Google is illegally monopolizing online advertising tech, judge rules

the FTC is like Jim Cramer. Once they judge a business to be a monopoly, the business falls apart and the monopoly is irrelevant. Look at the hundreds of millions wasted on the Windows / IE monopoly trial. the AT&T break up set American technology back by decades and killed our domestic chip production.

> Look at the hundreds of millions wasted on the Windows / IE monopoly trial

The fact that we actually were enforcing antitrust at the time absolutely prevented MS from getting a strangehold on the consumer internet as it was taking off. It's the reason you're posting on this forum in the first place, as it was essential to the success of tech startups in the first dot-com era.

Then we stopped enforcing antitrust laws, and after about 10 years or so the new market leaders had developed the stifling set of monopolies we're all dealing with today.

Breaking up Google (which seems inevitable, this is the third distinct recent case where they've been proven to be a monopoly) is likely to be good for literally everyone, including even Google shareholders.

If breaking Google up would be good for Google shareholders, surely the shareholders would have made it happen already, right?

Unless the argument is that shareholders don't know what's good for them.

The divergence between the interests of shareholders and the actions of a corporation in cases like this is a textbook example of a well established concept:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...

Naively I would've thought that by making management huge shareholders, (most of) the agents then become principals.

So when we talk about "the shareholders" we also include the CEO.

I guess the argument here is that that actually doesn't work and the CEO would prefer being in charge of a larger company even if it personally costs him tens or hundreds of millions of dollars.

That's what I'm skeptical of.