There's side effect benefit of big kahuna companies mainly on the significant breakthrough and game changing research output because these excellent researchers are paid handsome money compared to conventional universities or research institutions.
We saw this with AT&T Bell research labs with their inventions of transistor and Unix, among others. The same thing happened with Google research with (arguably) deep learning and transformer.
Split them up at your own (US) perils, not unlike killing own Golden Goose.
Clearly this model no longer works. Bell labs had 11 nobel prize winners. What did Google invent? Slightly better generative neural networks whose offsprings now pollute their search results?
Google invented the ability to put an animated Gif inside a spreadsheet cell.
You could interpret this the other way - Why has Jeff Dean been snubbed by the Nobel committee? Why hasn't Larry Page gotten a Nobel for inventing the search technology that half the planet now depends on? I don't know what category to put that one in, but there's some important results in lightspeed-limited communications in "The Datacenter as a Computer" that would be worth extending the Physics category for.
The split of ATT killed Unix2, so we spent 30 years re-implementing Linux+k8s. These things that existed in Unix2 & Plan9 were re-implemented by Plan9 employees in Google Labs.
UNIX exists because ATT was split. They could not profit from software (by law because of an agreement with the government) so early versions of UNIX where made free.
This should be well known, simple google search:
https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-general-1/why...
i can't even understand what you are saying? AT&T was good, or bad?
AT&T copyrights led to linux, and linux, independent of unix, has been a huge boon for good, and for unixness.
the threat to unix now is all the people who by nature prefer Dave Cutlerness, and can't see that their way is the wrong way, now they are using linux (because it won) and trying to ruin it.
UNIX only became a success, because ATT initially wasn't allowed to charge real money for research work.
Seconding info about "unix2". I used to pour over the trade tabloids, and I've never heard of this.
Novell bought UNIX and has some grand plans for "SuperNOS", which also never shipped. It certainly wasn't anything like K8s.
Never even heard of Unix2 - was it a complete replacement ?
just skip the middle man skimming off the top and 10x the national labs funding.
I wish this were a viable option, but it is not. US national labs are horribly, horribly mismanaged. For some slower-moving fields like particle physics where institutional knowledge is key, they hold up alright, but for fast moving fields like quantum they are very behind. They are stagnant bureaucracies. I could tell stories, but better to just compare the output of national labs in many fields to those of the top universities in the States.
What on Earth... you do realize that antitrust regulation was the only reason we got Unix in the first place, right?
So wait, markets don't work, then? A free market, theoretically, promotes innovation by ensuring that businesses must advance their products in order to compete with one another. You're saying that a lack of competition promotes innovation by concentrating all of an industry's capital under one roof.
The thing that makes markets work is the struggle. A Darwinian survival of the fittest in a way. Once the struggle is over and only one contestant remains, the results are generally dystopian.
Also I believe that even when working optimally the Darwinian mechanism can't solve certain problems. Some things need to be dealt with by a group of motivated people working for other goals than profit.
Markets gave us compuserve and facebook while CERN gave us the open web, for example.
Both can be true in varying degrees at certain points in time. They're not mutually exclusive. There are benefits to centralization and concentration of capital. Competition is the same exact process that leads to monopolistic entities in the first place.
Regalian roles are to ensure fair competition by reducing any actor bigger than the state to something smaller, and ensuring the economy works with transparent information (no lying, rule of law, etc.)
Companies getting too big are natural; Letting them get too big is what happens when your state borrows a trillion per semester: Your state is obese, intervening in every little sector of the economy (thus the opposite of liberal), and not playing its regalian role.
You should indeed reduce the size of both the state and the largest companies, to let the economy self-regulate, but then, how would the US govern the rest of the world?
This is a theoretical benefit which is directly at odds with the benefits of competition in a healthy market. For google, my observation is the "big kahuna" benefit of google basically does not exist and competition needs to be restored. Google is famous for not innovating on anything successfully, they produce graveyards of trash. Instead what they do is buy other companies then enshittify them in an anti competitive dance towards causing more damage than productivity.
You really have to think about exactly how our modern markets work and why buyouts are such dominant strategy. It's only sometimes about taking what you buy then using it, it's mostly about taking what you buy to stifle competition these days.
