Do it! Then, do every single major conglomerate they’ve allowed to form over the last 30 years
Antitrust comes in waves in the US. First, it’s a free for all to let the tech develop freely…then you see the horrors and a time of antitrust kicks in. This would be the 4th wave since the Sherman Act. Let’s hope it’s a good one.
Interesting! Go ooooonnnn 😍
That’s all I had, I’m not an expert, but I hope they go after FB and microsoft too (in case that makes you feel randy like that other guy in the comments) :P
Do you think they’d do Apple?
A human can live their whole life without ever interacting with an Apple product by mistake. I’m not sure about that for android/google/adsense/maps/youtube. It takes a deliberate effort to avoid these guys and I’m still not completely free from it. Slightly easier but still a minefield with Microsoft and FB, especially in niche areas.
My biggest fear about a Google breakup would be what that does to the mobile market, specifically in the US, given the iPhone’s popularity here.
You can also read about Lina Khan, the current chair on the FTC side of antitrust.
Keep going I’m almost there
😂
invest in Sherman Antitrust Act memes now
Unless Savannah is some girl he knows, not sure this lands. Savannah, GA wasn’t really ever ravaged in the Civil War or anything.
Like that is what you point out, and not the fact they got the wrong Sherman pictured lol. John Sherman ≠ William Tecumseh Sherman
Here you go. Right guy.
Ha, another good point. I didn’t recognize the person so I just lazily assumed it was supposed to be “generic Union Soldier”
I knew it was the wrong Sherman, but in the case of Google, I’d want the Total War Scorched Earth type.
Yeah. I just remembered from history class that he had given them a message saying basically “Surrender or I lay unholy seige apon the city and you either die by being blown up or starve to death.” and the name sounded good, lol. He did end up with the key to the city! Good old Sherman. Liked to laugh, sing, set fire to homes, sometimes with people in them, good old total war guy.
How about we start restricting how many businesses a company is allowed to buy out in a year. Maybe allow like 1-2 mergers a year. There no reason we should allow one company to buy everyone and then kill their products and services leaving the consumers holding the bag that will no longer function because the server is gone.
I would say even one a year would be too much.
That unless the business has failed and is no longer operating, for a merger and acquisition to occur they would have to petition the courts for permission first.
Imagine the shit that Microsoft and Google and Adobe and Amazon would be doing if they had to start their companies from scratch and compete against the already extant players in the field?
It would create so many jobs, and create an excess of consumer choice opportunity, lowering prices and fighting against inflation far more than a couple of percentage points on the interest rate index ever would.
I’m tired of only being offered incredibly overpriced very shitty low quality options in every single category.
We don’t need $100,000 cars. We need $5,000 cars.
We don’t need $1,000,000 homes, we need $25,000 homes that anyone in America who works a full-time job regardless of if they’re slinging fries at McDonald’s or digging ditches can afford.
We don’t need $100 a week grocery bills. We need $5 a week grocery bills.
Your arguments are all invalid because capitalism
(I fully agree with your post, I sorry the world is shit)
And ponies!
One thing that I’ve always found interesting is that silicon valley has a common start up strategy that is basically: do well enough to get bought buy your bigger competition. Basically, be a threat so your VCs can cash in when a Google, Facebook, etc buys you.
I’m other words, Silicon Valley has a start up culture that feeds an anticompetitive/anti-trust ecosystem. No one complains because they are all making money. It’s the users who slowly suffer and we end up were we are not with 5 companies running the modern web and Internet infrastructure.
Buyouts shouldn’t be allowed by default. The only cases where it should be allowed are when the business being bought out is struggling to the point where a buyout is really the only way to prevent bankruptcy. It should never be a good deal for the selling company and only a last resort to stop closing doors completely.
Can I vote for YOU for president?
Buying out companies takes longer than a year usually.
Ah yes, but you see, the US government only cares about faceless corporations, business owners and other rich people, and not about the average citizen, sorry.
I’d go further, restrict the market cap for businesses so they have to spin off if they get too big. Add to that a value limit for the number of boards you can sit on so 30 companies can’t be controlled by the same people.
God I hope it ends up splitting off Chrome. I think Google has done a great job with Chrome. But the recent Manifest v3 makes it clear they’re going to greatly degrade their users’ experience for Google’s bottom line. And they’re using their market dominance to do it.
