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It's time for antitrust to hit Meta, Alphabet, and Amazon. At the very least. Amazon: AWS is one of the most valuable businesses ever created. You don't need

It's time for antitrust to hit Meta, Alphabet, and Amazon. At the very least. Amazon: AWS is one of the most valuable businesses ever created. You don't need the retail arm any more, now that it is enshitting itself. Also spin off the media company, comprising Audible and prime video, to make a Disney competitor. Amazon would absolutely be more valuable broken up. Meta: Meta has always run 3 separate products either way. Spinning off the loser (Facebook), and the non-social networking product (WhatsApp) would let Instagram grow wings against TikTok. Google: Search, YouTube, ads, and technical infrastructure (cloud) can all easily be separated, and Search and YouTube could likely command an even bigger premium by treating other ad networks as first-class citizens. Google ads could get a lot more business too when they are not tied to other products (those products might compete with yours, driving you away from Google ads).

nubinetwork 4y ago
> Also spin off the media company, comprising Audible and prime video And twitch.
- walthamstow 4y ago
  MGM too? Or are they owned by Amazon in a different way?
paganel 4y ago
Not combatting the merits of those break-ups, of which I agree, just wanted to point out that WhatsApp is a social media product at this point, because all the relevant social group interactions have moved there from Facebook the website/the app.
- the_af 4y ago
  What do you mean? Just as anecdote, I don't have whatsapp groups for my fb groups. My whatsapp and fb worlds are entirely disconnected. People in groups from fb often promote Discord (which I don't like: real time chatting with strangers feels odd to me). Facebook is aggressively promoting its own chat for groups, spamming it violently and so I'm forced to unsubscribe/ignore lots of chat groups now. Do people really need yet another chat platform?
  - paganel 4y ago
    > ust as anecdote, I don't have whatsapp groups for my fb groups Exactly that, that the personal updates for close friends and family that we used to post on FB are now posted on several dedicated WhatsApp groups. Yes, that means that that former highschool colleague who you'd met once in the last 20 years won't get to see them, but it's still social. > Facebook is aggressively promoting its own chat for groups, Could be, but the WhatsApp interface when it comes to group chats is way nicer and more intuitive (especially when it comes to sharing photos).
rcme 4y ago
I used to support breaking up Meta, Google, and Amazon. Their market positions are pretty dominant, but not unassailable. Facebook barely avoided Snap eating their lunch with stories and now looks to be in a losing position against TikTok. Google vs. LLMs will be interesting to see play out. Amazon… is still in a very strong position.
capitalsigma 4y ago
It's unclear to me how making these divisions dramatically increase their infrastructure costs (by either pulling them in-house or paying a premium to the original parent company) will "help them compete"
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  Are you sure that they will dramatically increase infrastructure costs? Large companies get amazing deals from clouds, and this is no exception to that rule. Their infrastructure costs might actually decrease because the clouds will have to compete for their business.
  - jasode 4y ago
    >Are you sure that they will dramatically increase infrastructure costs? [...] Their infrastructure costs might actually decrease because the clouds will have to compete for their business. Maybe theoretically possible but I have doubts. As Youtube's founding was February 2005, they now have 18 years (i.e. exabytes) of videos stored on Google's datacenters. Exporting all that to a competitor like AWS (even with mass Snowmobile transfer service) probably wouldn't make financial sense. I worked on a corporate spin-out from a petroleum company and there was months of back & forth negotiation for "IT infrastructure services pricing" from the ex-parent company. The new spin out company was definitely not getting a deal from the ex-parent company and switching to other datacenter competitors wasn't realistic because the ex-parent already had all the data and the existing IT staff expertise to run-&-maintain the spin-off's proprietary systems. (E.g. think Lotus Notes custom programming workflows). Google could realistically raise their infrastructure prices to an independent Youtube spinoff but that higher cost is still less than switching to Azure or AWS.
- Scarblac 4y ago
  It will help their competitors compete, which would presumably be the point of antitrust action.
kryptiskt 4y ago
