blocked. There needs to be a much healthier ecosystem without a single company gobbling all this up.
Chrome is also a big issue. Google has regularly used its web sites and android to heavily push chrome. They also use that influence for web “standards” that are not really standards. On top of it, even googles own sites are often terrible with non chrome based browsers. We need a variety of user agents and we need real standards that a truly independent body has a say in. The web has matured and we don’t need to be in a race for new apis and features right now.
Google play services are also a huge pain point. When developing for Android, you almost have to use them. Running Android without Google Play services or with an alternate is a futile effort if you want any sort of main stream app. My degoogled work phone is mostly useless for anything. We definitely need standards for these services with replaceable components that are transparent to the apps.
You pay a lawyer a few thousand bucks to write some populist bromides you get to slap your name in the news. Seems like a good ROI.
I take it it's some sort of ads marketplace where they charge a fee to connect buyers with sellers?
But why are things like chrome and payments to companies for default search engine placement considered monopolistic?
It is increasingly sounding like a witch-hunt given the list of accusations I've heard.
B. The Remedy Should Prevent Google from Extending Its Monopolies into Query-Based AI Tools.
Good luck with that YC...
Said that… There’s a lot of interesting perspectives:
From YC: it’s a logical and quite unique business decision. YC can capitalize on a very weak moment of a gigantic moment from government support and general public sentiment.
At the end we’re in an all knives out and YC is taking the opportunistic route because it has economic interest in the Google break down.
From Google: I think we can think that the era of “cool monopoly” is officially over and Microsoft was right all the time. Be boring, be ruthless, be the only one. No amount of public good press for more than 1 decade will save your nice monopoly to fall from grace.
From the USA: will be interesting to see if the administration will celebrate it, since Google whether we like it or not, is one instrument I of soft power and influence of the American interest around the work. How the tradeoff of limit its reach due new foreign players or how pulverised market will help their policies its something to wait and see.
Form a personal perspective: as a consumer, and future candidate for a YC founding company I think have Google broke down to have 50 new SaaS selling their services for 9,99 per month, won’t be a net benefit.
Being completely honest: I prefer that the Google shareholders thar contains big billionaires and pension funds tied with retirements plus public regulatory and scrutiny it’s a way better alternative than 60 new SaaS tied with all private interests of Paul Graham VC family office or David Sachs/Chammath offices.
Gemini (the app, not the API or AI studio) is one of the few places where we can use frontier generative AI without a “customer noncompete” (you know, the one where they compete with us and then say we’re not allowed to compete back) … if you use Claude or OpenAI or Grok, you’re prohibited from training on your chat logs, or even using the thing to develop AI. Not so with Gemini app.
Too bad you have to lose your chat history just to deactivate model training (“Gemini apps activity” conflates opt-out of training with opt-out of storing chat history)
I don’t know much about the ads space but I just hope going after Google doesn’t create a vacuum that gets filled by an even worse monopoly (OpenAI)
So pretty much "We don't want google to develop new things, we want them to have buy those from us"
People, clean that shit up before publishing. That's an embarrassment. At least it's not "FINAL FINAL2 REWORKED" or something equally grotesque.
Google is being competitive.
YC is being anti-competitive.
Because they suck at competing against Google and they want to get unfair, unethical advantage themselves.
Imagine spending years and billions building something and then I show up and say “hey man that’s not fair, give me a slice of that thing for free. Oh and also I’m probably going to sell it back to you someday for a lot of money”.
And before someone tells me “that’s the law”, I don’t care. If that’s the law then it should be changed. Laws have been written (and lobbied) for all sorts of reasons and surprisingly not all of them are fair and ethical.
> "Our experience has been that entrenched monopoly power often deters new entry and chills investment in disruptive innovation."
> "independent venture-capital firms like YC often hesitate to fund startups in the “kill zone” —the area of deadened innovation around a monopolist like Google."
> "We agree with Plaintiffs' proposal that the remedy package should create pathways for startups and innovators to access Google's monopoly-derived datasets and search index."
> "The remedy order should also prevent Google from entering into exclusive agreements to access AI training data..."
> "An effective remedy package should help to leverage the current moment by ensuring that next-generation search and query-based AI tools can reach users free from exclusion, interference, or cooption."
> "the remedy package should prevent Google from anticompetitive self-preferencing, and this prohibition should apply specifically to Google's use of its monopoly search product to boost its query-based AI tools or discriminate against rivals' tools."
I think they have a good point with AI. After lagging behind initially, Google really went at it hard. Gemini is great now, and they are building a good set of tooling.
It's easy for Google to suffocate the startups in that area. They already have a massive advantage with all the data they are sitting on.
Amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief is being submitted by Y Combinator to pile on the US vs Google anti-trust case.
YC asks court to basically cripple Google in their Search, Advertising and AI endeavours:
- Open access to Google's datasets and search index.
- Restrict Google's expansion into AI through monopolistic practices.
- Limit Google exclusive agreements and pay-to-play distribution deals.
- Enforce anti-circumvention and anti-retaliation mechanisms.
IMO, from a VC standpoint, it's in YC's interest to give their privately funded startups the best chance possible to thrive. If that includes destroying solid giants of the industry, so be it.
I wonder why a VC firm who is quite heavily invested in AI based startups file an amicus brief like that…
Edit: before this gets downvoted into oblivion, the comment is not against antitrust enforcement. It’s about VC firms having very specific ideas about what the antitrust enforcement would look like.
As an european, I am happy to see that the US administration may be ready to kill the one of the most powerful and unassailable company in the world and allow any other country to build a replacement.