US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

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.

> If a large enough bank goes under, it takes out not just the bank, but huge sectors of the economy, affecting many more businesses and jobs. That's why the government bailed out the banks when they failed.

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.

This list is very telling. Instead of a healthy marketplace of companies competing to sell their software and services, we end up with one monopolist who gives away mediocre products and in return taxes everything you buy (in the form of ad spending), and then annoys you with the same ads. How is this a desirable outcome?

Let them die. The world will be a better place.

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.

It's important to try and de-googleify your life if only so you don't get caught up in making such an exaggerated sky-is-falling point. All of these could literally vanish tomorrow and the world would go on, they all have their alternatives, some of them arguably superior. For some, the near term pain would be greater than for others -- even just on my personal level I'd be caught with my pants down for email, because while I have over the years moved a lot of email addresses to something at my own domain name, I haven't done it for all of them, and I'd still need to update the forwarding to not-google. Not a huge deal though. A big one you didn't even list that's more important than several you did combined is Youtube, but again there are alternatives.

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.

When I worked in the travel tech industry several years ago, it was basically unfair to compete against Google Flights. We just accepted they didn't have to pay for marketing and had infinite compute to work with, and had to differentiate in other ways. They could operate the business at a loss and not really care because it was still good for Google as a whole to have user's travel data. They built a great product but didn't have to play by the rules everyone else had to follow.

Too big to fail means too big to exist. Google et. al should never have been allowed to get this large, same as those banks.

Better late than never.

It's not clear to me why you believe that an antitrust ruling against Google would make them bankrupt. At worst they will lay off workers. But a post-antitrust google is still a viable company

For the sake of argument, let's grant the implication that Google is in danger of going out of business. Even so, if our economy is at the point where one company going out of business would cripple it, it's almost certainly worth the pain of decoupling from that company. It would hurt, but we would get through it, and it would be better in the long run. On the other hand, if we just threw up our hands and said "do whatever you want, Google, you're too important for us to tell you what to do" then we're pretty much at their mercy. I can't imagine things getting better or fixing themselves in that situation.

Because Google has monopoly power, they can charge whatever they want for ads, and every company in the economy has to pay it. So there’s a pretty good argument the economy is being held back by a “Google tax”.

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.

The point is that splitting Google Ads business from eg. Google Maps business will make GAds company and GMaps company set up a mutually beneficial business arrangement — not much needs to change there!

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.

All monopolies plow a fraction of their wins into loss leaders that look generous. Apple grabs a take on developer sales? It's to maintain a high quality app environment. AT&T is distorting prices in the long distance market? They use it to make local telephony a lot more affordable. Etc etc.

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.

Isn't it depressing that a single private company wield such influence in society that Stockholm syndrome develops? I don't know about you, but accepting this is true is way worse than loosing gapps

I think comparing to banks is silly. Banks don't have competitive advantages like Google has. When banks fail it is not because they lost a competitive advantage (other than the competitive advantage of competent management). The catastrophe associated with a major bank collapse has to do with the specific function of banks in the financial system, not just: oh where are all their customers going to go?

They won't be killed, they'll be forced to stand up as their own businesses, like the Baby Bells after Ma Bell broke up, or the split of Standard Oil.

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.

Just to pick one of these: google Flights sucks. It had a better competitor - Hipmunk - which went under because Google ate their lunch by integrating flights search into the main search product. Don't know how many of these Google products have similar stories, but it's probably a non zero numbers.

What we're getting, in many of these cases, is an inferior product that drove out better competitors through Google search integration.

They're too big to fail argument of Obama, is now they're too big to break up.

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.

What happens to the assets of the dead Google? Will regulators actually let FAAN take over broad swaths of it? Not likely. It's much more likely that regional or smaller businesses will enter the vaccuum. Similarly but from the consumer side, I already know for many of these, there are already viable alternatives that would easily scale with demand.

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.

They'd have to adapt their business models, the likelihood of the services disappearing are minimal because they each have multiple revenue streams beyond just collecting user data. Indeed we know it's possible because much of the list are me-too products from those which have different business models.

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.

