I’m guessing this whole court case wouldn’t have been a thing if Google wasn’t bribing Apple, to the tune of $20 billion a year [1], to remain the default search engine on iOS.
1: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/apple-may-add-ai-search-...
It is nothing to do with "hiring the best people". Google's exec-level leadership is extremely poor, Mr Magoo-tier management. This is largely due to their share classes, the people at the very top are not very good at business so Google largely isn't run like a business. They have one business that is probably worth $4-5tn, and the rest is worth -$3-4tn. The number of "best people" out there is usually under 500 in a country the size of the US, a country that has hundreds of thousands of employees is not hiring the best.
I would guess under 100 people at Google actually positively impact financial results in any way because the advertising business grows rapidly, uses no capital, and requires no staff. This is true of many of the tech companies do, you aren't getting the best if you pay an exec $50m because the best will always do their own thing and make more. Rather you get someone like Pichai or Cook who sounds good and will get shareholders to believe that setting fire to $200m/year to pay them is a good idea, they are indistinguishable from politicians.
Google is under-earning massively. Staff aren't a monopoly, you just pay someone to leave and they are yours now (you see this in other areas like HFT where staff actually know useful stuff, you don't see this in tech because most staff don't know anything, they are looking for drones).
They start with a page with zero ads, they add one ad to that page one year, ad sales pushes that placements, then a few years they do it again, etc. Meta are the same.
Google do sell at a higher price than offline ads because of targeting/intent but this is inherent to the product: search has inherently better intent and their targeting tech is no better than anyone else such that their prices are higher/grow faster.
That is their growth model: higher ad density, the CEO deciding to add another ad to a page and earning $100m/year. There is no value-added otherwise because you don't need many people, you don't need capital and you are making $300bn/year.
And, again, if you own the shares you understand that you are getting the ads business, and because of the dual class you are also getting this tech bureaucracy that sets fire to tens of billions every year employing people to do nothing. If these people are so productive...where is the revenue? It is all ads or ancillary business, they have GCP now but there is nothing else...because these people aren't doing anything.
It is like owning a business that turns lead into gold, the process is automatic, requires no capital...and then employing a bunch of monks to pray for the lead and saying the business couldn't exist without them. Lol.
> I would guess under 100 people at Google actually positively impact financial results in any way
It's really funny to me that people write comments like this and yet are incapable of basic arithmetic, like this being 0.0001% of the US population, or thinking that the entire ad business runs on just 100 people who are magically making the company $4 trillion dollars while everyone else drags it down.
Google should not be punished for having gained a near-monopoly by hiring the best people.
But perhaps their near-monopoly is due to other reasons like paying large amounts to ensure that they are the default option on various platforms. In this case, legal restrictions might be more appropriate.
How do we determine which of these proposed reasons for the near-monopoly is correct? We use a legal process where each side presents their evidence and a neutral party decides which is most credible.
[0] https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-user-interaction-...
