The worst possible antitrust outcome
64 comments
·September 3, 2025AceJohnny2
null
frogperson
Americans have allowed the rich to become too wealthy. The kind of power that comes with billions of dollars just doesnt work with justice or democracy.
jmward01
I have nothing against rich. I have everything against a single person having a megaphone for themselves and a gag for everyone else and still calling it a democracy. We need strong laws that reduce the voice of money and increase the voice of individuals. Having said that, the practical implication is that money needs to loose power and there are very few ways to truly do that other than just take it away. So, I agree that our only known practical path to a healthier democracy is to make it harder to be pathologically rich.
idle_zealot
I'm not sure I understand what distinction you're drawing between ideological opposition to rich people existing and opposition to disproportionately powerful people existing.
In what hypothetical world are these not the exact same thing? Money is a unit of exchange that exists to compel action. That's the point of it, and is just another way of saying "power over others". A world where being rich doesn't grant power over others is one where money isn't money.
bigbadfeline
> A world where being rich doesn't grant power over others is one where money isn't money.
First off, my money doesn't grant me power over anybody and it's still money. That leaves only one logically possible version of your statement and the correction looks like this: "A world where being rich doesn't grant power over others is one where big money isn't big money"
In that form, your statement is perfectly logical, if somewhat tautological, but there is another problem with it and it's a real huge one: No textbook has anything like that and no school teaches it either, even the media is vary shy of talking about it.
At a first glance, that's not your problem but it definitely has to be, meaning, you and the people who gold similar views, should become loud public proponents of Speaking Truth to the Powerless (tm).
We can no longer have this cognitive dissonance economics that teaches that money is means of exchange, unit of account, etc, but skips the most important truth: that big money is, first and foremost, a tool of power over small money.
Only after this educational task is complete, your explanation will have the right to exist and be heard.
zdragnar
Being rich is a measure of wealth. In a world in which there is no resource scarcity and everyone has access to lots of resources, everyone is rich but not necessarily more rich or powerful than anyone else.
The average person today is much wealthier than many rich people from generations ago, even if they have less social power.
Being disproportionately powerful is tautologically a direct measure of disproportionate influence.
Tin pot dictators of resource-poor nations may not be especially wealthy compared to the very wealthy in the US, but typically have more disproportionate power (within their own country at least).
pdonis
> Money is a unit of exchange that exists to compel action
Not in a free market. In a free market, people have the option to refuse to accept your money if they don't want to give you what you want to buy from them with it.
like_any_other
> In what hypothetical world are these not the exact same thing?
A world with laws against monopolies, anti-competitive practices, and media ownership concentration. Not all uses of power are equivalent.
Standard Oil wasn't tamed by taking money from its owner. In fact, even if ownership over the company was dispersed among 10x as many shareholders as before, so long as the company can continue to act as a single entity, the abuse of its monopoly would continue.
JKCalhoun
> We need strong laws that reduce the voice of money and increase the voice of individuals.
Seeing the how flaccid "strong" laws have become, I prefer we go back to reducing the voice of money by taxing it away. Maybe our country could then finally have nice things.
nielsbot
Agreed. (I'm all in on confiscatory taxation.) No one person should be allowed to accumulate so much power and wealth.
culopatin
What do you do when all the money goes away to countries that don’t tax them that hard?
orwin
Yes, ideologically, i had no issue with people being rich, it's people having undue power over other people that i found morally wrong. I was a libertatian almost in the american meaning of the word, a liberal libertarian. Then, i tried to put my ideas real conditions, and came to the realisation that as long as money could buy you power, you can never be free. I don't realistically see how we can limit money influence on power, when you can offshore your company in two days, so in a practical manner, the only way to limit how rich one can get, until we figure out the rest.
saulpw
There's rich, and then there's 10x rich, and 100x rich, and 1000x rich, and 10000x rich, and now even 100000x rich. Millionaires are fine, billionaires are bad, and hectobillionaires are supremely terrible.
I think once someone gets to a billion dollars net worth, they should get an AmEx black card, and 99% of their assets moved into a sovereign public wealth fund. They can have anything they want, they lose the power of extreme asset allocation, and if they just like competing, they can start over and try to ring the bell again (and can give the second AmEx black card to a person of their choosing).
lotsofpulp
So if your business is extremely successful, your reward is losing control if it?
To who, politicians?
Leaving the large business intact and just changing the leader doesn’t seem like it changes anything.
tart-lemonade
It also doesn't work when the media is either striving to uphold the status quo that got us here or actively going out of its way to try and make things worse.
cut3
you mean the megaphones owned by the rich?
bilbo0s
Isn't "the media" really just, the rich?
From WSJ and The Economist, to CNN, BBC and FOX, right on through to Youtube podcasts.
AnthonyMouse
> Americans have allowed the rich to become too wealthy.
This consistently happens in a very specific way. A corporation that dominates a concentrated market becomes excessively large, which makes its early shareholders billionaires.