Google/Alphabet made a critical mistake. When the Alphabet parent company was founded, Google search and AD should have been divested. All those product lines you mentioned should have been part of separate corporations where at most Google is a minority owner in a joint venture. Google will still rip benefits including profits and some exclusivity but it won't stifle competition by directing those product to align with what benefits its AD revenue stream.

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.

You mean the internet would return back to how it was in the 00's? I don't see how that's bad...

I 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.

Why is this bad? All those services are areas where there could be interesting competition if google didn't strangle them at birth by subsidizing their own version with infinite ad monies. Take google docs as an example, everyone is talking about on shoring essential services now that the USA has become a security threat to other countries. Before now, imagine any European company trying to justify investment for building a docs competitor when google just gives it away? Yeah sure, your data stays on the continent but that wasn't put into perspective until recently.

Let's take Android. Who has a revenue stream and needs Android? All the major phone vendors except Apple.

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...

Are we sure that the things listed here will not go away in a few years if Google continues to exist?

https://killedbygoogle.com/

A lot of Google's products could be completely sustainable businesses on their own, but of course they couldn't offer them for free for personal use as they do now. Plenty of companies pay for Google Workspace, so that surely wouldn't die. Android could be spun out and returned to a more open development model, with phone manufacturers contributing money and developer time to the project instead of mostly freeloading from Gooogle. Google Cloud is supposedly profitable, (although I don't get why anyone would want to pay for that...).

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 don’t buy it. I suspect that a reason Google Cloud remains a laggard in market share is that Google’s core business, as an advertiser that feeds off user data, gives parts of the available market the heebie jeebies.

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.

> In the best case, killing these will force consumers to move to Apple.

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 whole web will shrink, and huge swaths of the worldwide economy will disappear."

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.

"The whole web will shrink, and huge swaths of the worldwide economy will disappear."

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.

Good. Every one of those products makes our lives significantly worse.

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.

  - 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, Zenuity

I have actively moved away from all of these services you listed years ago. The only one that is truly impactful is Gmail, again because of the monopoly they have in mail. But I don't understand your argument. There are options and you're worried about Apple, yet admit they don't have competing products in many of those segments.

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.

So Google is "to big to fail" - that's what you are really saying.

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.

I agree. At risk of being totally off base because I have not been keeping up with the details of the legal matter it seems to me that the solution isn't to kill Google's core business but rather to force it to sell off some of these branches, with thought and strategy. E.g. one of the comments below pointed out that Google Flights competes with other sites / businesses. Seems like a good candidate to spin off: it could probably be a profitable business in it's own right. Android? Chrome? Idk about those: who / how are they going to be funded? Each piece needs to be analyzed and a deal needs to be struck that's not based on principles as much as it is on what is pragmatically the right balance that benefits people (the American people in particular) the most in the medium to long term.

I genuinely do not use a single service on your list and my life is absolutely indistinguishable from that of one who does. I’m digitally literate and normally functional. Do people really believe these services are irreplaceable let alone the best of the best? That’s the trap…

This is juvenile thinking... none of them will go away. They can be independent services themselves, and be pretty profitable at it.

The upshoot is if they are independent, they will be forced to compete fairly with other services. Which, does increase competition and choice.

What a lame take on this.

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.

Yep, an over-sized, parasitic worm with control over most of the worlds communications, search, navigation, web browsing, and a size chunk of mobile software. That is definitely good for the Internet, security, privacy, and society at a whole. We can trust Google to always do what's right for the individual and to put profits second. Google makes money through donations and doesn't depend on the personal information of users it extracts to manipulate them into product purchases.

I don't have the right answer for this as in how to handle this - but this is needed.

Today I hear often people asking me "What's your Gmail" and that is fucking dangerous!

> Chrome

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.

Firstly you forgot YouTube. The vast majorities of these have alternatives that have existed before and currently, and of course none of these will "die". If they can’t be profitable without a monopoly, then consumers and businesses shouldn’t be overcharged for the services they depend on just to keep "Fitbit" afloat.

>In the best case, killing these will force consumers to move to Apple

Then Apple will be broken up.

> Here's a small number of things that will die when Google dies.

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.

Or it will force Google to charge for services - a much more honest transaction.