Isn’t Manifest 3 about 3rd party tracking cookies?
Everyones going ape about UBlock, but that’s an unintended consequence.
I’m very happy to have 3 party cookies more limited. FB already tracks me everywhere everywhen.
(But I will be very very sad when UBlock doesn’t work anymore)
What does that even look like as a business model, though? There’s an expectation now that you don’t pay for web browsers. What would a standalone Chrome, Inc. look like?
Something very close to Mozilla in my opinion. They’d have the browser as their core product, a few more apps as a logical extension of that (maybe a mail client like Thubderbird), perhaps Chrome Inc would inherit google’s office suite? That would be a breath of fresh air. Maybe revive a few of Google’s killed ventures that seemed more than promising.
Mozilla is about to have serous issues because almost 90% of their funding was from Google’s illegal payments to make them the default search engine.
So maybe not the best model after all.
Mozilla basically gets all its money from Google
Chrome on its own does not make Google money, in fact the only reason they care about chrome is because it helps Google search engine. I can’t find the article, but there was an email from a google exec saying something along those lines
Do it do it do it do it do it do it…
Smash them with a hammer. Google should not exist as it is. Not for decades.
Break up AdSense, chrome, search, android, shatter them all into separate companies that can stop selling out literally every waking aspect of life as their sole business model.
and then prosecute them for antitrust if those companies conspire together
Maybe if all their shadiness hadn’t been allowed in the first place they wouldn’t have been able to become a monopoly.
But please, I beg of you, do Adobe next.
No, Amazon next.
How would the US JD break up a Swiss corp?
Any brands protected by American law must be independently-owned, with full transfer of all branding, patents, trade secrets, intellectual assets and physical assets.
So, for example, for even a single bottle of Perrier to be sold in America, it needs to have been made by a company registered with the brand name of Perrier, with exclusive use of that name within the country, independently owned and under zero control by Nestle, being manufactured using the exact same process with the exact same ingredients, and having control of the exact same patents and American-side infrastructure.
America is such a large marketplace that it would be impossible to split a company like this. Patents alone would prevent this, forcing Nestle to divest themselves of each individual subsidiary.
Instead of invading Africa to control people and steal resources, the usa could kick Nestle out of their plantations.
I remember the days of google being a cool startup that had just made news releasing gmail with a whopping 1GB of storage making everyone go crazy for the invites. It’s a strange feeling.
Yeah, I thought Google was so cool around 2004. Now I can’t wait for them to become irrelevant. I need to stop using “googling” as a verb…
Hell, do all the “to big to fail” megacorps.
Best news I’ve heard all day! Break up Meta, too, while you’re at it!
Amazon.
Disney, Bayer, Unilever
Walmart, Kroger, Safeway (the latter two are in the midst of merging as well)
Don’t stop with them
Crush corporations, swiftly and without fanfare rebuild capitalism with worker co-ops, seize the means of production without all that stagnation and failure that usually follows.
Will cooperatives really be able to offer good services or will they become corrupt sooner or later?
Can’t predict the future but a system like this could be better than our current state of affairs where we already suffer user-hostile services and corrupt action all concentrated in a few private companies to which we have no alternatives.
If cooperatives were a more prevalent structure, there would likely be more of them since the power incentives to consolidate are lessened, but not eliminated. Because there would be more competition in the marketplace, there would be more incentives to provide good products and services. We can assume that underperforming cooperatives would generally be less successful.
Also, with more participants in the marketplace and greater decision-making by members, less power would be concentrated in the hands of the owners and managers. While that’s not a guarantee against corruption, limiting power concentration lessens the impact of any individual’s corrupt actions and provides opportunity for others not to have to do business with them. Compare to the current state of Google’s leadership directing so much of the company’s efforts not toward providing service but toward manipulating people and markets to squeeze more money out of them.
There are, however, things we likely would lose out on with a more cooperative-based economy. For one, while there would be more incentive for co-ops to produce higher quality products and services, they would probably spend less effort on the “high polish” (for lack of a better way to say it) that attracts marginal customer/user growth. In other words, things would work better but probably be less pretty.