Privacy will be impossible as long as platform owners are in the ad business so the most important thing for me is to separate Android and Chrome from Google's ad business. For the same reason Apple and Microsoft should be forced to choose between being in the phone/computer or ad business. I don't care too much about Facebook, no doubt they are capable of failing on their own.
- JustLurking2022 4y ago
  You should read up about DMA coming out of the EU. Privacy is possible even in a conglomerate.
- Dalewyn 4y ago
  I wouldn't even mind ads in Windows, objectively speaking, if Microsoft were to just give it out for free (as in no activation required). What sucks about Microsoft and ads right now is they sell you a product and then also drown you in ads. Either I pay cold hard cash or they give me ads, but not both; they shouldn't get to double dip.
kyrra 4y ago
Google side: from maybe a business idea, you could have it work. But from a technical perspective, it would be near impossible without years of engineering effort. Google has a ton of core internal infra that is shared between all the business units at Google. The only reason this is feasible is that the cost of running it is shared between the units. (Googler opinions are my own).
- zeckalpha 4y ago
  Call it a discontinued tier of GCP that only has a handful of customers, and things could more or less stay the same.
- hnbad 4y ago
  The fun thing about antitrust is that this is entirely Google's problem.
  - londons_explore 4y ago
    Op is suggesting this breakup might increase shareholder value. Ie. It would be worth doing even without a government regulator forcing it. If true, then their internal engineering limitations directly impact how viable the idea is.
- jeffbee 4y ago
  Yeah I'd love to know how this "spinoff" would work. YouTube is an arms-length independent company but Google happens to have deployed dedicated, co-designed accelerators around the world to support their use case?
  - pclmulqdq 4y ago
    AWS sells video accelerator machines. GCP could sell access to Argos.
- drdec 4y ago
  Sounds like the internal infrastructure should also be spun off into it's own company with the other baby Googles as customers! (sarcasm, in case Poe's Law has you down)
runako 4y ago
These hypothetical splits show the perils of having outsiders (including regulators) make decisions like these. Just some quick notes: > You don't need the retail arm any more [...] spin off the media company, comprising Audible and prime video, to make a Disney competitor The whole point of the conglomerate model they use (following Costco) is that the membership fee grants consumers access to a bevy of services. The services may not work a la carte. Further, spinning Amazon media to become one of the weakest Disney competitors doesn't obviously enhance competition or consumer welfare in media. > Spinning off the loser (Facebook), and the non-social networking product (WhatsApp) would let Instagram grow wings against TikTok. The "loser" (Facebook) generates most of the revenue and profit at Meta. The Google analysis arrives at a viable conclusion (the ads business could be run as a utility), for the wrong reasons. (For ex: Search/YT would not get a bigger premium by treating as first-class other, weaker, ad networks. The near-monopoly is what drives pricing power and is frequently a reason cited for forcing a hypothetical breakup.) Anyway, this stuff is not obvious or easy, even assuming people can agree on goals (which is difficult).
- vidarh 4y ago
  > The services may not work a la carte They don't need to. Prime could still offer Prime Video / Music as a membership perk. But if the media services are independent, maybe it'd turn out offering one or more of the others, or letting customer pick and choose, would end up making more financial sense (FireTV can already be used to subscribe to competing services in addition) I'm not saying it's necessarily a good idea - I don't have an opinion on that - but the bundling of services does not depend on them being part of the same company.
  - runako 4y ago
    This misses the point. A breakup would put Prime Video / Music (are those two even allowed to be in the same company? Why? Who decides?) on the same footing as Hulu or Spotify. This would create independent third-tier players in both markets. The consumer would likely end up paying more (because Prime Video / Music can't be run at zero or negative margins as part of a bundle; ditto for other media options like Spotify). Further, I'm not sure what goal would be served by doing all of this and increasing costs to the consumer.
swarnie 4y ago
? Meta: Meta has always run 3 separate products either way. Spinning off the loser (Facebook), and the non-social networking product (WhatsApp) would let Instagram grow wings against TikTok. Three products which share data. I don't care what the law says, or what they tell a select/congress committee, nothing will convince me otherwise.
