This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
But how do you break up Google? Their ad business is the lynchpin to their monopolies and breaking off chunks without being able to self fund is just asking for harm to the market.
Breaking off Chrome while banning paid default search status puts the browser company with the same problem as Firefox.
No one can run a search company without ads.
Cutting along business lines is just going to create smaller monopolies or dead product lines.
Cut Google Fiber off and it can be a separate ISP.
Cut the Chromebook and Pixel phone divisions off. thay can support itself with device sales.
go ahead and kill the projects they're gonna abandon in the next few years anyway, don't let them replace them.
maybe they shouldn't have put themselves in that predicament
Not our problem. Adtech is cyber warfare. They can find new business models not designed to exploit nor control us.
We need to stop depending on Big Tech giants like AWS, Google, Microsoft. I personally hope it breeds new innovation.
There’s plenty of good, free and non-invasive search engines. Give Qwant a try!
I seriously can't deal with google search anymore, I swear I can't find anything.
It's like it replaces my search terms with something more common (sometimes even completely unrelated) and runs the search with that. It's fucking ridiculous. Keyword search doesn't work at all anymore, and writing fucking sentences like it suggests you to leads to completely shit results. I just don't get it.
I noticed a change like this some 10 or so years ago. It used to be pretty simple, just an index search. And it was pretty reliable, you just had to get the hang of it. But I noticed they changed something because that didn't work so well anymore, so I switched up my search style to be more like you would expect people new to computers to have. Kinda annoying, and not as effective, especially for edge cases (some obscure searches) but for those it seemed to somewhat fall back to the old method.
But now, nothing works anymore. Honestly it fucking infuriates me sometimes, I can't find anything. If you want something specific, fucking forget it. More than three specifications and it shows you just 5 results??? What the fuck is with that? And not good results mind you. any less specific and it shows you generic, not applicable answers. I tried everything, it's useless beyond the most general questions.
So yeah, I kinda went off on a rant there, but the point of the comment is, is qwant (or any other alternative) similar to old google and can actually search by keywords?
The problem is SEO.
You can't just use keywords anymore because every site out there is actively exploiting that system. Being the search engine everyone uses inherently means everyone will try to cheat to be overrepresented. It's an adversarial system now, which forces an arms race between the search engine and web sites, meaning a search engine has to constantly evolve to stay ahead.
They've failed to do that and I definitely don't like the end product now, but there's nothing they can do to be what they were 10 years ago either. The web has changed.
You can't just use keywords anymore because every site out there is actively exploiting that system.
Ahh Goodhart's Law strikes again.
All of them do this to some degree unless you quotation mark the shit out of search terms but in my experience Qwant is better than others at this. If they didn’t do it at all many common search terms would be very hit or miss. This is my obviously just my opinion and your mileage might vary.
The biggest downsides you need to prepare yourself for in every other search engine are lack of Google Maps integrations (they’re so far ahead of everyone :/) and no Reddit results. The first one is offset by just how shit Google is now. The other is more tricky but I believe Reddit is so astroturfed that it’s no longer useful except for some niche communities. I do Reddit searches via Redlib so that spez gets none of my data.
About reddit - I was just looking up different search engines and stumbled upon this. So apparently reddit blocks other search engines. But honestly, that's not even that bad. Reddit's been astroturfed to hell and even the non-product placement content is AI generated garbage.
Quotation marks worked as a patch for a short while in google, but even that has been nerfed the last couple of years. Honestly I'm just looking for a search engine that doesn't return results for what it thinks I want, but returns results that actually contain the keywords I searched for.
But from what I've seen, it's slim pickings. I'll give Qwant a try tho, thanks!
Then the search company buy the ad service from the ad company, as all other search engines can then do as well. Isn’t that the point of breaking up a big company?
I’m a layman, but how is that harming the market?
Because the ad monopoly is subsidizing the other businesses.
Breaking up Google to smaller companies but leaving the ad market as is the same just creates more Mozillas, companies technically independent but still relying on the same revenue stream.
If there is money to be made those companies would make deals for data/ad-space, it’s just that they will do it in competition with other ad services and search services for example. That’s how a healthy market works, no? (Aside from the problematic data brokerage which is another issue)
And if they can’t survive that, then the business should probably not exist.
In that sense you could argue the market is “hurt” but I think consumers will benefit in the long run when competition can thrive, and monopolies do not exist.
Splitting off Chrome, Android, or Google Play isn't a meaningful, earnest act of "anti-trust" while AWS is allowed to control the data centers. All the web apps and click tracks are there, ICANN's children, and a growing number of federal departments.
requiring “Google to provide support for educational-awareness campaigns that would enhance the ability of users to choose the general search engine that suits them best.”
Real power move there, I feel the competition returning already.
Take a look at what Epic is doing and why - companies that are rich and salty enough are great allies against even bigger tech giants. Whatever remains of Google would still be able to afford lawyers and argue that the same should happen to Amazon, Meta, Apple and Microsoft :)
I’ll believe it when I see it.
It's not going to happen. Especially if the rumours of Harris replacing Lina Khan are true.
Don't get your hopes up. The US political class is far more pro business than people here would like.
I don't think she understands how much people adore what Lina Khan is doing.
I doubt she cares. If she's ever challenged, all she has to do is say "but Trump would be worse" and millions would fall in line.
And I sincerely doubt Lina Khan is a line in the sand for pretty much any Democratic Party voter. They'll hold their nose and vote for Harris as long as her positions are marginally better than Trumps.