Another potential drawback is in economies of scale. Theoretically, market-dominant and tightly integrated companies can produce more for less while every piece of the puzzle just fits together. I don’t see this as a very compelling argument since the efficiency gains don’t usually benefit anyone but the owners, with excess profit directed not to increased quality but to marketing and manipulation. Since cooperatives would be less able to build up their own “walled gardens,” interoperability may be more incentivized and this drawback may be mitigated.
Really, though, anything has got to be better than having so many smart people working toward finding new ways to squeeze money out of us rather than doing something actually productive.
Another potential drawback is in economies of scale. Theoretically, market-dominant and tightly integrated companies can produce more for less while every piece of the puzzle just fits together.
Personally, I have a pet theory that economies of scale fall start working backwards once a company reaches a certain size because so many employees become so disconnected from the actual activity that makes the company money that 1. Various management types try to do good but instead accidentally impede the money making process, 2. Various inefficies emerge just due to the sheer number of people involved and miscommunications are amplified 3. You reach a scale where lots of B2B products (especially SAAS products) start making sense, but B2B generally charges you a premium for the convenience compared to doing it in house, so the cost benefit can quickly get out of whack while lock-in and corporate intertia makes it harder and harder to change
History says corrupt…
rebuild capitalism
Replace, yes?
Let’s just choose our words carefully for now or the people with the money will get spooked and pay the people with the missiles to start blowing things up.
I’m already on a list.
I’m trying to make things easier for my own FBI agent, we’ve been through a lot together.
Don’t ‘break it up’, nationalize it, and do the same with all these other giant corporations.
Profits could support UBI instead of encouraging billionaires.
That’s not in anyone’s interest. It’s the surest way to have a thousand national search engines which are all shitty. National walled internet Gardens etc
Break it up instead
Not sure where you’re getting the idea that there would be thousands. But as for the shitty part, it’s already shit. Google’s search engine utterly fails at it’s job, and not just because of the rise in LLM/SEO. They waste billions on fancy new AI searches that nobody wants, they accept bribes to get pages to the top of the search, and even when you’re looking at an actual for real result, it often isn’t even what you want.
When a critical industry fails to do its job, it is time to nationalize it. With that said, the criticality of search engines is debatable. I’m cool with breaking it up at a bare minimum. The list of corps in need of getting broken up is way to long.
The idea stems from the propaganda tool that would be if it were state owned. Other countries would seriously discourage or ban its use, but as it is useful they’d need a replacement. Hence a thousand shitty ones.
The idea stems from the propaganda tool that would be if it were state owned.
How is it not currently a propaganda tool? It’s owned by shareholders like blackrock and vanguard. At least with it being nationalized it’s possible to control it democratically.
Our options are:
- An open source nationalized search engine (which would promptly run into problems with SEO, because anybody could see what would get their site the #1 spot). This option can’t honestly be called propaganda, because everyone would know what weights if any are placed on results.
- A blackbox search engine that has been nationalized, with limited ability of the people to know/modify the algorithm
- A blackbox search engine owned by the likes of blackrock and vanguard, with no ability to democratically modify the algorithm
None of these options are good, but the third is clearly the worst. The rich should not dictate what results pop up.
Other countries would seriously discourage or ban its use, but as it is useful they’d need a replacement. Hence a thousand shitty ones.
There is only ~200ish countries out there depending on how you count it. Most of them share search engines across borders, and that is unlikely to change, because if they were to see a nationalized search engine as a security problem, they would have already seen google as a security problem. So even if every third country made their own, there would only be a few dozen search engines.
But even assuming there would be 1000 search engines, 1000 shitty search engines is better than 1 shitty search engine with 85% market share. At least with the 1000 shitty engines there is competition. As of now, google is free to mess around with their black box engine however they like, showing and hiding what they like, all at the behest of blackrock, vanguard & company.
So I don’t see how this would be to everyone’s disinterest. Killing google and nationalizing it is exactly in everyone’s interest.
How is it not currently a propaganda tool? It’s owned by shareholders like blackrock and vanguard. At least with it being nationalized it’s possible to control it democratically
It is somewhat, but it’s not as bad as if it was run by Trump and co.
Which is how x would become the whole internet.
Which is why the best option. Which you didn’t include, is splitting Google up. Split the advertising from search. This is the surest way to make them cater to us. Especially if we can force them to compete with other search engines.but it’s not as bad as if it was run by Trump and co.
