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.
  • @merc
    3•28 days ago

    Have you forgotten about the Play Store?

    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.

    We used web browsers just fine before Chrome existed

    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

    before even Google existed, and nobody was paying $79.99 for them

    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.

    • moxOP
      -1•28 days ago

      Consumers spent about $47b in revenue on the Play Store,

      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.

      We don’t know how much Android costs Google.

      And yet you insist that Android is a huge money loser.

      Internet Explorer absolutely dominated browser user share.

      And?

      They used the money from Office / Windows to subsidize their free browser, which was illegal.

      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.