And you’re just naming random services most of which are already paid products like Google Cloud.

Why do antitrust proposals always suggest breaking up Google by function—Search, Ads, Gmail, etc.? What if, instead, we cloned the whole company?

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.

Waymo has zero business existing as some adtech-funded side project.

If Waymo cannot make the case that it should exist or be funded by itself, then it’s just not viable. Kill it.

Some of us still remembers pre-Google internet. Imagine how we were able to send emails and navigate on the streets. The image you are painting here is a classic false dichotomy. If Google goes under people won’t be moving to Apple, they are going to move to Fastmail, Yandex Maps, and so on. We might even see a new mobile platform that does not collect every single bit of your life.

That's the very reason we need to break down Google.

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.

Yeah, the unfortunate thing is reigning in one monopolist today seems like more an invitation to the other monopolists.

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.

You just listed a bunch of things I'd like to see go.

> 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?

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.

Of all the things you listed, I swear, only used maps in the last decade. All other I avoid them because I find them terribly bad. And I only use maps because is the one I remember the URL fast.

If this is the price we'll pay to break up a monopoly, then be it. Maybe we don't need these services, and maybe people will finally learn to not be dependent on a single provider for everything they have on the Internet.

Yes please

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.

Of this list, the only things I'd miss are Search (because Kagi relies on it) and Maps. I do use Android, but I'll be frank: It sucks. And I'm sure Translate is easily replaceable by a 3rd party.

Most of those products don't really matter much. I'm sure humanity will survive without them.

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.

How do you get from "google loses ad revenue" to "android dies"? Even if for some reason Google went bankrupt all these divisions would just be sold off.

We're gonna be fine without all those items from that list. There are plenty of alternatives and plenty more would arise once the monopolist sinks.

If what you are saying is that significant parts of the tech landscape will change, then that's exactly the point.

i’ve been using google products for over twenty years and they touch almost all aspects of my life and communications. in the past couple of years I’ve been working to de-couple by going to apple and local vs cloud data. it’s an extremely lengthy and error prone process. apple is workable but not great.

> Fitbit

google is killing that themselves.

- Google Fi - Google Fiber - Google Flights - Google Translate - Google Pay

won't miss these

> That's why the government bailed out the banks when they failed.

Who's gonna tell him?

My favourite one that you somehow missed, which should probably be at the top, YouTube.

Yes, we should break it up so new startups can work in the space!

Google has built all these free products for one reason: your comment. They want people to genuinely believe that they can't be treated like a monopoly in ads.

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.

If it is too big to fail, it is too big to exist.

Google Cloud is a decent business though, as is YouTube.

This is an incredibly hyperbolic take.

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.

You're talking like there are no alternatives to all of these products. There are, and not just from Apple. The reason Google's products are popular is because they're advertised as being "free", and Google has enough resources to run them as loss leaders, while also exerting pressure as a giant corporation and monopoly.

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.

Would YouTube not also be affected here? I don't have numbers but it seems to me a huge number of people depend on it as both consumers and producers, and I'm not sure it has any viable alternatives.

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.

This list makes the case this is long overdue.

"Here's a small number of things that will die when Google dies."

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.

digital advertisement is a mass-surveillance technology in the hands of corporations. I cheer its collapse

Android in this list stands out.

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.

You've made literally an argument to nationalise Google and make it into a government department - not to leave it to fester.

God forbid we allow other browser vendors and email providers to compete!

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!”

And nothing of value was lost.

We understand the consequences. The only projects listed that matter are the open source ones. They’ll survive. The rest don’t matter and will die as they frankly would’ve already if not for Google unfair position in the market.

Yup, ok with all of those.

- Google Maps - this would be a big loss but at least this will open the field for Apple Maps and OSM (and I wonder if a competitor will be able to properly leave OSM as is an perhaps integrate traffic data like with Waze or another product like it)

  - 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 - lol

And?

If monopoly is attained over such segment failure of those products and services is less bad outcome.

I think it was Heinlein who came up with it, but it's a principle that basic logic dictates is obvious:

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.

Oh no.

What a shame.

Opens popcorn, unfolds garden chair

+ Waze.

