I always thought that the idea behind antitrust laws was that if an entity reaches total market dominance and uses that dominance to keep other out of the game, the entity should be split into competing entities.

What I'm seeing however is nothing more than toothless, political pointing sticks.

Both IBM, Microsoft and Google have clearly at some point obtained total domination of their markets. Consequently they've all found themselves at the antitrust chopping blocks, however these companies have become so important to the economy that actual verdicts are reduced to a "carry on, just don't exert your dominance too much".

Or have I misunderstood antitrust laws?

Edit: s/excert/exert

Splitting companies that have physical presence is something that is a bit easier to do? That is, my gut would be that the examples you have in your mind for how companies that hit market dominance were split, are dominated by markets that required a bit more physical connection to the consumers they were serving.

You could also see easy ways to force a company that is using a dominant position in one industry to gain an upper hand in another to divest from that expansion.

Most of that falls apart with the nature of these markets, though?

The original Sherman Act specifies imprisonment for 1 year, a $5,000 fine, and the seizure of property due to the violating behavior. It also gives courts the authority to "prevent and restrain such violations". It makes no specific note of splitting up corporations.

Obviously this isn't the modern understanding, and the act was later amended.

I was just listening to this episode: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/acquired/id1050462261?...

They pointed out that a monopoly is not the sin, the sin is to abuse that market position for unfair advantage.

So your summary of their verdict in a way is what the US view of antitrust is.

FYI, when you share an Apple Podcasts link, anyone reading on an Apple device without the Podcasts app installed cannot do anything with it, even copy the link to open elsewhere-it just turns into a prompt to install "Podcasts." So I don't even know what podcast you're pointing to to find it in the app I prefer.

Sorry, I was on mobile and I got that link from the “share” sheet. I probably know that it is not portable, as I shared Apple News links and found that out before.

Here’s the part of the transcript:

> It is not necessarily illegal to be a monopoly. It is illegal to abuse your monopoly power. This court is examining both of those questions. (1) Is Microsoft a monopoly? (2) Are they abusing their power?

How would you split Google? Any type of split would kill that which makes Google so great.

1. Search site. As a separate product, it would need to earn money. Improve filtering and the search itself. It would be able to host ads from other advertising networks (like any other large site). Make an additional API or tool to regularly update data by certain filters) You can charge money for all these things.

2. Ads. As a separate advertising network, for which google.com will be just one platform/site, like thousands of others.

3. Mail as a separate service, leave the ability to log in to other sites through this account, so you keep one login for everything (who needs it). It can also be an advertising platform for any advertising network. You can offer better services for a fee, while keeping the basic functionality free.

4. YouTube as a separate service, as well as a platform where many other advertising networks or advertisers will compete for advertising space. Introduce paid plans for creators, where there will be a certain volume limit after which you will need to pay for the service.

5. Cloud services. Separately.

6. Google Docs. As a separate online document service, you can charge a subscription fee for certain features as in 365.

7. Browser. No need for Manifest v3. Improvements to the extension store. You can also sell advertising space and make integrations with various tools, as Opera does, for example. You can even make some kind of subscription, or make paid extensions that will speed up sites, improve the look, and cut out ads.

This is the first thing that came to mind. This can be thought out better. This will create competition for other players and for these potentially divided campaigns. General improvement of products. And all of this can be kept "under one login, in one ecosystem," with the ability to make "one system and one login" in conjunction with other tools.

Chrome, Android and the Play Store being separated companies would be great.

How would Chrome make money? Accepting $1B a year to make Google the default search engine?

Just like how they do now: selling your data.

thanks for saying out loud.

its uncanny how even people in the industry lives in the make believe world where google is a charity, moving mountains just so you can have a browser with "faster JavaScript" (which it's not, its all prefetch and marketing)

google made more money from the features they normalized by strong arming the w3c via chrome than anything else.

App store. The plug-in ecosystem is huge but Google makes more money using Chrome as an ad dump

Nothing is ever going to happen. Google, Apple etc are the US's international economic arm that ensures competing countries never develop a threatening IT sector. They're very happy to let any foreign startup be gobbled up, for example. Negative consequences on the domestic market are just an unfortunate byproduct.

I think in this case it could, simply because all of the competitors are American, none are foreign.

No, there are non-US competitors. Qwant, Mojeek, Seznam... You might reply, "but they're small" or "I haven't heard of them". Well, how do you think that came to be?

