DOJ: Google must sell Chrome, Android could be next

Yeah but it's also not great when Amazon can undercut their way into every market because AWS is a crazy cash cow, which hurt other US companies. Do you really need Amazon to be a "second government" who can decide what "you" buy, see and to some degree think.

It "works" in China where the government just stomps their feet if companies misbehave too much and everyone complies instantly or get replaced.

Edit: s/Amazon/Jeff Bezos/g?

We have megacorps in EU too, Airbus and Lidl comes to mind, though I don't think Lidl operates anything but their main business outside of Germany, in Sweden we have Lidl grocery stores however.

Breaking monopolies doesn't kneecap US companies. Noncompetitive markets do that. Forcing healthy competition is how we keep competitive advantage, failing to do so is how we lose it. See: Deepseek

Seen this argument a lot recently, it's a really interesting take that I wouldn't have really considered before.

The common argument for breaking up monopolies is to provide more competition in the key area, since monopolies tend to focus efforts on things that don't benefit the consumer (like buying out smaller companies to stop them existing).

From that view, monopolies don't really benefit the US, if anything it stops the US market functioning competitively, and eventually running themselves into the ground.

I guess the other view is that "somebody is going to have a monopoly so why shouldn't it be my country?", but I'd say that ignores the fact that you can just curb other non-competitive behaviour fron foreign countries, like the EU has been trying to do with Apple and Google.

Smaller companies would be more nimble and efficient. Also, Google’s main dominant product (e.g. search & ads) would be forced to compete & innovate vs leveraging Chrome & Android to keep themselves dominant.

I'm happy to let China and Russia be the global leaders in panopticons and mass propaganda for their citizens. Google and Meta would be no great loss for Americans.

Both of those countries dislike powerful, large corporations because they are a base of power that could compete with the state or party. The Wagner Group comes to mind. But China also did a huge crackdown affecting companies like Alibaba and Tencent.

There's no reason why there can't be international co-operation on this subject.

I've noticed that the bigger a company gets, the shittier they get. I don't think the answer to the threats posed by countries like Russia and China lies in consolidating our markets under an oligarchy of bloated mega-corps.

Smaller companies are faster, more agile, and hungry for success. This breeds market competition, spurring innovation and rendering better products for the consumer. The Amazons and Googles and Microsofts of the world have largely outlived their purpose and only exist to hoover up money in their cornered markets rather than innovate.

You think monopolies should exist?

Microsoft and Azure, Bing, Office 365

Amazon (the retailer portion) and AWS, and probably their logistics wing

Chrome, search/ads, youtube, consumer apps - gmail & docs etc.

The egg cartel, the potato cartel, the corn cartel, almost every food resource silo has its own monopsony or monopoly of some kind in the USA or globally. In the USA at least it seems many of these things are constructed to avoid the letter of the old laws around monopoly.

The problem with Google, Meta, Amazon, et. al. is that they have a steady stream of income from their main business, and use it to enter new markets with loss leader schemes obviously designed to destroy their pre-existing competition...

I'm not from the US, but it seems to me like the companies you mention stay in their respective market and don't try to destroy competition in other markets, like Walmart is a supermarket chain, UnitedHealth is just health insurance, Exxon just deals with gas, JPMorgan Chase is just a bank, etc...,

meanwhile Google operated YouTube, Chrome, Gmail and other services at significant losses for years up until the point where they basically have monopoly in those areas because the competition couldn't keep up with Google's free products, and now when the competition is destroyed, they are destroying these free services with increased pricing or ads, neither of which were there while they still had competition in those spheres...

That is one of the tactics that the DOJ was going after (at least previously, not sure any more).

I agree that's what the laws are supposed to go after, but forced sale or divestment seems like the wrong remedy here.

Force Google to charge money for the service, or to pay a portion of imputed stolen revenue to competitors. But Chrome itself is not a viable business without the huge fountain of money that is search ads.

Whats weird is that nobody has tried to sell browsers for a very long time. It's not like they gave away Chrome to drive some other browser out of the market.

They developed Chrome because their business was web based and they wanted a solid platform for their apps.

And we all benefited from that stable platform. And its mostly open source in Chromium. And they are paying Mozilla to stay in the game - an arms length, independent implementation of standards.

I think its wrong to suggest what they should have done is build an entire walled garden like Apple has done.

It doesnt need to be sustained at the level Google is pushing it. Development could slow down considerably and it wouldnt harm anything, in fact it would do just what the DoJ wants and make it a fairer playing field for other browsers to catch up and compete.

Hadn't though about openai, which does seem like a possible interested party. The problem for them however is that they make money from subscriptions, not ads which presumably makes it much harder to monetize via control of the browser.

Hellworld.