Americans have allowed the rich to become too wealthy. The kind of power that comes with billions of dollars just doesnt work with justice or democracy.
I have nothing against rich. I have everything against a single person having a megaphone for themselves and a gag for everyone else and still calling it a democracy. We need strong laws that reduce the voice of money and increase the voice of individuals. Having said that, the practical implication is that money needs to loose power and there are very few ways to truly do that other than just take it away. So, I agree that our only known practical path to a healthier democracy is to make it harder to be pathologically rich.
It also doesn't work when the media is either striving to uphold the status quo that got us here or actively going out of its way to try and make things worse.
> Americans have allowed the rich to become too wealthy.
This consistently happens in a very specific way. A corporation that dominates a concentrated market becomes excessively large, which makes its early shareholders billionaires.
In other words, if you want to change this, you need to enforce antitrust laws and break up large corporations.
> One of the facts established in the verdict was that Google had been slipping Apple more than $20b/year in exchange for which, Apple forbore from making a competing search engine.
Didn't Apple say that 1) they weren't interested in being in the Search Engine business 2) (in testimony) Google was by far the best search engine that they were going to use anyway ?
Certainly, $20B/Y weighs on the scale, but knowing Apple's negotiation tactics they could also have used their weight to do what they wanted anyhow and get paid handsomely for it (<waggle waggle> "if you don't pay us we might start using other defaults and you'll lose that lucrative iOS market")
My point is, while Google is clearly at fault in this whole situation, it's not quite as moustache-twirling evil as Doctorow paints it.
I can’t think of a single legitimate reason why Google should be allowed to pay Apple to use its search engine. Google is using the proceeds of its monopoly to exclude competition to maintain its monopoly. How is that norm per se antitrust violation? (That said, I’m not an antitrust lawyer and find it quite unintuitive, lol.)
The idea is that without $20 billion or an incentive to send people to google Apple might have become interested in chipping away at the search business. Sori already handles a lot of search.
Google didn't want Apple thinking about that. They wanted Apple to have an incentive to send traffic to google.
"Didn't Apple say that 1) they weren't interested in being in the Search Engine business 2) (in testimony) Google was by far the best search engine that they were going to use anyway ?"
That testimony worked in favor of the government
It raises the question, "Then why pay them?"
Google had no answer
The company always has an alternative explanation for its actions that lacks any relation to advertising services, or profit motive
> Didn't Apple say that 1) they weren't interested in being in the Search Engine business 2) (in testimony) Google was by far the best search engine that they were going to use anyway ?
Aren't Apple getting 20 bln annually to say that? Google search quality has deteriorated drastically in the last decade, as evidenced by the court and numerous HN threads.
> but knowing Apple's negotiation tactics they could also have used their weigh
These two megacorps are parts of the duopoly and have no incentive to change that.
His quote is stunningly disingenuous, I'm surprised to hear that coming from Doctorow.
That Google has paid Apple to be the default search engine was a business deal that has been open knowledge for a decade or more. Other search engines could've paid to be the default. Apple didn't have a search engine when they created the iPhone, and why would they start? Ever? MS didn't do so well. And why would Apple want to make their own search engine? Even if Apple did, the reaction would certainly be that Apple was abusing their position to promote their own search engine and would be committing an anti-trust violation then.
Also I think it's safe to say there is no actual testimony about a quid pro quo arrangement to get Apple to agree to not make a search engine.
The worst thing about Google is that they discovered the ad-model and created an entire generation that is entitled to free tools and services on the internet. People who think Gmail, drive, sheets, translate, Gemini, YouTube, search, android, etc., etc. are all inherently free services that Google is greedily slapping ads on.
Google is a monster because people so heavily favor the ad-model over paying for things.
Kagi wonderful, but paying for search? Lol that shit is free!
commercial TV and radio stations were a very well established thing already by the 90s, the audience paid for their receiver and in exchange for the ads got to see movies and serialized shows.
similarly there were free magazines which were basically ad booklets with some minimal original content in between a ton of ads
... there were ISPs experimenting with the model, both for users and for hosting
free email boxes were the norm, with 5-10MB storage
...
and just as now there was also HBO and fancy cable stations and encrypted stations, and many people did pay for magazine subscriptions
...
the real problem is that a hypergiant is cross-financing the development of a browser
these cross-financing setups ought to be firewalled, the browser should be in a foundation
(of course we know that in practice these are not super useful, see eg. OpenAI, but ... in the end California regulations seem to have helped to keep OpenAI as a "non-profit")
"But second, because Judge Amit Mehta decided that the Google case should be shrouded in mystery, suppressing the publication of key exhibits and banning phones, cameras and laptops from the courtroom, with the effect that virtually no one even noticed that the most important antitrust case in tech history, a genuine trial of the century, was underway:
I basically agree with the post and it's similar to what I was saying in comments on another post a few days ago. Trying to impose piecemeal conditions on monopolists is more trouble than it's worth. They should just be forcibly dismantled.