Look at twitter and Vine, twitter bought then shut down vine as part of a standard operating procedure just to stifle competition, and they had so little interest in capitalizing on what they bought that it left a market gap so wide TikTok filled it instead. But usually these practices do not leave such big market gaps, usually they simply shut down competition successfully and the buyer wins. Then in many cases if the company owners refuse to be bought out, extreme anti-competitive practices begin to destroy their business, which will not be punished until long after the victims get shut down. So owners need to choose between a huge pay out, or their company getting destroyed. Owners tend to choose the former.
> "big kahuna" benefit of google basically does not exist
I just given you the deep learning and transformer benefits.
There's a reason why the darling of AI Renaissance namely transformer was not invented at MIT, Stanford or Berkeley.
>Google is famous for not innovating on anything successfully
PageRank
Gmail
Maps
MapReduce
Chrome
Protocol Buffers
Go
Gmail was revolutionary at the start, but stopped innovating 10 years ago - why don’t we still have a good search engine within it?
MapReduce would be invented anyway (I implemented it from scratch before learning of it’s existence).
Chrome is just a slightly upgraded Firefox (and novadays Safari is just as good if not better with ai)
PageRank was what gave Google monopoly, it’s not a result of monopoly.
Go - I can give you that. ProtoBuf - not my field, but isn’t it just a format that someone else would develop to fill a niche? (unlike say mp3 that had new compression algorithms baked in)
Maps - I can give you that. Some people might argue that it was an acquisition, but without Google’s muscle, Street View would not be feasible.
Maps was technically an acquisition (Where2). But like YouTube, Doubleclick, Google Docs (Writely), Translate (Word Lens), Google Flights (ITA) and many others, Google successfully grew these products into giants.
Didn't some of the early GPT work come out of Google?
The popular transformer paper, which went on to be used in things like ChatGPT, was authored by Google employees. But “come out of Google” is giving the organization too much credit and the individual too little. Also transformers were themselves a continuation of prior work like multi head attention. And it is possible that transformers were not needed - see this discussion from the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41732853
Hilariously shortsighted. Big Tech companies have been a GDP-doubling runaway success for the US economy.
It would be like if we here in Denmark started breaking up Novo Nordisk. Our economists would probably do a public lynching of any government official who suggested doing that.
However as a European I can't help but welcoming the US shooting themselves in the foot like this. Something tells me we will see more of this as more reddit-brained American millennials get political influence.
Hilariously shortsighted. Breaking up Standard Oil created wildly competitive industries and launched Rockefeller's wealth into the stratosphere. Big Tech is a rent-seeking middleman that chokes the life out of innovation.
It is precisely the large impact on GDP that poses a threat to the host nation. When companies like Novo Nordisk are such a huge part of the economy, they can exert disproportionate influence on society itself.
Our economy is absolutely benefiting from Novo Nordisk's size right now, but if/when their demand weakens or they're out-competed, we're going to end up with a lot of unemployed biotechnicians and massive roads to Kalundborg which will need to be maintained.
A lot of Google's features when integrated and leading to ads and other Google properties they are justified, but if you were to forbid cooperation between the divisions, they may be shut down or diminished, as on their own they would need to be subsidized considerably and the 3rd party alternatives for ads would take most of the profits probably leading to negative cash flow without decreasing the level of service or charging fees.
It’s amazing to me that Google is still so rich given how lazy their culture is and how incompetent their product strategy has been. It just goes to show the power of their size and all it brings. Things like capital, monopolies (search), control over platforms (Chrome), network effects (YouTube and ad networks), and just plain old momentum.
This break up is long overdue but we also need a drastic rethink of antitrust law and corporate taxes to shift the economy towards innovative smaller instead of concentrating it in a few megacorps that are as powerful as some governments.
Google is such a rudderless mess that breaking it up may be the only way to salvage anything of societal value from this company.
One of the pendulums in business strategy is whether companies should be smaller so they can be more nimble and pursue their own destines or larger so the can be more protected from market demands and can capitalize on "synergies" with other business units.
In practice, investors usually discount larger companies for efficiency reasons. You can see this with acquisition announcements where the acquirer usually goes down in price. The synergies often fail to pay off because there aren't actually many synergies between making microwaves and running a TV network, and the sprawling empire turns into mostly independent fiefdoms.
>societal value
Genuine question: what societal value would be lost if Google was erased tomorrow (all technical reliance their services was magically replaced overnight with alternatives by pixies)?
What would happen if you replaced Google with a perfect functional equivalent? Well, nothing.
You don't happen to know where one could find these magical perfectly compatible and functional drop in replacements, do you?