rvz 4y ago
and Microsoft.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jxf 4y ago
Facebook is practically a utility company at this point. The number of businesses whose only online presence is Facebook/Instagram is significant.
kevinmchugh 4y ago
If I was an antitrust regulator worried about Disney's dominance, I would just make them sell star wars and/or avatar so they don't own three sci-fi mega franchises. I'd also consider Pixar and Hulu. Why do things to Amazon in service of sapping Disney's power?
geoduck14 4y ago
None of these are reasons for an antitrust case
lm28469 4y ago
> Also spin off the media company, comprising Audible and prime video, Prime video is what they use to get a foot in the door, then they know you'll want to extract as much value as you can from your prime membership, and that's done by buying shit from amazon
sofixa 4y ago
> Amazon would absolutely be more valuable broken up That is total nonsense, completely irrelevant, and true. Conglomerates being worth less than the sum of all parts is one of the stupidest parts of Wall Street. There is no actual rationale for this besides maybe it being easier to evaluate a company doing only a single thing? Specifically with regards to the examples given - Amazon, Meta, Google - it's the cross-subsidising and reuse of stuff that makes them profitable. Prime video without AWS' cache isn't a great competitor to Disney; YouTube on it's own will have a ruinous infrastructure bill that is subsidised by Google now; WhatsApp doesn't make money so can only survive on someone else's dime, etc. etc. Same goes for traditional conglomerates - of course GE were stronger before they split up into three. What will GE Aerospace do next time there's an air travel downturn like a pandemic? Crash and burn unless it has enough reserves, because it won't have the benefit of being propped up by different businesses that aren't impacted (like say GE HealthCare). Bombardier today are in a much worse spot, focusing only on a minuscule and volatile niche (private jets), but at least in their case it wasn't their choice, Boeing bankrupted them with protectionist tricks. The real reasons to split them up would be to improve competition and the choice of consumers, not because "idiot investors think 'value' will go up".
- conductr 4y ago
  Would customers pay for Amazon services individually if they were unbundled? I’m guessing there would be significant drop off. Prime Video would implode. Subscription revenue wouldn’t be sufficient to fund content and it’s a short life from there.
- SilverBirch 4y ago
  It's pretty wild that your example of a good conglomerate is GE considering GE's a perfect of example of why conglomerates don't work. Gee I sure wish I could invest in that great GE Aerospace division, too bad if I do the jokers over at GE Capital are going to snort half of it and place the rest on black. GE was the notorious exception to conglomerates being terrible right up until it also turned into a massive shit show.
- jefftk 4y ago
  > Conglomerates being worth less than the sum of all parts is one of the stupidest parts of Wall Street. There is no actual rationale for this besides maybe it being easier to evaluate a company doing only a single thing? One example: some parts of a business need a positive consumer reputation and others don't. When you connect these under the same company you may end up with two business units that are each less valuable than if they were free to take the approach that best suited their business. For example, an ad company that didn't care much what consumers thought about it would use fingerprinting to personalize ads and it's prevalent in the industry, but Google committed to not doing this. Why? My guess is that a big part was reputation: having an ads division that's tracking users with no opt out is inconsistent with the company-wide policies Google needs to be competitive in consumer markets. In this case I think the effects are positive, in that the display ads division is closer to what consumers would want than if it were independent, but I think it's pretty likely that spinning DoubleClick back out would increase overall profits. (I used to work at Google, and here I'm speculating about decisions made several levels above me that I wasn't a part of.)
AlchemistCamp 4y ago
Amazon doesn't have close to a monopoly with AWS, Prime Video or even its ecommerce. What possible anti-trust rationale would there be to forcibly break up the company?
giancarlostoro 4y ago
