this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2024
619 points (98.7% liked)

News

23367 readers
4478 users here now

Welcome to the News community!

Rules:

1. Be civil


Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.


2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.


Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.


3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.


Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.


4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.


Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.


5. Only recent news is allowed.


Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.


6. All posts must be news articles.


No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.


7. No duplicate posts.


If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.


8. Misinformation is prohibited.


Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.


9. No link shorteners.


The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.


10. Don't copy entire article in your post body


For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] mox@lemmy.sdf.org 32 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

YouTube, Google Search, Google Maps, Gmail, Android, Chrome, Google Drive, etc. are all money losers.

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.

Android is a huge money loser

Have you forgotten about the Play Store?

With Chrome, Google can afford to spend hundreds of millions a year developing it and then give it away for free

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.

Breaking it up would be like knocking over a domino without knowing what the chain reaction would be.

The same fear could have applied to the Bell System. I'm not worried. :)

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] mox@lemmy.sdf.org -1 points 3 months 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.