In other words, if you want to change this, you need to enforce antitrust laws and break up large corporations.
nielsbot
As well as tax like we used to in the 50s. (Ok, we can argue about the specifics, but you get the idea)
actionfromafar
Yeah, the regressives (can't call them conservatives anymore with a straight face) never want to go back to that part of the 50s, for some odd reason.
sieabahlpark
[dead]
thegreatpeter
Plenty of billionaires all over Europe. Relative to salaries the spread is quite worse. Democracy there is perfect
bbreier
As far as I am aware, wealth inequality is significantly better in Europe than it is in the United States (https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/wealth-in... as an example) and I still wouldn't characterize democracy in Europe as "perfect" even if we narrowly define the rubrick to be only concerned with money tipping the scales of power
aetherson
That site is weird. As far as I can tell, it's measuring income inequality, not wealth inequality, and it doesn't... appear to know the difference? Quoting it:
> The Gini index, or Gini coefficient, is a statistical measure of wealth distribution developed by the Italian statistician Corrado Gini. The Gini index is used to gauge economic inequality by measuring income distribution, also called wealth distribution.
It's a kinda big red flag if they say that income and wealth are the same thing!
There are a few notable cases of European countries having very high wealth inequality despite lower income inequality (my take which may not be shared by many: having low income inequality makes it hard for people who aren't generationally wealthy to overcome old money). Notably, Sweden has a higher wealth inequality than the United States.
However, I don't think it's true that Europe in general has higher wealth inequality than the United States. Here's the wikipedia list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_we...
NoMoreNicksLeft
> The kind of power that comes with billions of dollars just doesnt work with justice or democracy.
The government has billions of dollars. Thankfully government officials are immune to the corrupting influence of billions of dollars.
nielsbot
The bad part is that congress is bought so cheaply. Not with billions.
Under our current system you have to be daft to not invest in buying the government--it's a great return on your investment!
johannes1234321
Budget (in theory) is controlled by Congress, this is a bunch of people with their agendas who aim for being reelected.
The true billionaire doesn't have anybody else to ask and can finance the campaign to get somebody (not) elected.
BizarroLand
If you ever need to see what a false equivalence is, look at this comment
guyzero
I generally like Doctorow's writing and agree with a lot of what he says here, but:
"Google has stolen every fact about our lives, in service to propping up a monopoly that lets it steal our money, too."
I still have all the facts about my life and I don't think any money has been stolen. I get that this is rhetorical, but he's gone over the edge here.
gleenn
I think your phrase choice is also quite funny. Obviously a fact isn't physically stolen, it has been surveilled and sold to the highest bidder. Every fair chance a competitor had to offer you something better was taken from you, it just wasn't done in front of your face. And that data is becoming more and more valuable as we speak as all this AI data race heats up.
dumbledoren
Google became a monopoly in search, advertising and various other things. It uses all of those to extract money from everyone, especially the advertisers with absolutely no accountability. All the large and small businesses have to jack up prices to make up for the money that Google extracts from them through those monopolies, and then reflect that expense on the consumer. Just go to reddits like r/ppc or r/googleads. Google became a company that single handedly amplifies inflation during its endless extraction of profit.
BizarroLand
That's among the worst takes I've ever seen.
"Oh, a company knows literally everything about me and clandestinely sells that information to the highest bidder in order to target every facet of my existence so that multinational conglomerations can extract every erg of value from every heartbeat of my existence, but that's cool because I also know that information"
Geez.
saurik
I agree that the remedy sucks, but I am just not following the logic about private data? I'm totally willing to believe Cory is correct here, but I just need some more do the dots connected :/. I think the premise is that, if we want to have a competitor to Google Search--which I do not think was even the correct goal here, but seems to be what people were trying to optimize for :/--you would need to do something effectively impossible: you need to catch up to Google's search index operation, as, as a user, if I'm going to use a search engine, I'm going to use the one with the most data in it, lest I am just wasting my time. (I appreciate that for a minority of users they might have other things they are optimizing for, but that's always going to be a minority of users, and isn't going to really change Google's ridiculous market power.)
And so, if you have that goal--and I will again stress that I don't even think that is the correct primary goal to have at this point, due to Google having effectively taken control of the only browser that matters and being in control of the only video site that matters--breaking apart Google into a bunch of tiny companies along the obvious lines (Android, YouTube, Maps, Gmail, or even Chrome) wouldn't fix the situation, as that isn't going to suddenly allow anyone to create a viable competitor to Google search, as Google Search would still exist, it would still always continue to have more data indexed off the web than anyone else... forever.
You thereby have two options: you can try to destroy Google Search and make it so that no one has a search engine as good as Google--at least for a while--or you can figure out how to break up Google Search itself. The former is maybe a good outcome, but it is not only unrealistic, it isn't necessarily helpful in any external sense, which is where I get really confused about Cory's point here: the thing Google is searching over isn't my private data... it's my public data. Yes: they know a lot about my private data, and it could be cool to have that deleted, but that's kind of besides the point, as it has very little to do with Google Search; people aren't searching for my private data, and Google Search is going to find losing all of my private data as, at best, a minor inconvenience.
