Technology

We have been in this moment before in the past.

Have we though?

If we look specifically at search, it went from MSN/AOL (i.e. captive to your browser or internet service) to Yahoo to Google, and each was a step up from the prior. The problem with Google is that they've snapped up enough marketshare in enough types of products that competitors can't compete with the whole suite (i.e. search, email, browser, and ads). Breaking them up would enable other companies to succeed in one of those areas since it's no longer all bundled together.

This has absolutely worked in the past. Look at the anti-trust lawsuit against Microsoft and look at browser marketshare, before the anti-trust suit, IE ate Netscape's lunch, then a few years after the anti-trust suit, Firefox jumped to 30%-ish market share before Chrome started taking off. IE beat Netscape because of antitrust, then Firefox beat IE because of features, and Chrome beat Firefox and IE because of performance. That's how the market should work. However, Chrome cemented its dominant position through bundling with other Google products and Chrome-only extensions (i.e. much the same strategy that IE had), so people get frustrated with non-Chrome browsers and use Chrome.

free markets internal logic will create monopolies no matter what you do

I disagree, both with the premise (that we have a free market) and the conclusion (that a free market results in monopolies). We have a lot of protections for large tech companies, and that promotes monopolies. For example:

• DMCA - protects host from liability for illegal content, while preserving their profits, at the expense of individual users
• net neutrality - ends up putting the network costs onto users; it's the same idea as road construction being funded by income taxes instead of road users (i.e. higher registration costs for heavy trucks)
• complete lack of privacy laws - no real liability for breaches, data sharing, etc, unless it's something related to medicine or finance
• network effect - closed APIs lock in users, so once you get past a certain level of users, you essentially have a monopoly; this would be like a bank only supporting internal transfers of cash and having no mechanism like ACH or check writing, which would encourage users to flock to a single bank

A truly free market have a high likelihood of self-correcting once one group gets too influential. In the late 90s, it really looked like Yahoo was going to take over the world (everyone seemed to have a yahoo email address, used yahoo search, etc), and that existed until Google found a way to do search better, and bundled direct competitors to yahoo's services. That is an example of the free market working as intended, Yahoo sat on its hands and was punished for it. These days, however, Google is sitting on its hands, yet it's not getting punished for it because it has successfully locked in users. That tells me it's not a free market, and if you look closely, there are a lot of anti-competitive practices.

I can find a lot of evidence where a dominant party sits on its hands and a competitor eats its lunch. For example, Intel kept its position early on through anti-competitive behavior (massive lawsuit w/ AMD, which AMD won), and AMD later ate its lunch with Ryzen because Intel stopped innovating. These days, ARM is threatening to take marketshare on laptops from both because neither has a particularly compelling mobile CPU. If Nvidia stops innovating, Intel and AMD are ready to eat its lunch on GPUs. Steam is encroaching on Switch's dominance on handhelds (and has reinvigorated a whole PC handheld market), and I wouldn't be surprised if they could make inroads into XBox and Playstation console dominance, just like how XBox essentially filled in where Dreamcast failed.

There are healthy, relatively free markets, and there are unhealthy, unfree markets. The government's role should be to catch companies when they cheat to keep markets as free as possible.

You wouldn’t have that with a government institution.

Wouldn't you? Government programs often lead to stagnation, as well as legal barriers to competition. Look at the train system in the US, it used to be a really healthy, private ecosystem, but that was destroyed when the government heavily subsidized road infrastructure, making road transit cheaper than rail transit (which is absolutely nuts to me). If the government wants to promote a service, it'll subsidize it with income taxes so alternatives can't realistically compete.

I don't know what nationalizing Google would look like, but I expect to see some anti-competitive behavior from the government agency in control of it, and you can't really sue the government for anti-trust.

With monopolies it’s either suffer or make them work for you.

Or the alternative: lower the barrier for others to compete. For example, to break a monopoly on ISPs, either strip out bureaucracy so competitors can come lay lines (only attracts big companies), or provide infrastructure for companies to provide service on (e.g. muni fiber). I wouldn't want my city to be my ISP, but I'm happy with it owning the infra and private companies competing to win service contracts.

I don't see how government getting involved in search, email, or hosting makes any sense though. If they do search, there are huge ethical concerns (esp. around elections and partisan searches). If they do email, it's going to end up looking like TreasuryDirect or IRS.gov, as in incredibly dated and crappy to deal with. If they do hosting, they'll sit on upgrades and you'll be stuck on outdated hardware. That's just how governments operate, they only update things if there's enough political will to do so.

Government is most effective as a police to shut down bad behavior, it's really ineffective at actually providing services IMO (look at wait times for simple things, like processing a passport). Governments should set and enforce the rules, and then let the market provide the services.