EU and the US need to get together and start breaking up large companies. Pretty much every industry is now a couple large corporations that are large enough to crush any upstarts, which you know if bad for innovation. Also will add a major overhaul on patents and IPs.
Obligatory mention of the fact that Google employees can’t even say the words “market share” or “monopoly”.
Shh, that is wrongspeak. If you stop using the bad words in internal communications, then you can answer with a straight face that you had no idea that you had 80%+ market share and were crushing competition and innovation.
“Google is in every part of this value chain. As we see it they hold a dominant position in both the sell side and the buy side in order to favor their own ad exchange,”
I have seen ad tech middlemens that ~75% of the ads they “buy” come from Google dv360 and ~75% of all ads they sell was to Google ad manager.
The only close competition to Google is Facebook and Amazon mostly because they have their own closed garden big enough to sustain ad exchange. On the open web (random apps and websites) it’s all Google.
That would essentially create one massively profitable business (ads) and one very unprofitable business (everything else). There might be exceptions, like cloud computing, but most of Google is not self-sustaining without its ad business.
Doesn’t seam feasible for the survival of the rest of Google.
Google doesn’t need to control the entire value-chain of the as market like it does now to be sustainable. Right now they are basically the ticketmaster of online ads.
Google the advertising business would have no trouble on its own. But the advertising business and cloud computing business are their only meaningfully profitable businesses.
Google Arts & Culture, Google Photos, Google Duo, Google Voice, etc would likely need to figure out business models, and those business models may not be what you’d want.
If you read the article, the problem is not that Google has an advertisement business but that they control the entire chain. In particular they focusing on the Google AdX (Ad Exchange) which is only one of the components of their ad business, but it’s the one that gives them an unfair advantage, because it gives them full control over both the buying and selling sides of the ads business.
That’s one complaint. And breaking them up would be fine (probably). But regulators are also eyeing breaking Google and its other businesses up. Android has long caught the eye of regulators in Europe.
(Less so in America where it has a minority of the market…)
Good, the internet and android are an ad infested data mining hell scape. I’d love to see a post google tech world.
It wouldn’t be a post-Google world, it would be a world of “baby Googles” all trying to find a path to profitability, most likely by invading your privacy even more or doing other unsavory things. Google’s bad for privacy, but if broken up into a long tail of tiny businesses, it could actually be much worse.
Keyword could. Monopolies do know one any good. See Twitter and Reddit. I would rather roll the dice, then stick with Monopolies
Those businesses would quickly die and be outcompeted, as competition mostly doesn’t exist now in those spaces because of Google.
We’d all be better if the internet was not owned by an ad company.
The far, far more likely outcome if they can’t sustain a profit is that they’d be acquired.
Take for example Google Photos. I find it very unlikely that Google is making money off of it. What revenue they do have comes from storage, which is subsidized by the scale of the rest of the company.
On its own, though, Google Photos has a lot of data: who you were with, what products are in your home, where you were when you took those photos. Right now, Google doesn’t do anything to monetize the content of those images; it would be too much reputational damage and they already know enough about you from other signals.
But what if Google Photos were a stand-alone business? What if they were acquired by Epsilon or Oracle America? There are companies that are way worse on privacy than Google. They would have no qualms at all about taking your entire photo archive and adding to the profiles they sell.
The far, far more likely outcome if they can’t sustain a profit is that they’d be acquired.
And the same authority that would have broke up Google has to approve the acquisition. They most likely wouldn’t.
They would have no qualms at all about taking your entire photo archive and adding to the profiles they sell.
That’s not something that they can do under EU law.
And the same authority that would have broke up Google has to approve the acquisition. They most likely wouldn’t.
Why not? It wouldn’t create a monopoly.
That’s not something that they can do under EU law.
And EU law applies only with regard to Europeans. And European companies.
And EU law applies only with regard to Europeans. And European companies.
That AND in there is an OR. It definitely applies to American companies selling to EU customers.
And well to be honest, it’s not the EU’s fault other countries are not enacting reasonable privacy or market regulations.
I’m really interested what that would look like because much of their business depends on their ad revenue.
Probably they’d keep making money through ads, but less so since they couldn’t rely on their in-house ad monopoly, and may have to give a cut to a third party ad platform.
Just make ads for for-profit entities illegal