The U.S. isn’t a functioning democracy though, which is why that’s a problem. And just because a nationalized service is controlled democratically doesn’t mean it is controlled by a president. There are a lot of different ways to have democracy.
And we no longer live in an era of horse and buggy, so democracy can be far more direct than it has in the past.
In addition, there is already a multitude of positions filled/appointed/approved by the president. The administrator of NASA, the administrator of the EPA, etc. There is nearly 500 federal agencies like this.
So this would not be a problem unique to a nationalized search engine. So the solution is an actual democratic control of these agencies/administrators, not a wanna be dictator.
Another thing to keep in mind, what I’m proposing is something that would only ever work in an actual functioning democracy. So therefore I am not proposing this within the U.S.
Which you didn’t include, is splitting Google up
As I said, I think it is debatable if a search engine is even critical enough to warrant nationalization. I don’t think the need is there. And as I (admitted retroactively edited my comment to say), I have previously stated that I’m totally cool with breaking up Google at a bare minimum. The rest of this is just about the hypothetical of nationalization.
Split the advertising from search.
Short of publicly funding private companies, this would just result in a subscription model, which nobody wants. It’s either ads, subs, or public subsidization.
This is the surest way to make them cater to us.
It’s a half measure. The only real way to make them cater to us (aside from previously mentioned nationalization) is regulation, workplace democracy, and so on.
Even if Google got turned into a small company that only ever does search, they’ll still be a business running under capitalism, with all of the profit seeking motives that got us to where we are now.
I think what we’re running into here, is that you want to talk about removing capitalism. Which I’m all for, in the context of a functional democracy. Which isn’t the case in the US or anywhere in the world.
Until we know what that looks like, and its parameters you won’t admit how bad nationalising a search engine is without other privately owned alternatives.
Lol… Democratically.
Just because the U.S. is a joke of a democracy doesn’t mean democracy as a whole is a joke.
*Constitutional Republic.
How would there be thousands? There aren’t thousands of nations, and everyone would still use Google.
If you break it up, that’s how you get thousands of shitty versions.
Maybe some countries might disable Google if it was owned by the US, but I have a feeling those countries already have their own issues with Google as it stands now.
I just think if the monopolistic corporations are too big and too essential to take down, then nationalization is a solution with many more positive traits than negative.
That hasn’t been the case if you look into what happened with Microsoft and browsers.
The other thing is
everyone would still use Google.
Is actually wrong, and what they proved with the antitrust case itself. A huge chunk of the anticompetitive activity was Google paying to be the default because people don’t change the default.
Why would we support UBISoft? They haven’t released any good games recently
Unfortunately one of the big ideas republicans have conditioned half our population into believing is that government itself is basically a flawed idea and that our government will not ever be able to do anything right. So it would be a tough sell to say the least.
And also as an American, I imagine many people around the world would not be thrilled with the prospect of the US government owning the web browser they use.
There is a kernel of truth in that sentiment though. The government has a tendency to be grossly wasteful of resources, but I feel this is offset by the fact that they aren’t profit driven in their goals and less likely to skyrocket prices to line shareholder pockets. Corporation are also “wasteful” in a sense, where they charge insane markups over actual cost and refuse to pay taxes on them, the difference here is that corporations move their profits offshore and out of Americans pockets, where the government always ends up paying private contractors more than they should. In the end corporations do more with less while government controlled services are always WAAAAAY cheaper than their private counterparts for the consumer despite them being inefficient.
This is the part they don’t get. Do you want zero waste and ever rising prices for the sake of some worthless rent seeking billionaire cocksucker, or do u want some inefficiency, but you pay less overall. One makes someone else rich at your expense, the other allows you an affordable life while preventing another billionaire from existing.
“Give me the fruit of some else’s labor!!!” Gross.
Right? Fucking billionaires
I don’t agree with that guy but doesn’t that apply to the people running these companies. Profit can only be made by exploiting labour. There can’t be any other way
Profit can only be made by exploiting labour.
This is a bad take and suffers from overly-simplistic thinking. Corporations are force multipliers for labor and the economic value of your labor is increased by joining forces with others.
Why is it a bad take. How can there be any other way. Where exactly is profit created from?
Profit is created from the output of productive labor. The amount of profit varies depending on the efficiency of the market and the company.