> Meta: Meta has always run 3 separate products either way. Spinning off the loser (Facebook), and the non-social networking product (WhatsApp) You don't think of it as a social networking product, but it is used as such. I consider Discord social media, and WhatsApp is honestly a text only Discord competitor in the grand scheme of things, all the group chats are reminiscent of Discord servers, but for people who dont care about all that Discord has to offer, even if they never heard of Discord. I would absolutely include chat platforms under social media.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  I've never thought of WhatsApp as a social networking product. For me, it's just an SMS replacement necessary to talk to my friends outside of the US. Not saying my perspective is correct, but I think of a "social networking" product as one where I'm talking to groups of people. That's not how I use WhatsApp. That's always 1-on-1 conversations with people I know in the real world.
  - giancarlostoro 4y ago
    For some people it is all the social media they get. People share memes, and pictures, and live updates.
cptskippy 4y ago
Why wasn't Microsoft included in this list? They have more overlap with Amazon and Google then Meta does.
psychlops 4y ago
Globalization is at odds with national level anti-trust. The past has shown that international companies supported by their governments would eat away at the smaller US companies.
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  I think this is the big reason that the US hasn't taken action against these companies. They view them as strategic, and want to keep a very friendly relationship.
  - msabalau 4y ago
    In this case, treating the "US" as if "they" have a consistent, considered view that drives all their actions seems a little odd and vaguely conspiratorial. After all, it has been well reported that US politicians on both sides of the aisle are looking to put investigative scrutiny on big tech in the year ahead. And US regulators were broadly underutilizing antitrust tools across the board in the past, not just for big tech. That also seems to be changing. Sure, the US pursues strategies related industrial policy and national security. The CHIPS act or the Inflation Reduction Act are examples. But you don't need a "big reason" why to explain why US companies like these tech firms have been underregulated. It isn't isn't some mystery, it is just (unfortunately) normal. If US firms are grossly underregulated and under-punished for simple stuff like wage theft, you don't need to invoke strategy to explain why big tech has gotten away with anticompetitive stuff in the past.
adrr 4y ago
Hitting companies with antitrust when consumers have is a terrible idea. Antitrust laws were made to prevent monopolies giving consumers choice and preventing them from getting screwed. Amazon is e-commerce, i have multiple choices to shop on web. Amazon has even benefited the consumer by forcing retailers speed up shipping. For cloud hosting, there are alternatives to AWS. There’s healthy competition in both fields. Meta the consumer is the advertiser. They are the ones spending the money. For advertising, there are different channel and mediums. You could buy billboard ads, tv/radio ads, direct mail etc. Competition is very healthy. Google the same thing. The consumer are advertisers. Thats the market. Lets compare major anti-trust actions. Standard oil was the pretty much the sole source of oil in the US. Consumers had no choice. ATT another major antitrust case where there was just one telecom company in the US. Kodak where they were controlled all the film market.
actuator 4y ago
IMO Apple should be the biggest target for antitrust right now looking at what they do on their platforms.
lancesells 4y ago
> Spinning off the loser (Facebook) I'm not a Facebook user but it's not a loser. - 2.9B Monthly Users in 2022 - 5.3B People with Internet Access - 55% of the world uses Facebook. It seems both Instagram and Whatsapp have about ~2B monthly users. And sure, these numbers are juiced but none are losers.
chiefalchemist 4y ago
Last I read, which was a couple of years ago, after Google search, YouTube is the next most searched "search engine". It serves ads. Is it really, from Google's POV that different than it's core business? That aside, as we know now, Google wasted it's time with Plus. Instead it should have fleshed out YT's social aspects. While that's easy to say in retrospect, it's still not a bad idea if Google wanted to "social media" product.
WaitWaitWha 4y ago
The online retail portion of amazon.com would not survive such a split [0]. [0]: Most recent Amazon.com, Inc. 10-K https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001018724/d2fde7ee-05f7-419d-9ce8-186de4c96e25.pdf https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001018724/d2fde7e...
iaseiadit 4y ago
“Search, YouTube, ads, and technical infrastructure (cloud) can all easily be separated” At a product-level view from 10,000 feet, it might seem this way. In reality, these are deeply interconnected systems that are 15-20 years in the making. “Easily separated” are the last words I’d use.