There's a deeper problem with the way antitrust seems to work, though: it doesn't adequately deter prohibited acts, because in many cases the penalty is just that the bad actor has to stop doing what they were doing. This is a pervasive feature of punishment in "white collar crime" and civil suits for various kinds of regulatory violations. It's like, if you engaged in anticompetitive practices, the punishment is you have to stop doing that, and yeah maybe you pay a fine, but the biggest worst thing that can happen is they take away your monopoly after you've gotten the benefits of using it for a while.
We need to take the approach that everything derived from anticompetitive practices is ill-gotten gains. If you were a monopoly, everything you did as a monopoly is tainted and the proper remedy is a total rollback in all your gains since the beginning of your anticompetitive acts, plus penalties on top of that. This includes penalties against the individuals who directed and enabled the illegal practices (e.g., a personal fine against Sundar Pichai of several hundred million dollars).
What this means is that if Google has held a browser monopoly since, say, 2010, the punishment needs to be that they wind up worse off now than they would have been had they done the right thing and voluntarily taken pro-competitive actions at all times from 2010 until now. Everything they've gained from their monopolistic practices, every success they've built on that, every penny they've earned, every piece of IP they've glommed onto, every scrap of data they've collected --- all of it is forfeit. It may be that certain specific areas could be shown to be sufficiently insulated from the monopolistic practices to avoid such treatment, but the burden of proof is on Google to show that; the assumption should be that everything they accomplished with their monopoly power is poisoned by that wrong.
The penalties need to be so brutal that companies will bend over backwards to avoid becoming monopolies. As long as the penalties can be treated as just a cost of doing business, companies will continue to cheat.
Google became a monopoly in search, advertising and various other things. It uses all of those to extract money from everyone, especially the advertisers with absolutely no accountability. All the large and small businesses have to jack up prices to make up for the money that Google extracts from them through those monopolies, and then reflect that expense on the consumer. Just go to reddits like r/ppc or r/googleads. Google became a company that single handedly amplifies inflation during its endless extraction of profit.
I think your phrase choice is also quite funny. Obviously a fact isn't physically stolen, it has been surveilled and sold to the highest bidder. Every fair chance a competitor had to offer you something better was taken from you, it just wasn't done in front of your face. And that data is becoming more and more valuable as we speak as all this AI data race heats up.
"Oh, a company knows literally everything about me and clandestinely sells that information to the highest bidder in order to target every facet of my existence so that multinational conglomerations can extract every erg of value from every heartbeat of my existence, but that's cool because I also know that information"
I feel that the remedy at the end of the trial was really just unworkable.
If you want to break up google, you should break it into workable coherent profitable business units like youtube, maps and geo, search, adsense, android, google cloud (including email) or some combination of the above.
I think it makes little sense to sell off their loss leading platforms that don’t make up coherent business units.
> The government doesn't have to win an antitrust trial in order to create competition. As the saying goes, "the process is the punishment."
Regardless of what you think of Google or this case specifically, this is an argument for authoritarianism: that it is legitimate for the government to "punish" any company at will, based only on them falling into political disfavor.
> ... the only punishment Google would have to bear from this trial would come after the government won its case, when the judge decided on a punishment (the term of art is "remedy") for Google.
Yes, this is called the rule of law. Punishment comes through the courts, after a guilty verdict. The government has to actually win the argument as to what remedies would be proportionate under the law. In this case the judge didn't buy it. It's fine to disagree with his reasoning (or with the law), but the fantasizing about extrajudicial punishment here is frankly un-American.
There's very little reason that Google should have been protected from the evidence of its wrongdoing being made public. That's not extrajudicial punishment, that is public record. Justice should be seen to be done as well as done.
Who can know how appropriate or not the remedy was when the evidence is hidden?
For full disclosure: I'm neither a google employee nor a US citizen.
>This is an argument for authoritarianism, that the government should be able to "punish" any company at will based only on them falling into political disfavor.
No its more like, the process of transparency harms the company enough that they will shift their own mentality to ensure they never have to participate in a transparent process.
