Dismemberment.
And then, when you're done with the officers and directors...
Okay, just kidding. The most logical remedy is to regulate search as a public utility. And if they push back against that, dismemberment.
I have to stop reading medieval history before going to sleep at night.
How's about we rip the company's index from the still-living beast and...
That's it, from now on it's Pollyanna with her 'glad game.' And Candide. And maybe Leibniz.
In the meantime here is ProMarket from the University of Chicago's Stigler Center, September 6:
For more than a decade, Google has paid firms such as Apple and Mozilla to set Google Search as the default search engine on their web browsers. The company has also required mobile phone developers who use Google’s Android operating system to pre-install Google’s products, including Google Chrome and Search. On August 5, Judge Amit Mehta found this behavior violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act as constituting exclusionary conduct to maintain monopoly power. Judge Mehta now must investigate and mandate a remedy to restore competition. This will be a daunting endeavor because his performance in setting the remedy will be remembered for a long time. Consider Judges Harold Greene in AT&T and Thomas Penfield Jackson in Microsoft. I do not envy the pressure on him. In this short note, I analyze some of the alternatives that Judge Mehta can choose along with my comments and recommendations.
Legal and Policy Considerations
In U.S. v. Microsoft Corp., the court stated four objectives: unfetter a market from anticompetitive conduct; terminate the illegal monopoly; deny to the defendant the fruits of its statutory violation; and ensure that there remain no practices likely to result in monopolization in the future. In this monopoly maintenance case (including where the conduct enhanced the defendant’s monopoly power), the goals are similar. However, the strength of a reasonable remedy for the anticompetitive conduct depends on the degree to which the actual and potential rivals disadvantaged by the anticompetitive exclusionary conduct would have substantially reduced or eliminated the monopoly power of the defendant.
Stated slightly differently, the remedy in the Google Search case must restore the intensity of the competitive process that would have occurred but for the years of anticompetitive conduct. Judge Mehta will need to decide if an effective remedy requires affirmative efforts that go beyond simply enjoining the specific illegal conduct. To this end, Judge Mehta will surely look to the formative Microsoft case settled at the turn of the century, as he did in his ruling finding Google in breach of Section 2.
In his analysis and critique of the Microsoft remedy some years after testifying for the states on remedy, Professor Carl Shapiro explained his remedial framework that “[r]estoring competition requires taking affirmative steps to lower the barriers to entry” to prevent the monopolist from continuing to profit from its anticompetitive conduct. He further explained that “lowering entry barriers does not mean picking winners or engineering the market; it means imposing conditions that make it easier for potential entrants to overcome those barriers.” Shapiro’s article also notes that Professor Kevin Murphy (testifying on behalf of Microsoft) made a similar point, stating there that “[t]o the extent that past illegal acts have injured competition, the remedies should work to restore the prospects for consumer welfare to the level that would have existed absent the illegal acts.” Craig Romaine and I framed this remedial approach in our analysis of Microsoft as “jump starting” competition.
In short, the remedy must go beyond simply enjoining the anticompetitive conduct. It should include provisions to reignite the competitive process sufficiently to more quickly and surely restore effective competition. It also is important to recognize that there are degrees of monopoly power. And if he finds that the long duration of Google’s conduct increased its monopoly power over time, that fact calls for an even stronger remedy.
To conceptualize this relationship with a simple hypothetical example, suppose that a monopolist has maintained and enhanced its monopoly power with exclusionary conduct that has created and maintained prohibitive barriers to entry over (say) a ten-year period. Suppose further that absent the exclusionary conduct, there would have been (say) a 10% independent probability in each year that there would have been entry which would have successfully substantially reduced or eliminated the monopoly power. Given this 10% probability, the likelihood there would have been such successful entry within 10 years is about 65%. Thus, the likelihood that the monopolist would still have had monopoly power by the tenth year is only about 35% absent the conduct....
....MUCH MORE
Or a five year-old post:
August 2019
What Alphabet Really Fears: Why Google Won't Make Google Search the Default in Android For Europe
This is a half-measure that will do nothing to curb the GOOG's power. It
almost looks like regulatory capture. After the jump, the proposal that
would work....
To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public
The tech giant doesn’t have to be dismantled. Sharing its crown jewel might reshape the internet.
Recognition is growing worldwide that something big needs to be done about Big Tech, and fast.
