If you watched the hearing, you will have noticed many of the congressmen and women, after asking their questions in a harsh, accusatory manner, sometimes speaking over the witnesses, turn down to their laps to look at their Apple or Google phones, Google search something, post it to Twitter and or Facebook, and maybe purchase something on Amazon for good measure.
That kind of illustrates the point that these companies just might be too big, but what I don't hear anyone discussing are the potential consequences of breaking these companies up--they are a hard dependency in some way for most of the American populace if not the world's day to day operations and the quality of their services is largely reliant on their scale--I don't think the analogy to Standard Oil does justice to the complexity of the situation. We're not talking about a simple consumer product here, we're talking about complicated data-driven services, services that all rely on access to massive pools of information collected over years at this point, once you fragment the access to that data, the services will no longer perform as they currently do--then what will happen to the little guy we're trying to protect from the big boys who relies on Facebook and Google to advertise, Amazon to feed part of his supply chain, and Apple hardware? How might his business look if you suddenly swap out all of these behemoth quality services he depends on for disjointed shadows of their former selves, many of which will no longer be able to justify the gratis offerings and free tiers they currently can?
Not saying it these giants shouldn't be broken up, just saying it's a process that will require a lot of incredibly careful thought and to be honest I'm not confident those with the power to make the decisions in this case have all the tools they need to ensure such a transition happens without having catastrophic side-effects.
>That kind of illustrates the point that these companies just might be too big
While these companies are big in every sense, they are not load bearing structures of the economy.
What I mean is that they are big, but say Google fails overnight. None of the phones work, none of their services work. There will be short term pain, losses and perhaps some economic impact too. However, the world will move on relatively quickly. There will be another tech company, or a bunch of companies to replace it. There will be new areas of economy opening up to competing products and services. Youtubers will move to platforms like Twitch, email gets moved to Hey (perhaps?), communication moves to platforms like Zoom and what not.
In a few months or perhaps a year, hardware makers will pivot to a new OS, new services, new products. Business will go on, with or without whatsapp / gmail / what not. Credit flow will not stop, businesses will not stop producing goods and services. If a business depends on Google for distribution of it's services, it will eventually find other ways to do it, perhaps through twitter, or email marketing or SMS or what not.
Coming to data collected over the years. Lets say all the data google ever collected gets deleted this instant. The most hurt people are the advertisers, who will start buying generic, non targeted ads for some time and then slowly move to other platforms.
However on the flip side, a company like Google has very real power to influence public thought, manufacture consent, hide facism, nudge elections, lobby congress for unfair playing grounds, etc.
Companies like Google, Facebook & Apple are big, but in a lopsided way. Too much power to do harm, but not really a 'catastrophic' effect on daily lives of people, in the long term. They are important, but not structural. They provide jobs, but are not irreplaceable. Their power to do good is substantial, but their goal to increase shareholder value comes first.
In my view, big tech companies ought to be churned, by force if necessary, to prevent monopolistic or oligopolistic entities.
Imagine what havoc Facebook can wreak with society, if it actively starts promoting one political spectrum, and suppresses the other. The sad part is, it may already be doing that and we just can't damn know.
There isn't a company in the world (except maybe Microsoft, with Outlook, and Azure to build on) who are in a position to even think about stepping in to replace Google's biggest services, and the businesses that are built on, and integrate with, them. Even with a year's notice, let alone overnight.
I think you're drastically underestimating the scale (and number - you missed Google Maps, which is bordering on an essential service) of these systems, the degree to which people rely on them - both businesses and individuals - and the difficulty of replacing them.
If Google failed overnight it would be a macro-economically significant event.
I would not consider GMaps as an "essential" service. One, I can find my way around my city well. Two, I can find my way around my country well too, even with offline maps.
Also, you seem to forget that there are other mapping companies out there. Google Maps itself came into picture after crushing Satnav systems like Garmin, and Nokia Maps.
If Google Maps were to be dead today, again, it is inconvenience, but people would move on.
