My belief is: legislation needs to either make it just as hard to merge two companies as it is to unmerge them, or make it just as easy to unmerge two companies as it is to merge them.
It's insane to me that for how often companies merge and cause competition issues, we effectively never see the opposite happen. I know there's a ceremonial approval for merging two companies (at least in the US), but it's just impossible to undo or prevent the damage.
This point of view has more to do with your information diet than it does with reality. Companies un-merge and spin out all the time, for many reasons. Mergers and acquisitions are more interesting because they are often associated with a growth story. We like success.
Aswath Damodaran, who teaches corporate finance at NYU Stern, has a bunch of great talks and content about this where he discusses how companies should act their age. When older companies that are no longer paying dividends are moving into a divestiture phase, they restructure and split up. What we are seeing with some of these big tech companies is that they are transitioning from an exciting growth story into an extractive dividend story in a way that's becoming harmful to consumers. That's why we're talking about breaking them up, and thats the line their management will have to walk if they want to maximize the value of the firm to shareholders through the decline.
This is true, I'd go much further than the OP here and say the barrier for merger should be MUCH higher than the barrier for spin-out or split.
There's no shortage of obvious problems that can arise from concentration of influence and control over a market. So just try to prevent it. Trade some max efficiency for redundancy + anti-corruption/pro-competition/pro-consumer market forces.
The real benefit of a merged company is that where the two original companies were competing in the same market, it would be illegal for them to collude to set the same prices as eachother.
However, when merged, they can do exactly that - which allows them to extract more profits.
Rather than denying mergers, I suggest merged companies have an extra sales tax for ever on all goods they sell where they used to be competing - with the size of that tax set by the regulator to estimate the benefit they get.
Merged companies are more able to compete. Combining duplicate corporate structures let them save on costs, etc.
It's not a strictly bad thing - iirc spirit? Airlines? Wanted to merge with someone, got denied, and went bankrupt anyway, depriving people of any competition at all.
Companies that have massive startup costs (Automakers, Airlines) are harder to replace. This is a failure of the system we are in. Seems like the free market cannot properly evaluate value when all the cash is going into nonsense like Bitcoin, NFT and now a lot of the AI.
Allegiant is an old Airline that has had a lot of problems. Breeze is new but both are starting super small and are not planning to really cover Spirits extended network anytime soon. The result of Spirit dying is alot of that prior investment in second tier cities/airports is just gone for the forseeable future. The potential value that could have generated will now not come to pass.
>Poorly run companies are supposed to go bankrupt, that’s the feedback loop keeping management in check.
The problem that is occuring in my opinion is that Spirit is a symptom of a greater problem. The "K shaped" economy is not only segregating groups of people into haves and have nots, its extending into regions of the country. Losing major airlines access is the precursor to entire regions declining, and ultimately dying completly. If the AI robot world comes to fruition maybe many humans just have no economic value at all.
To be fair, Spirit suffered from multiple reasons and a merger with Frontier may have just delayed the inevitable.
Note: I was very emotionally invested in Spirit because they made possible many fascinating trips that wouldn't have happened so my take may be biased. I can only think of a handful of companies that clearly positively impacted my life and Spirit was one of them.
1. Post COVID, the structural costs went up: pilots, flight attendants, suppliers demanded more money. Spirit paid decently well, had decent benefits from what I heard. When you are Spirit...to attract good people you gotta pay. It really showed in their operations, they had 0 crashes during their 34 years and had notable excellence in their maintenace operations. People thought they flew rickety junk planes. The reality was that they had a stellar run.
2. Pratt & Whitney GTF issues: Spirit actually had quite a young Airbus only fleet. Great for lowering costs through fuel/maintenance savings, customers enjoy the newest best planes...the downside is that if a major issue comes out, it could spread across the entire fleet. Thats exatly what happened: They leased brand new planes and then a serious engine issue occured that forced grounding of many new planes for 1+years....while they are still paying the leases on those planes.
3. The bigger competitors are really just credit card companies that fly planes as a hobby on the side. That gave them the financial ability to siphon off customers by introducing a barebones tier. Spirit customers aren't really the type to play the credit card points game so they couldn't copy what the big guys do and despite travel increasing after COVID, people decided to pay a bit more to not have the barebones experience.
4. Spirit was in the process of revamping their entire offering to better compete. More simple tiers with things baked in and less extreme customization that they used to offer. Makes sense: 9$ fares were gone for good so maybe they could compete as a solid basic tier. They did not move fast enough to turn things around. Its a bummer because it looks like they had an interesting plan after the second bankruptcy but we never got to see it fully play out.
5. The final nail in the coffin: The Iran war took out any remaining breathing room. They were just coming out of their second bankruptcy. I personally feel they had a viable plan to try and turn things around but the Trump admin just let them die without really trying. From my understanding(and I could be wrong) Trump pulled some nonsense where he wanted like 90% of the airline for peanuts, they would support ICE transport operations etc. The owners of the debt obviously said no and that was the end of that. Great job losing 17k employees their livelihood. Since this is a tenure based industry, many end up starting from scratch at another airline. A emergency merger or something would have had better consequences for the employees. Will be interesting to see how this affects the midterms since Spirit was based in Dania Beach, FL (Miami area)
The idea behind a Frontier + Spirit merger makes sense. The airlines combining together can cover a greater network, Spirit was getting rid of its poor leases through bankruptcy and maybe they could have been a major airline in the low end. The argument against is that Frontier is not doing too well either so should you really combine bad + bad?
The whole problem of monopolies is that they can set the monopoly tax as high as they want. There is no real upper limit. What you suggest will
1) make monopolies legal
2) set a floor for the monopoly tax (whilst excessive company profits are bad, obviously companies MUST make a profit, and hence whatever this governor sets as extra tax must be added to the costs for customers. Profit = good (even if you are a communist), only excessive profits or profiteering are bad. Otherwise, after a short while, no more company, no more goods, no more service. No exceptions, not even under different systems. Or in other words: communist companies must make profits too, and just ask some older Russians, even if that means making a profit at the expense of employees)
This seems to me like it would be by far the worst of all worlds. This would mean lots of monopolies, with the specific purpose of making life more expensive.
Conglomerates may not be as nimble and agile as single-focus companies, but they are uniquely more resilient to economic shock events, and branches being "unprofitable" for a time can be supported by others.
Unfortunately, MBA beancounter/neoliberal extremism aka "throw out everything not the core business" has become the norm... and so, with Covid, Ukraine and Trump's tariff and Iran wars, we got a ton of "single focus" companies that are struggling hard, and with everything deemed "not the core business" including internal IT, cleaning etc. sourced out, many a corporation has become internally enshittified.
Conglomerates aren't a strictly optimal form of organization. They are more resilient, but they are also massively bureaucratic and can lose their focus. They may also be able to exert a disproportionate amount of leverage on vendors and suppliers.
I'm not saying infinitely asset-light companies are strictly superior either.
I'm saying there's no silver bullet or free lunch here.
If you look at it from one layer above, capital markets that enable the continuous recycling of corporate structures into smaller or larger as needed are more resilient than those in which company structures are ossified.
Of course not every deal is for the better. But no M&A isn't good either. Speaking as a former Wall St M&A banker.
Objectively no. For example carbon taxes or other environmental taxes have been proposed by free market advocates since the 70s and never been implemented (from the left you see advocacy for environmentalism but not related to taxation)
Also if we had enough taxes, the wealth inequality would not be ramping up to great depression levels and basic necessities like healthcare and housing would not be catastrophically related to bankruptcies in america.
If you are a worker, specially one in the upper middle class range of salaries, then yes. You are being over taxed. But that is simply because those below you have nothing to contribute and the system refuses to tax those above you appropriately. You are a local maximum in a system that is not globally efficient, so you have too much tax, the country doesnt
Vague assertions with no evidence don't really help the discussion. If someone is going to assert such a strong claim like "We have more than enough taxes on working people and not enough on the wealthiest classes.", they really need to at least define what they mean by "working people" and "wealthiest classes" and then give some evidence to show that "taxes are disproportionately applied" between these groups. (You say it was a "truthful comment" but how can you even be sure you are interpeting the comment the way the original poster meant?)
(In general, whether people agree or disagree with an assertion I would hope they wouldn't downvote something as long as the person contributes enough to the discussion that the reader can understand what they are asserting and can check for themselves if the evidence they give supports or doesn't support the assertion.)
Wealth inequality in the US is so bad that the statement is true with pretty much any reasonable interpretation.
The top quantiles of the population (10%, 1%, 0.1%, billionaires) are paying less taxes than they should in a fair system; and that statement becomes increasingly illustrative of the situation the smaller and richer the quantile you choose is.
The fact that wealth inequality is _accellerating_ should be enough to tell you that the taxation system is unfair towards the poorer end.
IBM is more than 100 years old, has defined a huge part of how we think about computers, made plenty of its employees and workers of the wider field rich, has sold many businesses it considered distracting, and is still worth $200B+. Anyone saying "IBM" in the sense of "stagnant failure" is delusional.
Not to mention they are still at the forefront of materials science and industrial design, and just so happen to manufacture bespoke CPU & server platforms that run circles around all the hyperscalers...
> This point of view has more to do with your information diet than it does with reality. Companies un-merge and spin out all the time, for many reasons.
That’s condescending and wrong. Mergers and acquisitions are hundreds of times more common than spinoffs.
>What we are seeing with some of these big tech companies is that they are transitioning from an exciting growth story into an extractive dividend story in a way that's becoming harmful to consumers.
Alphabet is rolling out autonomous driving vehicles in many cities around the USA, potentially getting rid of the need to drive a car in 90% of today's use cases.
How is this not still an exciting growth story? My kids might never need to drive a vehicle, even though we live in a car dependent suburb.
Some cute tech projects do not justify a massive monopoly. Google is financing Waymo using the ~300 billion dollar it extracts annually from consumers via ad spending. I would rather pay substantially less on anything I buy, and have the free market sort out self-driving cars.
A product/service that can drastically reduce the top cause of injury and death, as well as give safe mobility to so many who do not currently have it is not a "cute tech project".
>I would rather pay substantially less on anything I buy, and have the free market sort out self-driving cars.
Alphabet's entire revenue divided by the total amount of goods and services sold is miniscule, so I don't see how it could be mathematically possible to pay substantially less on anything you buy.
>and have the free market sort out self-driving cars.
This is the free market sorting out self-driving cars.
Self-driving cars are an absurdly inefficient way to reduce traffic deaths that exists only because it makes substantially more money for shareholders than the alternatives. You are being witheld a good and cheap solution now for the promise of a worse and expensive solution some time in the future. All the while people keep dying.
Oh, and what's this "those who don't have it" bullshit? If anything, turning driving into a subscription service will mean mobility becomes harder for many people, as dirt-cheap used cars slowly stop being available. As for people who can't drive for whatever reason, they already have taxi apps. And don't think for a second that self-driving taxis will be cheaper in the long term than regular ones, only the margins will go up.
> Oh, and what's this "those who don't have it" bullshit? If anything, turning driving into a subscription service will mean mobility becomes harder for many people, as dirt-cheap used cars slowly stop being available.
Too many people are in the "You Will Own Nothing And You Will Be Happy" camp.
Apparently the thought of lifelong indenture is a plus to these people :-/
I prefer to live in reality, where American suburbs are nowhere near dense enough for public transport to pencil out, plus there is no political will from the voters for it. No one is tearing up existing roads and replatting all the detached single family homes to more dense housing.
Waymo is a real solution to reducing injuries from distracted and drunk drivers, as well as reducing insurance costs. Obviously, if Waymo is the only game in town, then prices will be high but hopefully there will be competition. Owning a car 24/7 along with space to store it and insure it is not necessarily always cheaper than renting it per trip.
A robotic car can be utilized for far more hours per day amortizing its costs over far more trips making each trip cost less. Which, if there is competition, should result in lower prices.
> I prefer to live in reality, where American suburbs are nowhere near dense enough for public transport to pencil out, plus there is no political will from the voters for it. No one is tearing up existing roads and replatting all the detached single family homes to more dense housing.
Car Country was designed by the US car lobby. Political will of the voters? Oh yeah sure, now a century into it that’s also not palatable for home owners and the like.
You mean public transport? I live in a country with one of the best public transport systems in the world. I enjoy it, but please don't fool yourself into thinking that it is cheap. It is not, very much NOT. All the big Czech cities spend between 25 and 35 per cent of their municipal budgets on public transport, and those are mostly already mature systems where the most expensive work like laying track is already amortized. New trams and buses, repairs, drivers wages, electricity, nothing is cheap nowadays.
Sure, an American city can decide to build a new tram or subway system from scratch, but don't promise anyone that it is going to be cheap. It won't, doubly so if the mayors stipulate high wages for the workers, like NYC does.
And even the best public transport system fails at the peripheries, where density of the population drops under a limit of viability. Then you have two buses a day even here in CZ.
Compared to every person owning their own car, but now it has a bunch of extra sensors and a cloud subscription? And the city still needs to build and maintain the roads.
Or a bunch of robotaxis, which reduce the up-front cost and amount of parking needed, but the operational and infrastructure costs remain.
I am not excited about my transportation becoming a subscription service, likely through regulatory capture. It will almost certainly mean less freedom of choice for me.
I am a fan of kids being able to roam freely because we don’t have to worry about people in their huge pickup trucks and SUVs looking down at their phone mowing down people and not even noticing.
It will certainly mean more freedom for those who don’t want or can’t use a giant vehicle to move around.
I trust automated vehicles with cameras and LIDAR to do a much better job of avoiding collisions.
what i personally find most insightful about this website is how the techbro culture will do anything except consider the needs of the many. why bother with good transit when we can automate cars? why bother with copyright when we can just steal content at a scale that few can comprehend.
The “needs”, or rather revealed preferences of many, is to live in detached single family homes on minimum 3,000 sq ft lots, with space for personal car storage.
There is no way public transit works in that kind of non dense living arrangement.
Do you have data to show Americans want to live in Manhattan/Tokyo style or even European style 4 story apartment/shared wall buildings?
Population trends in the US show me the suburbs are far more popular, at least among those who end up having children.
People in the US don’t magically “want” giant pickup trucks and pedestrian killing SUVs. They want cheap and practical vehicles, neither of which are available in large quantities. Notice how the advertising for pickups works? Straight, white, rural men in jeans telling you how your expensive pickup can drive off road? And then you read the manual and warranty where that exact usage is either forbidden or discouraged.
Same with the suburbs. Those we designed and pushed by the car lobby and the US made it illegal or very unprofitable to build any alternatives
Where is your data showing that people “prefer” this?
My data is the far lower prices for equivalent sized townhouses (homes that share walls) compared to detached single family houses, the increasing volumes of larger vehicles sold over smaller vehicles, and higher proportions of children in suburban areas compared to urban areas.
People like space, people like choosing who to share space with, and people like feeling more powerful (sitting higher up in bigger vehicles).
In my area, Zillow shows sold home prices for comparable townhomes vs detached SFH at roughly 30% lower price per square foot. People are willing to pay a couple hundred thousand dollars to not share walls.
>Those we designed and pushed by the car lobby and the US made it illegal or very unprofitable to build any alternatives
The US (federal government) didn't make it illegal or unprofitable to build more dense housing.
Local city and county level voters made it illegal and unprofitable, because more dense housing means poorer people, and poorer people means schools with kids who have poorer parents, which typically means a peer group that may not perform as well.
Splitting a large company is already done to shed and transfer liabilities. Divisional Merger Tactic / Texas Two Step. [0] [1] Keep the yoke and drop the albumen with time and patience.
You can bet that if the board of directors could show that unscrambling the omelet would result in greater shareholder value produced, it would suddenly be really easy to do...
Happened with Dow-Dupont! A three-way split, even (from a two-way merger). Took roughly two years and was the shareholders' plan from the start. By most accounts it went very smoothly.
It is a key point... if splits are encouraged and made easier (and I agree it'd be healthier for the market if the largest companies did), then liability needs to be handled carefully.
One doesn't want to create a 'snake sheds its skin' scenario where Meta (for example), stuffs all its liability in a spin-off, yet keeps the profits those actions accrued in the other entity.
Can we stop with taxing everything you don’t like? Taxes should be equal and used to fund the government, not as tools to make people do things you like.
Can we stop with pushing all of the taxes into the work-consume economy and out of the invest-return economy? The latter is eating the world, would it really hurt it to help clean up its own messes for once?
My first tech job was at HP, in 2015, started there just in time work and live through that split. That was a smoother one from what I hear but it was not a fun job to have at the time
I’m advocating for controlling the damage. The way I said it is cutesy, not literal.
I intended it to point out that it’s too easy to merge companies together but it’s effectively impossible to stop someone from becoming anticompetitive without a real consequence.
If we can’t make it easier to rip them apart then we shouldn’t be so slap-happy about approving them in the first place.
Nothing was skipped - the point is that this is directly analagous to unscrambling an omelet. Separating mixed things is significantly more difficult than mixing them.
"The laws says X" doesn't change whether X is possible or not.
fwiw I thought it was a good analogy. Sure splitting a company is possible and scrambling an omelette is not, but it sure takes a lot more effort to effectively undo entropy.
In a merger you can take as long as you want to go from
1. Two separate companies except at the end of the quarter we add their revenue and expenses together in a spreadsheet to transition to
2. One fully integrated organization
And usually you are becoming more efficient and saving time and money as you integrate.
Splitting a company needs to happen quickly or you'd get all sorts of weird effects where coworkers are ostensibly competitors whilst sharing resources during the transition. And you have to expend a huge amount of effort. Just a couple random complex systems that need to be untangled off the top of my head: physical property and leases, IP space for every IT service you run, multi-year contracts with every vendor from janitorial to SaaS, multi year contracts with customers depending on how the split goes, and of course all the intermingled finances and HR and spreadsheets every company in the world lives on. I'm sure there's thousands more considerations.
I agree antitrust is a big problem that needs to be solved. But "it should be the same amount of effort to merge and split a company" is just fantasy.
Yes, because the difficulties in separating integrated pieces have nothing to do with a merger.
What makes splitting a company out difficult isn't (directly) a financial or paperwork burden - it's that tightly integrated systems are very difficult to untangle. There is nothing analagous that could be introduced in the merger process. You could add a mandatory delay, but that's not making it "as hard", it's just making it slower.
I don't understand why you think the only possible ways to make mergers harder need to be "analogous". If they put a hard cap on the size of companies allowed to merge, that would make it harder, without making it harder to break them up. It's hard to take seriously the idea that you think there's literally no possible legislation that could end up changing the relative difficulty in the way the parent comment describes when I was able to come up with an insanely trivial example without needing to think about it for more than a couple minutes.
The law could make mergers executed provisionally for up to X years, with a binding plan to "unmerge" that must be updated every Y months. The FTC already half-does this with post-merge divestiture requirements.
Yes, that's the point, making something hard means that sometimes it will not happen. Only comparing to the cases where it does happen is missing the entire point.
Yes, this is obviously the ask: why doesn't government unmix the omelet. Your very body unscrambles the omelet and makes you. It's what intelligent things do when they are moving agency into the proper places.
what is the purpose of regulation except to resist entropy in such strategic places?
Progressive corporate taxation would give the market an incentive to do spinoffs and undo the merger wave.
Or we could just roll antitrust policy back to what it was before Ronald Reagan and Robert Bork installed the Consumer Welfare Standard, the idea that companies must be allowed to merge if they can scribble a tall tale with crayons on butcher paper about how the merger will benefit consumers, for sure, pinky promise. This is obviously mega-rigged, it comes from the Robber Baron era, it was defeated before (look up Louis Brandeis) and it can be defeated again (look up Lina Khan). They didn't even change the talking points (dontcha know, the Standard Oil monopoly reduced the price of Kerosene by 70%?!) -- time is a flat circle when it comes to anti-trust policy. Let's spin it back to the part of the circle where we win.
Progressive corporate taxation would lead to every company splitting its revenue and expenses across 50 shell companies, without actually splitting operations.
Not if the gaggle of shell companies was difficult to invest into or had enough rights to make it a strategic threat. But sure, wave those infomercial-hands some more and maybe you'll convince me that I can't use a screwdriver.
I like globalisation on its face. The second-order effects are a bitch. I don't want to go full protectionist, bit we should swing the needle back a bit.