Companies are force multipliers for labor. The company’s profit comes from that force mulitplication, not by withholding profit from the worker who generated it.
Welcome back from your 6 month bad take hiatus.
Who’s labor?
Who is labor?
Ignoring the snark in your comment…
I assume you take issue with UBI?
Would you feel different if we ‘required service’ for UBI? For example, some countries have mandatory military service. If we nationalize these giant corporations, we could make working there a way to qualify for UBI.
Do you think UBI is just taking money from the average person and giving it to lazy people who do nothing? Or do you enjoy the separation of the rich while the rest of us struggle for scraps? Do you understand that the UBI would apply to you as well?
Or am I missing deeper thoughts given to your comment?
I don’t worry much about people who have more than me. I am grateful to enjoy my work and my life. I don’t want the government to steal from me and I don’t want them to steal from others either. Even in the black and white world of marxists, exploitation of labor just moves from the oppressors to the government. The government becomes the oppressors. It has never worked, it will never work. People are naturally motivated by profit. It’s built in. Messing with that or short-circuiting the work-reward system is unsustainable.
Fully support the action, don’t know how the timing works…
Best case, you only start to basically outline what this looks like before the election. Worst case, you enliven the complacent, left-centrist billionaires to vigorously join in with the perpetually batshit right wing billionaires to get trump in to “live to fight another day” with the reasoning of, “we need to save ourselves first, then we’ll deal with trump when he goes full fascist” and then they either won’t be able to or won’t care to because they won’t want to upset their share price.
Yea, I’m afraid of that, tbh, if more corpos go full elon.
Well, something, but that action is only temporary because those companies that were the result of the division are reunited to form or are acquired by other large companies.
Obviously they will no longer be what they were in the original company. But something is something.
I so want this to happen, but at the same time I’m scared that Samsung or whoever will buy AOSP and enshittify it completely
PBMs/healthcare conglomerating needs to be looked at as a top priority
And this Kroger Albertsons thing needs to be stopped for good
Separate the search engine from anything that stinks of advertising so it can return to what it’s supposed to do: return the most relevant results.
Because even appending
udm=14only gets rid of promoted links and in-page advertising, it does f**k-all to correct manipulated search results.No business in their right mind is going to just disable advertising altogether. There’s no other viable way to support a search engine. Google search has been supported by advertising since day 1.
They can fix search without removing advertising. Preventing them from simply paying off others to be the default could be enough.
A decentralized search engine, running on something like what Locutus (neo-Freenet) is intended to be, can work without a business.
Okay but no non-business is going to buy Google Search…
Can you elaborate on the business model of a search engine that has no ads?
The only business model that really works is charging people to use it, like Kagi is doing.
like Kagi is doing
I haven’t seen much to suggest Kagi’s results are better than Google’s. But that’s as much a function of time and horsepower as anything.
I would argue that the private model is what’s fundamentally wrong with modern search. Nationalize Google and make it a public utility, like any public library or publicly financed research institution. Open up the front end source code and let people apply their own filters and modifications, rather than locking everything down to force feed you sponsored content.
That’s the only real way to fix search.
Nationalize Google and make it a public utility, like any public library or publicly financed research institution.
This would be great. Running a search engine is very expensive though.
The Internet Archive is probably the closest thing we’ve got to something like this. It’s a non-profit but AFAIK they don’t get any government funding. They’ve got the scrapers and could probably work on a search engine project, but I doubt they could afford it in their current state. They’re spending a lot of money at the moment due to companies filing lawsuits about Internet Archive archiving their content (and a bunch of content is gone from the archive forever as a result
Running a search engine is very expensive though.
The federal government spends about $1.3B a year on advertising and another $37.5B on data collection, with Google being a major recipient of both budgets. Nationalization would save a small fortune.
And for the economic tailwinds that efficient Internet research provides, I’m willing to bet we’d see significant economic benefits that eclipse the base cost, not unlike with Amtrak or the USPS.
The Internet Archive is probably the closest thing we’ve got to something like this.
Them and Wikipedia, definitely. Both make for excellent models of non-profit free-at-point-of-use information services.
Yeah, let’s see how much worse corrupt bureaucrats can make this already rotten turd of a product!
Not trusting the EPA because Exxon has done such an awful job.