nubinetwork 4y ago

> Also spin off the media company, comprising Audible and prime video And twitch.

walthamstow 4y ago
MGM too? Or are they owned by Amazon in a different way?

paganel 4y ago

Not combatting the merits of those break-ups, of which I agree, just wanted to point out that WhatsApp is a social media product at this point, because all the relevant social group interactions have moved there from Facebook the website/the app.

the_af 4y ago
What do you mean? Just as anecdote, I don't have whatsapp groups for my fb groups. My whatsapp and fb worlds are entirely disconnected. People in groups from fb often promote Discord (which I don't like: real time chatting with strangers feels odd to me). Facebook is aggressively promoting its own chat for groups, spamming it violently and so I'm forced to unsubscribe/ignore lots of chat groups now. Do people really need yet another chat platform?
- paganel 4y ago
  > ust as anecdote, I don't have whatsapp groups for my fb groups Exactly that, that the personal updates for close friends and family that we used to post on FB are now posted on several dedicated WhatsApp groups. Yes, that means that that former highschool colleague who you'd met once in the last 20 years won't get to see them, but it's still social. > Facebook is aggressively promoting its own chat for groups, Could be, but the WhatsApp interface when it comes to group chats is way nicer and more intuitive (especially when it comes to sharing photos).

rcme 4y ago

I used to support breaking up Meta, Google, and Amazon. Their market positions are pretty dominant, but not unassailable. Facebook barely avoided Snap eating their lunch with stories and now looks to be in a losing position against TikTok. Google vs. LLMs will be interesting to see play out. Amazon… is still in a very strong position.

capitalsigma 4y ago

It's unclear to me how making these divisions dramatically increase their infrastructure costs (by either pulling them in-house or paying a premium to the original parent company) will "help them compete"

pclmulqdq 4y ago
Are you sure that they will dramatically increase infrastructure costs? Large companies get amazing deals from clouds, and this is no exception to that rule. Their infrastructure costs might actually decrease because the clouds will have to compete for their business.
- jasode 4y ago
  >Are you sure that they will dramatically increase infrastructure costs? [...] Their infrastructure costs might actually decrease because the clouds will have to compete for their business. Maybe theoretically possible but I have doubts. As Youtube's founding was February 2005, they now have 18 years (i.e. exabytes) of videos stored on Google's datacenters. Exporting all that to a competitor like AWS (even with mass Snowmobile transfer service) probably wouldn't make financial sense. I worked on a corporate spin-out from a petroleum company and there was months of back & forth negotiation for "IT infrastructure services pricing" from the ex-parent company. The new spin out company was definitely not getting a deal from the ex-parent company and switching to other datacenter competitors wasn't realistic because the ex-parent already had all the data and the existing IT staff expertise to run-&-maintain the spin-off's proprietary systems. (E.g. think Lotus Notes custom programming workflows). Google could realistically raise their infrastructure prices to an independent Youtube spinoff but that higher cost is still less than switching to Azure or AWS.
Scarblac 4y ago
It will help their competitors compete, which would presumably be the point of antitrust action.

kryptiskt 4y ago

Privacy will be impossible as long as platform owners are in the ad business so the most important thing for me is to separate Android and Chrome from Google's ad business. For the same reason Apple and Microsoft should be forced to choose between being in the phone/computer or ad business. I don't care too much about Facebook, no doubt they are capable of failing on their own.

JustLurking2022 4y ago
You should read up about DMA coming out of the EU. Privacy is possible even in a conglomerate.
Dalewyn 4y ago
I wouldn't even mind ads in Windows, objectively speaking, if Microsoft were to just give it out for free (as in no activation required). What sucks about Microsoft and ads right now is they sell you a product and then also drown you in ads. Either I pay cold hard cash or they give me ads, but not both; they shouldn't get to double dip.

kyrra 4y ago

Google side: from maybe a business idea, you could have it work. But from a technical perspective, it would be near impossible without years of engineering effort. Google has a ton of core internal infra that is shared between all the business units at Google. The only reason this is feasible is that the cost of running it is shared between the units. (Googler opinions are my own).

zeckalpha 4y ago
Call it a discontinued tier of GCP that only has a handful of customers, and things could more or less stay the same.
hnbad 4y ago
The fun thing about antitrust is that this is entirely Google's problem.
- londons_explore 4y ago
  Op is suggesting this breakup might increase shareholder value. Ie. It would be worth doing even without a government regulator forcing it. If true, then their internal engineering limitations directly impact how viable the idea is.
jeffbee 4y ago
Yeah I'd love to know how this "spinoff" would work. YouTube is an arms-length independent company but Google happens to have deployed dedicated, co-designed accelerators around the world to support their use case?
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  AWS sells video accelerator machines. GCP could sell access to Argos.
drdec 4y ago
Sounds like the internal infrastructure should also be spun off into it's own company with the other baby Googles as customers! (sarcasm, in case Poe's Law has you down)