Undoing mistakes is usually difficult and costly, but still worth doing on the road to not making the mistake again. Grandfathering in the subversion of the economy and our democracy is worth fighting.
No, they're advocating for more scrutiny of whether the omelet is going to be very bad for everyone who isn't part of the omelet (yes, this metaphor is weird, but I didn't introduce it)
That’s one half. The other, more interesting half, recognizes that unscrambling the egg is difficult, so we must take more precautions before scrambling it in the first place.
I’ve been saying that an easy solution is just don’t allow companies with even modestly large overall sizes to merge or acquire other companies. At all. For any reason.
I think that despite this reform being a blunt instrument it would work surprisingly well.
It would allow companies that should have declined to decline and it would give massive incumbents a major incentive to innovate in-house.
PE companies do it with very little regard for if any of the pieces are viable and survive after the fact, so their model isn't one I'd suggest following.
From a public policy perspective it doesn't matter if some pieces are unviable and fail to survive. Across the entire economy, this creative destruction allows for quickly reallocating resources to more productive uses. Most of the companies that take PE investments do so because they're badly managed and unable to obtain capital from other sources; they would likely fail anyway. At least the PE investment gives them a chance to survive and brings in more financially disciplined management.
There's many examples of companies who were conducting a low growth, long-term viable business. And where then PE stepped in, ripped out the most profitable part(s), and discarded the less-profitable parts as a dead husk.
In the process, the public lost the benefit that less-profitable part provided. Besides ripping up a company that was doing fine as-is.
You call that "reallocating resources to more productive uses". Yes that may be what's happening in some cases. But not always.
Less-profitable != non-beneficial to the public. At this point I regard PE entities as value-extraction machines. Which sometimes, but rarely, work with the public's benefit in mind.
And let's not get started on cases where PE secured loans, sold off a company's assets, only to lease them right back. Leaving company deprived of their assets & debt-laden, going under shortly after, while PE firm runs off with the goodies. Most people would think of that as theft & destruction. But in high-finance world it's named differently & somehow legal.
> or make it just as easy to unmerge two companies as it is to merge them.
[Disclaimer: I work at Google, all words my own and not representative of anyone, etc.]
There's no such thing. Let's stick to software since it's what HN knows best, but it's a universal truth.
Merging two companies: you take the two sides and they keep running. You probably need some extra accounting work to make sure the mandatory reports from each side get combined, but that's all you have to do.
Splitting two companies: oof. If you split ChildCo out of ParentCo:
* You need to hire all the roles that weren't part of that organization before (HR, legal, compliance, etc.)
* You need to register this new entity in all the countries it operates and/or has employees in
* Technologically it's somewhere between messy and impossible. Now you no longer have Google's build stack or monorepo. You have to rewrite everything. You can't just move some VMs to a cloud provider of choice
I suspect a large majority of the issues you brought up with splitting can be addressed by legislation.
Off the top of my head, something along the lines of having a mandatory period of time where the company being acquired must be kept separate enough that the merger can be dissolved in a timely manner should it be deemed necessary. How long that window should be would be up for debate but personally I'd argue the window should scale somehow based on things like the valuations of each company involved, headcounts, and maybe even competitive landscape.
An example would be requiring both companies to perform a pre-merger assessment to determine positions/roles, technology use and regulatory requirements that must be maintained for a clean separation and creating a plan that gets filed with the relevant agencies to be used if/when the merger needs dissolving. If the time comes that they need to dissolve the merger but they don't maintain that separation, they still have to do it and you slap a fine on them equal to some percentage of that mergers cost to be paid by the parent company.
Hell, that idea alone would accomplish both making it harder to merge and easier to dissolve the merger.
I think a better framing we should ask ourselves is why is the onus on the government to make sure a breakup is clean? Nothing in the constitution guarantees the rights of corporation.
I disagree with your premise that I shouldn’t express concern/opinions or point out problems with things that affect me simply because I’m not a trained expert in that thing.
"I think that the law should make this happen" without any thought for whether what you're proposing is possible or consistent with the laws of the universe is lazy.
This is similar to people who think we should just legislate secure encryption that has law enforcement backdoors. It's not possible, and people demanding it without an understanding of the area they're trying to regulate is lazy and insulting.
I have less sympathy for Facebook/Meta. Zuckerberg is on record as saying IG can hurt us. The Whatsapp co-founder Acton saying "it's time. delete Facebook". The fact Zuckerberg's engineers were apparently specifically asked to merge the backends to make them harder to break up. I have very little sympathy for that specifically. I'm not thrilled with a lot of the things Google has done with (say) Youtube - people LOST THEIR ACCOUNTS because of forcing the link to Google+ - but I don't think it's in the same league
Chrome is one of those nebulous areas. If they're dictating web standards they deserve at least an antitrust glance
But what are you trying to say about the greater argument? The parent had two parts to it - make merging as difficult as unmerging, or make unmerging as easy as merging. While you're right that the wiggle room for making unmerging a lot easier is very constrained, this doesn't say anything about the feasibility of the other part of the 'or' and the actual argument they're putting forward. Unless you're trying to extrapolate this to saying that both these changes are impossible, it just comes off as being pedantic.
> Technologically it's somewhere between messy and impossible. Now you no longer have Google's build stack or monorepo. You have to rewrite everything. You can't just move some VMs to a cloud provider of choice
You could give a copy to both successors. Probably would want to excise some of the repo on both sides, but build tools for sure would be fine to have a second copy. There's no need to rewrite everything, especially if Parent and Child are barred by court decree from entering overlapping businesses.
For things that really need a single corporate owner, you could potentially spin that off as well and have both successors contract from that one or depending on the terms of separation have a joint partnership.
Hosting would be messy, yes. But somehow the tech world outside google manages to run systems without Google tools. It would be an adjustment, potentially a large adjustment and take a lot of hours.
> You need to hire all the roles that weren't part of that organization before (HR, legal, compliance, etc.)
> You need to register this new entity in all the countries it operates and/or has employees in
This costs money, people, and time, but it's straight forward. HR and legal would likely need some additional people, but likely you assign the people who work with the spinoff business to the spin off corporation and then back fill as needed.
In none of those two cases is what's being proposed "as easy as a merger" - especially since those companies get to take as much time as they want without any court or law-enforced timeline.
Companies that spin off separate businesses do this stuff all the time, staff up the new business to fill the gaps, license tech from the parent to the new spinoff etc
Very often a demerge comes before an acquisition. Example, a fund could buy a huge group/conglomerate made of various companies, and then sell each companies separately. Each company sold is merged to another group but demerged from its original group.
My experience is that "split" companies are often split only at the superficial financial level and the behind-the-scenes engineering systems are never actually decoupled, you just have a services agreement where the new company pays the old company to continue providing software. Or vice versa. It's usually pretty ugly and expensive and not the clean win for competition you are thinking about.
> My belief is: legislation needs to either make it just as hard to merge two companies as it is to unmerge them, or make it just as easy to unmerge two companies as it is to merge them.
Easy for companies to merge, and... who is going to "unmerge" them when they don't want to? It is easy for them to split up if they want to you know, it's just: they don't want to.
I don't necessarily disagree, but in practice it's never as easy. Combing ingredients for a cake is always easier than separating them back out. Getting married is easier than getting divorced. It almost feels like some kind of fundamental law.
This is an incredibly naive view. It truly is shocking to me that anyone in this day and age with any sense of how business works in the United States or even in any reasonably free economic system would view merhers as prima facie bad or in need of regulation which this comment implies. Are we truly going to submit every merger of any size or type to regulatory review? Oh boy.
> Google’s ad tech business brought in $30 billion last year, or about 8 percent of the revenue for its parent company, Alphabet. Its ad tech revenue has declined for 16 straight quarters, and analysts estimate it accounts for less than 1 percent of the company’s profit...
“This is a business no one cares about"
Can someone closer to GOOG explain this? The phrase "ad tech" seems to have a very specific meaning here. Does this 1% include all advertising around the Web? Basically all ad revenue outside of Google's own properties? The number is surprisingly low.
Google owns Google Ad Manager (the tool third-party website and app publishers like NyTimes use to show ads on their properties), Google Ads (the place advertisers like Nike go to run ad campaigns across both Google properties and also these third party sites), and AdX the ad exchange that runs the auction that sits between Ad Manager and Google Ads.
The lawsuit is specifically about googles ownership of the auction and the ownership of the relationship on either side of the auction. The AdX auction also contains demand (ads from places besides google ads) and inventory (ad slots outside of ad manager). Website publishers allege that Google uses this ownership to artificially deflate the value of ads on third party websites.
On page numbered 60, you can see the Disaggregated Revenues.
The $30B quote seems to be referencing "Google Network" revenues declining from $31B in 2023 to $30B in 2025. "Google Network" is grouped with "YouTube ads" and "Google Search & other" to comprise the "Google advertising" category of revenues which increased from $238B in 2023 to $295B in 2025.
So yea, "ad tech" does not represent the whole of Google's advertising revenue.
I haven't been in ads there in, like, over a decade and some but I believe what was under threat here was specifically Google's ad exchange network. Basically third party bidding for space in Google's display ad network. Basically a part of the business which sells excess "inventory" and which is a much smaller part of their ad business than AdWords and AdSense. Or whatever they call these things now.
I used to work in AdX (and AdMeld that Google acquired) but not since 2014 or so. I believe the AdMeld acquisition itself was one of the things under the microscope here.
The money is nbd, but it's much more important to Google (same as it would be for any of the other tech giants) to keep a certain streak going - 42 years now and counting since the government forced a large or important company to do anything even resembling breaking up. A loss here would serve as precedent (either legally, or at minimum in people's emotions) that you CAN force a divestiture. If Google can be forced to divest this business, why not Chrome, YouTube, or Android? Why can't Apple be forced to divest the App Store business, or Amazon be forced to divest AWS?
Well they had their chance for "change" with Obama, just like the french PS had their chance for "changement" with Hollande. And both betrayed their electoral base and honest people by empowering multinational corporations against consumers and small businesses. Who could have predicted that noone would want to elect them again?
Please. If you’re an adult and you still believe anything any politician ever says, then you may still have some growing up to do.
Left. Right. Up. Down. Doesn’t matter. A politicians job description nowadays boils down to doing everything in their power benefit themselves and their partners and to hell with you unimportant people if it bothers you any.
Crazy to think there were no GOP presidents between Bush and Trump. I first interpreted this as the new record low is lower than the old record low. But no, Trump was the very next one.
I won’t lie, I asked Copilot (of all things) first, in order to be more confident I wasn’t forgetting even one breakup, and it also pointed out that “almost” one.
Hot take? But I think antitrust trials should not he subject to settlement. It only proves to reinforce the accusations when a company is big enough to pay off the government.
...then how do you maintain an adversarial proceeding?
Like, it's a pretty basic part of American law that courts only hear "cases and controversies" - that is to say, you need to have two parties who disagree before judges are allowed to do anything. If both parties no longer disagree, a settlement is how they call the lawsuit off. But if they're not allowed to settle... what happens? Are we going to force both parties into the court to argue positions they no longer hold? Like, what stops the government from just arguing the case really badly to intentionally lose? That would be worse: now, instead of a prosecution leading to a weak settlement, you have every weak case being carried to term, resulting in a miscarriage of justice as each judgment forms negative precedent against future antitrust action. This is a recipe for eroding antitrust faster.
What you're thinking is that government lawyers are just there to extract the settlement, ergo if we force them to go for the kill, they will get more kills. The reality is that the current social class of lawyers and judges hate antitrust. They successfully recast it from an argument about market power to an argument about price controls, and well, most monopolies don't actually raise prices[0], so building a case against them is very difficult.
Hell, in the Microsoft lawsuit, the reason why the government settled was because the initial judgement to break up Microsoft got thrown out, because the judge who issued it blabbed about it to the press. Keeping the case going would not have produced a better outcome than a negotiated settlement.
Furthermore, while the current "monopoly is about prices" argument is new, the judicial contempt for antitrust is not new. It took three tries and FDR threatening to pack the courts before we got judges consistently applying antitrust law as anything more than a mere ban on unions. While courts are ostensibly neutral arbiters of law, they bend to the fiscal interests of the nation and are inherently political entities, because courts have no inherent power but what they are given by the state.
Or, in other words, if you want more antitrust breakups you need Congress to start appointing more neo-Brandeis leaning judges.
[0] Strictly speaking, there are lots of businesses where monopolies are economically efficient. A monopolist that raises prices is
> If both parties no longer disagree, a settlement is how they call the lawsuit off. But if they're not allowed to settle... what happens?
As someone who's been in court quite a lot, personally involved, in the cases, etc, I can guarantee you that legislation fixes this. Just about your entire argument falls apart if legislation enforcing a spirit of "Antitrust against a party can only be settled by a division of the the party".
You wanna settle? Sure, but it means you gotta divide in a way that we agree to . You're claiming you're not guilty of antitrust? Okay, lets take it before a court.
This way there will never be a "settlement" whereby the monopolist gets to pay a cost of doing business and then continue doing business in the same way.
It's the government as a prosecutor. If current teams are compromised, they find a different team.
This isn't like some law firm with an interest to keep their own lights on. A government prosecution against a threat to labor and economic markets should be to close whatever loopholes lead up to this point.
>The reality is that the current social class of lawyers and judges hate antitrust. They successfully recast it from an argument about market power to an argument about price controls, and well, most monopolies don't actually raise prices[0], so building a case against them is very difficult.
Sounds like a compromised DoJ in that case. Which is definitely the case in the modern day.
But the monopoly argument doesn't hold weight. Some aspects of life are best run as monopolies. But such businesses are highly, highly regulated to prevent the downsides of unbridled capitalism. Big tech is not regulated at all in terms of pricings. And thus we're seeing the results of that in real time.
>While courts are ostensibly neutral arbiters of law, they bend to the fiscal interests of the nation and are inherently political entities, because courts have no inherent power but what they are given by the state.
Sounds like a fancy way to say "big companies always bribed the courts". It's in economic best interest to have a free flow of competition. But it's in individuals' best interests to have good relationships with the biggest winners. The claim of 'interests of the nation' contradicts the fact that being soft on anti-trust betrays such interests.
I apologize - I know that the "Citation needed" meme is mostly a way to say "I disagree" but in this case you literally left out your citation :)
You make a claim ("most monopolies don't actually raise prices") you use the end-note citation format ( "[0]" ), but then the end-note is a parenthetical comment that starts to restart your claim and then trails off.
In all seriousness: If you or anyone else can list examples of efficient monopolies I'd be curious to know.
Off the top of my head: local utilities are often given local monopolies. Telecom seems to often be a local monopoly (I've got one option for Internet access, and that's reasonably common here in the US, especially outside of metro areas). I feel like the utilities are reasonably efficient but the telecoms aren't, but I don't have any specific data to back that up.
i think the distinction is between ads that google sells vs software infrastructure for 3rd part ads (ad tech). ie the revenue's from google's ads on search, maps, youtube, etc are still huge and important -- that's google's advertising business, the eyeballs they sell, if you will. ad tech is google's business brokering ads on other sites, helping others sell their eyeballs.
at least this is how i understand it currently, but i don't know very much. happy to be corrected by someone who does.
Classic capitalism move. It’s not directly making much profit therefore it’s not important! When something that gives you outsized influence or control.. sometimes you would lose money just to control.
Something can be unprofitable but still extremely valuable. These companies are playing strategy games at the geopolitical level and money is not the only resource they want to accumulate to win the game…
By "ad tech" they apparently mean AdX, the part of Google that used to monetize the old open third-party Internet we used to have. (That old Internet that Google itself killed in favor of their walled-garden ecosystem.)
Ok I have some existing comments I'd love to quote[3] on this sad, sad day for the world, but in the meantime: yes, you are 100% correct that this is small compared to their money printer, and yes, this is "all advertising around the web", including many Google first-party publishers like the homescreen of the Google Search app. This is called Display Advertising, as opposed to Search Advertising.
Its still a massive business that they make way too high of a margin on through some truly brazen monopoly tactics[1], so the takeaway there is fundamentally twofold:
1. Google's money printer is so much bigger than one can really even fathom. When you're searching, you have intentionality already; for this reason search ads are less like a new type of billboard, and more like a technology that replaces the racks at Macy's every time you walk in, depending on who bid the most for you in particular based on what you're there to buy.
One consequence we don't think about enough is the crazy levels of innovation that Google has gifted the world for free, from Gmail to Google Maps to Android (all problematic in various ways, sure, but still incredibly expensive products to make that we get for free). They don't do that because they're some weird company who likes giving away stuff -- they do that because that's rational behavior when you own a money printer.
2. Display ads are becoming more and more desparate as our online culture spurns them more and more. It's perhaps not obvious that this business is why they care about gathering your data -- specifically, because personalized Display Ads on the internet are so relatively inneffective at this point that they need the boost.
I'm honestly guessing that Sundar is sad about this decision, TBH; splitting off the whole "buy side" of their display ads business would win them pity for the next few decades from regulators, and it's just so clearly doomed, IMHO. Ads increase, blockers increase, paywalls increase, scrapers increase, ads increase, on and on...
e.g., to pull a random old quote:
Meanwhile, the economic engine that powers the long tail of the open internet — Google AdSense — has been quietly shrinking. The “Google Network” (which includes AdSense and AdMob) once represented around 20% of Alphabet’s revenue. At this pace, by the end of 2026, it could be less than 5%, with AdSense (web) potentially representing half of that. In Q3 2024, for example, Google Network revenues declined to about $7.7 billion — less than 8% of Alphabet’s $76.7 billion total revenue — continuing a steady multiyear slide.[2]
TL;DR: On Google's brand new, gorgeous Ads campus right up against the San Francisco Bay, giant signs were put up with "Powering the free and open internet," apparently an old informal motto from the AdSense days. I just can't help but think about that sign, today. I wonder what the people working there feel, now that it's mostly just powering the scammy mobile gaming market.
[1]: Super basically, , they've spent insane sums of money to stay as the middle man for the split-second auctions that determine what to put on the Macy's shelves. This makes them some money directly, but it makes them way more money by unfairly propping up their own advertising companies, which are competetive customers of Google's own marketplace.[3] The details get boring, but I think it's obvious why running a fundamentally-opaque auction in which you are a participant creates perverse incentives.
Technically they run the automated marketplace that lives below the marketplaces that the advertisers and publishers work with directly, if that makes more sense.
Who gets to define the market? Does the "market" consist of only advertising technology platforms, or everything involved in online advertising, or all advertising through every possible channel worldwide?
Because bad behavior tends to scale with company size, not because smaller companies are more virtuous, but because they just have less power to do harm than bigger companies.
Imagine that there were only two companies, and they each had 50% market share in every market that exists. Would you expect either to be well behaved?
You may be surprised to learn that the US corporate tax (yes, that one, the main one we already have and everyone pays) was originally introduced in 1909 specifically as an antitrust measure, to clip the wings of US Steel and Standard Oil.
Of course the best laid taxes always get abused or turn into something else entirely.
There is a reference to this in For Whom the Bell Tolls:
“ Robert Jordan, wiping out the stew bowl with bread, explained how the income tax and inheritance tax worked. 'But the big estates remain. Also, there are taxes on the land,' he said.
'But surely the big proprietors and the rich will make a revolution against such taxes. Such taxes appear to me to be revolutionary. They will revolt against the government when they see that they are threatened, exactly as the fascists have done here,' Primitivo said.”
They lost in court, and were found to be a Monopoly. The solution is they tell the court, "sorry we will stop abusing our behaviour now", and then it's just all good?
Meta just had to make a settlement in a major case that is bad for them. That doesn't look like the "donations" are working very well.
And yes, that settlement is bad for them. What nearly every commenter here in the threads about it overlooked is that it is not the only case against Meta. There are still several cases from governments below state level against them, and several thousand individual cases.
Almost all the vast amounts of material the plaintiffs used in the recent case, including a massive amount of internal Meta documents plaintiffs got in discovery, material from depositions, material from experts, legal arguments, and more can now be used in those thousands of other cases.
Thousands of small plaintiffs have just been handed a fully loaded anti-Meta weapon built using the vast resources of 47 state Attorney General's offices. Meta season is now open and they are going to be trying to doge Meta hunters who just got a big upgrade from the bows and arrows they hunted with before.
