Yeah, I'm fine splitting youtube and google and even adwords. I don't think any of the rest are viable businesses, TBH. However I don't think this will solve t

Yeah, I'm fine splitting youtube and google and even adwords. I don't think any of the rest are viable businesses, TBH. However I don't think this will solve the issues raised in the original article or the general issues with monopoly. People used to think that Microsoft had an unfair monopoly with its browser because of bundling. Well, Chrome took over market share pretty easily when it released something better. It turns out it wasn't bundling, but investing more dev resources than the competitor that made the difference. And you can do that if you have surplus profits from a monopoly. It is those profits that allow for more resources that make the difference, not any consumer-facing bundling problems. So even if you completely eliminate the bundling, you'll still have a situation where off-shoot products by monopolies outcompete other self-funded products. Now, you have to complain not about bundling, but about subsidies -- basically making it illegal for the monopoly to branch out into another business, because all tech investment starts out as subsidies. But now you are really hurting innovation, because a large part -- I would say a large majority -- of innovation happens as subsidized R&D performed by monopolies. From the invention of C at Bell Labs to Android at Google. These are all side projects afforded to monopolies but not to private investors, who would never invest in such things. Thus no standard of consumer harm will result in making this illegal. So you say, OK, we wont ban a firm from creating other products but we will ban it from purchasing companies. So that takes care of Youtube and Adwords, but not android, office, etc. But now if the monopoly has surplus profits, it has an edge at making competing products and outcompeting smaller incumbents. Yes, it's harder than just buying them, but you have not fundamentally changed the landscape. It's an improvement, yes, but only a marginal improvement. It's really a tough call, and not at all the same thing as the previous US push on anti-trust, which was conceptually much simpler until you had the ill-advised ATT breakup, which showed the limits of the old approach. Merely longing for the old days of anti-trust in which we were busting up Standard Oil doesn't address any of the reasons why we have moved past that period.