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I’m not so worried about unfairness to the companies. They have many billions of dollars in the bank. Even after breaking them up all the pieces would still have billions of dollars.
What I’m not so much worried about but puzzled at is exactly how you would break up something like Google or Apple. Do you make every single app its own company?
So for Google you would have Chrome, Android (sans Chrome), the Google Play Store, Google Search, YouTube, Google Cloud, Gmail, Google Ads… Making all of these into separate companies feels right but I don’t know how they would operate. Chrome on its own doesn’t make any money, for example, it’s just a free browser they use to steer people into their other services. Gmail also doesn’t make any money either, it’s just a vehicle for Google’s ads. Same goes for Search and YouTube. They’re all integrated into the same ad platform. Would each piece have to break off and start selling their own ads individually?
Also Android without Chrome sounds pretty bad. Tons of Android apps are using Chrome under the hood, so they would just stop working altogether.
I think the same story applies to Apple and their operating systems and services. Break them up and iOS just doesn’t work anymore. It would have to be completely rewritten and a lot of apps would as well.
I mostly disagree. I think most parts of Google would do fine on their own. And for something like Chrome, it's Chromium that really matters, which is open source. If Chrome as a separate entity can't survive (despite plenty of other browser companies existing), let it die. However I do think Google could just be split into a few companies, rather than each individual product.
Fundamentally, though, I think the strategies that companies like Google and Apple use are inherently anticompetitive. Using the resources of a large corporation to prop up a service or product means that nobody can compete in that space
If a service is necessary, but is only exists because a large corporation is using it for data extraction, then we need a better alternative.
I think the most difficult piece is something like YouTube. Personally, I think we need something open source and publicly funded to replace it.
Would you split the ad division apart from all the rest? Or would each piece (Chrome, Android, Search, YouTube) get part of the ad business?
The issue is that ads are the only thing that makes Google any money. Essentially everything Google does has only one purpose: to drive ad revenues.
And I flat out disagree that Chrome could make any money on its own. It is absolutely mediocre without all the integration into Google services. It would not be able to compete with Firefox on a level playing field.