So as I understand it, Google’s using it’s monopoly market position to force web “standards” unilaterally (without an independent/conglomerate web specification standards where Google is only one of many voices) that will disadvantage its competitors and force people to leave its competitors.
I’m not a lawyer, and I’m a fledgling tech guy, but this sounds like abuse of a monopoly. Google which serves 75% of the world’s ads and has 75% of the browser market share seems to want to use its market power to annihilate people’s privacy and control over their web experience.
So we can file a complaint with FTC led by Lina Khan who has been the biggest warrior against abuse by big tech in the US.
https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/report-antitrust-violation
We can also file a complaint with the DOJ:
https://www.justice.gov/atr/citizen-complaint-center
And there have to be EU, UK, Indian, Chinese, and Japanese organizations that we can file antitrust complaints to.
Break up Google.
Browser is one company. YouTube is another. The search a third company. The ad one has to be the richest and should be it’s own.
Then once you cut down Google into manageable companies, go after Facebook.
Antitrust regulations have been neutered in the US since the Reagan administration, which is how we have not only unfettered tech monopolies, but telecommunications regional monopolies and a national oligopoly (that is, an organized cartel, but legal)
Since most federal regulatory departments are captured, and serve their industries rather than the public. Mileage may vary re: state regulations.
While that probably is “legally” what should happen:
I hate to say it, but google is very much “too big to fail” at this point. People lost their minds over how many helpful posts were hidden during the reddit protests. Imagine how they’ll feel when pretty much 99% of the videos on the internet go away (I pulled that number out of my ass but… it is probably not that far off).
While Google failing would definitely cause a disruption, I don’t think they are too big to fail. I’ve done some experimenting with other search engines and Kagi & Duckduckgo are both sufficient.
Gmail is very popular, but everyone could find another email provider. Losing YouTube would hurt but we have other large sites with infrastructure that could cover. Facebook, Twitter, reddit, Instagram, tiktok, etc. Together I think they could take on the bandwidth
As for the browser, I’d be glad if Chrome died. We need more browsers. Chrome dying would force all of the derivatives to do something else. Vivaldi, edge, brave, etc would all need to either switch to Firefox or a project for a new browser would begin
I think while disruptive Google failing would ultimately be good. We have anti-trust laws for a reason and we need to actually use them. If we don’t enforce them, why did we pass the laws in the first place? The market stagnated and the consumers lose. Plus we fall behind pragmatic countries like China who are blazing forward full speed. Their government is more than willing to turn the $$$ hose to innovate in technology. Here in the US we rely on the market. But if we hamstring the market with a monopoly… just a recipe for disaster in my opinion
Losing gmail (which I didn’t even think of…) would be MASSIVELY disruptive. People would literally lose touch with family and friends, companies would go under, etc.
And no, social media sites can’t handle what youtube does. Even ignoring how laughable twitter currently is: at its prime, it STILL couldn’t serve videos reliably. Tiktok and Instagram have very strict limits on video uploads and the rest largely rely on youtube anyway. Yes, some people upload videos to facebook or choose to mirror them, but it is often still youtube links. Same with reddit.
That also ignores the creator side of things. To my understanding, instagram is mostly about getting enough views to get sponsors. Tiktok? I have no freaking idea how you monetize that. Facebook briefly had the idea of paying content creators but, to my understanding, has worse ad revenue than twitch. Youtube is pretty unique in that, because it is Google, they can give significant amounts of ad revenue to creators who can more or less make their entire life releasing a few videos a month. MAYBE twitch could de-shit a bit (because losing your competition is when you give more money to creators?) but they aren’t a VOD site. So even if these social media sites could “handle the load”, they wouldn’t provide the environment that generates that kind of load.
Antitrust laws should have prevented us from getting this far in the first place. But taking out google will have massive repercussions that go beyond “it would be great if we ate the rich” levels of thought.
Anyone who hasn’t planed for this with an account on another service, at the very least like proton, kinda deserves whats coming due to the signs.
I’m no soothsayer and even I can see that Google is making enemies with governments, China, US, and Europe. You can survive one or two but not all three.
The world is much larger than just the wealthy nations. Where I’m from, the internet is synonymous with Google, emails with gmail and online video sharing with YouTube.
Digital literacy is hard to worry about when you are struggling to improve your life. Even outside of harsh situations it’s not okay to expect everyone to literate themselves.
Nobody is claiming it wouldn’t be disruptive, but the question is if the long term it would be better for society. Monopolies are not good and the longer we allow them to survive, the more ingrained they become.