As to stepping into the most biggest services? What are they? Google search? I am sure venture capital would flow into other companies that are technically capable to provide internet search. You have Bing, DDG, etc. Sure, they are crap, but they are not end of the world. And they will improve. Google Mail? I can live without it. I can choose other providers. There are hundreds out there. Heck, I will setup my own mail server.
People do rely on many Google services, but people can also get by without any of that.
In an event of Google failing right now, it would sure be a macro-economically significant event, but for a very tiny section of the population. And they too would move on.
Until it fails, people will talk and talk and talk about big, size, impact, and other nonsense.
Just see when it fails. It's going to be a collective shrug from 99% of the population.
Google's page might be better-looking and have more sophisticated features than DuckDuckGo, but in terms of the quality of the service I am trying to use? Google is unquestionably inferior to DDG.
Fun fact, on my android device, Google has ZERO results visible at first. I have to scroll past an ad to get to the results. (Often, there are multiple ads that must be scrolled past to get to the content).
Maybe only dinosaurs like me actually use web search to search for web pages rather than to have a guided AI-driven experience, but that's the product I'm looking for. DDG delivers that, Google does not.
This is all outside the greater issue of the web in general and searched-web especially becoming massively clogged with low-quality, overly ad-laden content. If anyone remembers the state of the web when Google first came onto the scene, the problems were similar. Most advertising was obnoxious, intrusive, and costly in an era when bandwidth was scarce. Google came on the scene offering (a) the best search product and (b) discreet, polite, often relevant ads that didn't trigger all sane people to install ad-blockers.
The difference is that in 2000, the internet ad market was tiny compared to today. The audiences were different, also.
I think you're drastically underestimating the scale (and number - you missed Google Maps, which is bordering on an essential service) of these systems, the degree to which people rely on them - both businesses and individuals - and the difficulty of replacing them.
I don't know how old you are but I suspect this is an age thing. I remember the world before Google, before smartphones, before mobile phones even. It actually worked pretty well. People had jobs, traveled, communicated over long distances, read the news, invested in shares, organised events with friends, bought products, and everything else. Google at vast cost has made some of those things marginally more convenient, as well as introducing a whole raft of new problems. They could go away and it would be a blip nothing more. As for Google Maps I also remember when everyone owned an "A-Z" and found their way around cities with it, and that was OK too, and there was very little misleading information in an A-Z nor squabbles over who "owned" which business and could write about it!
If Google failed overnight it would be a macro-economically significant event.
Other than their shareholders and a bunch of sleazy adtech merchants without which the world would be better off anyway, very few would be negatively impacted beyond a minor inconvenience for a few weeks.
I’m old enough to remember all of these things you’ve condescendingly assumed I must be ignorant of, including trying to find my way around LA freeways, during my first hours in America, at night, with a paper map unfolded on my lap, trying to work my way backwards from the address of our motel to our current location, as that changed constantly at 60 mph.
Google Maps is much better.
But you’re missing my point, and also the specific thing I was replying to. My point was not that things didn’t work before Google, obviously they did - we’re here, now. The universe didn’t start with Google. My point is that so many businesses and people today are directly, constantly, relying on the multitude of Google services that if Google went away overnight it would be a catastrophe for them. Google going away overnight is the thing that was posited in the post I replied to.
I also made no assertion about whether Google is a net good or not, so again you’re replying to something I didn’t say.
(For the record I do believe sum of the services provided by Google and the cost at which they provide them is a net good for the world. No, In not interested in debating that)
If you are talking about videos that teach something, for most of youtubers out there that churn out quality content, they will have a library of videos that they will upload to an alternate site. Things will be back up in no time.
I wouldn't worry about it too much. What's the worst that could happen in YT is dead now, people go back to not wasting time on YT Binges.
I’m in full agreement with the social and political concerns you raise, and I think it’s the strongest argument for breaking up these companies, but I don’t think the economy is as flexible or pliable as you assume—especially when the small companies that would try to replace some of the services the big guys offer often rely on a subset of these very services (e.g. cloud services).