More than $8 billion in fines have been levied against Google by the European Union since 2017. Facebook Inc., facing an onslaught of investigations, has dropped in reputation to almost rock bottom among the 100 most visible companies in the U.S. Former employees of Google and Facebook have warned that these companies are “ripping apart the social fabric” and can “hijack the mind.”
Adding substance to the concerns, documents and videos have been leaking from Big Tech companies, supporting fears—most often expressed by conservatives—about political manipulations and even aspirations to engineer human values.
Fixes on the table include forcing the tech titans to divest themselves of some of the companies they’ve bought (more than 250 by Google and Facebook alone) and guaranteeing that user data are transportable.
But these and a dozen other proposals never get to the heart of the problem, and that is that Google’s search engine and Facebook’s social network platform have value only if they are intact. Breaking up Google’s search engine would give us a smattering of search engines that yield inferior results (the larger the search engine, the wider the range of results it can give you), and breaking up Facebook’s platform would be like building an immensely long Berlin Wall that would splinter millions of relationships.
With those basic platforms intact, the three biggest threats that Google and Facebook pose to societies worldwide are barely affected by almost any intervention: the aggressive surveillance, the suppression of content, and the subtle manipulation of the thinking and behavior of more than 2.5 billion people.
Different tech companies pose different kinds of threats. I’m focused here on Google, which I’ve been studying for more than six years through both experimental research and monitoring projects. (Google is well aware of my work and not entirely happy with me. The company did not respond to requests for comment.) Google is especially worrisome because it has maintained an unopposed monopoly on search worldwide for nearly a decade. It controls 92 percent of search, with the next largest competitor, Microsoft’s Bing, drawing only 2.5%.
Fortunately, there is a simple way to end the company’s monopoly without breaking up its search engine, and that is to turn its “index”—the mammoth and ever-growing database it maintains of internet content—into a kind of public commons.
There is precedent for this both in law and in Google’s business practices. When private ownership of essential resources and services—water, electricity, telecommunications, and so on—no longer serves the public interest, governments often step in to control them. One particular government intervention is especially relevant to the Big Tech dilemma: the 1956 consent decree in the U.S. in which AT&T agreed to share all its patents with other companies free of charge. As tech investor Roger McNamee and others have pointed out, that sharing reverberated around the world, leading to a significant increase in technological competition and innovation.
Doesn’t Google already share its index with everyone in the world? Yes, but only for single searches. I’m talking about requiring Google to share its entire index with outside entities—businesses, nonprofit organizations, even individuals—through what programmers call an application programming interface, or API.
Google already allows this kind of sharing with a chosen few, most notably a small but ingenious company called Startpage, which is based in the Netherlands. In 2009, Google granted Startpage access to its index in return for fees generated by ads placed near Startpage search results.
With access to Google’s index—the most extensive in the world, by far—Startpage gives you great search results, but with a difference. Google tracks your searches and also monitors you in other ways, so it gives you personalized results. Startpage doesn’t track you—it respects and guarantees your privacy—so it gives you generic results. Some people like customized results; others treasure their privacy. (You might have heard of another privacy-oriented alternative to Google.com called DuckDuckGo, which aggregates information obtained from 400 other non-Google sources, including its own modest crawler.)
If entities worldwide were given unlimited access to Google’s index, dozens of Startpage variants would turn up within months; within a year or two, thousands of new search platforms might emerge, each with different strengths and weaknesses....
....MUCH MORE
And:
"Google to Donate Its Search Engine to the American Public" (GOOG)
Or at the Huffington Post:
Google Critic Killed in “Ironic” Car Accident: Struck by Google Street View Vehicle
San Diego, CA. Prominent research psychologist and author Dr. Robert Epstein, age 60, was killed yesterday afternoon by a Google Street View vehicle while crossing Front Street in San Diego, where he has long resided. Although foul play is not suspected, Epstein’s friends are calling the accident “ironic.”According to Daryn Thompson, a 30-year friend of Epstein’s who also lives in San Diego, “We all know that Google isn’t evil, so there’s no chance this was deliberate, but it’s troubling and ironic that it just happened to be an outspoken critic of Google who was hit. I’m sure it was just a coincidence, though.”...MORE
Maybe "Warped sense of humour could be ‘sign of impending dementia’"
Following last week's "Long-winded speech could be early sign of Alzheimer's disease, says study" a "friend" sent this along.
I can't catch a freaking break this month....