Besides, I'm replying to a comment about the wider trust case against google. It's not just about search engines.

Seznam took over 10 seconds for me to load start to finish and I'm on gigabit fiber. It has no English language option.

Maybe that's why I haven't heard of them?

Although Qwant looks kind of nice and obviously localized.

I also think it's interesting that I know about Kagi already but don't know about Mojeek despite Kagi using their results.

I fully agree that Google is a monopolist that has been oppressing the search engine market but at some point if you're going to start a company you need to do some marketing. DuckDuckGo is an example of success in that realm, it's nearly overtaken Yahoo.

DDG have done very well with their marketing.

It may have a lot to do with them not having to develop a search engine from scratch though, since they use the Bing API for their results. Mojeek predates them by some years but does their own crawling/indexing/ranking.

Even Ecosia who are essentially identical on the back-end (Bing results) market themselves on planting trees for every search and I see them mentioned a bunch. Interestingly they don't seem to factor in the energy consumed on Bing's side of the search - where the heavy lifting of data is done.

Also that US investors have a much bigger risk appetite means the likes of Neeva (who IIRC were also using other's results) can spring into existence and seemingly get a love in from the press because of their big tech connection.

The issue is that there is no direct fix.

It depends instead on the overall health of the Internet.

We are moving away from open commerce and into walled gardens. Once Google makes deals similar to their Reddit deal with Meta and Bytedance, it's going to become basically impossible for an upstart search engine to index anything competitively.

On the flip side once you leave the dark forest you stop needing search engines as much since you're contributing to a community you exist on the inside of.

I’m not really sure how you fix it. Considering it specifically calls out being the default option on iOS, we can assume that’s going to change. However, I could also see Chrome’s market dominance challenged. Maybe they’ll be forced to somehow split that off and Chrome will need to be funded through some combination of donations or selling its own ads/data.

An independent Chrome App Store would easily achieve profitability. There are more than 3 billion chrome users.

Are Chrome plugins capable enough to sustain a paid store model? I thought they were becoming more restricted to stifle ad blockers.

In this scenario, if Chrome were a separate business from the rest of Google, they would not be incentivized to stifle adblocking.

An aspect often overlooked is that the tech giants have an enormous advantage because they have harvested information for decades. In addition, highly targeted advertising creates all kinds of troubles for democracy when done on a scale like Google and Meta.

So, a powerful solution would be to make targeted advertising illegal. This would make it easier for new competitors to enter the market and make it visible if someone abuses the ad industry to push political agendas.

I can envision a gnarly Venn diagram of search, ads, AI, analytics, Chrome. You could easily make this 5 separate companies (ads and analytics were acquired), but you probably just need to split it somewhere in the middle.

"easily?" Which one would own Platforms? Which one would own the google3 monorepo?

This is not the courts problem. Google needs to solve this before the split.

It is always the court's problem. A judge does not have arbitrary or absolute authority. If Google can convince an appeals court that the judge has imposed an impossible or unreasonable remedy it will be overturned.

So if you make your anticompetitive business a tangled hairball then you're immune from being broken up because it would be "too hard"? Genius strategy.

All monopolies try this old scheme, that's why they became a monopoly in the first place. No reasonable judge will fall for this.

Haha, I mean they could easily survive as separate companies. Not that separating them would be easy.

Search would just farm out ads or develop their own again: its two sides of the same paper, by necessity.

Chrome is a loss leader and if cut out to it’s own company will die, because browsers are not a business that can make money anymore (same with eg C compilers for x86), AI maybe, but the only advantage AI has at google is that it has a crap-ton of data to train it with. Without that? The market just has one less AI product.

Regardless of how you split it, whomever ends up with search ends up with the value. And I guess the only way to split search would be into a background service api you could query and then have the front page be its own business. Others could then buy access, but the problem with that is that you then have a supplier that has all the power…

> Chrome is a loss leader and if cut out to it’s own company will die, because browsers are not a business that can make money anymore

That's the definition of anti-copetitive monopoly abuse, not an argument against doing something about it.

Except that Firefox was there first with a free unbundled browser.

But this verdict only involves the search business. All that other stuff is out of scope. And breaking it up like that leaves the search monopoly intact anyway.

Do you know which will happen first? Specifically, will the court put forth its remedies before the appeals begin? Or will those actions happen in parallel? Or what?