A rare bid to break up Alphabet Inc.’s Google is one of the options being considered by the Justice Department after a landmark court ruling found that the company monopolized the online search market, according to people with knowledge of the deliberations.
Only if you view them in isolation. In fact, they are what enables Google’s advertising dominance, by providing detailed insight into people’s lives, thereby powering the targeted advertising of AdWords and making it as valuable as it is.
Have you forgotten about the Play Store?
We used web browsers just fine before Chrome existed, before even Google existed, and nobody was paying $79.99 for them. (In fact, Chrome was originally built upon one of the free engines.)
I would personally be glad to see Chrome disappear, since it is now starting to cause the same problems that Internet Explorer caused more than 20 years ago. Monoculture is bad in this realm. Yes, Google does seem to pour a lot of resources into their browser, but most of that is self-interest; very little of the results are actually needed for a useful, healthy web.
The same fear could have applied to the Bell System. I’m not worried. :)
Consumers spent about $47b in revenue on the Play Store, of that Google keeps about 30% so that’s $14b. Google’s total revenue is $306 billion, so the Play Store generates only 5% of Google’s total revenue.
https://www.businessofapps.com/data/google-play-statistics/
We don’t know how much Android costs Google. They have to develop the OS and maintain it, they have to develop all the android apps. They have to run the servers that handle the traffic from the apps, and so-on.
Between 1999 when Netscape was acquired by AOL and when Chrome was launched in 2008, Internet Explorer absolutely dominated browser user share.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars
No, but Netscape had planned to start charging for their browser, until Microsoft drove them out of business by bundling IE for free with Windows, illegally leveraging their monopoly to drive the company out of business. Microsoft was willing to give away IE for free because they thought it was strategically important to control the Internet, and were willing to take a huge loss on the browser business to do that. They used the money from Office / Windows to subsidize their free browser, which was illegal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp.
The article you linked actually says, “Consumers spent $47 billion on Google Play apps and games in 2023.” Google’s 30% of that every year can easily fund something like Android. And that doesn’t even count the advertising revenue from free apps on the Play Store, nor the additional reach into people’s lives that it provides, which translates to even more income from their highly targeted advertising platform.
And yet you insist that Android is a huge money loser.
And?
Sigh… I don’t know what point you’re trying to make with all these tangential comments. If it’s to support your notion of a hypothetical “domino effect” making a Google breakup dangerous, I don’t think you’ve succeeded.