I'm unconvinced that breaking them up is a good thing or not. But for me the biggest "for" argument isn't that the broken up companies will compete with each o

I'm unconvinced that breaking them up is a good thing or not. But for me the biggest "for" argument isn't that the broken up companies will compete with each other (that makes no sense because you'd break them up along business lines where they don't compete anyway). Instead for me it is that it removes cross subsidies both financial (as in "we can give away this loss making application because we make so much money from X) and marketing (our new product Y is inferior to the existing product Z but we can make Y the default in our other apps and then people will just use it). This removal of cross subsidies does increase competition. However it's possible to force the removal of cross subsidies by other means (eg, the old "force the user to be able to select the search engine in Internet Explorer" regulation etc).