And how exactly are they working? The DOJ didn't drop the case or withdraw its request for a breakup. And Judge Brinkema is the Clinton-appointed judge who just blocked Trump's 1.6B anti-weaponization fund, so it's not like she's in the administration's pocket.
Ok, so "ad tech" is basically situations where someone pays you to run their ad network, like a newspaper or a magazine or something who sells their own ads to people. Google used to call this "Doubleclick for Publishers" (DFP) and don't anymore to be confusing, but I am going to use the old names so it is easier to tell you what each part of the business does.
When someone sells "ads" they are selling the placement itself. When advertisers buy this, they use "AdWords" or "Doubleclick for Advertisers".
Many DFP users got a checkbox one day permitting Google to sell ads and checked this. As a result, Google was able to outcompete _every_ ad publisher, and now "ad tech" doesn't make money buy "ads" does.
Google is right that they cannot separate them, but is lying about why: Neither unit would be profitable without the monopoly, because quite frankly if someone else could sell ads without sucking a ton of money off the top to make a failing self-driving car company, they would and simply win on price.
The judge was appointed by Clinton, so they've been in their role for decades now. It seems unlikely that someone who has served that long in her position would rule based on making the child in the White House happy.
> It seems unlikely that someone who has served that long in her position would rule based on making the child in the White House happy.
The US is a corporatocracy. It's apparently a lot easier for Americans to convince themselves that the current administration is corrupt and end there than it is to acknowledge that the entire system has been corrupted and it won't change once the administration changes.
The current administration is in a class of its own regarding corruption -- it is the principle driver of everything they do. The nazi stuff is just bonus for them.
At the turn of the century (yikes!) Clinton reconfigured the DNC to serve the corporations rather than labor. I left the party after that but am compelled to vote blue as the least worst option. Partisan politics allows capture of the government by creating a duopoly of power.
You are correct, but it's largely our first-past-the-post voting system that forces only TWO political parties on us. Voting reform is necessary to help make other parties/candidates electable.
You can change the details of the numbers game that is played every 4 years, but that won't solve the structural issues. I live in France, in any given election we have between 10 and 15 candidates from as many parties. Yet, we're still ruled by corporate interests.
The media makes sure to qualify any candidate threatening the interests of capital as a "dangerous extremist", while "pro-business" candidates receive the lion share of donations for their campaigns. And there are many other guardrails in place to ensure nothing impedes the slow erosion of our infrastructure and public services under the strains of austerity in profit of the few.
All true, but at least in France those in power who commit serious corruption might go to actual jail; there's no way a US current or former president would face what Sarkozy did
Sarkozy got like 4 days in jail total, for taking money from an actual terrorist, and then helping them (among other heinous acts). And the entire media circus was behind him during this "ordeal", complaining about how unjust and unfair it was for this piece of shit to face any justice.
It's not quite as bad as in the US yet, but it's getting there. Media is consolidating in fewer and fewer hands, populists are getting bolder and more shameless, the left is demonized, etc. Same disease, same symptoms, same outcomes.
but Trump tried to overturn an election, not only got zero jail time but got re-elected and SCOTUS issued him a "do whatever you want while president" card, and so now what would have been a "huge corruption scandal" in the past is just routine
Reread the second paragraph of my previous comment. It's a process, of which the US are further along. But eventually, the entire west will go that path.
I get your point. In the US at least there's less of a paradox of choice.
The key problem is that most people don't want to pay attention to any of it because it's either depressing or just not within there range of interests. Add to that the fact that most people vote based on their emotions and those are stupid simple to manipulate on the Right: anger at immigrants and "others" works all the time.
Democracy is the least worst option, but FFS, it would be nice if the electorate were actually properly informed when they vote.
Edit: I kind of contradicted myself on the "choice" thing, but this is effectively like herding cats.
Broadcast media is boomer stuff (disclaimer: I am technically a boomer). I expect its relevance to fade. That said, the failure to prevent media aggregation (e.g., Sinclair et al) is also a betrayal to the people.
As a boomer, I recognize the value of having constrained media choices: it was a unifying factor albeit at the price of milquetoast and "establishment" programming. Everything has a price...
The fairness doctrine should have been employed when Rush Limbaugh started his hate speech career that aimed to literally demonize half the population.
You too are correct, it was a "get it out there" comment.
My armchair assessment of the the electoral trap we're in:
* first-past-the-post voting
* dark money (money is not speech, it is power)
* campaign finance reform (current model is legalized bribery)
* eliminate the electoral college (popular vote for president)
yeah, it's just that the current administration has a level of "banana republic" style corruption and corporate-dealing/bribing that makes Clinton look like Mother Teresa
It is in fact true that the Trump administration is corrupt on a significantly different level than any prior administration. It is harmful to paper over this.
To the contrary, the entire DOJ understands that FAANG and the three-letter-agencies are one revolving door. Any judge that attempts to defang Google's data collection may well run afoul of the American surveillance system, which this administration will fight tooth and nail to defend.
Not very different from how federal protectionism keeps Apple's App Store centralized despite trillions of dollars in ostensible market damage. Anyone trying to loosen America's grip on software distribution is crossing an ugly national security line that we're all too ashamed to admit exists.
100% glad someone states the obvious. Sometimes here people think these tech companies are on truly altruistic missions on making “the world a better place!!1” or truly making an impact by being an IC in their role and having access to perks which, have largely been taken away as the market matures to data collection and surveillance.
If you want to have some fun, go on LinkedIn and see how many former military people, proud of their service, boast how they are at x or y tech company in director esque roles.
Then bookmark them and see the pages disappear in the future. Boy I’m glad it’s legally 100% ok to scrap LinkedIn data because it truly is a revolving door.
You're not beholden to make any effort to understand me or anyone else, that's a given.
Here is what an LLM thinks about what you've done:
> The “we” is doing a lot of rhetorical work: it turns what could have been stated as “the U.S. government doesn't openly admit this” into the much broader and more dramatic “we Americans are collectively unwilling to admit it.”
I hope that helps. Or is the LLM also nitpicking and failing to understand your 'perfectly clarifying' remarks? Feel free to copy paste and ask an LLM yourself, all I did was ask it 'who is the 'we' referring to?' and copy pasted original parent and your reply.
RCS is google's foothold. It forces everyone to share with google and currently, there is no carrier option for RCS. You have to pick google or apple or go without.
Google employees tens of thousands of people. The US intelligence apparatus employees hundreds of thousands of people. In all of that, over eight years, there are 251 people who moved between the two, and because of that absolute rounding error, the entire federal government is beholden to them?
Since you are making the accusation that this is a real conspiracy: statistically, how many people should have rotated between these two giant employers over an 8 year span? The answer isn't zero.
Also, this makes the "data" even more pointless:
"between Google or related firms, and the federal government, national political campaigns and Congress during President Obama’s time in office"
"were appointed to federal advisory boards."
Do you know how many of those boards exist? There are tons of them. I've known a couple of people who have served on them. They're incredibly boring and deal with things like "What accessibility standards should federal government websites support?". Of course you would want people from Google on that type of board.
> 251 individuals in such detected instances just in google. And that report is 10 years old, I'd bet it's 10x that by now.
"Detected instances"
It's so secret that I can name one of them off the top of my head: Matt Cutts. Is he part of this vast conspiracy too?
What conspiracy mate? It's not so deep, I was curious if what he said was a lie due to the downvotes and found nice evidence for it. You don't find it convincing it's your choice, but the dude didn't pull it out of his ass.
You think that giant employers being protected, especially when they align themselves with government interests of the day, is a conspiracy? Do you also think that suggesting economic producer interests are a high priority is a conspiracy? Or that corporations with contracts to the government are generally compliant with governmental requests?
Then why is the DOJ bringing the anti-trust cases in the first place? You think it's all one big conspiracy with the judges so they can save face with consumers?
This litigation was initiated under the Biden admin and not withdrawn by Trump.
Because winning an anti-trust case sets a much larger precedent than having no case at all. Closing the case can block repeat litigation on the same grounds.
If you were Meta, for example, you would much rather be investigated by a corrupt administration than gamble on a future administration being nice. You might even make political donations to this end, and curry favor with the politicians to steer into the outcome you want. Like how Apple was able to escalate foreign App Store litigation to a presidential flamewar, all because Tim Cook bet on the right political cards. We see the same partisan cake-cutting with AI firms, as a way to punish Anthropic for not kissing ass hard enough.
The natural response to a grassroots demand for regulation is to invest your money against it. If Microsoft could avoid a breakup, why can't Google? Why not Apple? What if they're all for sale, like the Catholic Church selling indulgences?
This case against Google was initiated under Biden, and generally celebrated at the time. For your theory to be correct you need to explain how the DOJ brought a deliberately flawed case or weakened it at some point. I haven't read anyone suggesting anything like that.
The DOJ isn't part of the Judiciary branch, it's part of the Executive.
> FAANG and the three-letter-agencies are one revolving door
Most of the NSA is active duty service members and former military. Did you mean other three letter agencies, excluding the most powerful one dealing with surveillance?
> Any judge that attempts to interfere with Google's data collection may well run afoul of the American surveillance system
The judge in this case put the final nail into Trumps slush fund. But now she's doing his bidding. Is that what you're claiming?
Not everything is a conspiracy. You don't have some special insight into this.
Given the sentence immediately following the revolving door metaphor, I think it was clumsily being used for data, not personnel. Especially because it's true for obvious reasons.
> The judge in this case put the final nail into Trumps slush fund. But now she's doing his bidding. Is that what you're claiming?
No, they're clearly claiming it's a non-partisan thing and the sitting president is irrelevant, as are the specifics of the virtue signalling happening. Yes, even though they qualified themselves with "this administration". Do you think that the Clintons aren't friends with the state department surveillance abomination or the nastiest parts of government writ large? That Bill or Hillary wouldn't fight tooth and nail to protect this terrible thing that's been wrought? Replace the context with some virtue signal about NATO intervention in Serbia 27 years ago, nothing changes. Partisan politics is for yokels.
> These days all three branches march lock step in their jackboots
Which is why the Judicial branch has been ruling against the Executive branch again and again? I don't understand what evidence you think you have to the contrary, other than vibes?
> The judge in this case put the final nail into Trumps slush fund.
That's a very different, partisan effort. It's not bipartisan like the Patriot Act was, or domestic surveillance in-general.
> Not everything is a conspiracy. You don't have some special insight into this.
Not everything is as it seems. You can't meaningfully prove that the NSA sat on their hands in the 13 interceding years since Snowden. There's no evidence that US interventionism is on the straight-and-narrow now, you're wishcasting and calling it truth.
> You can't meaningfully prove that the NSA sat on their hands in the 13 interceding years since Snowden.
I mean, you're correct? It's impossible to prove a negative.
> There's no evidence that US interventionism is on the straight-and-narrow now, you're wishcasting and calling it truth.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and all that. You're the ones making the extraordinary claims. The burden of proof is on you, not the people pointing out the flaws in these claims.
i would argue, the NSA not being up to some bullshit is more unlikely, and thus has the burden of proof on it, to assume otherwise is to ignore history and basic incentives these orgs have.
Citation needed. The idea that somehow my mum can't even find the space bar on her keyboard and yet is competent enough to go through several warning screens to install a custom .apk is just laughable.
The internet is full of scams. If you desensitize someone to that reality, then you better disable Safari access, iMessage, calls and FaceTime for their own good.
Indeed, it would be a good idea for iOS to have a mode for the elderly that is almost exactly like that (similar to child mode, and for similar reasons).
Also worth a shoutout is the fact that Google also got off scott free for their main monopoly case (the "will they have to sell Chrome?" headlines from a while back). I won't pretend to have even a vague idea of why exactly both rulings (sentencings?) came down so leniently, but it does seem even more unlikely that any sort of executive branch interference was at play.
Clinton was a neoliberal. Not an expert, but I thought for a long time the vision of anti-trust being democracy-preserving (or at least preventing corporations from being able to compete with the government for power) was replaced by a view "consumer harm" was the only concern of anti-trust law. Basically focusing on pricing competition.
Read more about SCOTUS justice Robert Bork who ushered in the modern anti-trust viewpoint.
> Bork argues that the original intent of antitrust laws as well as economic efficiency makes consumer welfare and the protection of competition, rather than competitors, the only goals of antitrust law.
Isnt that updated by some national database and google just pulls that data? Apparently Apple Maps will also get it in a few days, since they get the data from them as well.
Yes. We had the same comments about Gulf of America.
Edit: I don't know that there's an actual database served up by the US Gov, but governments control the naming of these things within their own jurisdictions. All of the big mapping products have the ability to serve up different names based on where you're viewing from.
> Per Secretarial Order 3453, Lake Ontario has been renamed to Lake America. The basemaps for GNIS are in the process of being updated to reflect this name change.
It would be nice if Maps would prefer data from government DBs that have localized versions of foreign place name data (e.g., Germany's BKG) when available.
It makes perfect sense that govs control names within their jurisdiction - I am eyerolling at both the name change and the reaction.
I am curious though - is it convention to leave the data as is, or is it illegal to modify it?
Regardless, itll just be changed back in 2 years; as long as I can type "lake ontario" and get directed to Lake Ontario, I do not care at all what the gov database calls it currently.
Well, because I expect this to last for two years. Nobody likes it except for birthday boy and his sycophants. All of the signs around Lake Ontario still say the name; same goes for the people that live by it.
Google should override it but I don’t expect them to, because theyre selfish and suck. Only thing to do is win elections.
I have been wondering this as well. I cannot imagine having this be autoupdated without review from a centralized database is a good idea. This is a process that needs to be frangible and have some friction in it.
In this day and age, GPS mapping tools have major implications for societal function, safety, economics, national security, healthcare, etc. I'm struggling to think of an industry where a sudden absence/subtle changes of named GPS mapping data would not have an effect.
If everyone relied on the same data base which could push changes to the map in the pocket of every resident of a nation that would be the first thing I would think to hack. Probably easier than actually jamming or spoofing GPS/GNSS over a huge area.
There are thousands of small street changes across the country each day. New subdivisions, road expansions, lane changes, new traffic lights. Of course the vast majority should be auto-updated without manual review, what would a person add to the process? The public database is the system of record in the first place.
Seems like something that should be user-configurable (like DNS servers). While the recent annoying renamings have drawn attention to the issue, landmark names have basically always been political.
To all the people pissed about the "Lake America" stuff: why in the actual fuck do you want Google of all organizations to be arbiter of geographical info, instead of federal institutions that are (at least nominally) operated under democratic principles?
Don't you understand the horror of what you're suggesting: "I want Google to impose it's own personal value judgments over the government's."
Yes, I think it's incredibly stupid, 3rd grader childlike to call this "Lake America". But the problem is not Google, the problem is the ass hats we (collectively, even if not you/me personally) voted for. The problem is especially with our Congressional reps who have just neutered themselves in service to this stupidity. And I get it, our federal institutions have definitely showed their frailty lately, but I can't fathom then why people think the proper solution is to give more decision-making authority to Google.
I do wonder how many people that criticize the renaming, were criticizing Obama when he rename Mt McKinley. What are the principles here? Or is it just names I like vs names I don't like.
I think "avoid naming things after people without a deep personal connection to the thing being named" and "prefer established names used by locals" are pretty good principles to follow.
> The Koyukon people who inhabit the area around the mountain have referred to the peak as "Denali" for centuries. In 1896, a gold prospector named it "Mount McKinley" in support of then presidential candidate William McKinley, who later became the 25th president.
Tons of people complained about the renaming of Mt McKinley for the same reason people complain about "Lake America" now. It has nothing to do with the names and everything to do with the reasons for the renaming.
The principal is it's OK if a democrat does it. For example:
It's OK to rename something named after a Republican president who was shot (Mt Mckinley).
It's not OK to rename or change something about a Democratic president who was shot (ie. The Kennedy Center).
Man, give me an effing break, do you honestly believe that is the correct analogy?
As another commenter said, Obama was reverting a previous name change - he didn't change the name to "Mt. Obama and McKinley" and paint the whole thing gold.
Democracy works best as a diffuse institution and is more than just voting. People are supposed to have rights and power themselves and I want them to try to make things better (whether I agree with them or not) and "corporations" are just groups of people. Needing to just go with the government, especially on something so clearly within their rights, is counter to the ideals of the system.
I can understand Google somewhat here (if I was running a business I wouldn't be happy wading into a political issue like this) but the idea that they are above criticism for just falling in line still doesn't resonate with me.
Corporations being only "groups of people" is kind of wishful thinking. They are one cog in a large machinery that is steered by a few very rich people.
Corporations should not be absolved of criticism. But at the same time it makes little sense to put a hamster in hamster wheel and then blame him for running.
Corporatism works best when people as citizens and civic agents are preoccupied and sort of diffuse, not organized for anything substantial, just busy with their work, hobbies, and local councils. Then the workers go to work every day, some of the lobbying the government, to undermine democracy.
Just a group of people. And some of them are paid to influence the government. But the citizens? They are just diffuse. Sometimes they vote...
Yeah it's meaningless to fight. Except not really. If the powers that be are corrupt we can simply keep calling it Lake Ontario across the board, and use the difference to find who is or isn't on my side on that issue.
The only people calling it Gulf of America or Lake America are hardcore MAGATs in my social circle. Even former Trump voters in my social circle are annoyed and not using the new names. So it's an effective way to figure out who is or isn't going along with the Administration today.
> If the powers that be are corrupt we can simply keep calling it Lake Ontario
This is the same logic that the right wing used when they disagreed with Obama on some issues, so they blocked his Supreme Court nominations just because anything Obama does must be bad.
Sounds like your social circle is in denial. There are certainly plenty of things Trump, buffoon and graft-a-holic he is, has done that are corrupt. Renaming bodies of water doesn't look like one of them. (Obviously, because he would have renamed it after a donor, or at least after himself.)
I mean, sure, we can all call anything whatever. I can call New Mexico "Best Mexico" or call Washington, DC "Bad Washington" and that's my right. But pretending that there aren't official names for things because we don't like the current guy seems immature. It's clearly within the authority of the government. Talk like this makes me think that people want to just live in a reality defined exclusively by party politics where we just pretend every law or policy made by The Bad Party doesn't exist, rather than try to win elections so we can shape the one actual reality.
The President doesn't have an ability to officially change the names of these locations.
They have the ability to change name services in some database somewhere. But it's not actually an official name change.
So all this hand wringing about official names or whatever ignores the reality of the situation. This is just another temper tantrum by Trump that we reasonable people can ignore.
The easiest way to do that is to just say Gulf of Mexico.
> They have the ability to change name services in some database somewhere. But it's not actually an official name change.
Is it Congress who officially holds that power, then? And are you saying that if Congressional Republicans passed a bill renaming whatever, and Trump signed it, you'd then acknowlege it? Given how vanishingly little they accomplish in Congress already, I'm not sure we'd be better off distracting them from their semiannual debt ceiling/budget hostage situation in order to debate these inconsequential things.
I’m not sure either is “how names are established”.
This is a pretty mushy area, philosophically. Is a name what you think something is called (I think our planet is called “Bloop”, but nobody cares) what a lot of people think something is called (“Indian” in reference to indigenous Americans is a famous example of that going poorly, as are many racist epithets), or what an official body says it should be called (“Palestine”, “New Zealand”, and “Taiwan” have entered the chat)?
I don’t think popular usage is any more “truly authoritative” for a name than other sources.
They didn't do anything special for "Lake America". Google's long standing maps policy is to show people the names that their government says they have. As soon as that name showed up in the US government's database it showed up for people in the US on Google Maps.
In Canada it shows up as "Lake Ontario" because that's what their government says it is. In the rest of the world it gets both names because the two governments whose territories it is in call it two different names.
As much as I love when people pretend Trump is the first government official to ever rename something, there is no evidence this had any impact on the court's decision.
While I lament another monopolistic tech giant yet again dodging the most meaningful regulatory consequences of their actions, the more useful meta-question is how these behomoths are now so reliably skirting major enforcement like break-ups. It's not that judges have gone soft or just that the current admin is nerfing enforcement (though they are), this trend goes back much further.
The biggest factor is that tech giants now 'pre-game' major anti-trust relevant actions through an internal compliance team staffed by former regulators. The result is the slam dunk smoking guns of 20 years ago are rare. Today's monopolists artfully push right up to the line between "red-handed" and "arguable". Then take measures to fuzz that line and kick up clouds of plausible deniability in the record. Imagine how hard it would be to convict an embezzler who was carefully coached during the crime by expert former prosecutors and forensic accountants.