I agree that the remedy sucks, but I am just not following the logic about private data? I'm totally willing to believe Cory is correct here, but I just need some more do the dots connected :/. I think the premise is that, if we want to have a competitor to Google Search--which I do not think was even the correct goal here, but seems to be what people were trying to optimize for :/--you would need to do something effectively impossible: you need to catch up to Google's search index operation, as, as a user, if I'm going to use a search engine, I'm going to use the one with the most data in it, lest I am just wasting my time. (I appreciate that for a minority of users they might have other things they are optimizing for, but that's always going to be a minority of users, and isn't going to really change Google's ridiculous market power.)
And so, if you have that goal--and I will again stress that I don't even think that is the correct primary goal to have at this point, due to Google having effectively taken control of the only browser that matters and being in control of the only video site that matters--breaking apart Google into a bunch of tiny companies along the obvious lines (Android, YouTube, Maps, Gmail, or even Chrome) wouldn't fix the situation, as that isn't going to suddenly allow anyone to create a viable competitor to Google search, as Google Search would still exist, it would still always continue to have more data indexed off the web than anyone else... forever.
You thereby have two options: you can try to destroy Google Search and make it so that no one has a search engine as good as Google--at least for a while--or you can figure out how to break up Google Search itself. The former is maybe a good outcome, but it is not only unrealistic, it isn't necessarily helpful in any external sense, which is where I get really confused about Cory's point here: the thing Google is searching over isn't my private data... it's my public data. Yes: they know a lot about my private data, and it could be cool to have that deleted, but that's kind of besides the point, as it has very little to do with Google Search; people aren't searching for my private data, and Google Search is going to find losing all of my private data as, at best, a minor inconvenience.
What you need to do, thereby, is figure out how to break up the Google Search product into parts, to separate the wholesale part of the business from the retail part of the business, whether by making it into two separate companies or putting restrictions on the combined whole to offer both services separately... and, it sounds like that is what they are going to try? Now, I don't know if this is going to work--as it might be extremely painful or confusing to actually build a useful search engine accessing Google's catalog--but it certainly isn't as if I have a better idea for how to create a competitor to Google Search.
(Again, though: I'm not sold on the idea that the actual problem with Google is that we don't have a competitor to Google Search. Hell: as of recently, my usage of Google Search has plummeted, as I've replaced most of the things I used to use Google for with various uses of large language models... and, yet, I still find Google to be too powerful in a way that distorts markets and should require some kind of antitrust intervention. :/ Maybe, then, the premise is that Cory feels that we should have tried to fix some other problem? But, he's saying that this result is itself a privacy breach... while simultaneously saying Google is going to skirt the benefit by redacting data so hard that they end up in court? I don't get it.)
> Judge Mehta was similarly cautious when forcing the company to share data. The company will need to share parts of its search index, the corpus of web pages and information that feeds its results page. But Google does not need to share other data associated with those results, including information about the quality of web pages, he added.
> Google must syndicate its search results to its competitors, Judge Mehta said, adding that the company could do so using the terms it already provides to commercial partners using the company’s results.
> And if you're waiting for Europe to jump in and act where America won't, don't hold your breath. EU Commission sources leaked to Reuters that the EU is going to drop its multi-billion euro fine against Google because they don't want to make Trump angry:
frogperson|6 months ago
jmward01|6 months ago
tart-lemonade|6 months ago
AnthonyMouse|6 months ago
This consistently happens in a very specific way. A corporation that dominates a concentrated market becomes excessively large, which makes its early shareholders billionaires.
In other words, if you want to change this, you need to enforce antitrust laws and break up large corporations.
worik|6 months ago
It is a sin to be poor
There being poor, is the sin of the rich
thegreatpeter|6 months ago
NoMoreNicksLeft|6 months ago
The government has billions of dollars. Thankfully government officials are immune to the corrupting influence of billions of dollars.
AceJohnny2|6 months ago
Didn't Apple say that 1) they weren't interested in being in the Search Engine business 2) (in testimony) Google was by far the best search engine that they were going to use anyway ?
Certainly, $20B/Y weighs on the scale, but knowing Apple's negotiation tactics they could also have used their weight to do what they wanted anyhow and get paid handsomely for it (<waggle waggle> "if you don't pay us we might start using other defaults and you'll lose that lucrative iOS market")
My point is, while Google is clearly at fault in this whole situation, it's not quite as moustache-twirling evil as Doctorow paints it.
rayiner|6 months ago
graeme|6 months ago
Google didn't want Apple thinking about that. They wanted Apple to have an incentive to send traffic to google.