runako 4y ago

These hypothetical splits show the perils of having outsiders (including regulators) make decisions like these. Just some quick notes: > You don't need the retail arm any more [...] spin off the media company, comprising Audible and prime video, to make a Disney competitor The whole point of the conglomerate model they use (following Costco) is that the membership fee grants consumers access to a bevy of services. The services may not work a la carte. Further, spinning Amazon media to become one of the weakest Disney competitors doesn't obviously enhance competition or consumer welfare in media. > Spinning off the loser (Facebook), and the non-social networking product (WhatsApp) would let Instagram grow wings against TikTok. The "loser" (Facebook) generates most of the revenue and profit at Meta. The Google analysis arrives at a viable conclusion (the ads business could be run as a utility), for the wrong reasons. (For ex: Search/YT would not get a bigger premium by treating as first-class other, weaker, ad networks. The near-monopoly is what drives pricing power and is frequently a reason cited for forcing a hypothetical breakup.) Anyway, this stuff is not obvious or easy, even assuming people can agree on goals (which is difficult).

vidarh 4y ago
> The services may not work a la carte They don't need to. Prime could still offer Prime Video / Music as a membership perk. But if the media services are independent, maybe it'd turn out offering one or more of the others, or letting customer pick and choose, would end up making more financial sense (FireTV can already be used to subscribe to competing services in addition) I'm not saying it's necessarily a good idea - I don't have an opinion on that - but the bundling of services does not depend on them being part of the same company.
- runako 4y ago
  This misses the point. A breakup would put Prime Video / Music (are those two even allowed to be in the same company? Why? Who decides?) on the same footing as Hulu or Spotify. This would create independent third-tier players in both markets. The consumer would likely end up paying more (because Prime Video / Music can't be run at zero or negative margins as part of a bundle; ditto for other media options like Spotify). Further, I'm not sure what goal would be served by doing all of this and increasing costs to the consumer.

swarnie 4y ago

? Meta: Meta has always run 3 separate products either way. Spinning off the loser (Facebook), and the non-social networking product (WhatsApp) would let Instagram grow wings against TikTok. Three products which share data. I don't care what the law says, or what they tell a select/congress committee, nothing will convince me otherwise.

rvz 4y ago

and Microsoft.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

jxf 4y ago

Facebook is practically a utility company at this point. The number of businesses whose only online presence is Facebook/Instagram is significant.

kevinmchugh 4y ago

If I was an antitrust regulator worried about Disney's dominance, I would just make them sell star wars and/or avatar so they don't own three sci-fi mega franchises. I'd also consider Pixar and Hulu. Why do things to Amazon in service of sapping Disney's power?

geoduck14 4y ago

None of these are reasons for an antitrust case

lm28469 4y ago

> Also spin off the media company, comprising Audible and prime video, Prime video is what they use to get a foot in the door, then they know you'll want to extract as much value as you can from your prime membership, and that's done by buying shit from amazon

sofixa 4y ago

> Amazon would absolutely be more valuable broken up That is total nonsense, completely irrelevant, and true. Conglomerates being worth less than the sum of all parts is one of the stupidest parts of Wall Street. There is no actual rationale for this besides maybe it being easier to evaluate a company doing only a single thing? Specifically with regards to the examples given - Amazon, Meta, Google - it's the cross-subsidising and reuse of stuff that makes them profitable. Prime video without AWS' cache isn't a great competitor to Disney; YouTube on it's own will have a ruinous infrastructure bill that is subsidised by Google now; WhatsApp doesn't make money so can only survive on someone else's dime, etc. etc. Same goes for traditional conglomerates - of course GE were stronger before they split up into three. What will GE Aerospace do next time there's an air travel downturn like a pandemic? Crash and burn unless it has enough reserves, because it won't have the benefit of being propped up by different businesses that aren't impacted (like say GE HealthCare). Bombardier today are in a much worse spot, focusing only on a minuscule and volatile niche (private jets), but at least in their case it wasn't their choice, Boeing bankrupted them with protectionist tricks. The real reasons to split them up would be to improve competition and the choice of consumers, not because "idiot investors think 'value' will go up".