Yep. Almost sounded like a human being. Very close to reaching a state of readability and ease of comprehension that humans tend to go for. I myself like to speak normally and actually say things, but I guess going round in circles and ultimately saying nothing is also a valid strategy…
There was quite literally zero LLM in my response. Um, being a good writer and having a decent vocabulary isn't a crime?
According to Pangram and GPTZero, what I wrote isn't AI. Maybe your AI detector isn't working as well as you think it is. Both my account and the GP are over 10 years old with >10,000 karma while your account was made minutes before your post and has zero karma.
The $22M ballroom donation was a pretty sweet deal.
https://patriot.university/knowledge-base/organizations/org-...
"$22 million ballroom contribution — the largest single documented amount from any corporate donor — arising from a lawsuit settlement over YouTube’s content moderation decision to suspend Trump post-January 6. Settlement filed September 29, 2025, in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California (Trump v. YouTube, LLC et al.)."
The US judges lack courage here. This means they help Google power through with its de-facto monopoly.
This is, interestingly, also against capitalism, since now you no longer have a truly free market; no real competition. It is just one giant blob contorlling (almost) everything. Every blind one sees how Google controls WAY too much. Youtube is part of Google too. It is a cash cow that excludes competitors.
This isn't a matter of courage. They're doing what they want to do. Clinton's deregulation, especially of telecommunications, is what lead to our horrible present (he appointed this judge.) The judges that Obama appointed literally don't believe that antitrust should exist.
The United States government is fractured and can't get its act together. No one has a credible plan to solve this. Electing your preferred president doesn't solve a broken Senate and other structural problems. The presidency is likely to keep bouncing between parties that care as much (if not more) about undoing the previous four years as they do sketching out a coherent plan for the future four.
How is wielding this weapon against our most innovative companies going to help the United States compete at scale against China? Scale is sort of required to do so.
So if the government isn't going to be in the business of massive capex investment (the kind China subsidizes) well then you need massive private companies.
The American peoples response to a future dictated by the terms of Chinese hegemony is break up the centers of American innovation? What do you think is keeping the capex cost manageable if it's not the government? How does Google work if you take away its cash cow?
So many of you (I assume despite the complaining that > 99% of HN readers can afford it) need to just pay the $20 or whatever for YouTube premium if it's so terrible and get over yourselves. The tax your children will have to pay if the United States is reduced to a second rate power will be far greater. What's with people wanting free access to services and simultaneously offended by ads? I don't like them either but I understand it would be silly to think they should be free. They can be regulated or reformed in many ways, but the government should be highly restrained about cleaving apart companies. Just remember the powers you give the government today the next government will inherit, and it is not so easy for a party to maintain power for more than eight years. Meanwhile China is operating on government initiatives and sustained strategy on a timeline that spans decades. Companies need to be able to match this horizon without fear of whatever the new normal in Washington is every four years. The trend for the United States is not looking good.
A theory behind busting trusts is that monopolies stifle innovation, and thus growth, in the long term. When it comes to "competing with China" (which, to be naive, I'm not sure the meaning of), many nationally competing firms will have a better result for future consumers than if there were a single "national champion."
That's how the theory goes but I would argue the observable evidence says otherwise. TSMC is Taiwan's national champion and effectively a global monopoly, Samsung is the same for Korea and is highly effective on the world stage, same again with ASML.
When a country does what it can to support its key industries those companies often out compete their global rivals and this is exactly the strategy China is using against the west with their support of domestic electric car manufacturing, solar panels, battery tech.
Alternatively the west is often anti big business and we've repeatedly seen national championions go under.
I will watch this. Generally I think you raise a fair concern, and I appreciate the shade of nuance.
By "compete with China" I mean at least have parity of competition with China in the essential technologies of the future, rather than falling behind into some sort of obsolence or inability to shape the global economy we all on the whole benefit from. If China becomes the dominant economic hegemon without a viable American competitive check, I think the world (and certainly Americans) will be worse off.
Meanwhile, a balanced competition between the US and China I think will benefit almost everyone on the planet, for reasons likely not that unlike what I expect Lina Khan will say in that video. There is no perfect solution, so I will look forward to hearing more of her perspective on this issue, thanks.
> Meanwhile China is operating on government initiatives
china fosters intense internal competition though; they don't just create and then subsidize some monopoly... avoiding breaking up mono/oligopolies feels the opposite (and a loosing strategy long-term imo)
It is a good and important point. But again this is paired with vast amounts of public investment. So to focus on the government's prevention of single sources of power (that which could eventually threaten the primacy of the Chinese central government itself) obscures the issue.
In the United States we don't have the same reliability of public initiative. That's the point I'm making. Therefore, in such a context breaking up and weakening the companies that do makes us competitive doesn't strike me as a good strategy. And I wish more people would acknowledge that tradeoff in their anti "big tech" rhetoric.
> How is wielding this weapon against our most innovative companies going to help the United States compete at scale against China? Scale is sort of required to do so.
Meta and Google gobble up an absolutely gobsmacking duopolist's share of western world's economy each year.
Meanwhile, two other American companies without monopolies are ahead of them in the frontier model race.
I believe this question rests on a few faulty assumptions of the state of the AI race. Including the value of any particular snapshot in time when it comes to judgements about "who is ahead". And also failing to mention Google is an investor in at least one of the "two companies" I believe you are specifying.
If you think Google (or any large firm) is going to be by necessity be a loser in the AI race relative to smaller firms, you should go ahead and explain why you think that is.
Why would they be subjected to anti-trust? There's a robust competition from AMD and Intel, and NVidia is not using any obviously illegal competition tricks.
Idk how you're defining "robust competition", but NVIDIA and CUDA definitely rule the GPU computing space right now, at least judging from a biased sample of what I read online. Those who experienced computing in the 1990s and 2000s know of the harmful effects that result when proprietary tech stacks become de facto monopolies. Think Adobe Flash, think Microsoft's "embrace/extend/extinguish" strategy. Perhaps antitrust law needs rework if it can't deal with this kind of monopoly.
That's because CUDA had been better than alternatives for quite a while. But ROCm and MLX exist, and they are rapidly advancing. Google has its own chips, as does AWS.
There are also no signs of NVidia colluding against other manufacturers. For example, AMD's MI350[P] are all sold out for the next year or so.
I just don't see NVidia becoming the next MS circa year two thousand.
> Google’s ad tech business brought in $30 billion last year, or about 8 percent of the revenue for its parent company, Alphabet. Its ad tech revenue has declined for 16 straight quarters, and analysts estimate it accounts for less than 1 percent of the company’s profit... “This is a business no one cares about"
Uhhh, what? What kind of colorful accounting is this that they're pulling off?
This isn't for the whole of Google's ad business. Just its ad exchange and I think parts of DFP; basically just mechanisms for auctioning off excess display ad inventory.
Thanks. I was trying to figure out exactly what's in scope here. I'd love to get a broad breakdown or a big pie chart that goes to this level of granularity so I can see where this sits within its other 'non-Google-property' ad businesses.
You’re partly right. It’s indeed mostly about AdX but also because Google owns all three sides of the equation (publisher-side via AdSense (and to a lesser extent DFP), AdX, and buy-side via Google Ads)
who is to say that it is great. what makes it so, why is that valuable. Is doing more good than harm. that there is even some inherent value in a "great institution". A bunch of smaller companies would probably be better economically and be more innovative.
I kinda somewhat reluctantly agree with you, and I think other commenters are missing the point that breaking up Google may allow non-US competitors to rise up and take Google's place on the world stage. Thus, breaking them up is not in the national interest of the US.
If Alphabet allows a non-US competitor to replace them, isn't it their fault for failing to compete? The threat of replacement is supposed to be what motivates Alphabet to innovate.
It could also be argued that allowing Alphabet to sustain anticompetitive damages is exactly what creates the opportunity for them to be replaced. Alternatives to AdSense and YouTube can only succeed in America if Alphabet rests on their laurels and is artificially defended from natural price competition.
As long as there are many competitors, that's better than a monopoly, even if some of the competitors are foreign. Powerful monopolists restricting our freedoms is not in the interest of Americans long-term.
Same way you prevent monopolies based in your own country from forming. Anti-trust regulation. Your country's government controls how companies operate inside it
Appropriate last name. So any institution that lies, cheats, and steals their way to top is absolved of all wrongdoing just because they got to the top?
So because Google monopolizes on a big enough scale, suddenly they are too important to break up? I would argue that if any single company is big enough to where if it were to break up it would be "against the national interest," then it is too big and must be broken up.
"long history of prevailing in court" is another way of saying "Google isn't being punished as much as they deserve"
> Their job isn't to make people happy.
Sure, but I think we can all agree the US legal system very, very, very rarely issues any ruling that materially punishes a corporation. Even the worst of the worst typically get off very easy.
“The system” by which I assume you mean the Government of the United States or America doesn’t need to, because “the system” is sovereign. Corporations are not. They get checked when they get checked, and this ruling only avoided a worse-case scenario for Google. It wasn’t a win for them either.
Not GP, and I regularly lament as well the incredibly gentle treatment of certain companies that I'd argue should have been literally fined out of existence (e.g. Equifax, PG&E, etc.), but we should probably stop to reflect that if the US were a country which erred in the other direction, issuing crippling fines often, we would probably stop being the country where innovative companies choose to do business. I don't just mean that as a talking point, I actually think I probably would prefer to have the economy we have here today (with its injustice) compared to one where most innovative companies won't do business here because they can't afford the possible fines.
I wonder if it would help to revoke patents that help google maintain its monopoly, assuming that's the case and it's doable by a judge/congress/someone?
What exactly is the nature of its monopoly that moots competition? I was of understanding that it's more than just ads on google search results, isn't it?
I have no proof, but this just figures. It's entirely plausible that google gave some heavy-duty major dark money campaign donations and have used the return on their investment to avoid being broken up. Maybe I'm just cynical and the corporations and ultra-wealthy wouldn't really do anything like that all the time. They are ultra-greedy, though.
You should probably learn how courts work so you can construct hypotheses that are consistent with observations. In this case, that the outcome was due to the ruling of a "liberal" judge, and not because the government withdrew its case.
> Sergey Brin ($154 billion), the co-founder of Alphabet and seventh-richest man in the world, joined Musk, Bezos and others in being seated behind Trump during the swearing-in.
You aren't cynical. Big tech absolutely bent the knee and are now wearing red kneepads.
What an incredible miscarriage of justice. Make enough money and pay off enough politicians, and you can pretty much shoot people on the street in broad daylight.
A separate discussion for sure, but simply seeing a headline and declaring it an "incredible miscarriage of justice" seems a little far fetched.
For example, many times the courts will point out that the laws need to be updated, which would be in the ruling. Or that a law as written is unconstitutional but it could be made so with some changes. That stuff doesn't make the headlines though, just the "Courts rules for/against X". Ideally we'd have a legislative branch that would look at these rulings and update our laws, but their disinterest in doing so isn't the courts' fault.
A legitimately rule based legal system is far more beneficial than one that takes sides based on the taste of the day. beneficial for everyone involved. If you want to write "Stan for billionaires", without any sort of reasoning, well, that says more about you.
The system should serve the people, not a small minority of concentrated players. If you can't see how the system is manipulated in their favor, you are part of the problem.
Accepting behavioural changes, is the same stink of the last five decades.
I would like to wait for my own judgement... But someone reacting to the same, "We're sorry", that has been so common it became a South Park meme? They have had no evidence, probably in their lifetime, that government has not simply sold out to private enterprise. There is zero reason to be mad at them.
People react to actions. The actions thus far... Do not encourage any of kind of trust. Taking time to redact the ruling, is not an encpuragement to trust.
Sure. Wait for a ruling. Re-evaluate when it releases, too.
But reacting to the exact same pile shit they've seen everytime... Why blame them?
It's the modern "Never argue with a man who buys ink by the barrel". I think it's why outdoor advertising is so rife. It's hard to fight something when you rely on it to keep your position.
Just to make sure I'm understanding, you're saying that Google payed someone (presumably Trump), who then went and convinced a Clinton appointed judge who has ruled against Trump in the past to give the case to Google?
Slightly tangential thought:
My belief is: legislation needs to either make it just as hard to merge two companies as it is to unmerge them, or make it just as easy to unmerge two companies as it is to merge them.
It's insane to me that for how often companies merge and cause competition issues, we effectively never see the opposite happen. I know there's a ceremonial approval for merging two companies (at least in the US), but it's just impossible to undo or prevent the damage.
This point of view has more to do with your information diet than it does with reality. Companies un-merge and spin out all the time, for many reasons. Mergers and acquisitions are more interesting because they are often associated with a growth story. We like success.
Aswath Damodaran, who teaches corporate finance at NYU Stern, has a bunch of great talks and content about this where he discusses how companies should act their age. When older companies that are no longer paying dividends are moving into a divestiture phase, they restructure and split up. What we are seeing with some of these big tech companies is that they are transitioning from an exciting growth story into an extractive dividend story in a way that's becoming harmful to consumers. That's why we're talking about breaking them up, and thats the line their management will have to walk if they want to maximize the value of the firm to shareholders through the decline.
This is true, I'd go much further than the OP here and say the barrier for merger should be MUCH higher than the barrier for spin-out or split.
There's no shortage of obvious problems that can arise from concentration of influence and control over a market. So just try to prevent it. Trade some max efficiency for redundancy + anti-corruption/pro-competition/pro-consumer market forces.
The real benefit of a merged company is that where the two original companies were competing in the same market, it would be illegal for them to collude to set the same prices as eachother.
However, when merged, they can do exactly that - which allows them to extract more profits.
Rather than denying mergers, I suggest merged companies have an extra sales tax for ever on all goods they sell where they used to be competing - with the size of that tax set by the regulator to estimate the benefit they get.
Merged companies are more able to compete. Combining duplicate corporate structures let them save on costs, etc.
It's not a strictly bad thing - iirc spirit? Airlines? Wanted to merge with someone, got denied, and went bankrupt anyway, depriving people of any competition at all.
Not exactly. Competitors like Breeze and Allegiant filled in some prior Spirit routes. Those are better budget airlines.
Poorly run companies are supposed to go bankrupt, that’s the feedback loop keeping management in check.
Companies that have massive startup costs (Automakers, Airlines) are harder to replace. This is a failure of the system we are in. Seems like the free market cannot properly evaluate value when all the cash is going into nonsense like Bitcoin, NFT and now a lot of the AI.
Allegiant is an old Airline that has had a lot of problems. Breeze is new but both are starting super small and are not planning to really cover Spirits extended network anytime soon. The result of Spirit dying is alot of that prior investment in second tier cities/airports is just gone for the forseeable future. The potential value that could have generated will now not come to pass.
>Poorly run companies are supposed to go bankrupt, that’s the feedback loop keeping management in check.
The problem that is occuring in my opinion is that Spirit is a symptom of a greater problem. The "K shaped" economy is not only segregating groups of people into haves and have nots, its extending into regions of the country. Losing major airlines access is the precursor to entire regions declining, and ultimately dying completly. If the AI robot world comes to fruition maybe many humans just have no economic value at all.
To be fair, Spirit suffered from multiple reasons and a merger with Frontier may have just delayed the inevitable.
Note: I was very emotionally invested in Spirit because they made possible many fascinating trips that wouldn't have happened so my take may be biased. I can only think of a handful of companies that clearly positively impacted my life and Spirit was one of them.
1. Post COVID, the structural costs went up: pilots, flight attendants, suppliers demanded more money. Spirit paid decently well, had decent benefits from what I heard. When you are Spirit...to attract good people you gotta pay. It really showed in their operations, they had 0 crashes during their 34 years and had notable excellence in their maintenace operations. People thought they flew rickety junk planes. The reality was that they had a stellar run.
2. Pratt & Whitney GTF issues: Spirit actually had quite a young Airbus only fleet. Great for lowering costs through fuel/maintenance savings, customers enjoy the newest best planes...the downside is that if a major issue comes out, it could spread across the entire fleet. Thats exatly what happened: They leased brand new planes and then a serious engine issue occured that forced grounding of many new planes for 1+years....while they are still paying the leases on those planes.
3. The bigger competitors are really just credit card companies that fly planes as a hobby on the side. That gave them the financial ability to siphon off customers by introducing a barebones tier. Spirit customers aren't really the type to play the credit card points game so they couldn't copy what the big guys do and despite travel increasing after COVID, people decided to pay a bit more to not have the barebones experience.
4. Spirit was in the process of revamping their entire offering to better compete. More simple tiers with things baked in and less extreme customization that they used to offer. Makes sense: 9$ fares were gone for good so maybe they could compete as a solid basic tier. They did not move fast enough to turn things around. Its a bummer because it looks like they had an interesting plan after the second bankruptcy but we never got to see it fully play out.
5. The final nail in the coffin: The Iran war took out any remaining breathing room. They were just coming out of their second bankruptcy. I personally feel they had a viable plan to try and turn things around but the Trump admin just let them die without really trying. From my understanding(and I could be wrong) Trump pulled some nonsense where he wanted like 90% of the airline for peanuts, they would support ICE transport operations etc. The owners of the debt obviously said no and that was the end of that. Great job losing 17k employees their livelihood. Since this is a tenure based industry, many end up starting from scratch at another airline. A emergency merger or something would have had better consequences for the employees. Will be interesting to see how this affects the midterms since Spirit was based in Dania Beach, FL (Miami area)
The idea behind a Frontier + Spirit merger makes sense. The airlines combining together can cover a greater network, Spirit was getting rid of its poor leases through bankruptcy and maybe they could have been a major airline in the low end. The argument against is that Frontier is not doing too well either so should you really combine bad + bad?
The whole problem of monopolies is that they can set the monopoly tax as high as they want. There is no real upper limit. What you suggest will
1) make monopolies legal
2) set a floor for the monopoly tax (whilst excessive company profits are bad, obviously companies MUST make a profit, and hence whatever this governor sets as extra tax must be added to the costs for customers. Profit = good (even if you are a communist), only excessive profits or profiteering are bad. Otherwise, after a short while, no more company, no more goods, no more service. No exceptions, not even under different systems. Or in other words: communist companies must make profits too, and just ask some older Russians, even if that means making a profit at the expense of employees)
This seems to me like it would be by far the worst of all worlds. This would mean lots of monopolies, with the specific purpose of making life more expensive.
100% we do not need one company that makes everything hi there Samsung.
The other day I was looking up Samsung and they make everything in south Corea, even boats and all kinda of stuff
Conglomerates may not be as nimble and agile as single-focus companies, but they are uniquely more resilient to economic shock events, and branches being "unprofitable" for a time can be supported by others.
Unfortunately, MBA beancounter/neoliberal extremism aka "throw out everything not the core business" has become the norm... and so, with Covid, Ukraine and Trump's tariff and Iran wars, we got a ton of "single focus" companies that are struggling hard, and with everything deemed "not the core business" including internal IT, cleaning etc. sourced out, many a corporation has become internally enshittified.
Conglomerates aren't a strictly optimal form of organization. They are more resilient, but they are also massively bureaucratic and can lose their focus. They may also be able to exert a disproportionate amount of leverage on vendors and suppliers.
I'm not saying infinitely asset-light companies are strictly superior either.
I'm saying there's no silver bullet or free lunch here.
If you look at it from one layer above, capital markets that enable the continuous recycling of corporate structures into smaller or larger as needed are more resilient than those in which company structures are ossified.
Of course not every deal is for the better. But no M&A isn't good either. Speaking as a former Wall St M&A banker.
A progressive tax on the size of the company can do this.
And to what end does discouraging scaling in an industrial economy serve? Corporations don't grow huge for the fun of it.
After certain size benefits of hyperscale do not compensate for the harm done to society.
Don’t we have enough taxes? Taxes should fund government not be used to force people to do things.
> Don’t we have enough taxes?
Objectively no. For example carbon taxes or other environmental taxes have been proposed by free market advocates since the 70s and never been implemented (from the left you see advocacy for environmentalism but not related to taxation)
Also if we had enough taxes, the wealth inequality would not be ramping up to great depression levels and basic necessities like healthcare and housing would not be catastrophically related to bankruptcies in america.
