Or the stock price was suppressed pending antitrust decision?

That's exactly what the parent was saying. The market expected and priced in an antitrust decision but the one we got was very light, hence the stock going up sharply.

In the current era of already light antitrust actions, coming in even lighter than expectations is a sign that the regulators are not doing their jobs.

Why? Maybe stock price is just a reflection that whatever the penalty, even large, now there is legal certainty rather than unlimited risk.

this is not a good heuristic. what if markets believed that Google would be fined a quadrillion dollars, when that doesn’t happen, it pops. The markets can expect state actors to take unreasonably harsh action.

Or, the antitrust enforcement would have been economically punishing without actually achieveing the antitrust aims at all, and therefore a net negative.

So no. The stock price change is reflective only of economic value. Not of whether an antitrust decision was correct or appropriate.

Do you think it's better if all companies with competitive moats have a collapse in share price? I'm not really understanding what you're implying here.

I don't understand. The court has ruled this already a year ago:

> Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly

What should be the effect of antitrust enforcement to a monopolists share price? We are looking at something structural after all.

Why should shareholders have to suffer just because the Google engineers were good at their job?

The verdict makes it's clear that Google got to its position via anti competitive practices which are illegal.

However, for whatever reason, the judge decided that penalty was basically slap on the wrist and finger wagging.

Everyone is free to make their own search engine. The consumers choose Google time and time again.

It was shown time and time again, defaults are what most consumers will use even if better alternatives exist. A ton of Bing market share comes from Edge pushing it so hard.

Google would not spend all this money with Apple/Firefox if they knew that customers would use Google without being forced into it. Since they won't change search engines, Google realized they need to force it.

Gen Z has been pretty good at ignoring the default and using ChatGPT for everything.

Because the overall well-being of a society is supposedly more important than a few shareholders' wealth?

Probably about 60% of Americans are Google shareholders.

Not saying we should favor share price over all else, but far more than a few wealthy shareholders will be the benefactors of this.

...owning some tiny percentage of stock, often not knowingly. Those same 60% would also benefit from having a less monopolistic Internet. Well, that's the theory at least.

I think a lot of regular users actually might prefer one company that makes all their choices for them so they don't have to deal with decision fatigue so often... the browser wars of the 90s and 2000s were not pretty, either...

Do you know of any societies in the world that have a high quality of life but don’t have wealthy shareholders?

They're not mutually exclusive? Especially with antitrust, where the whole point is to enable a healthier marketplace such that all shareholders of Google's competitors can also benefit (not to mention users).

It's not that high-QoL societies cannot have shareholders, it's that the stock market shouldn't take precedence over laws and regulations and anti-trust enforcement.

I know plenty with very low quality of life and very wealthy shareholders.

This is disgusting.

But I think this problem should be solved at the level of countries, not individuals.

Because individuals are always looking for a way to avoid taxes, they can disappear as a class, and there is not that much money if it is fairly redistributed among everyone.

In fairness, EVERY American should be taxed an additional 80-90% in favor of poorer countries. How can a country with a minimum wage of $10-20 an hour not share with other countries when billions of people make less than a dollar an hour?

There has never been any fairness in the world :shrug:

bluntly, because incentives for investors to benefit from anticompetitive practices should be removed, in order to deter those anticompetitive practices. regulation works when you let it.