This is nonsense. Some people may have to sign up to Google One to pay them a fee starting at $20/year to access gmail/drive/docs/groups/forms. We, and they, will all live through.

etc.

Killing Gmail would be a massive win for email deliverability. It's got so big now that they simply don't give a shit about delivering emails from smaller players.

That gives users the impression that other providers are unreliable, and further bolsters their monopoly.

Google collapsing would be an incredible gift to the economy. Some companies are paying 30% in their advertising budget, before we even talk about the Play Store tax. We all pay an incredible amount for Google's existence, and a massive renaissance of technology development would occur if it stopped sucking all of the air out of the room.

Apart from all of the illegal things, it's just bad that it exists.

At Blekko we advocated for this as well.

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.

This just in: small search engine company thinks it's a great idea for small search engine companies to have the same search index as Google.

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."

Crawling the internet is a natural monopoly. Nobody wants an endless stream of bots crawling their site, so googlebot wins because they’re the dominant search engine.

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.

Assuming the simplified diagram of Google’s architecture, sure, it looks like you’re just splitting off a well-isolated part, but it would be a significant hardship to do it in reality.

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.

This solution would also yield search engines that will actually be useful and powerful like old Google search was. They have crippled it drastically over the years. Used to be I could find exact quotes of forum posts from memory verbatim. I can't do that on Google or YouTube anymore. It's really dumbed down and watered down.

Discussed at the time, in case anyone is curious:

Dawn of a new era in Search: Balancing innovation, competition, and public good - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41393475 - Aug 2024 (79 comments)

I feel like there's some conceptual drift going on in Kagi's blog post wrt their proposed remedy.

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.

That's like asking the foxes how the farmer should manage his chickens. Kagi is a (wannabe) competitor. Likewise, YC's interest here is in making money by having viable startups and having them acquired.

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...

Googles c suite is clearly not thinking ahead here. They could have helped to slow down the anti-trust lawsuits by opening up their search index to whichever AI company wants to pay for it. Web crawling is expensive, and lots of companies are spending wild amounts of money on it. There is a very clear market arbitrage opportunity between the cost of crawling the web and Google's cost of serving up their existing data.

Then you'd just end up with all the ads being scams, and people not wanting to search on Google, because all the top results are scams instead of things they might actually be interested in that are not scams.

Woudl the search index contain only raw data about the websites? Or would some sort of ranking be there?

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.

Separating the index creates a commodity data layer that preserves Google's crawling investment while enabling innovation at the ranking/interface layer, similar to how telecom unbundling worked for ISPs.

It's such a ridiculous proposal that would completely destroy Google's business. If that's the goal fine, but let's not pretend that any of those remedies are anything beyond a death sentence.

I would be you $1 that in five to ten years there will be zero "AI" players replacing search. But that's a different topic than this one.

> This action comes a bit late, at the end of the "Search engine" era, at a time when AI responses from many sources are largely replacing the "Google Search".

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.

Do you think its a coincidence that companies start getting regulated when they are at the end of their rope? I think its the other way around. When Google started to lose power, when alternatives started to pour money into the political system, when jobs and money from alternatives presented themselves, then the wheels of justice began turning. The regulation is caused by googles apparent decline.

YC should benefit most from an ecosystem where distribution channels (search, ads, etc) are not monopolized.

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.

> seems much less anti-competitive by nature

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.

Google killed the Edge browser with the same tricks MS used.

The use money and Google Play services to hinder competition.

Not really less anti-competitive.

Google is now a basic utility. Unless you don't believe in basic public goods, allowing equitable access to the utility benefits everyone, especially businesses.

Google doesn't own all of ads though, only search ads. Facebook nets $70 billion per year with an ad system that prints golden bricks. No-one cares how it works due to it makes so much money. 80% of shares are held by institutions.

People only want to not pay, when that is an alternative.

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.

> People want the death of Google because people hate ads and tracking.

> 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.

And of course it works when I change only the user-agent to windows.

Same here with firefox, FreeBSD.

Does Apple have a monopoly on web maps?

So should Gmail et al go with Chrome or with Android?

As in a standalone car gps unit? A ton of people use Garmin fitness and backcountry gear.