If you are a worker, specially one in the upper middle class range of salaries, then yes. You are being over taxed. But that is simply because those below you have nothing to contribute and the system refuses to tax those above you appropriately. You are a local maximum in a system that is not globally efficient, so you have too much tax, the country doesnt
How's carbon credits not a tax?
> Taxes should fund government not be used to force people to do things.
Others think differently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steering_tax
Considering our massive yearly deficits we definitely do not tax enough.
Taxes are disproportionately applied. We have more than enough taxes on working people and not enough on the wealthiest classes.
It's crazy to get downvotes for this matter of fact, good faith, truthful comment.
What's going on, HN?
Vague assertions with no evidence don't really help the discussion. If someone is going to assert such a strong claim like "We have more than enough taxes on working people and not enough on the wealthiest classes.", they really need to at least define what they mean by "working people" and "wealthiest classes" and then give some evidence to show that "taxes are disproportionately applied" between these groups. (You say it was a "truthful comment" but how can you even be sure you are interpeting the comment the way the original poster meant?)
(In general, whether people agree or disagree with an assertion I would hope they wouldn't downvote something as long as the person contributes enough to the discussion that the reader can understand what they are asserting and can check for themselves if the evidence they give supports or doesn't support the assertion.)
It's not vague at all.
Wealth inequality in the US is so bad that the statement is true with pretty much any reasonable interpretation.
The top quantiles of the population (10%, 1%, 0.1%, billionaires) are paying less taxes than they should in a fair system; and that statement becomes increasingly illustrative of the situation the smaller and richer the quantile you choose is.
The fact that wealth inequality is _accellerating_ should be enough to tell you that the taxation system is unfair towards the poorer end.
I would say google is still in its growth phase, albeit a slower one. Especially with capex spending etc.
Google is the new IBM. All the signs are there.
IBM is more than 100 years old, has defined a huge part of how we think about computers, made plenty of its employees and workers of the wider field rich, has sold many businesses it considered distracting, and is still worth $200B+. Anyone saying "IBM" in the sense of "stagnant failure" is delusional.
I don't think this is what I respoded to. We cannot deny IBMs contribution, just like we can't deny google's.
But where they are in their life as a company is a different question. IBM is beyond growth phase. May even be on the decline phase.
My point is Google is still in its growth phase, still inventing, growing, etc.
Not to mention they are still at the forefront of materials science and industrial design, and just so happen to manufacture bespoke CPU & server platforms that run circles around all the hyperscalers...
Though of late, IBM has apparently decided it should be just another Indian outsourcer.
Google will do the same eventually.
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> This point of view has more to do with your information diet than it does with reality. Companies un-merge and spin out all the time, for many reasons.
That’s condescending and wrong. Mergers and acquisitions are hundreds of times more common than spinoffs.
>What we are seeing with some of these big tech companies is that they are transitioning from an exciting growth story into an extractive dividend story in a way that's becoming harmful to consumers.
Alphabet is rolling out autonomous driving vehicles in many cities around the USA, potentially getting rid of the need to drive a car in 90% of today's use cases.
How is this not still an exciting growth story? My kids might never need to drive a vehicle, even though we live in a car dependent suburb.
Some cute tech projects do not justify a massive monopoly. Google is financing Waymo using the ~300 billion dollar it extracts annually from consumers via ad spending. I would rather pay substantially less on anything I buy, and have the free market sort out self-driving cars.
A product/service that can drastically reduce the top cause of injury and death, as well as give safe mobility to so many who do not currently have it is not a "cute tech project".
>I would rather pay substantially less on anything I buy, and have the free market sort out self-driving cars.
Alphabet's entire revenue divided by the total amount of goods and services sold is miniscule, so I don't see how it could be mathematically possible to pay substantially less on anything you buy.
>and have the free market sort out self-driving cars.
This is the free market sorting out self-driving cars.
Google is one of many monopolies that are collectively bleeding society dry. Of course, the others should be broken up as well.
Waymo is currently financed by a monopolist and has negligible revenue itself, so it is not part of the free market.
Self-driving cars are an absurdly inefficient way to reduce traffic deaths that exists only because it makes substantially more money for shareholders than the alternatives. You are being witheld a good and cheap solution now for the promise of a worse and expensive solution some time in the future. All the while people keep dying.
Oh, and what's this "those who don't have it" bullshit? If anything, turning driving into a subscription service will mean mobility becomes harder for many people, as dirt-cheap used cars slowly stop being available. As for people who can't drive for whatever reason, they already have taxi apps. And don't think for a second that self-driving taxis will be cheaper in the long term than regular ones, only the margins will go up.
> Oh, and what's this "those who don't have it" bullshit? If anything, turning driving into a subscription service will mean mobility becomes harder for many people, as dirt-cheap used cars slowly stop being available.
Too many people are in the "You Will Own Nothing And You Will Be Happy" camp.
Apparently the thought of lifelong indenture is a plus to these people :-/
I prefer to live in reality, where American suburbs are nowhere near dense enough for public transport to pencil out, plus there is no political will from the voters for it. No one is tearing up existing roads and replatting all the detached single family homes to more dense housing.
Waymo is a real solution to reducing injuries from distracted and drunk drivers, as well as reducing insurance costs. Obviously, if Waymo is the only game in town, then prices will be high but hopefully there will be competition. Owning a car 24/7 along with space to store it and insure it is not necessarily always cheaper than renting it per trip.
A robotic car can be utilized for far more hours per day amortizing its costs over far more trips making each trip cost less. Which, if there is competition, should result in lower prices.
> I prefer to live in reality, where American suburbs are nowhere near dense enough for public transport to pencil out, plus there is no political will from the voters for it. No one is tearing up existing roads and replatting all the detached single family homes to more dense housing.
Car Country was designed by the US car lobby. Political will of the voters? Oh yeah sure, now a century into it that’s also not palatable for home owners and the like.
* a good and cheap solution *
You mean public transport? I live in a country with one of the best public transport systems in the world. I enjoy it, but please don't fool yourself into thinking that it is cheap. It is not, very much NOT. All the big Czech cities spend between 25 and 35 per cent of their municipal budgets on public transport, and those are mostly already mature systems where the most expensive work like laying track is already amortized. New trams and buses, repairs, drivers wages, electricity, nothing is cheap nowadays.
Sure, an American city can decide to build a new tram or subway system from scratch, but don't promise anyone that it is going to be cheap. It won't, doubly so if the mayors stipulate high wages for the workers, like NYC does.
And even the best public transport system fails at the peripheries, where density of the population drops under a limit of viability. Then you have two buses a day even here in CZ.
Compared to every person owning their own car, but now it has a bunch of extra sensors and a cloud subscription? And the city still needs to build and maintain the roads.
Or a bunch of robotaxis, which reduce the up-front cost and amount of parking needed, but the operational and infrastructure costs remain.
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free market :) (forgets about patents, tax cuts, excessive regulations thats unbearable for small players). Can it be that is not so free after all.
I am not excited about my transportation becoming a subscription service, likely through regulatory capture. It will almost certainly mean less freedom of choice for me.
I am a fan of kids being able to roam freely because we don’t have to worry about people in their huge pickup trucks and SUVs looking down at their phone mowing down people and not even noticing.
It will certainly mean more freedom for those who don’t want or can’t use a giant vehicle to move around.
I trust automated vehicles with cameras and LIDAR to do a much better job of avoiding collisions.
what i personally find most insightful about this website is how the techbro culture will do anything except consider the needs of the many. why bother with good transit when we can automate cars? why bother with copyright when we can just steal content at a scale that few can comprehend.
The “needs”, or rather revealed preferences of many, is to live in detached single family homes on minimum 3,000 sq ft lots, with space for personal car storage.
There is no way public transit works in that kind of non dense living arrangement.
Do you have data to show Americans want to live in Manhattan/Tokyo style or even European style 4 story apartment/shared wall buildings?
Population trends in the US show me the suburbs are far more popular, at least among those who end up having children.
You are not a transport planner and it shows.
People in the US don’t magically “want” giant pickup trucks and pedestrian killing SUVs. They want cheap and practical vehicles, neither of which are available in large quantities. Notice how the advertising for pickups works? Straight, white, rural men in jeans telling you how your expensive pickup can drive off road? And then you read the manual and warranty where that exact usage is either forbidden or discouraged.
Same with the suburbs. Those we designed and pushed by the car lobby and the US made it illegal or very unprofitable to build any alternatives
Where is your data showing that people “prefer” this?
My data is the far lower prices for equivalent sized townhouses (homes that share walls) compared to detached single family houses, the increasing volumes of larger vehicles sold over smaller vehicles, and higher proportions of children in suburban areas compared to urban areas.
People like space, people like choosing who to share space with, and people like feeling more powerful (sitting higher up in bigger vehicles).
In my area, Zillow shows sold home prices for comparable townhomes vs detached SFH at roughly 30% lower price per square foot. People are willing to pay a couple hundred thousand dollars to not share walls.
>Those we designed and pushed by the car lobby and the US made it illegal or very unprofitable to build any alternatives
The US (federal government) didn't make it illegal or unprofitable to build more dense housing.
Local city and county level voters made it illegal and unprofitable, because more dense housing means poorer people, and poorer people means schools with kids who have poorer parents, which typically means a peer group that may not perform as well.
You're basically advocating for unscrambling the omelet to be easier. Should be obvious why it's harder to unmix than it is to mix.
Splitting a large company is already done to shed and transfer liabilities. Divisional Merger Tactic / Texas Two Step. [0] [1] Keep the yoke and drop the albumen with time and patience.
[0] https://batesonlaw.com/divisional-merger-tactic-how-liabilit...
[1] https://www.creditandcollectionnews.com/u-s-supreme-court-de...
You can bet that if the board of directors could show that unscrambling the omelet would result in greater shareholder value produced, it would suddenly be really easy to do...
Happened with Dow-Dupont! A three-way split, even (from a two-way merger). Took roughly two years and was the shareholders' plan from the start. By most accounts it went very smoothly.
[1] https://www.investors.dupont.com/news-and-media/press-releas...
[2] http://www.dow-dupont.com/
Progressive corporate taxation could make it happen for reasons other than dodging the ghosts of chemical sins past!
It is a key point... if splits are encouraged and made easier (and I agree it'd be healthier for the market if the largest companies did), then liability needs to be handled carefully.
One doesn't want to create a 'snake sheds its skin' scenario where Meta (for example), stuffs all its liability in a spin-off, yet keeps the profits those actions accrued in the other entity.
Can we stop with taxing everything you don’t like? Taxes should be equal and used to fund the government, not as tools to make people do things you like.
I question the assumption that taxes you don't like will not fund the government
"Should" needs some unpacking; there's a subjective value lurking inside.
Personally, i prefer economic incentives over coercion. My starting point: there is a degree to which society must govern entities within it.
What type of taxes, state or federal? Because federal taxes do NOT fund federal spending.
https://mmt101.substack.com/p/an-explanation-of-why-taxes-do...
Taxes used to offset the costs of undesirable activity are the most effective and efficient taxes, but you want less of that?
Can we stop with pushing all of the taxes into the work-consume economy and out of the invest-return economy? The latter is eating the world, would it really hurt it to help clean up its own messes for once?
On a technical level it would still be a nightmare. But yes it would actually get done.
My first tech job was at HP, in 2015, started there just in time work and live through that split. That was a smoother one from what I hear but it was not a fun job to have at the time
I’m advocating for controlling the damage. The way I said it is cutesy, not literal.
I intended it to point out that it’s too easy to merge companies together but it’s effectively impossible to stop someone from becoming anticompetitive without a real consequence.
If we can’t make it easier to rip them apart then we shouldn’t be so slap-happy about approving them in the first place.
Why skip this part ?
> legislation needs to either make it just as hard to merge two companies as it is to unmerge them
Nothing was skipped - the point is that this is directly analagous to unscrambling an omelet. Separating mixed things is significantly more difficult than mixing them.
"The laws says X" doesn't change whether X is possible or not.
It’s quite literally not analogous as breaking up companies has happened a bunch but no one has ever unscrambled an omelet
fwiw I thought it was a good analogy. Sure splitting a company is possible and scrambling an omelette is not, but it sure takes a lot more effort to effectively undo entropy.
In a merger you can take as long as you want to go from
1. Two separate companies except at the end of the quarter we add their revenue and expenses together in a spreadsheet to transition to
2. One fully integrated organization
And usually you are becoming more efficient and saving time and money as you integrate.
Splitting a company needs to happen quickly or you'd get all sorts of weird effects where coworkers are ostensibly competitors whilst sharing resources during the transition. And you have to expend a huge amount of effort. Just a couple random complex systems that need to be untangled off the top of my head: physical property and leases, IP space for every IT service you run, multi-year contracts with every vendor from janitorial to SaaS, multi year contracts with customers depending on how the split goes, and of course all the intermingled finances and HR and spreadsheets every company in the world lives on. I'm sure there's thousands more considerations.
I agree antitrust is a big problem that needs to be solved. But "it should be the same amount of effort to merge and split a company" is just fantasy.
Do you really think it's impossible to pass legislation that makes something that's currently easy hard without making the reverse any harder as well?
Yes, because the difficulties in separating integrated pieces have nothing to do with a merger.
What makes splitting a company out difficult isn't (directly) a financial or paperwork burden - it's that tightly integrated systems are very difficult to untangle. There is nothing analagous that could be introduced in the merger process. You could add a mandatory delay, but that's not making it "as hard", it's just making it slower.
I don't understand why you think the only possible ways to make mergers harder need to be "analogous". If they put a hard cap on the size of companies allowed to merge, that would make it harder, without making it harder to break them up. It's hard to take seriously the idea that you think there's literally no possible legislation that could end up changing the relative difficulty in the way the parent comment describes when I was able to come up with an insanely trivial example without needing to think about it for more than a couple minutes.
The law could make mergers executed provisionally for up to X years, with a binding plan to "unmerge" that must be updated every Y months. The FTC already half-does this with post-merge divestiture requirements.
This still amounts to "don't mix" which is far easier than unmixing once it's happened.
Yes, that's the point, making something hard means that sometimes it will not happen. Only comparing to the cases where it does happen is missing the entire point.
Yes, this is obviously the ask: why doesn't government unmix the omelet. Your very body unscrambles the omelet and makes you. It's what intelligent things do when they are moving agency into the proper places.
what is the purpose of regulation except to resist entropy in such strategic places?
Progressive corporate taxation would give the market an incentive to do spinoffs and undo the merger wave.
Or we could just roll antitrust policy back to what it was before Ronald Reagan and Robert Bork installed the Consumer Welfare Standard, the idea that companies must be allowed to merge if they can scribble a tall tale with crayons on butcher paper about how the merger will benefit consumers, for sure, pinky promise. This is obviously mega-rigged, it comes from the Robber Baron era, it was defeated before (look up Louis Brandeis) and it can be defeated again (look up Lina Khan). They didn't even change the talking points (dontcha know, the Standard Oil monopoly reduced the price of Kerosene by 70%?!) -- time is a flat circle when it comes to anti-trust policy. Let's spin it back to the part of the circle where we win.
Progressive corporate taxation would lead to every company splitting its revenue and expenses across 50 shell companies, without actually splitting operations.
Not if the gaggle of shell companies was difficult to invest into or had enough rights to make it a strategic threat. But sure, wave those infomercial-hands some more and maybe you'll convince me that I can't use a screwdriver.
...which is common today.
I like globalisation on its face. The second-order effects are a bitch. I don't want to go full protectionist, bit we should swing the needle back a bit.
Undoing mistakes is usually difficult and costly, but still worth doing on the road to not making the mistake again. Grandfathering in the subversion of the economy and our democracy is worth fighting.
No, they're advocating for more scrutiny of whether the omelet is going to be very bad for everyone who isn't part of the omelet (yes, this metaphor is weird, but I didn't introduce it)
That’s one half. The other, more interesting half, recognizes that unscrambling the egg is difficult, so we must take more precautions before scrambling it in the first place.
I’ve been saying that an easy solution is just don’t allow companies with even modestly large overall sizes to merge or acquire other companies. At all. For any reason.
I think that despite this reform being a blunt instrument it would work surprisingly well.
It would allow companies that should have declined to decline and it would give massive incumbents a major incentive to innovate in-house.
He's saying that if we can't unscramble the omelet then we should make damned sure the omelet will be healthy before allowing it to be scrambled.
I don't think it's particularly unusual for a company to spin off another company?
That is about as bad of an analogy as you can make
PE companies do it all the time.
PE companies do it with very little regard for if any of the pieces are viable and survive after the fact, so their model isn't one I'd suggest following.
From a public policy perspective it doesn't matter if some pieces are unviable and fail to survive. Across the entire economy, this creative destruction allows for quickly reallocating resources to more productive uses. Most of the companies that take PE investments do so because they're badly managed and unable to obtain capital from other sources; they would likely fail anyway. At least the PE investment gives them a chance to survive and brings in more financially disciplined management.
There's many examples of companies who were conducting a low growth, long-term viable business. And where then PE stepped in, ripped out the most profitable part(s), and discarded the less-profitable parts as a dead husk.
In the process, the public lost the benefit that less-profitable part provided. Besides ripping up a company that was doing fine as-is.
You call that "reallocating resources to more productive uses". Yes that may be what's happening in some cases. But not always.
Less-profitable != non-beneficial to the public. At this point I regard PE entities as value-extraction machines. Which sometimes, but rarely, work with the public's benefit in mind.
And let's not get started on cases where PE secured loans, sold off a company's assets, only to lease them right back. Leaving company deprived of their assets & debt-laden, going under shortly after, while PE firm runs off with the goodies. Most people would think of that as theft & destruction. But in high-finance world it's named differently & somehow legal.
Maybe if a large company is anticompetitive and the parts would not survive on their own, we should be letting those pieces fail
its not unheard of for large public companies to do spinoff. a few examples that seem to have worked out fairly well
Phillip Morris / Altria / Kraft / Mondelez
HP / HPE / Agilent / Keysight
large corporations spin off divisions into separate companies all the time
Eh, thats a bit of a False analogy. spinning off a division of a company is easier than fully integrating another.
> or make it just as easy to unmerge two companies as it is to merge them.
[Disclaimer: I work at Google, all words my own and not representative of anyone, etc.]
There's no such thing. Let's stick to software since it's what HN knows best, but it's a universal truth.
Merging two companies: you take the two sides and they keep running. You probably need some extra accounting work to make sure the mandatory reports from each side get combined, but that's all you have to do.
Splitting two companies: oof. If you split ChildCo out of ParentCo:
* You need to hire all the roles that weren't part of that organization before (HR, legal, compliance, etc.)
* You need to register this new entity in all the countries it operates and/or has employees in
* Technologically it's somewhere between messy and impossible. Now you no longer have Google's build stack or monorepo. You have to rewrite everything. You can't just move some VMs to a cloud provider of choice
I suspect a large majority of the issues you brought up with splitting can be addressed by legislation.
Off the top of my head, something along the lines of having a mandatory period of time where the company being acquired must be kept separate enough that the merger can be dissolved in a timely manner should it be deemed necessary. How long that window should be would be up for debate but personally I'd argue the window should scale somehow based on things like the valuations of each company involved, headcounts, and maybe even competitive landscape.
An example would be requiring both companies to perform a pre-merger assessment to determine positions/roles, technology use and regulatory requirements that must be maintained for a clean separation and creating a plan that gets filed with the relevant agencies to be used if/when the merger needs dissolving. If the time comes that they need to dissolve the merger but they don't maintain that separation, they still have to do it and you slap a fine on them equal to some percentage of that mergers cost to be paid by the parent company.
Hell, that idea alone would accomplish both making it harder to merge and easier to dissolve the merger.
I think a better framing we should ask ourselves is why is the onus on the government to make sure a breakup is clean? Nothing in the constitution guarantees the rights of corporation.
What can’t be solved with legislation?
A malevolent electorate.
Lots of shit can't be solved by legislation, what's your point?
crime
I disagree with your premise that I shouldn’t express concern/opinions or point out problems with things that affect me simply because I’m not a trained expert in that thing.
"I think that the law should make this happen" without any thought for whether what you're proposing is possible or consistent with the laws of the universe is lazy.
This is similar to people who think we should just legislate secure encryption that has law enforcement backdoors. It's not possible, and people demanding it without an understanding of the area they're trying to regulate is lazy and insulting.
