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echelontoday at 1:49 AM1 replyview on HN

Google owns 92% of all "URL bars".

They turned this into "search".

Every brand or product has to competitively bid for its own identity in a monopoly competitive bidding market.

It's downright evil.

Look at Google's AI rivals having to spend hundreds of millions just so customers can find them. Google Anthropic or OpenAI and see what you get.

The next admin needs to break Google up horizontally (not vertically) into competing browsers, clouds, and search products. They all need to fight. Healthy capitalism is fiercely competitive. Not whatever this invasive species that preys on everything else is.

They also need to make it illegal to place ads for registered trademarks. The EU should get in on that too.


Replies

Aerroontoday at 2:43 AM

>The next admin needs to break Google up horizontally (not vertically) into competing browsers, clouds, and search products. They all need to fight. Healthy capitalism is fiercely competitive. Not whatever this invasive species that preys on everything else is.

That sounds great if you're rich and can afford to pay for all the million subscriptions that will pop up to replace what Google offers.

Google offers an insane amount of value to people for free: YouTube, Android, Google Search, Trends, Scholar, Maps, Chrome, Translate, Gmail. These would all be paid subscription products without adsense (or some equivalent). And as paid products they would get the typical subscription enshittification over time.

Also, on the topic of AI: didn't the transformers research paper come from Google? In an alternate world that would've been a trade secret locked away inside Google.