Since I brought him up, I revisited Doctorow’s takes on the recent antitrust ruling against #Google. It is now, undeniably, a #monopoly:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/07/revealed-preferences/

This is a *seismic* legal rumbling, on the scale of the rulings that led to the break-ups of Standard Oil and Ma Bell. Across the world, antitrust has been reinvigorated, and lawmakers have enforced competition laws more times in the past four years than the last *forty.*

Now, were this a work of fiction, this might be where the story ends and we all live happily ever after. But this is real life, and in real life, those with the authority now have to decide what happens to Google’s ad-tech #monopoly. I share the view that it would be better if #Google – all of Big Tech – were broken up into smaller companies, incentivised by competition, and unable to gain the footholds that allowed their current forms from becoming too big to fail, jail, and care.

An acquaintance who I conversed with when the story broke also shares this view. And at the same time, they don’t. Sure, break up #Amazon, and *sure,* break up #Meta. But Google? Google’s products – its ad-tech stack, its search engine, and YouTube – are integral to not just how the web’s financed, but how it functions. You can’t just break up #Google – it’s exceptional. And if you do, us end-users downstream will suffer.

How? Well, the argument they put forward, as I understood it, was that a smaller, more competitive ad-tech market, where Google is not the only marketplace, where Google is not the only buyer and seller, would give site owners less of a cut of the ad-revenue made. Therefore, there would be more ads on websites to make up for this. Never mind the fact that Big Tech already skims 51% off of every ad dollar. Somehow, a small-fry ad-tech company is going to withhold even more than that.

Now, don’t get them wrong, they are not one to blindly defend Big Tech. But their argument, no matter how deep the hypotheticals go, is based on a lie that monopolists have always told: that services like Google Search and YouTube cannot function efficiently, cheaply, and at scale with the government getting in the way. You can’t have YouTube without Big Tech, therefore, we should just let them get on with it.

To believe this, and thus believe that #Google is exceptional and shouldn’t be broken up (at least not right away) is to misunderstand the lessons that the history of antitrust law can teach us. Doctorow’s latest nonfiction book, The Internet Con, gives us a masterclass on these lessons in its first chapter:

https://brologue.net/2023/12/31/users-arent-free-until-big-tech-is-wee/

A panel on the histories of IBM and AT&T doesn’t come amiss, either:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VNivXjrU3A

When you can fit all the leaders of industry around a table, what you have is a cartel that can move swiftly and with little friction. *That’s* #monopoly. But when your industry leaders are a hundred smaller companies, you’ve got a cacophony. They will be too busy disciplining each other with competition to agree on what they should be lobbying for.

In all, the debate’s premise was extremely important – we *should* be concerned with how a Google breakup could go wrong – but I just don’t buy the idea that an accountable ad-tech industry would make the web even more riddled with ads than it is right now. I just wish I could’ve said it like this at the time…

Next – most Pluralistic posts end with a trio of ‘hey look at this’ links. One recent link is a retrospective on griefing culture in MMO spaces:

https://www.raphkoster.com/2024/08/07/the-neverending-griefing-discussion/

These old games were some of the first online 3D games to try and address a fundamental content moderation dilemma – “How do we allow users to express themselves freely and disincentivise behaviour that sours the experience for other users?” We can learn from their post-mortems.

@raphkoster, a game designer known for his work on MMORPGs Ultima Online and EverQuest, makes a salient point about “player governance.” Although Reddit and Discord are centralised platforms, they do offer their users a lot more freedom over how communities are constructed. Everyone is not clumped in with everyone else on Discord – this lets users create their own private spaces, or “dark corners” as Doctorow describes them:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/15/normalize-dark-corners/