I’m not convinced a start up can get to the same level of quality as these big four within a year or so—and that dip in quality will have palpable economic effects, sure it may not cause a collapse, but you’d experience a slow down of the economic engine for sure, and it'd last longer than a year—basically it’d last as long as it took for some other company to reach monopoly size—concentration of wealth and economic power is a flaw internal to the structure of capitalism itself and is the inevitable telos of capitalistic structure.
I think a better way to place limits on the social and political power of these companies is to put in greater data protections. Make these companies pay for user data, make it incredibly difficult for them to abuse data or users, that would help restrict their influence and open up avenues for competition—a smaller company may not have as great of a service but if they offer users greater compensation for their data they can draw in customers.
If Google search vanished overnight the world would turn to DDG within a day. Ok, that would probably crash their servers but I'm sure they and other search engines could scale up quickly.
You're trivializing search. DDG only works because for the hard stuff it's grandfathered into an old Bing API. DDG is small and scrappy but it's built on the shoulders of a giant investing billions of dollars.
Right, but the average person doesn't know about DDG--sure word would catch on, but the initial break would cause major friction for the vast majority of people.
Also, what happens to all that data in stowed away in other services? What happens, with Gmail if it's separated from the ads division? Do they suddenly start charging everyone to use it? Can they still run ads in Gmail? Would they have access to the infra serving those ads? If they flame out completely do we lose all our data? Will they give us a chance to export it? In what format?....
I just can't help but feel these sorts of breaks would be extremely difficult to get right.
Swapping one monopoly for another really isn't the answer we want.
Speaking as one who worked with many who'd cheared Microsoft over IBM, who myself once saw Google, and later Apple, as just deserts for Microsoft's own monopoly abuses, and presently relies principally on DDG for Web search, and acknowledges that it too relies heavily, though not exclusively, on Microsoft's Bing.
Providing a useful tech capacity without winner-take-all monopolies should be the goal. And result.
Search naturally tends towards monopoly; nobody wants to navigate to half a dozen separate sites to and parse through the results of each individually to find what they want.
All of them would be ad supported too, thanks to the fact that we in the software industry have conditioned users to expect things for "free" and advertisers would also want to put the bulk of their ad dollars toward the most effective search engine to get the most bang for the buck, again reinforcing the trend toward monopoly.
The only alternative that comes to mind is to make search a government run public utility but, as I'm sure a number of you are thinking rather loudly right now, that comes with its own set of problems.
I mean, honestly, it would just be a massive surge of users to Bing. I don't think any of the other competitors have the existing public name recognition.
After switching to DDG (and recently, Bing after switching to Edge), I don't think Google's stock web-search is that much better. Not saying it's not better - it is - but if it disappeared from the face of the Earth, we'd all survive perfectly well on the alternatives.
Google Maps, though, is still unquestionably king. It is ludicrous how poor the alternatives are.
> ... turn down to their laps to look at their Apple or Google phones, Google search something, ...
This reminds me of the article where the newspapers know when a senator or congressman is reading their article. Maybe these are seasoned politicians, but I wonder how much subtle influence will wend its way into government going forward.
That kind of illustrates the point that these companies just might be too big, but what I don't hear anyone discussing are the potential consequences of breaking these companies up--they are a hard dependency in some way for most of the American populace if not the world's day to day operations and the quality of their services is largely reliant on their scale--I don't think the analogy to Standard Oil does justice to the complexity of the situation. We're not talking about a simple consumer product here, we're talking about complicated data-driven services, services that all rely on access to massive pools of information collected over years at this point, once you fragment the access to that data, the services will no longer perform as they currently do--then what will happen to the little guy we're trying to protect from the big boys who relies on Facebook and Google to advertise, Amazon to feed part of his supply chain, and Apple hardware? How might his business look if you suddenly swap out all of these behemoth quality services he depends on for disjointed shadows of their former selves, many of which will no longer be able to justify the gratis offerings and free tiers they currently can?
Not saying it these giants shouldn't be broken up, just saying it's a process that will require a lot of incredibly careful thought and to be honest I'm not confident those with the power to make the decisions in this case have all the tools they need to ensure such a transition happens without having catastrophic side-effects.