What you need to do, thereby, is figure out how to break up the Google Search product into parts, to separate the wholesale part of the business from the retail part of the business, whether by making it into two separate companies or putting restrictions on the combined whole to offer both services separately... and, it sounds like that is what they are going to try? Now, I don't know if this is going to work--as it might be extremely painful or confusing to actually build a useful search engine accessing Google's catalog--but it certainly isn't as if I have a better idea for how to create a competitor to Google Search.
(Again, though: I'm not sold on the idea that the actual problem with Google is that we don't have a competitor to Google Search. Hell: as of recently, my usage of Google Search has plummeted, as I've replaced most of the things I used to use Google for with various uses of large language models... and, yet, I still find Google to be too powerful in a way that distorts markets and should require some kind of antitrust intervention. :/ Maybe, then, the premise is that Cory feels that we should have tried to fix some other problem? But, he's saying that this result is itself a privacy breach... while simultaneously saying Google is going to skirt the benefit by redacting data so hard that they end up in court? I don't get it.)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/02/technology/google-search-...
> Judge Mehta was similarly cautious when forcing the company to share data. The company will need to share parts of its search index, the corpus of web pages and information that feeds its results page. But Google does not need to share other data associated with those results, including information about the quality of web pages, he added.
> Google must syndicate its search results to its competitors, Judge Mehta said, adding that the company could do so using the terms it already provides to commercial partners using the company’s results.
davmre
> The government doesn't have to win an antitrust trial in order to create competition. As the saying goes, "the process is the punishment."
Regardless of what you think of Google or this case specifically, this is an argument for authoritarianism: that it is legitimate for the government to "punish" any company at will, based only on them falling into political disfavor.
> ... the only punishment Google would have to bear from this trial would come after the government won its case, when the judge decided on a punishment (the term of art is "remedy") for Google.
Yes, this is called the rule of law. Punishment comes through the courts, after a guilty verdict. The government has to actually win the argument as to what remedies would be proportionate under the law. In this case the judge didn't buy it. It's fine to disagree with his reasoning (or with the law), but the fantasizing about extrajudicial punishment here is frankly un-American.
ratherbefuddled
There's very little reason that Google should have been protected from the evidence of its wrongdoing being made public. That's not extrajudicial punishment, that is public record. Justice should be seen to be done as well as done.
Who can know how appropriate or not the remedy was when the evidence is hidden?
For full disclosure: I'm neither a google employee nor a US citizen.
davmre
Sure, there's a strong public interest in having proceedings on record. US civil cases are supposed to have a presumption of openness, which the judge weighs against other interests, like protecting trade secrets, confidential business information, privacy of third parties, etc.
The public record argument is fine; it's just a different argument than the extrajudicial punishment advocated by the original post.
protocolture
>This is an argument for authoritarianism, that the government should be able to "punish" any company at will based only on them falling into political disfavor.
No its more like, the process of transparency harms the company enough that they will shift their own mentality to ensure they never have to participate in a transparent process.
davmre
If there's a general standard of transparency applied to all companies, fine. There are costs to increasing transparency, but certainly you could argue for that policy.
The argument that we should cheer on the use of government power to target a specific company, to selectively expose their dirty laundry as punishment for a crime they have not been convicted of, is what I found noxious in the original post.
protocolture
The direct reference was Bill Gates being forced to testify about internet explorer. Its hard to argue with that particular case. There are very few people who argue that the results of that intervention were unwarranted.
I do find it a bit curious however, where later in the article theres a discussion about explicit collusion between corporates and the government. I vastly prefer the state and corps to be at odds with each other, than in bed with each other. Do any of the allegations towards the end register on your authoritarianismometer?
drivebyhooting
Can I opt out from having my data shared with other companies? Or will some kind of privacy framework like ATT be applied to it?
inetknght
Would you be shocked to learn that neither will happen?
wmf
I think it's aggregate data so it's not really yours.
vkou
> Can I opt out from having my data shared with other companies?
Sure, the easiest way you can do that is to move to Europe and petition its regulators to further tighten the screws. They might actually listen.
drivebyhooting
How is moving to Europe the easiest solution? What about my family and life?
msarrel
[flagged]
> One of the facts established in the verdict was that Google had been slipping Apple more than $20b/year in exchange for which, Apple forbore from making a competing search engine.
Didn't Apple say that 1) they weren't interested in being in the Search Engine business 2) (in testimony) Google was by far the best search engine that they were going to use anyway ?
Certainly, $20B/Y weighs on the scale, but knowing Apple's negotiation tactics they could also have used their weight to do what they wanted anyhow and get paid handsomely for it (<waggle waggle> "if you don't pay us we might start using other defaults and you'll lose that lucrative iOS market")
My point is, while Google is clearly at fault in this whole situation, it's not quite as moustache-twirling evil as Doctorow paints it.