1vuio0pswjnm7|6 months ago
That testimony worked in favor of the government
It raises the question, "Then why pay them?"
Google had no answer
The company always has an alternative explanation for its actions that lacks any relation to advertising services, or profit motive
fsflover|5 months ago
Aren't Apple getting 20 bln annually to say that? Google search quality has deteriorated drastically in the last decade, as evidenced by the court and numerous HN threads.
> but knowing Apple's negotiation tactics they could also have used their weigh
These two megacorps are parts of the duopoly and have no incentive to change that.
unknown|6 months ago
[deleted]
isleyaardvark|6 months ago
That Google has paid Apple to be the default search engine was a business deal that has been open knowledge for a decade or more. Other search engines could've paid to be the default. Apple didn't have a search engine when they created the iPhone, and why would they start? Ever? MS didn't do so well. And why would Apple want to make their own search engine? Even if Apple did, the reaction would certainly be that Apple was abusing their position to promote their own search engine and would be committing an anti-trust violation then.
Also I think it's safe to say there is no actual testimony about a quid pro quo arrangement to get Apple to agree to not make a search engine.
Workaccount2|6 months ago
Google is a monster because people so heavily favor the ad-model over paying for things.
Kagi wonderful, but paying for search? Lol that shit is free!
tomComb|6 months ago
pas|5 months ago
similarly there were free magazines which were basically ad booklets with some minimal original content in between a ton of ads
... there were ISPs experimenting with the model, both for users and for hosting
free email boxes were the norm, with 5-10MB storage
...
and just as now there was also HBO and fancy cable stations and encrypted stations, and many people did pay for magazine subscriptions
...
the real problem is that a hypergiant is cross-financing the development of a browser
these cross-financing setups ought to be firewalled, the browser should be in a foundation
(of course we know that in practice these are not super useful, see eg. OpenAI, but ... in the end California regulations seem to have helped to keep OpenAI as a "non-profit")
1vuio0pswjnm7|6 months ago
https://www.promarket.org/2023/10/27/google-monopolizes-judi...
But Judge Mehta turned his courtroom into a Star Chamber, a black hole whence no embarrassing information about Google's wicked deeds could emerge."
I did submit the Order to HN for discusssion
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45109044
People read the Opinion, but probably no one read the Order that accompanied it
It seems the limited redactions in the Opinion somehow makes up for the trial's lack of transparency
Nor was Google ever sanctioned for its past discovery violations
The remedies hearing transcripts should be released to the public
BrenBarn|6 months ago
There's a deeper problem with the way antitrust seems to work, though: it doesn't adequately deter prohibited acts, because in many cases the penalty is just that the bad actor has to stop doing what they were doing. This is a pervasive feature of punishment in "white collar crime" and civil suits for various kinds of regulatory violations. It's like, if you engaged in anticompetitive practices, the punishment is you have to stop doing that, and yeah maybe you pay a fine, but the biggest worst thing that can happen is they take away your monopoly after you've gotten the benefits of using it for a while.
We need to take the approach that everything derived from anticompetitive practices is ill-gotten gains. If you were a monopoly, everything you did as a monopoly is tainted and the proper remedy is a total rollback in all your gains since the beginning of your anticompetitive acts, plus penalties on top of that. This includes penalties against the individuals who directed and enabled the illegal practices (e.g., a personal fine against Sundar Pichai of several hundred million dollars).
What this means is that if Google has held a browser monopoly since, say, 2010, the punishment needs to be that they wind up worse off now than they would have been had they done the right thing and voluntarily taken pro-competitive actions at all times from 2010 until now. Everything they've gained from their monopolistic practices, every success they've built on that, every penny they've earned, every piece of IP they've glommed onto, every scrap of data they've collected --- all of it is forfeit. It may be that certain specific areas could be shown to be sufficiently insulated from the monopolistic practices to avoid such treatment, but the burden of proof is on Google to show that; the assumption should be that everything they accomplished with their monopoly power is poisoned by that wrong.
The penalties need to be so brutal that companies will bend over backwards to avoid becoming monopolies. As long as the penalties can be treated as just a cost of doing business, companies will continue to cheat.
guyzero|6 months ago
"Google has stolen every fact about our lives, in service to propping up a monopoly that lets it steal our money, too."