I think you should reread my post. My post is making a very specific point that your reaction tells me you get, but aren't applying.
Read it more like a poem and less like a proposed bill.
It's not really useful to write poems when proposing norms.
I have less sympathy for Facebook/Meta. Zuckerberg is on record as saying IG can hurt us. The Whatsapp co-founder Acton saying "it's time. delete Facebook". The fact Zuckerberg's engineers were apparently specifically asked to merge the backends to make them harder to break up. I have very little sympathy for that specifically. I'm not thrilled with a lot of the things Google has done with (say) Youtube - people LOST THEIR ACCOUNTS because of forcing the link to Google+ - but I don't think it's in the same league
Chrome is one of those nebulous areas. If they're dictating web standards they deserve at least an antitrust glance
> There's no such thing.
Spinning off companies happens all the time.
But what are you trying to say about the greater argument? The parent had two parts to it - make merging as difficult as unmerging, or make unmerging as easy as merging. While you're right that the wiggle room for making unmerging a lot easier is very constrained, this doesn't say anything about the feasibility of the other part of the 'or' and the actual argument they're putting forward. Unless you're trying to extrapolate this to saying that both these changes are impossible, it just comes off as being pedantic.
> Technologically it's somewhere between messy and impossible. Now you no longer have Google's build stack or monorepo. You have to rewrite everything. You can't just move some VMs to a cloud provider of choice
You could give a copy to both successors. Probably would want to excise some of the repo on both sides, but build tools for sure would be fine to have a second copy. There's no need to rewrite everything, especially if Parent and Child are barred by court decree from entering overlapping businesses.
For things that really need a single corporate owner, you could potentially spin that off as well and have both successors contract from that one or depending on the terms of separation have a joint partnership.
Hosting would be messy, yes. But somehow the tech world outside google manages to run systems without Google tools. It would be an adjustment, potentially a large adjustment and take a lot of hours.
> You need to hire all the roles that weren't part of that organization before (HR, legal, compliance, etc.)
> You need to register this new entity in all the countries it operates and/or has employees in
This costs money, people, and time, but it's straight forward. HR and legal would likely need some additional people, but likely you assign the people who work with the spinoff business to the spin off corporation and then back fill as needed.
I think most of these problems could be solved through contracts.
A contract for purchasing Parent Co.'s HR, legal, and compliance expertise for child co.
And a contract for sharing technology infrastructure.
The terms and pricing of the contract would likely be strictly regulated to prevent preferential treatment and encourage a clean separation over time.
I'm not a lawyer though, so who knows.
I worked at HP in 2015 during it's split into Inc and HPE.
I then worked at FireEye during it's split.
Fun times.
This is far from impossible, and happens all the time when, for example, a company spins off a subsidiary, or any number of other situations.
It's hard isn't really a blocker, it's just saying 'this isn't convenient for us', which is why it would have to be forced by legislation.
In none of those two cases is what's being proposed "as easy as a merger" - especially since those companies get to take as much time as they want without any court or law-enforced timeline.
Companies that spin off separate businesses do this stuff all the time, staff up the new business to fill the gaps, license tech from the parent to the new spinoff etc
And yet, Bell was split.
Very often a demerge comes before an acquisition. Example, a fund could buy a huge group/conglomerate made of various companies, and then sell each companies separately. Each company sold is merged to another group but demerged from its original group.
My experience is that "split" companies are often split only at the superficial financial level and the behind-the-scenes engineering systems are never actually decoupled, you just have a services agreement where the new company pays the old company to continue providing software. Or vice versa. It's usually pretty ugly and expensive and not the clean win for competition you are thinking about.
> My belief is: legislation needs to either make it just as hard to merge two companies as it is to unmerge them, or make it just as easy to unmerge two companies as it is to merge them.
Easy for companies to merge, and... who is going to "unmerge" them when they don't want to? It is easy for them to split up if they want to you know, it's just: they don't want to.
We stopped this in the 1950s with a 90% federal income tax bracket. CEOs could not make more thab the equivalent of 5mil a year in 2026 dollars.
No CEO wanted to merge when it would turn two 5mil a year jobs into one 5mil a year job. Cutting taxes on the rich enabled profiteering by CEOs.
IIRC, the last real break-up was Standard Oil back then?
Since then, anti-cartel laws are written but no more enforced
AT&T back in the 80s Microsoft almost got it 2000-ish, but that did seem to mark the end of it.
Slightly tangential thought: My belief is
So is it a thought or a belief?
Also it's an immature either way - as a belief and or as a thought.
You didn't even rationalize your "belief" so there is nothing for me to relate to, except you are wrong
I don't necessarily disagree, but in practice it's never as easy. Combing ingredients for a cake is always easier than separating them back out. Getting married is easier than getting divorced. It almost feels like some kind of fundamental law.
> My belief is: legislation needs to either make it just as hard to merge two companies as it is to unmerge them
This is a good start, but it needs to be more generalized to also cover a related and overarching problem:
Modern Capitalism Is Weirder Than You Think: It also no longer works as advertised
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/03/how-asset-managers-h...
(https://archive.is/wSmtd)
Merging implies growth, separation implies decay
This is an incredibly naive view. It truly is shocking to me that anyone in this day and age with any sense of how business works in the United States or even in any reasonably free economic system would view merhers as prima facie bad or in need of regulation which this comment implies. Are we truly going to submit every merger of any size or type to regulatory review? Oh boy.
> Google’s ad tech business brought in $30 billion last year, or about 8 percent of the revenue for its parent company, Alphabet. Its ad tech revenue has declined for 16 straight quarters, and analysts estimate it accounts for less than 1 percent of the company’s profit... “This is a business no one cares about"
Can someone closer to GOOG explain this? The phrase "ad tech" seems to have a very specific meaning here. Does this 1% include all advertising around the Web? Basically all ad revenue outside of Google's own properties? The number is surprisingly low.
Google owns Google Ad Manager (the tool third-party website and app publishers like NyTimes use to show ads on their properties), Google Ads (the place advertisers like Nike go to run ad campaigns across both Google properties and also these third party sites), and AdX the ad exchange that runs the auction that sits between Ad Manager and Google Ads.
The lawsuit is specifically about googles ownership of the auction and the ownership of the relationship on either side of the auction. The AdX auction also contains demand (ads from places besides google ads) and inventory (ad slots outside of ad manager). Website publishers allege that Google uses this ownership to artificially deflate the value of ads on third party websites.
You don't need to be closer to GOOGL to look at their 10-K.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204426...
On page numbered 60, you can see the Disaggregated Revenues.
The $30B quote seems to be referencing "Google Network" revenues declining from $31B in 2023 to $30B in 2025. "Google Network" is grouped with "YouTube ads" and "Google Search & other" to comprise the "Google advertising" category of revenues which increased from $238B in 2023 to $295B in 2025.
So yea, "ad tech" does not represent the whole of Google's advertising revenue.
I haven't been in ads there in, like, over a decade and some but I believe what was under threat here was specifically Google's ad exchange network. Basically third party bidding for space in Google's display ad network. Basically a part of the business which sells excess "inventory" and which is a much smaller part of their ad business than AdWords and AdSense. Or whatever they call these things now.
I used to work in AdX (and AdMeld that Google acquired) but not since 2014 or so. I believe the AdMeld acquisition itself was one of the things under the microscope here.
If it is a business no one cares about, then why has Google been fighting this?
The money is nbd, but it's much more important to Google (same as it would be for any of the other tech giants) to keep a certain streak going - 42 years now and counting since the government forced a large or important company to do anything even resembling breaking up. A loss here would serve as precedent (either legally, or at minimum in people's emotions) that you CAN force a divestiture. If Google can be forced to divest this business, why not Chrome, YouTube, or Android? Why can't Apple be forced to divest the App Store business, or Amazon be forced to divest AWS?
Microsoft got pretty close to getting broken up in 2000, but settled in time to avoid the split
It was GW Bush winning the election that allowed Microsoft to a settlement.
... for those who think that Trump is an outlier. No, just a slight acceleration to a very much established trend.
People used to joke that W was the bottom of the barrel, then the GOP did a hold my beer and dug a little deeper.
Crazy to think that, despite trump existing, the Democrats still lost two elections to him.
Well they had their chance for "change" with Obama, just like the french PS had their chance for "changement" with Hollande. And both betrayed their electoral base and honest people by empowering multinational corporations against consumers and small businesses. Who could have predicted that noone would want to elect them again?
Please. If you’re an adult and you still believe anything any politician ever says, then you may still have some growing up to do.
Left. Right. Up. Down. Doesn’t matter. A politicians job description nowadays boils down to doing everything in their power benefit themselves and their partners and to hell with you unimportant people if it bothers you any.
If the democrats were serious about winning they would be putting forward candidates that actually have a chance of being popular
Hillary and Kamala were just really bad choices
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Yeah and how was it done? Why did all (60?) of the trump campaigns lawsuits get thrown out due to lack of evidence?
Why did the democrats just simply forget to do it again?
How many hoops will you have to jump through to answer these questions?
What is to which thou art referring?
Crazy to think there were no GOP presidents between Bush and Trump. I first interpreted this as the new record low is lower than the old record low. But no, Trump was the very next one.
Kid Rock is probably next, or worse.
I won’t lie, I asked Copilot (of all things) first, in order to be more confident I wasn’t forgetting even one breakup, and it also pointed out that “almost” one.
You dont have to tell people when your not lying.
Hot take? But I think antitrust trials should not he subject to settlement. It only proves to reinforce the accusations when a company is big enough to pay off the government.
...then how do you maintain an adversarial proceeding?
Like, it's a pretty basic part of American law that courts only hear "cases and controversies" - that is to say, you need to have two parties who disagree before judges are allowed to do anything. If both parties no longer disagree, a settlement is how they call the lawsuit off. But if they're not allowed to settle... what happens? Are we going to force both parties into the court to argue positions they no longer hold? Like, what stops the government from just arguing the case really badly to intentionally lose? That would be worse: now, instead of a prosecution leading to a weak settlement, you have every weak case being carried to term, resulting in a miscarriage of justice as each judgment forms negative precedent against future antitrust action. This is a recipe for eroding antitrust faster.
What you're thinking is that government lawyers are just there to extract the settlement, ergo if we force them to go for the kill, they will get more kills. The reality is that the current social class of lawyers and judges hate antitrust. They successfully recast it from an argument about market power to an argument about price controls, and well, most monopolies don't actually raise prices[0], so building a case against them is very difficult.
Hell, in the Microsoft lawsuit, the reason why the government settled was because the initial judgement to break up Microsoft got thrown out, because the judge who issued it blabbed about it to the press. Keeping the case going would not have produced a better outcome than a negotiated settlement.
Furthermore, while the current "monopoly is about prices" argument is new, the judicial contempt for antitrust is not new. It took three tries and FDR threatening to pack the courts before we got judges consistently applying antitrust law as anything more than a mere ban on unions. While courts are ostensibly neutral arbiters of law, they bend to the fiscal interests of the nation and are inherently political entities, because courts have no inherent power but what they are given by the state.
Or, in other words, if you want more antitrust breakups you need Congress to start appointing more neo-Brandeis leaning judges.
[0] Strictly speaking, there are lots of businesses where monopolies are economically efficient. A monopolist that raises prices is
> If both parties no longer disagree, a settlement is how they call the lawsuit off. But if they're not allowed to settle... what happens?
As someone who's been in court quite a lot, personally involved, in the cases, etc, I can guarantee you that legislation fixes this. Just about your entire argument falls apart if legislation enforcing a spirit of "Antitrust against a party can only be settled by a division of the the party".
You wanna settle? Sure, but it means you gotta divide in a way that we agree to . You're claiming you're not guilty of antitrust? Okay, lets take it before a court.
This way there will never be a "settlement" whereby the monopolist gets to pay a cost of doing business and then continue doing business in the same way.
>how do you maintain an adversarial proceeding?
It's the government as a prosecutor. If current teams are compromised, they find a different team.
This isn't like some law firm with an interest to keep their own lights on. A government prosecution against a threat to labor and economic markets should be to close whatever loopholes lead up to this point.
>The reality is that the current social class of lawyers and judges hate antitrust. They successfully recast it from an argument about market power to an argument about price controls, and well, most monopolies don't actually raise prices[0], so building a case against them is very difficult.
Sounds like a compromised DoJ in that case. Which is definitely the case in the modern day.
But the monopoly argument doesn't hold weight. Some aspects of life are best run as monopolies. But such businesses are highly, highly regulated to prevent the downsides of unbridled capitalism. Big tech is not regulated at all in terms of pricings. And thus we're seeing the results of that in real time.
>While courts are ostensibly neutral arbiters of law, they bend to the fiscal interests of the nation and are inherently political entities, because courts have no inherent power but what they are given by the state.
Sounds like a fancy way to say "big companies always bribed the courts". It's in economic best interest to have a free flow of competition. But it's in individuals' best interests to have good relationships with the biggest winners. The claim of 'interests of the nation' contradicts the fact that being soft on anti-trust betrays such interests.
Citation?
I apologize - I know that the "Citation needed" meme is mostly a way to say "I disagree" but in this case you literally left out your citation :)
You make a claim ("most monopolies don't actually raise prices") you use the end-note citation format ( "[0]" ), but then the end-note is a parenthetical comment that starts to restart your claim and then trails off.
In all seriousness: If you or anyone else can list examples of efficient monopolies I'd be curious to know.
Off the top of my head: local utilities are often given local monopolies. Telecom seems to often be a local monopoly (I've got one option for Internet access, and that's reasonably common here in the US, especially outside of metro areas). I feel like the utilities are reasonably efficient but the telecoms aren't, but I don't have any specific data to back that up.
Great question. The adtech is what rigs the auctions for their moneymaker, the ads.
If they no longer own the adtech then their ad revenue suffers greatly.
i think the distinction is between ads that google sells vs software infrastructure for 3rd part ads (ad tech). ie the revenue's from google's ads on search, maps, youtube, etc are still huge and important -- that's google's advertising business, the eyeballs they sell, if you will. ad tech is google's business brokering ads on other sites, helping others sell their eyeballs.
at least this is how i understand it currently, but i don't know very much. happy to be corrected by someone who does.
Classic capitalism move. It’s not directly making much profit therefore it’s not important! When something that gives you outsized influence or control.. sometimes you would lose money just to control.
Something can be unprofitable but still extremely valuable. These companies are playing strategy games at the geopolitical level and money is not the only resource they want to accumulate to win the game…
By "ad tech" they apparently mean AdX, the part of Google that used to monetize the old open third-party Internet we used to have. (That old Internet that Google itself killed in favor of their walled-garden ecosystem.)
Ok I have some existing comments I'd love to quote[3] on this sad, sad day for the world, but in the meantime: yes, you are 100% correct that this is small compared to their money printer, and yes, this is "all advertising around the web", including many Google first-party publishers like the homescreen of the Google Search app. This is called Display Advertising, as opposed to Search Advertising.
Its still a massive business that they make way too high of a margin on through some truly brazen monopoly tactics[1], so the takeaway there is fundamentally twofold:
1. Google's money printer is so much bigger than one can really even fathom. When you're searching, you have intentionality already; for this reason search ads are less like a new type of billboard, and more like a technology that replaces the racks at Macy's every time you walk in, depending on who bid the most for you in particular based on what you're there to buy.
One consequence we don't think about enough is the crazy levels of innovation that Google has gifted the world for free, from Gmail to Google Maps to Android (all problematic in various ways, sure, but still incredibly expensive products to make that we get for free). They don't do that because they're some weird company who likes giving away stuff -- they do that because that's rational behavior when you own a money printer.
2. Display ads are becoming more and more desparate as our online culture spurns them more and more. It's perhaps not obvious that this business is why they care about gathering your data -- specifically, because personalized Display Ads on the internet are so relatively inneffective at this point that they need the boost.
I'm honestly guessing that Sundar is sad about this decision, TBH; splitting off the whole "buy side" of their display ads business would win them pity for the next few decades from regulators, and it's just so clearly doomed, IMHO. Ads increase, blockers increase, paywalls increase, scrapers increase, ads increase, on and on...
e.g., to pull a random old quote:
TL;DR: On Google's brand new, gorgeous Ads campus right up against the San Francisco Bay, giant signs were put up with "Powering the free and open internet," apparently an old informal motto from the AdSense days. I just can't help but think about that sign, today. I wonder what the people working there feel, now that it's mostly just powering the scammy mobile gaming market.[1]: Super basically, , they've spent insane sums of money to stay as the middle man for the split-second auctions that determine what to put on the Macy's shelves. This makes them some money directly, but it makes them way more money by unfairly propping up their own advertising companies, which are competetive customers of Google's own marketplace.[3] The details get boring, but I think it's obvious why running a fundamentally-opaque auction in which you are a participant creates perverse incentives.
Technically they run the automated marketplace that lives below the marketplaces that the advertisers and publishers work with directly, if that makes more sense.
[2]: https://www.thecurrent.com/opinion/opinion-andrew-eifler-vp-...
[3]: Some goats rants from previous stages of my DABDA process, if anyone is curious:
- From day 1 of this trial: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41496923, and w/ some links: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41496968, on a particularly damning memo: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41497424, and my honest best attempt to characterize the exchange itself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41501491
For clarity: I'm just some fool, and there is absolutely 0 inside information I can/would share in any of the above.
We should just progressively tax monopolies. Companies will break themselves up to compete, no decade long DOJ case needed.
Yes, this, and we need to have this progressive tax be over the company's total assets, including subsidiaries.
Why assets and not existing antitrust metrics like market share? Assuming market share is reasonably defined
Who gets to define the market? Does the "market" consist of only advertising technology platforms, or everything involved in online advertising, or all advertising through every possible channel worldwide?
Because bad behavior tends to scale with company size, not because smaller companies are more virtuous, but because they just have less power to do harm than bigger companies.
Imagine that there were only two companies, and they each had 50% market share in every market that exists. Would you expect either to be well behaved?
You may be surprised to learn that the US corporate tax (yes, that one, the main one we already have and everyone pays) was originally introduced in 1909 specifically as an antitrust measure, to clip the wings of US Steel and Standard Oil.
Of course the best laid taxes always get abused or turn into something else entirely.
There is a reference to this in For Whom the Bell Tolls:
“ Robert Jordan, wiping out the stew bowl with bread, explained how the income tax and inheritance tax worked. 'But the big estates remain. Also, there are taxes on the land,' he said.
'But surely the big proprietors and the rich will make a revolution against such taxes. Such taxes appear to me to be revolutionary. They will revolt against the government when they see that they are threatened, exactly as the fascists have done here,' Primitivo said.”
> Of course the best laid taxes always get abused or turn into something else entirely.
Can you explain this more?
They lost in court, and were found to be a Monopoly. The solution is they tell the court, "sorry we will stop abusing our behaviour now", and then it's just all good?
all the "donations" are working, hence this. same with the meta case too.
Meta just had to make a settlement in a major case that is bad for them. That doesn't look like the "donations" are working very well.
And yes, that settlement is bad for them. What nearly every commenter here in the threads about it overlooked is that it is not the only case against Meta. There are still several cases from governments below state level against them, and several thousand individual cases.
Almost all the vast amounts of material the plaintiffs used in the recent case, including a massive amount of internal Meta documents plaintiffs got in discovery, material from depositions, material from experts, legal arguments, and more can now be used in those thousands of other cases.
Thousands of small plaintiffs have just been handed a fully loaded anti-Meta weapon built using the vast resources of 47 state Attorney General's offices. Meta season is now open and they are going to be trying to doge Meta hunters who just got a big upgrade from the bows and arrows they hunted with before.
And how exactly are they working? The DOJ didn't drop the case or withdraw its request for a breakup. And Judge Brinkema is the Clinton-appointed judge who just blocked Trump's 1.6B anti-weaponization fund, so it's not like she's in the administration's pocket.
> its ad tech business
now there's the euphemism of the day. Alphabet derives 75% of their revenue from Ads. It is their business.
The article seems to distingish ads from ad tech, stating ads bring in a lot of revenue, but ad tech not. Kinda confused about what the difference is.
I agree it doesn't make sense. How are they supposed to make money from ads without ad tech? They're intimately intertwined.
Ok, so "ad tech" is basically situations where someone pays you to run their ad network, like a newspaper or a magazine or something who sells their own ads to people. Google used to call this "Doubleclick for Publishers" (DFP) and don't anymore to be confusing, but I am going to use the old names so it is easier to tell you what each part of the business does.