The crazy part is that the threat is real. Imagine not voting for Harris in the US because of perceived antitrust fears and ending up with 6 Trump Supreme Court justices who spend the next 40 years turning the USA into a Christian nationalist state.
You don't have to imagine it. You will get to live it if you don't do one specific thing. Show up at the polls and vote blue.
It won't save the world. It will buy four years. If that's not good enough do what you should have done four years ago, keep these discussions alive. Make Kamala regret ever wanting to be president by forcing her to make the right decisions. Also, since she never won a presidential primary force the Dems to have an open primary in 2027.
I know I can't make any of this happen. WE have to make it happen.
While I do think that many of these companies need regulation, I think it would be very easy for many of them to cut off a finger or two to save the body, especially when you factor in that many departments of these companies either operate at a loss, or are in positions where they are losing market share.
For Google, losing Chrome would do very little for them. Fill the board with several execs, and it'll be Google-aligned for the next decade or so. They could also kill off Music, Docs, Fit, Pay, Keep, almost a dozen products that could either be killed or spun off into separate businesses. The same goes for Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, countless businesses that have a finger in a lot of pies.
EDIT: This is why people on the fediverse don't like Lemmy...
At&t/pacbell basically just kept recombining after being repeatedly broken apart. The market is broken, not the company.
There’s so much to chop off there. They’re an ad monopolist, cut that. Their YouTube business is self sufficient, cut that. Android and Play Store? Chop chop chop. Cloud Services? Chainsaw goes wrrr. Google, Chrome and assorted services could stay with Google for brand recognition. All of them would be still very big and dangerously influential.
Unless you spin off Youtube along with the ad business into their own company, YouTube dies. It is in no way self-sufficient without the ad network that literally supports it.
I’m happy enough with the discourse being „how would we chop Google into pieces”, I know my dream is probably just a dream haha.
YouTube is probably the biggest streaming service out there. They’d have no issues negotiating a sweet deal with some ad company, former Google or other. As of now most YouTube users are products sold to advertisers so we’d benefit from adjusting this a bit too.
No shit, good fucking luck getting a business to purposely neuter itself.
Any reduction in operations or separating into new businesses would almost certainly be an effort to trim expenses/fat, and not a realistic effort into creating multiple viable businesses.
With that said, I'd definitely cut Cloud. They're a distant and expensive third to AWS and Azure, and it probably doesn't make the kind of money that other arms will make.
Break up Google!
Changes to the online advertising market would make online ads less valuable for publishers and merchants, and less useful for consumers.
If by useful they meant anything that is heavily promoted by Google ads get added on the 'will not touch with a 10 foot pole' list. Sure, I guess?
Also hinting at changing their business models, raise the cost of devices, should chrome or android be forced to break up.
Google blog response is exactly why this breakup should happen. They are getting out of control.
Ads are not useful for consumers ever
I've seen useful ads, dozens of times. Usually for camping equipment
Ads can not be made less useful to me in their present state, and as it is they are far overvalued as an industry.
I unironically want to go back to the days where ads told you what the product was, what it cost, why you should buy it (compared to competitors) and where to buy it. All the cutesy "we're gonna tell a story" advertising falls flat on its face because, as much fun as the "real deal" can be, 99% of it is designed by committees to reach as big of a spread as they can. It's soulless. I'd rather my soulless advertising be straight and to the point than some eye-rolling, meandering, soul-sucking corporate garbage that takes 90 seconds to say what it could have said in 15s.
Hey advertisers, quit wasting my time, and your money and quit fucking doing it. The reason why the, "narrative advertising" or whatever you call it, works is because it's made by a small company and targeted at an equally small community. Chances are, it's enthusiasts selling to enthusiasts, and they know the people they're targeting better than you ever could.
You. are. not. a. small. company. You. are. not. enthusiasts. Stop it.
When was that period?
I'll make an exception to this rule. I'll gladly watch Thai Life Insurance ads. 3 minutes of nothing to do with insurance. And you'll shed a tear or 2. I won't buy the product though, I don't live in Thailand.
Totally agree, nothing annoys me more than an ad that cant seem to even tell me what the product is.
Before YouTube's switch to "your going to watch 6 ads before the video starts, and you are going to like it," schtick, I always enjoyed getting to skip the ad before they managed to tell me what the product even was.
That's for sure. I already assume ads contain malware and consider and ad blocker to be essential for security and privacy.
microsoft need it just as much if not more. Hope it happens to both.
Years ago a Microsoft breakup was also once on the table, but it never happened.
I wouldn’t get too excited that regulators will follow through with this for Google either.
Specifically, it didn't happen because the supreme court made Bush Jr president and he killed it
Let us also not forget the Ma Bell breakup and what happened thereafter.
Tell us the story, Grandpa!
Let's just say, the telcos didn't like being away from each other.
I'm unreasonably upset that They list it as Bellsouth rather than its original name, South Central Bell.
"Somehow.. Ma Bell returned."
Pretty much most of the big tech needs it.
Trying to think of a way to profit off the haords of concern trolls taking about "destabilizing the economy" if this ever became a thing. I don't know much but I know if the first thing happens the second thing is guaranteed.
Please let me know if anyone has an idea. Maybe like a "save Google" coin or NFT?
It wouldn’t fly anywhere but I’d laugh my ass off if some tech giant did it and then got bailed out by the state in return for controlling stake.