I still have all the facts about my life and I don't think any money has been stolen. I get that this is rhetorical, but he's gone over the edge here.
dumbledoren|6 months ago
gleenn|6 months ago
BizarroLand|6 months ago
"Oh, a company knows literally everything about me and clandestinely sells that information to the highest bidder in order to target every facet of my existence so that multinational conglomerations can extract every erg of value from every heartbeat of my existence, but that's cool because I also know that information"
Geez.
fsflover|5 months ago
No, you don't. Google knows more about you than yourself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26639261, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2840916, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1584589
daft_pink|5 months ago
If you want to break up google, you should break it into workable coherent profitable business units like youtube, maps and geo, search, adsense, android, google cloud (including email) or some combination of the above.
I think it makes little sense to sell off their loss leading platforms that don’t make up coherent business units.
davmre|6 months ago
Regardless of what you think of Google or this case specifically, this is an argument for authoritarianism: that it is legitimate for the government to "punish" any company at will, based only on them falling into political disfavor.
> ... the only punishment Google would have to bear from this trial would come after the government won its case, when the judge decided on a punishment (the term of art is "remedy") for Google.
Yes, this is called the rule of law. Punishment comes through the courts, after a guilty verdict. The government has to actually win the argument as to what remedies would be proportionate under the law. In this case the judge didn't buy it. It's fine to disagree with his reasoning (or with the law), but the fantasizing about extrajudicial punishment here is frankly un-American.
ratherbefuddled|6 months ago
Who can know how appropriate or not the remedy was when the evidence is hidden?
For full disclosure: I'm neither a google employee nor a US citizen.
protocolture|6 months ago
No its more like, the process of transparency harms the company enough that they will shift their own mentality to ensure they never have to participate in a transparent process.
unknown|6 months ago
[deleted]
drivebyhooting|6 months ago
inetknght|6 months ago
wmf|6 months ago
vkou|6 months ago
Sure, the easiest way you can do that is to move to Europe and petition its regulators to further tighten the screws. They might actually listen.
socalgal2|6 months ago
conartist6|6 months ago
conartist6|5 months ago
saurik|6 months ago
And so, if you have that goal--and I will again stress that I don't even think that is the correct primary goal to have at this point, due to Google having effectively taken control of the only browser that matters and being in control of the only video site that matters--breaking apart Google into a bunch of tiny companies along the obvious lines (Android, YouTube, Maps, Gmail, or even Chrome) wouldn't fix the situation, as that isn't going to suddenly allow anyone to create a viable competitor to Google search, as Google Search would still exist, it would still always continue to have more data indexed off the web than anyone else... forever.
You thereby have two options: you can try to destroy Google Search and make it so that no one has a search engine as good as Google--at least for a while--or you can figure out how to break up Google Search itself. The former is maybe a good outcome, but it is not only unrealistic, it isn't necessarily helpful in any external sense, which is where I get really confused about Cory's point here: the thing Google is searching over isn't my private data... it's my public data. Yes: they know a lot about my private data, and it could be cool to have that deleted, but that's kind of besides the point, as it has very little to do with Google Search; people aren't searching for my private data, and Google Search is going to find losing all of my private data as, at best, a minor inconvenience.
What you need to do, thereby, is figure out how to break up the Google Search product into parts, to separate the wholesale part of the business from the retail part of the business, whether by making it into two separate companies or putting restrictions on the combined whole to offer both services separately... and, it sounds like that is what they are going to try? Now, I don't know if this is going to work--as it might be extremely painful or confusing to actually build a useful search engine accessing Google's catalog--but it certainly isn't as if I have a better idea for how to create a competitor to Google Search.
(Again, though: I'm not sold on the idea that the actual problem with Google is that we don't have a competitor to Google Search. Hell: as of recently, my usage of Google Search has plummeted, as I've replaced most of the things I used to use Google for with various uses of large language models... and, yet, I still find Google to be too powerful in a way that distorts markets and should require some kind of antitrust intervention. :/ Maybe, then, the premise is that Cory feels that we should have tried to fix some other problem? But, he's saying that this result is itself a privacy breach... while simultaneously saying Google is going to skirt the benefit by redacting data so hard that they end up in court? I don't get it.)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/02/technology/google-search-...
> Judge Mehta was similarly cautious when forcing the company to share data. The company will need to share parts of its search index, the corpus of web pages and information that feeds its results page. But Google does not need to share other data associated with those results, including information about the quality of web pages, he added.
> Google must syndicate its search results to its competitors, Judge Mehta said, adding that the company could do so using the terms it already provides to commercial partners using the company’s results.
aucisson_masque|5 months ago
Well no. Europe just confirmed it yesterday.
msarrel|6 months ago
tomhow|6 months ago