The USA has big tech Dutch disease.

Kind of the point of breaking up a monopoly is that it benefits a lot of the rest of the industry since the monopoly had been hindering it before. Also, it looks like you are saying any interest = a conflict of interest. Should only entities that have no interest in this matter be allowed to file in this way?

> and provides liquidity by acquiring startups

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.

Of course it is good for YC to do this. They have significant investments in OpenAI both directly and indirectly through the countless startups they've funded whose core is OpenAI.

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.

Meanwhile Apple, also sitting on infinite cash, is easily entertained by toying with regulators around the world and contributes back almost nothing in comparison to Google.

Heck, they can't even be bothered to fund a single developer to help their hardware run Linux.

You keep qualifying your comments with "by tech people" but the problem is that Google bought their way into non-tech people's computers. Every single Google product on every single pageload had an "install Chrome" link at the top. Every Chrome release blurred the line between 'signing into chrome' and 'signing into google' and, later, 'signing into your phone'. Most Google products broke on non-Chrome browsers on such a regular cadence that deliberate sabotage was a common assumption. So yes, Google has always been a darling to the "tech people", but the aggressive ways they worked to ensure that people adopted Chrome were very real.

Gmail and GMaps were 20 years ago. Chrome, almost 15 years ago.

You're right. And that really shows you how destructive Google has been.

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.

No. They are being punished for unfairly limiting competitiveness with repeated monopolistic practices affecting the browser/search markets relation.

ok so google paid companies like apple to make google the default search engine. you cannot claim everything was just because their product was good. you can argue that striking the deal with apple was just a smart business move, but google isn't winning just because of their r&d.

> Their "monopoly" is because people choose to use them, not because they have to.

If I give you only one reasonable option and you choose that, is that selection? What if this one option distinguished others?

> Google is effectively being punished for retaining their earnings and re-investing in tons of software R&D over the years

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?

Google's research departments hyped up DeepMind's success in board games and enabled huge amounts of marketing which makes you believe this. However, DeepMind was a resounding failure after GPT's were released. If you look at the multiple documentaries, they now seem cringeworthy because of Google's arrogance about AI. Google did not simply do a better job, they acquired the companies that did and then convinced you that they were part of Google the entire time so they can take the credit.

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.

Competitive maybe. Healthy almost certainly not. My definition for healthy industries is being able to fund operations and development either by revenues or debt. Not by continuously raising capital from investors and then burning it on hardware and operating costs.

> but data isn’t the deciding factor.

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.

It's not the deciding factor yet. You can bet the IP hammer is going to swing in again once the big players have been decided just to keep the small players out.

[dead]

There are two ways to remedy an anti competitive monopoly:

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.

that is not a google problem that is a big tech problem. people move where the money is and the money flows to google easily because ads is such a lucrative business. if you force the talent pool to move off google, meta or amazon will easily absorb them

I haven’t looked at the merits, and I don’t like what the EU is doing to US companies with 20% market share, but I remember feeling the same way about Microsoft over 20 years ago. Fortunately, groklaw provided a constant stream of easily readable, high quality content. That, and I could see some of my favorite companies shutting down because their customers were restricted from doing business with them if they wanted to sell Windows.

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.)

You can retrofit today's arguments on both the oil industry and phone industry: if you don't want to pay, then don't use it. Both letter and horses where available.

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.

Do you think the world benefits from this monopoly though? I think the world would be a worse place without Google, a much worse place. While it would be nice to live in some timeline were lots of choices for search (there actually are, people are just lazy and don't like change), but we built a world with Google and let it get to where its at. We will just be shooting ourselves in our own foot, at least in the short term.

> Multiple companies should be able to listen to that feed, and then be responsible for tracking and indexing on their own.

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.

Summarized by o3:

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.

Why? The point of antitrust is to promote market fairness.

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?

> Presumably, if that data is so useful, why dont all of these companies lining up to pay the users?

Because users are lining up to give away their data.

> Put another way, who has the biggest monopoly on direct and indirect tax-payer funding?

The Pentagon.

But when AT&T had a monopoly it funded Bell Labs which was responsible for much innovation.

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.

You can do basic research without being monopolistic.