When someone sells "ads" they are selling the placement itself. When advertisers buy this, they use "AdWords" or "Doubleclick for Advertisers".
Many DFP users got a checkbox one day permitting Google to sell ads and checked this. As a result, Google was able to outcompete _every_ ad publisher, and now "ad tech" doesn't make money buy "ads" does.
Google is right that they cannot separate them, but is lying about why: Neither unit would be profitable without the monopoly, because quite frankly if someone else could sell ads without sucking a ton of money off the top to make a failing self-driving car company, they would and simply win on price.
Thanks for the clarification
That "Lake America" is doing a hell of a lot of work for Google
The judge was appointed by Clinton, so they've been in their role for decades now. It seems unlikely that someone who has served that long in her position would rule based on making the child in the White House happy.
> It seems unlikely that someone who has served that long in her position would rule based on making the child in the White House happy.
The US is a corporatocracy. It's apparently a lot easier for Americans to convince themselves that the current administration is corrupt and end there than it is to acknowledge that the entire system has been corrupted and it won't change once the administration changes.
Two things can be true at once, the entire system is corrupt and the current administration is much more corrupt than any prior administration.
The current administration is in a class of its own regarding corruption -- it is the principle driver of everything they do. The nazi stuff is just bonus for them.
At the turn of the century (yikes!) Clinton reconfigured the DNC to serve the corporations rather than labor. I left the party after that but am compelled to vote blue as the least worst option. Partisan politics allows capture of the government by creating a duopoly of power.
Washington warned us of this threat.
You are correct, but it's largely our first-past-the-post voting system that forces only TWO political parties on us. Voting reform is necessary to help make other parties/candidates electable.
You can change the details of the numbers game that is played every 4 years, but that won't solve the structural issues. I live in France, in any given election we have between 10 and 15 candidates from as many parties. Yet, we're still ruled by corporate interests.
The media makes sure to qualify any candidate threatening the interests of capital as a "dangerous extremist", while "pro-business" candidates receive the lion share of donations for their campaigns. And there are many other guardrails in place to ensure nothing impedes the slow erosion of our infrastructure and public services under the strains of austerity in profit of the few.
All true, but at least in France those in power who commit serious corruption might go to actual jail; there's no way a US current or former president would face what Sarkozy did
Sarkozy got like 4 days in jail total, for taking money from an actual terrorist, and then helping them (among other heinous acts). And the entire media circus was behind him during this "ordeal", complaining about how unjust and unfair it was for this piece of shit to face any justice.
It's not quite as bad as in the US yet, but it's getting there. Media is consolidating in fewer and fewer hands, populists are getting bolder and more shameless, the left is demonized, etc. Same disease, same symptoms, same outcomes.
but Trump tried to overturn an election, not only got zero jail time but got re-elected and SCOTUS issued him a "do whatever you want while president" card, and so now what would have been a "huge corruption scandal" in the past is just routine
Reread the second paragraph of my previous comment. It's a process, of which the US are further along. But eventually, the entire west will go that path.
I get your point. In the US at least there's less of a paradox of choice.
The key problem is that most people don't want to pay attention to any of it because it's either depressing or just not within there range of interests. Add to that the fact that most people vote based on their emotions and those are stupid simple to manipulate on the Right: anger at immigrants and "others" works all the time.
Democracy is the least worst option, but FFS, it would be nice if the electorate were actually properly informed when they vote.
Edit: I kind of contradicted myself on the "choice" thing, but this is effectively like herding cats.
> it would be nice if the electorate were actually properly informed when they vote
Which is why a balanced free press is vital for democracy.
Yet the USA abandoned its 'fairness doctrine' in broadcast media some decades ago.
Broadcast media is boomer stuff (disclaimer: I am technically a boomer). I expect its relevance to fade. That said, the failure to prevent media aggregation (e.g., Sinclair et al) is also a betrayal to the people.
As a boomer, I recognize the value of having constrained media choices: it was a unifying factor albeit at the price of milquetoast and "establishment" programming. Everything has a price...
The fairness doctrine should have been employed when Rush Limbaugh started his hate speech career that aimed to literally demonize half the population.
You too are correct, it was a "get it out there" comment.
My armchair assessment of the the electoral trap we're in:
yeah, it's just that the current administration has a level of "banana republic" style corruption and corporate-dealing/bribing that makes Clinton look like Mother Teresa
It is in fact true that the Trump administration is corrupt on a significantly different level than any prior administration. It is harmful to paper over this.
To the contrary, the entire DOJ understands that FAANG and the three-letter-agencies are one revolving door. Any judge that attempts to defang Google's data collection may well run afoul of the American surveillance system, which this administration will fight tooth and nail to defend.
Not very different from how federal protectionism keeps Apple's App Store centralized despite trillions of dollars in ostensible market damage. Anyone trying to loosen America's grip on software distribution is crossing an ugly national security line that we're all too ashamed to admit exists.
100% glad someone states the obvious. Sometimes here people think these tech companies are on truly altruistic missions on making “the world a better place!!1” or truly making an impact by being an IC in their role and having access to perks which, have largely been taken away as the market matures to data collection and surveillance.
If you want to have some fun, go on LinkedIn and see how many former military people, proud of their service, boast how they are at x or y tech company in director esque roles.
Then bookmark them and see the pages disappear in the future. Boy I’m glad it’s legally 100% ok to scrap LinkedIn data because it truly is a revolving door.
Can you give an example of what you’re saying here? Companies spin up and vanish?
> an ugly national security line that we're all too ashamed to admit exists
We're all ashamed, apparently?? What do they call this, projections of a guilty conscience?
Jingoism. America loves the free market until TikTok and Chinese cars enter it, then it's kicking and screaming all the way down.
You're not getting it.
There is no 'we', there is no 'America'.
These are propaganda terms. When you use them, you bolster the people who mindlessly repeat slogans and frustrate those who don't. It's a lose-lose.
My point was to relate the American POV of the judge with the America-optimistic POV of the parent comment.
Using "we" and "America" in that context is perfectly clarifying, I'm not beholden to pivot to your pet nitpick.
You're not beholden to make any effort to understand me or anyone else, that's a given.
Here is what an LLM thinks about what you've done:
> The “we” is doing a lot of rhetorical work: it turns what could have been stated as “the U.S. government doesn't openly admit this” into the much broader and more dramatic “we Americans are collectively unwilling to admit it.”
I hope that helps. Or is the LLM also nitpicking and failing to understand your 'perfectly clarifying' remarks? Feel free to copy paste and ask an LLM yourself, all I did was ask it 'who is the 'we' referring to?' and copy pasted original parent and your reply.
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agree with you but including netflix is becoming hilarious
Or that N could be Nvidia now.
The acronym gets awkward if we don't, though
I thought we were using "Mag7" these days.
RCS is google's foothold. It forces everyone to share with google and currently, there is no carrier option for RCS. You have to pick google or apple or go without.
Since you are getting no replies but getting downvoted I'm adding source from 2016 corroborating what you mention: https://www.techtransparencyproject.org/articles/googles-rev...
251 individuals in such detected instances just in google. And that report is 10 years old, I'd bet it's 10x that by now.
That makes the argument worse, not better.
Google employees tens of thousands of people. The US intelligence apparatus employees hundreds of thousands of people. In all of that, over eight years, there are 251 people who moved between the two, and because of that absolute rounding error, the entire federal government is beholden to them?
Since you are making the accusation that this is a real conspiracy: statistically, how many people should have rotated between these two giant employers over an 8 year span? The answer isn't zero.
Also, this makes the "data" even more pointless:
"between Google or related firms, and the federal government, national political campaigns and Congress during President Obama’s time in office"
"were appointed to federal advisory boards."
Do you know how many of those boards exist? There are tons of them. I've known a couple of people who have served on them. They're incredibly boring and deal with things like "What accessibility standards should federal government websites support?". Of course you would want people from Google on that type of board.
> 251 individuals in such detected instances just in google. And that report is 10 years old, I'd bet it's 10x that by now.
"Detected instances"
It's so secret that I can name one of them off the top of my head: Matt Cutts. Is he part of this vast conspiracy too?
What conspiracy mate? It's not so deep, I was curious if what he said was a lie due to the downvotes and found nice evidence for it. You don't find it convincing it's your choice, but the dude didn't pull it out of his ass.
The conspiracy that Google is protected on high because people have rotated between two giant employers.
If you think it is "nice evidence", how many people should have moved between those two employers?
And you made the claim that the rate likely drastically increased over the past 10 years. Based on what, exactly?
yes, such has been the reality for some time now. look at boeing
Big companies being protected "from high" based on payments and favors is not conspiracy theory anymore. It is out there in the open expected thing.
You think that giant employers being protected, especially when they align themselves with government interests of the day, is a conspiracy? Do you also think that suggesting economic producer interests are a high priority is a conspiracy? Or that corporations with contracts to the government are generally compliant with governmental requests?
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Understandable, but how is that fair to other competitors?
The whole system is now easily abused by huge mega-corporations. That goes against capitalism. Why did the USA suddenly abandon capitalism?
There's nothing sudden about it. It was happening since 1970, according to one very popular site.
Then why is the DOJ bringing the anti-trust cases in the first place? You think it's all one big conspiracy with the judges so they can save face with consumers?
This litigation was initiated under the Biden admin and not withdrawn by Trump.
Because winning an anti-trust case sets a much larger precedent than having no case at all. Closing the case can block repeat litigation on the same grounds.
If you were Meta, for example, you would much rather be investigated by a corrupt administration than gamble on a future administration being nice. You might even make political donations to this end, and curry favor with the politicians to steer into the outcome you want. Like how Apple was able to escalate foreign App Store litigation to a presidential flamewar, all because Tim Cook bet on the right political cards. We see the same partisan cake-cutting with AI firms, as a way to punish Anthropic for not kissing ass hard enough.
The natural response to a grassroots demand for regulation is to invest your money against it. If Microsoft could avoid a breakup, why can't Google? Why not Apple? What if they're all for sale, like the Catholic Church selling indulgences?
This case against Google was initiated under Biden, and generally celebrated at the time. For your theory to be correct you need to explain how the DOJ brought a deliberately flawed case or weakened it at some point. I haven't read anyone suggesting anything like that.
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The DOJ isn't part of the Judiciary branch, it's part of the Executive.
> FAANG and the three-letter-agencies are one revolving door
Most of the NSA is active duty service members and former military. Did you mean other three letter agencies, excluding the most powerful one dealing with surveillance?
> Any judge that attempts to interfere with Google's data collection may well run afoul of the American surveillance system
The judge in this case put the final nail into Trumps slush fund. But now she's doing his bidding. Is that what you're claiming?
Not everything is a conspiracy. You don't have some special insight into this.
Given the sentence immediately following the revolving door metaphor, I think it was clumsily being used for data, not personnel. Especially because it's true for obvious reasons.
> The judge in this case put the final nail into Trumps slush fund. But now she's doing his bidding. Is that what you're claiming?
No, they're clearly claiming it's a non-partisan thing and the sitting president is irrelevant, as are the specifics of the virtue signalling happening. Yes, even though they qualified themselves with "this administration". Do you think that the Clintons aren't friends with the state department surveillance abomination or the nastiest parts of government writ large? That Bill or Hillary wouldn't fight tooth and nail to protect this terrible thing that's been wrought? Replace the context with some virtue signal about NATO intervention in Serbia 27 years ago, nothing changes. Partisan politics is for yokels.
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This started under Biden? Crazy.
> These days all three branches march lock step in their jackboots
Which is why the Judicial branch has been ruling against the Executive branch again and again? I don't understand what evidence you think you have to the contrary, other than vibes?
> The judge in this case put the final nail into Trumps slush fund.
That's a very different, partisan effort. It's not bipartisan like the Patriot Act was, or domestic surveillance in-general.
> Not everything is a conspiracy. You don't have some special insight into this.
Not everything is as it seems. You can't meaningfully prove that the NSA sat on their hands in the 13 interceding years since Snowden. There's no evidence that US interventionism is on the straight-and-narrow now, you're wishcasting and calling it truth.
> You can't meaningfully prove that the NSA sat on their hands in the 13 interceding years since Snowden.
I mean, you're correct? It's impossible to prove a negative.
> There's no evidence that US interventionism is on the straight-and-narrow now, you're wishcasting and calling it truth.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and all that. You're the ones making the extraordinary claims. The burden of proof is on you, not the people pointing out the flaws in these claims.
i would argue, the NSA not being up to some bullshit is more unlikely, and thus has the burden of proof on it, to assume otherwise is to ignore history and basic incentives these orgs have.
> Apple's App Store centralized despite trillions of dollars in ostensible market damage
Please. The Androidfication of iOS with malware/scamware would cost quadrillions in market damage.
So the market damage would be more than the entire planet's GDP?
Citation needed. The idea that somehow my mum can't even find the space bar on her keyboard and yet is competent enough to go through several warning screens to install a custom .apk is just laughable.
> is competent enough to go through several warning screens
What about "is incompetent enough to press the buttons when the nice man from Microsoft calls about the viruses on her USB"?
She's laugh at him and disconnect. She might not know where the space bar is but she's not an idiot.
Good for her - MANY people fall for these scams, however.
The internet is full of scams. If you desensitize someone to that reality, then you better disable Safari access, iMessage, calls and FaceTime for their own good.
Indeed, it would be a good idea for iOS to have a mode for the elderly that is almost exactly like that (similar to child mode, and for similar reasons).
I interpreted GP as referring to the higher quantity of questionable software in the Play Store, not custom .apk installation.
Also worth a shoutout is the fact that Google also got off scott free for their main monopoly case (the "will they have to sell Chrome?" headlines from a while back). I won't pretend to have even a vague idea of why exactly both rulings (sentencings?) came down so leniently, but it does seem even more unlikely that any sort of executive branch interference was at play.
Clinton was a neoliberal. Not an expert, but I thought for a long time the vision of anti-trust being democracy-preserving (or at least preventing corporations from being able to compete with the government for power) was replaced by a view "consumer harm" was the only concern of anti-trust law. Basically focusing on pricing competition.
Read more about SCOTUS justice Robert Bork who ushered in the modern anti-trust viewpoint.
E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Antitrust_Paradox
> Bork argues that the original intent of antitrust laws as well as economic efficiency makes consumer welfare and the protection of competition, rather than competitors, the only goals of antitrust law.
Indeed, Judge Brinkema is more recently famous for blocking the 1.6B "anti-weaponization fund".
we got rick grimes over here walking into atlanta
Isnt that updated by some national database and google just pulls that data? Apparently Apple Maps will also get it in a few days, since they get the data from them as well.
Yes. We had the same comments about Gulf of America.
Edit: I don't know that there's an actual database served up by the US Gov, but governments control the naming of these things within their own jurisdictions. All of the big mapping products have the ability to serve up different names based on where you're viewing from.
And Apple just renamed: https://apnews.com/article/apple-lake-ontario-america-google...
https://edits.nationalmap.gov/apps/gaz-domestic/public/searc...
GNIS, Geographic Names Information System
(Which still shows Lake Ontario for me as I write this. The body of water along the US's southern coast is Gulf of America however.)
The database entry was updated to "Lake America" on August 27:
https://edits.nationalmap.gov/apps/gaz-domestic/public/searc...
GNIS renders their own static map tiles, so it may take a while for the update to be reflected on the map itself.
> Per Secretarial Order 3453, Lake Ontario has been renamed to Lake America. The basemaps for GNIS are in the process of being updated to reflect this name change.
I see this on the top bar
The government does not control the words you or I use to refer to things.
> governments control the naming of these things within their own jurisdictions
No they don't. People can, and should, call things what they want without deference to government overreach.
It would be nice if Maps would prefer data from government DBs that have localized versions of foreign place name data (e.g., Germany's BKG) when available.
It makes perfect sense that govs control names within their jurisdiction - I am eyerolling at both the name change and the reaction.
I am curious though - is it convention to leave the data as is, or is it illegal to modify it?
Regardless, itll just be changed back in 2 years; as long as I can type "lake ontario" and get directed to Lake Ontario, I do not care at all what the gov database calls it currently.
I wouldn't exactly describe one person as "the government".
I mean ... currently I would? The environment will be different soon
> I am eyerolling at both the name change and the reaction.
Why do you expect meek reaction in a rename like this? What is eye rolling over reacting to this particular rename?
Well, because I expect this to last for two years. Nobody likes it except for birthday boy and his sycophants. All of the signs around Lake Ontario still say the name; same goes for the people that live by it.
Google should override it but I don’t expect them to, because theyre selfish and suck. Only thing to do is win elections.
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So unimportant that you just have to comment on how unimportant it is
It’s so unimportant folks are commenting on my comment about how unimportant it is!
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/apple-maps-changes-name-lak...
Apple updated it yesterday. If I were Google I'd turn down that refresh rate and let someone else take the bad PR next time
There is no bad PR, 99% of people don’t care.
I have been wondering this as well. I cannot imagine having this be autoupdated without review from a centralized database is a good idea. This is a process that needs to be frangible and have some friction in it.
In this day and age, GPS mapping tools have major implications for societal function, safety, economics, national security, healthcare, etc. I'm struggling to think of an industry where a sudden absence/subtle changes of named GPS mapping data would not have an effect.
If everyone relied on the same data base which could push changes to the map in the pocket of every resident of a nation that would be the first thing I would think to hack. Probably easier than actually jamming or spoofing GPS/GNSS over a huge area.
There are thousands of small street changes across the country each day. New subdivisions, road expansions, lane changes, new traffic lights. Of course the vast majority should be auto-updated without manual review, what would a person add to the process? The public database is the system of record in the first place.
> GPS mapping tools
You mean GPS (or rather GNSS) navigation tools.
GPS != map
Seems like something that should be user-configurable (like DNS servers). While the recent annoying renamings have drawn attention to the issue, landmark names have basically always been political.
To all the people pissed about the "Lake America" stuff: why in the actual fuck do you want Google of all organizations to be arbiter of geographical info, instead of federal institutions that are (at least nominally) operated under democratic principles?
Don't you understand the horror of what you're suggesting: "I want Google to impose it's own personal value judgments over the government's."
Yes, I think it's incredibly stupid, 3rd grader childlike to call this "Lake America". But the problem is not Google, the problem is the ass hats we (collectively, even if not you/me personally) voted for. The problem is especially with our Congressional reps who have just neutered themselves in service to this stupidity. And I get it, our federal institutions have definitely showed their frailty lately, but I can't fathom then why people think the proper solution is to give more decision-making authority to Google.
I do wonder how many people that criticize the renaming, were criticizing Obama when he rename Mt McKinley. What are the principles here? Or is it just names I like vs names I don't like.
I think "avoid naming things after people without a deep personal connection to the thing being named" and "prefer established names used by locals" are pretty good principles to follow.
> The Koyukon people who inhabit the area around the mountain have referred to the peak as "Denali" for centuries. In 1896, a gold prospector named it "Mount McKinley" in support of then presidential candidate William McKinley, who later became the 25th president.
Tons of people complained about the renaming of Mt McKinley for the same reason people complain about "Lake America" now. It has nothing to do with the names and everything to do with the reasons for the renaming.
That was reverting a rename. Denali was the original name.
The principal is it's OK if a democrat does it. For example: It's OK to rename something named after a Republican president who was shot (Mt Mckinley). It's not OK to rename or change something about a Democratic president who was shot (ie. The Kennedy Center).
Man, give me an effing break, do you honestly believe that is the correct analogy?
As another commenter said, Obama was reverting a previous name change - he didn't change the name to "Mt. Obama and McKinley" and paint the whole thing gold.
Democracy works best as a diffuse institution and is more than just voting. People are supposed to have rights and power themselves and I want them to try to make things better (whether I agree with them or not) and "corporations" are just groups of people. Needing to just go with the government, especially on something so clearly within their rights, is counter to the ideals of the system.
I can understand Google somewhat here (if I was running a business I wouldn't be happy wading into a political issue like this) but the idea that they are above criticism for just falling in line still doesn't resonate with me.
Corporations being only "groups of people" is kind of wishful thinking. They are one cog in a large machinery that is steered by a few very rich people.
Corporations should not be absolved of criticism. But at the same time it makes little sense to put a hamster in hamster wheel and then blame him for running.