I get the feeling a lot of people would complain about Google search doing that too.
Let’s not make them a business. Search Engines are fundamental core services for the modern globalized and connected world. It’s just like your post-office service. Make it an internationally owned and funded non-profit organization with open-source and the goal of enabling the unrestricted sharing of knowledge over the internet.
What does the creation of a multi-national state owned search engine have to do with Google? I presume nations have the resources to do that all on their own.
What would you suggest the Google search engine be allowed to do to profit as a business?
There’s no suggestion. There is currently no way a search engine can be a viable modern business model and a good tool at the same time. It could potentially be a good business model and a decent tool even with ads, but only in a world where we accept that things can’t grow forever.
And chrome from everything else too
Chrome doesn’t make any money. How is it supposed to support itself as a separate company?
Chrome doesn’t make any money.
It defaults you to the Google web suite, where Google makes money on ads. And it harvests your data, which it can then sell to ad agencies as a tool to optimize targeted ad sales.
It doesn’t have to be free. People used to pay for licensed software with money instead of their private data. We can do that again, or there’s still open source options like Firefox and it’s derivatives.
It does have to be free. It’s open source software. If they tried to charge money for Chrome, people would just use Chromium or one of f the other browsers based on it.
Chromium is open source. Chrome is not. Open source also doesn’t mean that you can’t charge for the compiled binaries. But that isn’t my point. My point is that the reason it’s free is that you’re actually paying for it through the value of Google tracking and storing everything you do, but as a society have don’t have to structure services this way.
So they’re breaking up Google but giving Intel more free money after it cut 15k jobs?
Google also cut 12000 jobs in Jan 2023, but it does not have an AMD or Nvidia to kick its ass in search when it fucks up.
Intel is a near monopoly and it controls the physical hardware that runs the entire universe with the exception of mobile devices and embedded.
If you’re going to break anyone up that’s who I would go for first but because of the pipe dream of making computer chips in 'Murica these idiot politicians keep propping up Intel’s Wall Street investors while its employees get fucked over.
At the very least the x86 duopoly has to end. It’s not only legal but kept the way it is because of legal contracts. The courts need to declare them void because their enforcement leads to to the violation of antitrust laws.
IFS is struggling to compete against TSMC, Datacenter is bleeding and loosing Customers to AMD, Ampere. Microsoft, NVIDIA and Google are also working on ARM server CPUs. Client Computing Group is loosing marketshare to Apple and AMD, with Qualcomm also recently entering the ring. They had to kill Optane, sell their NAND business, they’re not really relevant in GPU, have to IPO Altera again to get some cash and Mobileye already had to be IPOd again.
Clearly the CPU market didn’t need intervention to get competitive again, Intel didn’t have the power to prevent others from competing in the market and as soon as they got complacent others got ready.
Relying on TSMC as the exclusive manufacturer for bleeding edge semiconductors would be insane. We need Intel and Samsung to remain competitive.
At the very least the x86 duopoly has to end. AMD, Intel and Centaur/VIA have x86 licensees. ARM exists, RISC-V is gaining traction - No need to implement all the legacy baggage of x86 when you can start with something a little bit more current.
Kagi is kicking their ass.
really? Is it growing that fast? I expected it would remain more niche than Linux, particularly if you need a subscription.
Oh I just mean in terms of product quality. It’s gonna take forever to even teach people they can change search engines.
Almost as hard as picking a lemmy server :D
How is this related?
Now break up Coca-Cola, those tax dodging fucks.
coca-cola, apple, windows, amazon…
Let’s include the airlines in that too. Fuck em!
If you’re angry at companies avoiding taxes, you should direct your anger towards the government. Companies that avoid taxes usually do so legally, either through loopholes or through intentional terms in the tax code. The fact that companies find ways to legally reduce their tax liability just means they’ve got good accountants that understand the tax laws.
Companies lobby the state for these hand outs. This has nothing to with being “good” and everything to do with them capturing the law making and regulatory processes for their benefit. Politicians are willing whores, no doubt.
Sure Goverment is limp dick but but it takes corporate lobby to make this corruption work.
Very naive take tbh.
Also brave of you to assume they are not actually breaking any laws considering what we know about US mega corp behaviors lol
This is such a pointless comment. What, do you work for Coca-Cola?