You could make that argument for anything, though.
“The DoJ identified four areas that its remedies framework needed to address: search distribution and revenue sharing; generation and display of search results; advertising scale and monetisation; and gathering and use of data.
…
In addition to potential spin-offs, prosecutors said remedies could include banning the exclusive contracts at the heart of the case — in particular the $20bn that Google pays Apple each year to be its default search engine — as well as imposing ‘non-discrimination’ measures on Google products such as its Android operating system and Play app store.
The DoJ is also considering requiring Google to share its vast trove of data gathered to improve search ranking models, indices and advertising algorithms, which prosecutors argue was accumulated unlawfully.”
Related DOJ may want to break up Google (84 points, 2 months ago, 98 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41240716
It will be really ironic if this kills Mozilla / Firefox
That's one of several scary scenarios.
What if it kills Android, and everyone has to buy an iPhone? (Yeah, I know, Android is OSS and the phone makers could just maintain/improve it as a consortium without Google, but looking at how these companies operate I don't think they're capable of doing this.) (And no, I don't think the USG will break up Apple if this happens. They're already showing highly preferential treatment to Apple compared to Google.)
What if it kills YouTube, and the only viable alternative is TikTok? I recommend everyone start downloading all their favorite YouTube videos with yt-dlp right away, just in case.
What if it kills Google Maps? Again, there's no real viable alternative here unless you have an iPhone.
I can see a lot of ways things could go horribly wrong here if you're someone who doesn't want to be an Apple user.
> And no, I don't think the USG will break up Apple if this happens. They're already showing highly preferential treatment to Apple compared to Google.
The largest business by far is iPhones. It has 16% market share in the PC business, behind Lenovo, HP, and Dell. The only business that makes sense to peel off is the iPhone services (Apple Music, News, etc.) because that's the place it uses its dominant position to help its own products.
They biggest web advertising company definitely shouldn't control the world's most popular browser. Just like we all knew they would, they're blocking ad blockers, and this problem will only get worse.
Tell your friends to use Firefox, people.
I'm not so sure this is a problem. They're not completely blocking ad-blockers, just neutering them somewhat with MV3. You can still use uBOL (the "Lite" version of uBO) and get a lot of ads blocked on Chrome.
Remember, Chrome is not installed by default on Windows PCs; Edge is. People are using Chrome because they want to. They could just as easily download Firefox and uBO, like more-savvy users do. Unfortunately, too many can't be bothered. Should they be saved from excessive and intrusive ads? Again, they can easily install uBOL on their Chrome instance, or they can download and install FF+uBO. Or use something else like Brave.
>Tell your friends to use Firefox, people.
Absolutely, yes. Just don't be too surprised when you visit them later and they're still using Chrome (or Edge) with no ad-blocker at all. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.
>Chrome is not installed by default on Windows PCs; Edge is
Whenever this is brought up, the silence is deafening.
Edge is a good browser, and users are notoriously lazy; most won't read a dialog box before clicking it away. And yet... ~everyone on Windows still downloads Chrome.
Edge is a Chromium skin. At this point, people probably download a new browser because they've been trained MS browsers are bad.
It's fascinating how "preventing web extensions from having full access to everything on every site you visit when there is a repeated history of extensions being bought by companies that turn them into spyware data miners" gets turned into "blocking ad blockers".
break up google for fumbling transformers alone
Yeah that's what monopolies do. Make people use inferior products. The US used to break up monopolies all the time. This was followed with a wave of innovation.
I can't tell if you're serious.
Not only did Google not "force" anyone to use the LLM tech that they largely developed, most people think they're silly for inventing it and then sitting on their hands until another company (OpenAI) ate their lunch.
There has been many announcements of lawsuits based on antitrust in the last 3 weeks.
We can assume the message is “If you reelect the current party, we’ll finish these lawsuits.” There are two perverse effects:
- It positions the alternate party as the party that Google should sponsor,
- The good choice after reelection will then be to delay the next step of those popular antitrust cases to 3 weeks before the end of the next mandate, to tell the electors that they should reelect. Which ironically puts the current party in the position of the one doing nothing on the popular antitrust case (a corollary to “a party’s platform depends on ensuring the problems it’s supposed to solve keep existing”).
Weren’t some of these cases begun under the previous administration? Neither party is a fan of big tech
Harris has been thin on policy, so it's hard to say, but seeing that she's from the Bay Area, she might be more careful more careful to not break one of the country's key industries.