Free market capitalism only works well when there is competition. When big companies are so powerful they can just buy up any potential competitors, we’re not in free market capitalism anymore. We’re entering a merger of corporate and state power - teetering slowly towards a “tolerant” fascism. It’s something that desperately needs to be addressed.
Firefox is currently kept alive by Google, which pays $500M/year to Mozilla in order to have Google Search as the default in Firefox and to not let Google Chrome become a monopoly on paper too. Break Google and it would probably die.
Creating “more browsers” (browser engines I would add, we already have enough browsers) is not an easy task. The specification that needs to be implemented is massive, and doing so efficiently is even more complex. It would be a waste of resources to have many browser engines, not to mention the confusion in the webdev community when you suddently have to work around many more bugs in the implementations.
Web browsers are a critical infrastructure. Linux too, is very complex and requires lots of development and standards. But we have companies that spend the resources because it’s necessary for their bottom line. Servers all run on Linux.
Similar thing I think would happen with web browsers. Many companies would have incentive to develop web browsers - Facebook for example would want people on their site and that requires a web browser.
My question is if this would simply result in another company taking Google spot in the market or there would be a new open source collaborative effort by many companies like Linux? I’m not really sure. Like you said, the specifications are massive and basically shape and mold the internet as a whole. So it’s not a simple task.
Also just because Google funds Mozilla through search does not mean Firefox would immediately die should Google go under. Consider that Firefox would be only 1 of 2 browsers left alive. They could presumably make a deal with Bing or Duckduckgo or something and would be able to make up the lost income in spades because of sheer volume of users.
There was a time Firefox was actually the most popular browser.
Chrome became popular for 2 reasons:
Number 1 isn’t always true anymore but has momentum while 2 is fixed. Until something changes, Chrome is cemented into web browsing.
I know it’s probably just me, but YouTube could disappear tomorrow and it would probably take me weeks to notice.
If there’s one thing I actively avoid for it’s abysmal information density, it’s videos.
If I’m not mistaken Youtube creators get something like 1/10 of a penny per view of a video. Is that really favorable for creators?
I don’t know any of the youtubers that were cited in this, but this lines up with what other youtubers have said on podcasts and the like
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-much-do-youtubers-make
1.61 to 29.30 USD per 1000 views. That is going to vary based on how many ads they run but that does indeed come out to ~0.002 USD per ad play.
Which… is still really good compared to stuff like twitch. And that doesn’t include the youtube premium numbers which are a LOT more privately held but are universally acknowledged as a lot better… even by twitch streamers.
The twitch math gets harder due to a mix of twitch being a lot stricter about streamers sharing their revenue and it changing every five minutes. But going by the current 50/50 split on subscriptions: If you have 1000 subscribers in a given month (which is already amazing since having a couple hundred concurrents put you in the top 1% of streamers) AND it averages out to all at the 5 dollar tier (they aren’t, most are going to be using bezos bucks), you are getting 2500 USD. Per month. Considering that most streamers at this range are looking at 3-5 8 hour days per week (and many go MUCH farther), and let’s say 4 weeks per month:
2500 bucks/ (4 days per week * 8 hours per day * 4 weeks) = 19.5 bucks an hour.
Which… is still a lot better than minimum wage but that speaks to the US being a complete shitshow.
But let’s just do rough numbers on some youtubers. I watched a HowNOT2 on big walling last night. 74k views for a one hour video that was uploaded eight months ago. I have youtube premium so I have no idea how many ads that video had, but a quick google suggests people do 4 ads for a 12 minute video. Ryan is actively pushing away from ad based monetization, so let’s say that was 4 ads for a one hour video.
4 ads per video * 74 thousand views * 2 bucks per 1000 views = 592 dollars for a video.
Which is shit… except he has 457 videos uploaded. And they all (okay, a lot probably got demonetized, but roll with me) generate revenue. That adds up and is why people like NileRed can talk about NOT making videos for a year because people will keep watching his older ones and keep him going while he figures out what kind of experiments are worth filming.
Whereas, if you take a week off Twitch you take a week off getting paid (sort of. subscription models get weird).
This is the way. The more I think about it, the more I realize it needs to happen. Market positions in each of them give Google an unfair, anti-competitive advantage in all the rest of them.
Same with Facebook. It’s used its market power to copy features from its competitors and get a leg up on them from their existing userbase. It should have never been allowed to buy its competitors like instagram, whatsapp and what not. It’s time to break them all apart again.
The most recent egregious example of this is the Threads app. But what it did to Snapchat with Instagram stories is another example, IMO.