>Democracy works best as a diffuse institution and is more than just voting. People are supposed to have rights and power themselves
People holding power themselves is called self-governance (in the Jeffersonian way).
People voting for representation is called a republic.
People voting away their own power to another is called democracy.
Corporatism works best when people as citizens and civic agents are preoccupied and sort of diffuse, not organized for anything substantial, just busy with their work, hobbies, and local councils. Then the workers go to work every day, some of the lobbying the government, to undermine democracy.
Just a group of people. And some of them are paid to influence the government. But the citizens? They are just diffuse. Sometimes they vote...
Why should the USA override every other country about the names of things outside the USA?
Uh, does it? And with regards to Google Maps, when you use it in a different country you see different things... Not just names, but even the borders.
Yeah it's meaningless to fight. Except not really. If the powers that be are corrupt we can simply keep calling it Lake Ontario across the board, and use the difference to find who is or isn't on my side on that issue.
The only people calling it Gulf of America or Lake America are hardcore MAGATs in my social circle. Even former Trump voters in my social circle are annoyed and not using the new names. So it's an effective way to figure out who is or isn't going along with the Administration today.
> If the powers that be are corrupt we can simply keep calling it Lake Ontario
This is the same logic that the right wing used when they disagreed with Obama on some issues, so they blocked his Supreme Court nominations just because anything Obama does must be bad.
Sounds like your social circle is in denial. There are certainly plenty of things Trump, buffoon and graft-a-holic he is, has done that are corrupt. Renaming bodies of water doesn't look like one of them. (Obviously, because he would have renamed it after a donor, or at least after himself.)
I mean, sure, we can all call anything whatever. I can call New Mexico "Best Mexico" or call Washington, DC "Bad Washington" and that's my right. But pretending that there aren't official names for things because we don't like the current guy seems immature. It's clearly within the authority of the government. Talk like this makes me think that people want to just live in a reality defined exclusively by party politics where we just pretend every law or policy made by The Bad Party doesn't exist, rather than try to win elections so we can shape the one actual reality.
No, they didn't use any logic and they aren't now. They simply said whatever would let them win and it worked.
The President doesn't have an ability to officially change the names of these locations.
They have the ability to change name services in some database somewhere. But it's not actually an official name change.
So all this hand wringing about official names or whatever ignores the reality of the situation. This is just another temper tantrum by Trump that we reasonable people can ignore.
The easiest way to do that is to just say Gulf of Mexico.
> They have the ability to change name services in some database somewhere. But it's not actually an official name change.
Is it Congress who officially holds that power, then? And are you saying that if Congressional Republicans passed a bill renaming whatever, and Trump signed it, you'd then acknowlege it? Given how vanishingly little they accomplish in Congress already, I'm not sure we'd be better off distracting them from their semiannual debt ceiling/budget hostage situation in order to debate these inconsequential things.
Nobody officially holds that power. Names of geographic places are established by popular usage, not government fiat.
I’m not sure either is “how names are established”.
This is a pretty mushy area, philosophically. Is a name what you think something is called (I think our planet is called “Bloop”, but nobody cares) what a lot of people think something is called (“Indian” in reference to indigenous Americans is a famous example of that going poorly, as are many racist epithets), or what an official body says it should be called (“Palestine”, “New Zealand”, and “Taiwan” have entered the chat)?
I don’t think popular usage is any more “truly authoritative” for a name than other sources.
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They didn't do anything special for "Lake America". Google's long standing maps policy is to show people the names that their government says they have. As soon as that name showed up in the US government's database it showed up for people in the US on Google Maps.
In Canada it shows up as "Lake Ontario" because that's what their government says it is. In the rest of the world it gets both names because the two governments whose territories it is in call it two different names.
You mean by Judge Leonie M. Brinkema who was appointed by Clinton and has ruled against Trump policies/agenda regularly?
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As much as I love when people pretend Trump is the first government official to ever rename something, there is no evidence this had any impact on the court's decision.
While I lament another monopolistic tech giant yet again dodging the most meaningful regulatory consequences of their actions, the more useful meta-question is how these behomoths are now so reliably skirting major enforcement like break-ups. It's not that judges have gone soft or just that the current admin is nerfing enforcement (though they are), this trend goes back much further.
The biggest factor is that tech giants now 'pre-game' major anti-trust relevant actions through an internal compliance team staffed by former regulators. The result is the slam dunk smoking guns of 20 years ago are rare. Today's monopolists artfully push right up to the line between "red-handed" and "arguable". Then take measures to fuzz that line and kick up clouds of plausible deniability in the record. Imagine how hard it would be to convict an embezzler who was carefully coached during the crime by expert former prosecutors and forensic accountants.
Thank you for your thoughtful and eloquently crafted comment.
Yep. Almost sounded like a human being. Very close to reaching a state of readability and ease of comprehension that humans tend to go for. I myself like to speak normally and actually say things, but I guess going round in circles and ultimately saying nothing is also a valid strategy…
There was quite literally zero LLM in my response. Um, being a good writer and having a decent vocabulary isn't a crime?
According to Pangram and GPTZero, what I wrote isn't AI. Maybe your AI detector isn't working as well as you think it is. Both my account and the GP are over 10 years old with >10,000 karma while your account was made minutes before your post and has zero karma.
More information on the specific remedies in the USDOJ announcement: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/department-justice-wins-signi...
Sounds like it's not nothing, but also not much.
> said Attorney General Pamela Bondi.
That must have been in drafts for a while.
This is from last year (and a different trial).
> Google used anticompetitive tactics to maintain and extend its monopolies in search and search advertising.
At least there is Europe to enforce antitrust.
https://archive.is/rlAbY
Non-paywalled link
The $22M ballroom donation was a pretty sweet deal.
https://patriot.university/knowledge-base/organizations/org-... "$22 million ballroom contribution — the largest single documented amount from any corporate donor — arising from a lawsuit settlement over YouTube’s content moderation decision to suspend Trump post-January 6. Settlement filed September 29, 2025, in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California (Trump v. YouTube, LLC et al.)."
The US judges lack courage here. This means they help Google power through with its de-facto monopoly.
This is, interestingly, also against capitalism, since now you no longer have a truly free market; no real competition. It is just one giant blob contorlling (almost) everything. Every blind one sees how Google controls WAY too much. Youtube is part of Google too. It is a cash cow that excludes competitors.
This isn't a matter of courage. They're doing what they want to do. Clinton's deregulation, especially of telecommunications, is what lead to our horrible present (he appointed this judge.) The judges that Obama appointed literally don't believe that antitrust should exist.
yea, a lot of people claiming "but its a clinton judge" dont really get this i think...
The United States government is fractured and can't get its act together. No one has a credible plan to solve this. Electing your preferred president doesn't solve a broken Senate and other structural problems. The presidency is likely to keep bouncing between parties that care as much (if not more) about undoing the previous four years as they do sketching out a coherent plan for the future four.
How is wielding this weapon against our most innovative companies going to help the United States compete at scale against China? Scale is sort of required to do so.
So if the government isn't going to be in the business of massive capex investment (the kind China subsidizes) well then you need massive private companies.
The American peoples response to a future dictated by the terms of Chinese hegemony is break up the centers of American innovation? What do you think is keeping the capex cost manageable if it's not the government? How does Google work if you take away its cash cow?
So many of you (I assume despite the complaining that > 99% of HN readers can afford it) need to just pay the $20 or whatever for YouTube premium if it's so terrible and get over yourselves. The tax your children will have to pay if the United States is reduced to a second rate power will be far greater. What's with people wanting free access to services and simultaneously offended by ads? I don't like them either but I understand it would be silly to think they should be free. They can be regulated or reformed in many ways, but the government should be highly restrained about cleaving apart companies. Just remember the powers you give the government today the next government will inherit, and it is not so easy for a party to maintain power for more than eight years. Meanwhile China is operating on government initiatives and sustained strategy on a timeline that spans decades. Companies need to be able to match this horizon without fear of whatever the new normal in Washington is every four years. The trend for the United States is not looking good.
A theory behind busting trusts is that monopolies stifle innovation, and thus growth, in the long term. When it comes to "competing with China" (which, to be naive, I'm not sure the meaning of), many nationally competing firms will have a better result for future consumers than if there were a single "national champion."
Here is an hour long video where Lina Khan makes this point to the Council on Foreign Relations much more cogently than I can: https://www.youtube.com/live/L_QaZk5iJOA?is=rk192CuSIBHLemsi
That's how the theory goes but I would argue the observable evidence says otherwise. TSMC is Taiwan's national champion and effectively a global monopoly, Samsung is the same for Korea and is highly effective on the world stage, same again with ASML.
When a country does what it can to support its key industries those companies often out compete their global rivals and this is exactly the strategy China is using against the west with their support of domestic electric car manufacturing, solar panels, battery tech.
Alternatively the west is often anti big business and we've repeatedly seen national championions go under.
I will watch this. Generally I think you raise a fair concern, and I appreciate the shade of nuance.
By "compete with China" I mean at least have parity of competition with China in the essential technologies of the future, rather than falling behind into some sort of obsolence or inability to shape the global economy we all on the whole benefit from. If China becomes the dominant economic hegemon without a viable American competitive check, I think the world (and certainly Americans) will be worse off.
Meanwhile, a balanced competition between the US and China I think will benefit almost everyone on the planet, for reasons likely not that unlike what I expect Lina Khan will say in that video. There is no perfect solution, so I will look forward to hearing more of her perspective on this issue, thanks.
It is a good and important point. But again this is paired with vast amounts of public investment. So to focus on the government's prevention of single sources of power (that which could eventually threaten the primacy of the Chinese central government itself) obscures the issue.
In the United States we don't have the same reliability of public initiative. That's the point I'm making. Therefore, in such a context breaking up and weakening the companies that do makes us competitive doesn't strike me as a good strategy. And I wish more people would acknowledge that tradeoff in their anti "big tech" rhetoric.
> How is wielding this weapon against our most innovative companies going to help the United States compete at scale against China? Scale is sort of required to do so.
Meta and Google gobble up an absolutely gobsmacking duopolist's share of western world's economy each year.
Meanwhile, two other American companies without monopolies are ahead of them in the frontier model race.
Why do you think that is?
I believe this question rests on a few faulty assumptions of the state of the AI race. Including the value of any particular snapshot in time when it comes to judgements about "who is ahead". And also failing to mention Google is an investor in at least one of the "two companies" I believe you are specifying.
If you think Google (or any large firm) is going to be by necessity be a loser in the AI race relative to smaller firms, you should go ahead and explain why you think that is.
I don't know what you mean when you say "by necessity be a loser" here.
My point is that Meta and Google have had an almost comical resource advantage when compared to all of the rest of the firms in the AI race.
Anthropic raised $65 billion this year, meta is spending double that on capex and alphabet 3x.
That's just their capex.
If you also factor the deadweight loss the duopoly imposes on the entire economy, it paints a grim resource efficiency picture.
Not to mention the negative externalities caused by the decline of journalism. This one is hard to quantify but I believe is the worst.
Hopefully the way for the United States to compete with China isn't to be more like them.
Arguably tangential, but for how long more will Nvidia and CUDA avoid the US anti-trust?
Why would they be subjected to anti-trust? There's a robust competition from AMD and Intel, and NVidia is not using any obviously illegal competition tricks.
Idk how you're defining "robust competition", but NVIDIA and CUDA definitely rule the GPU computing space right now, at least judging from a biased sample of what I read online. Those who experienced computing in the 1990s and 2000s know of the harmful effects that result when proprietary tech stacks become de facto monopolies. Think Adobe Flash, think Microsoft's "embrace/extend/extinguish" strategy. Perhaps antitrust law needs rework if it can't deal with this kind of monopoly.
That's because CUDA had been better than alternatives for quite a while. But ROCm and MLX exist, and they are rapidly advancing. Google has its own chips, as does AWS.
There are also no signs of NVidia colluding against other manufacturers. For example, AMD's MI350[P] are all sold out for the next year or so.
I just don't see NVidia becoming the next MS circa year two thousand.
> Google’s ad tech business brought in $30 billion last year, or about 8 percent of the revenue for its parent company, Alphabet. Its ad tech revenue has declined for 16 straight quarters, and analysts estimate it accounts for less than 1 percent of the company’s profit... “This is a business no one cares about"
Uhhh, what? What kind of colorful accounting is this that they're pulling off?
This isn't for the whole of Google's ad business. Just its ad exchange and I think parts of DFP; basically just mechanisms for auctioning off excess display ad inventory.
Thanks. I was trying to figure out exactly what's in scope here. I'd love to get a broad breakdown or a big pie chart that goes to this level of granularity so I can see where this sits within its other 'non-Google-property' ad businesses.
Ads market is terrifyingly complicated. Or was when I worked in it fifteen years ago. I stopped following it out of disgust
You’re partly right. It’s indeed mostly about AdX but also because Google owns all three sides of the equation (publisher-side via AdSense (and to a lesser extent DFP), AdX, and buy-side via Google Ads)
Good.
twenty billion walkin out the court buildin woo woo!
They will always "avoid" stuff because there is no real antitrust anymore just the illusion of it, it stopped with Reagan.
So, essentially, a nothing burger.
As usual.
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> a great US institution
So, too big to fail, but to small to be a monopoly that abuses it's power?
I'm more on your side than most but surely you don't think zero antitrust enforcement is best for our country?
who is to say that it is great. what makes it so, why is that valuable. Is doing more good than harm. that there is even some inherent value in a "great institution". A bunch of smaller companies would probably be better economically and be more innovative.
I kinda somewhat reluctantly agree with you, and I think other commenters are missing the point that breaking up Google may allow non-US competitors to rise up and take Google's place on the world stage. Thus, breaking them up is not in the national interest of the US.
If Alphabet allows a non-US competitor to replace them, isn't it their fault for failing to compete? The threat of replacement is supposed to be what motivates Alphabet to innovate.
It could also be argued that allowing Alphabet to sustain anticompetitive damages is exactly what creates the opportunity for them to be replaced. Alternatives to AdSense and YouTube can only succeed in America if Alphabet rests on their laurels and is artificially defended from natural price competition.
As long as there are many competitors, that's better than a monopoly, even if some of the competitors are foreign. Powerful monopolists restricting our freedoms is not in the interest of Americans long-term.
> As long as there are many competitors, that's better than a monopoly, even if some of the competitors are foreign
How do you prevent another monopoly from forming from a different country than your own?
Same way you prevent monopolies based in your own country from forming. Anti-trust regulation. Your country's government controls how companies operate inside it
> colincowardly
Appropriate last name. So any institution that lies, cheats, and steals their way to top is absolved of all wrongdoing just because they got to the top?
Companies like modern Google should not be permissible in the even firster place.
Ah yes, the great US institution of ad tech. Mass privacy intrusion in the service of selling clicks for a nickel.
Stalin wishes he had this much reach
So because Google monopolizes on a big enough scale, suddenly they are too important to break up? I would argue that if any single company is big enough to where if it were to break up it would be "against the national interest," then it is too big and must be broken up.
Bring back Ma Bell and Standard Oil they were great US institutions!
Standard Oil was sued for keeping low prices thanks to vertical integration prompting the classic quip about antitrust litigation.
Capitalism requires some level of regulation to avoid eating itself.
what shocker . google has a long history of prevailing in court
The ACLU has a long history of prevailing in court, as does the NRA.
Courts should regularly issue rulings you don't like. Their job isn't to make people happy.
"long history of prevailing in court" is another way of saying "Google isn't being punished as much as they deserve"
> Their job isn't to make people happy.
Sure, but I think we can all agree the US legal system very, very, very rarely issues any ruling that materially punishes a corporation. Even the worst of the worst typically get off very easy.
Do you disagree with that?
> "long history of prevailing in court" is another way of saying "Google isn't being punished as much as they deserve"
Those two things are completely different and have very different meanings. For the most part, the courts aren't the ones that fine businesses.
> There have been more than 180,000 corporate fines issued in the US between 2020 and 2024, totaling more than $345 billion
> 3M Company has been issued with the costliest fines, adding up to $18.6 billion
$345 billion over 4 years seems like a lot to me. Maybe it should be higher? I don't know.
The system is not equipped to check and balance multi-trillion dollar corporations.
“The system” by which I assume you mean the Government of the United States or America doesn’t need to, because “the system” is sovereign. Corporations are not. They get checked when they get checked, and this ruling only avoided a worse-case scenario for Google. It wasn’t a win for them either.
Not GP, and I regularly lament as well the incredibly gentle treatment of certain companies that I'd argue should have been literally fined out of existence (e.g. Equifax, PG&E, etc.), but we should probably stop to reflect that if the US were a country which erred in the other direction, issuing crippling fines often, we would probably stop being the country where innovative companies choose to do business. I don't just mean that as a talking point, I actually think I probably would prefer to have the economy we have here today (with its injustice) compared to one where most innovative companies won't do business here because they can't afford the possible fines.
I wonder if it would help to revoke patents that help google maintain its monopoly, assuming that's the case and it's doable by a judge/congress/someone?
What exactly is the nature of its monopoly that moots competition? I was of understanding that it's more than just ads on google search results, isn't it?
I have no proof, but this just figures. It's entirely plausible that google gave some heavy-duty major dark money campaign donations and have used the return on their investment to avoid being broken up. Maybe I'm just cynical and the corporations and ultra-wealthy wouldn't really do anything like that all the time. They are ultra-greedy, though.
You should probably learn how courts work so you can construct hypotheses that are consistent with observations. In this case, that the outcome was due to the ruling of a "liberal" judge, and not because the government withdrew its case.
> Sergey Brin ($154 billion), the co-founder of Alphabet and seventh-richest man in the world, joined Musk, Bezos and others in being seated behind Trump during the swearing-in.
You aren't cynical. Big tech absolutely bent the knee and are now wearing red kneepads.
Correct. Trump has a lot of influence over liberal, Clinton appointed, judges.
What an incredible miscarriage of justice. Make enough money and pay off enough politicians, and you can pretty much shoot people on the street in broad daylight.
Assuming you read the ruling, what do you disagree with the judge on?
What politicians were paid off to make a judge in a lifelong position who has served for decades rule in Google's favor?
What ruling? It isn't released yet. We have declining to breakup, based on behavioral remedies, and zero details.
Kind of my point. How does one know something is a miscarriage of justice if you haven't read the ruling? Because you don't like the outcome?
I don't think it's a stretch to see a systemic pattern of big tech avoiding consequences that leave the rest of us in the power of monopolies.
Regardless of the content of this ruling, it's another brick in the wall.
A separate discussion for sure, but simply seeing a headline and declaring it an "incredible miscarriage of justice" seems a little far fetched.
For example, many times the courts will point out that the laws need to be updated, which would be in the ruling. Or that a law as written is unconstitutional but it could be made so with some changes. That stuff doesn't make the headlines though, just the "Courts rules for/against X". Ideally we'd have a legislative branch that would look at these rulings and update our laws, but their disinterest in doing so isn't the courts' fault.
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A legitimately rule based legal system is far more beneficial than one that takes sides based on the taste of the day. beneficial for everyone involved. If you want to write "Stan for billionaires", without any sort of reasoning, well, that says more about you.
The system should serve the people, not a small minority of concentrated players. If you can't see how the system is manipulated in their favor, you are part of the problem.
Accepting behavioural changes, is the same stink of the last five decades.
I would like to wait for my own judgement... But someone reacting to the same, "We're sorry", that has been so common it became a South Park meme? They have had no evidence, probably in their lifetime, that government has not simply sold out to private enterprise. There is zero reason to be mad at them.
People react to actions. The actions thus far... Do not encourage any of kind of trust. Taking time to redact the ruling, is not an encpuragement to trust.
Sure. Wait for a ruling. Re-evaluate when it releases, too.
But reacting to the exact same pile shit they've seen everytime... Why blame them?
It's the modern "Never argue with a man who buys ink by the barrel". I think it's why outdoor advertising is so rife. It's hard to fight something when you rely on it to keep your position.
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Just to make sure I'm understanding, you're saying that Google payed someone (presumably Trump), who then went and convinced a Clinton appointed judge who has ruled against Trump in the past to give the case to Google?
Is that actually what you think?
I do not no, I don’t have an opinion on the Google situation. I was responding to the following:
> Make enough money and pay off enough politicians, and you can pretty much shoot people on the street in broad daylight.
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