conductr 4y ago
Would customers pay for Amazon services individually if they were unbundled? I’m guessing there would be significant drop off. Prime Video would implode. Subscription revenue wouldn’t be sufficient to fund content and it’s a short life from there.
SilverBirch 4y ago
It's pretty wild that your example of a good conglomerate is GE considering GE's a perfect of example of why conglomerates don't work. Gee I sure wish I could invest in that great GE Aerospace division, too bad if I do the jokers over at GE Capital are going to snort half of it and place the rest on black. GE was the notorious exception to conglomerates being terrible right up until it also turned into a massive shit show.
jefftk 4y ago
> Conglomerates being worth less than the sum of all parts is one of the stupidest parts of Wall Street. There is no actual rationale for this besides maybe it being easier to evaluate a company doing only a single thing? One example: some parts of a business need a positive consumer reputation and others don't. When you connect these under the same company you may end up with two business units that are each less valuable than if they were free to take the approach that best suited their business. For example, an ad company that didn't care much what consumers thought about it would use fingerprinting to personalize ads and it's prevalent in the industry, but Google committed to not doing this. Why? My guess is that a big part was reputation: having an ads division that's tracking users with no opt out is inconsistent with the company-wide policies Google needs to be competitive in consumer markets. In this case I think the effects are positive, in that the display ads division is closer to what consumers would want than if it were independent, but I think it's pretty likely that spinning DoubleClick back out would increase overall profits. (I used to work at Google, and here I'm speculating about decisions made several levels above me that I wasn't a part of.)

AlchemistCamp 4y ago

Amazon doesn't have close to a monopoly with AWS, Prime Video or even its ecommerce. What possible anti-trust rationale would there be to forcibly break up the company?

giancarlostoro 4y ago

> Meta: Meta has always run 3 separate products either way. Spinning off the loser (Facebook), and the non-social networking product (WhatsApp) You don't think of it as a social networking product, but it is used as such. I consider Discord social media, and WhatsApp is honestly a text only Discord competitor in the grand scheme of things, all the group chats are reminiscent of Discord servers, but for people who dont care about all that Discord has to offer, even if they never heard of Discord. I would absolutely include chat platforms under social media.

JohnFen 4y ago
I've never thought of WhatsApp as a social networking product. For me, it's just an SMS replacement necessary to talk to my friends outside of the US. Not saying my perspective is correct, but I think of a "social networking" product as one where I'm talking to groups of people. That's not how I use WhatsApp. That's always 1-on-1 conversations with people I know in the real world.
- giancarlostoro 4y ago
  For some people it is all the social media they get. People share memes, and pictures, and live updates.

cptskippy 4y ago

Why wasn't Microsoft included in this list? They have more overlap with Amazon and Google then Meta does.

psychlops 4y ago

Globalization is at odds with national level anti-trust. The past has shown that international companies supported by their governments would eat away at the smaller US companies.

pclmulqdq 4y ago
I think this is the big reason that the US hasn't taken action against these companies. They view them as strategic, and want to keep a very friendly relationship.
- msabalau 4y ago
  In this case, treating the "US" as if "they" have a consistent, considered view that drives all their actions seems a little odd and vaguely conspiratorial. After all, it has been well reported that US politicians on both sides of the aisle are looking to put investigative scrutiny on big tech in the year ahead. And US regulators were broadly underutilizing antitrust tools across the board in the past, not just for big tech. That also seems to be changing. Sure, the US pursues strategies related industrial policy and national security. The CHIPS act or the Inflation Reduction Act are examples. But you don't need a "big reason" why to explain why US companies like these tech firms have been underregulated. It isn't isn't some mystery, it is just (unfortunately) normal. If US firms are grossly underregulated and under-punished for simple stuff like wage theft, you don't need to invoke strategy to explain why big tech has gotten away with anticompetitive stuff in the past.

adrr 4y ago

Hitting companies with antitrust when consumers have is a terrible idea. Antitrust laws were made to prevent monopolies giving consumers choice and preventing them from getting screwed. Amazon is e-commerce, i have multiple choices to shop on web. Amazon has even benefited the consumer by forcing retailers speed up shipping. For cloud hosting, there are alternatives to AWS. There’s healthy competition in both fields. Meta the consumer is the advertiser. They are the ones spending the money. For advertising, there are different channel and mediums. You could buy billboard ads, tv/radio ads, direct mail etc. Competition is very healthy. Google the same thing. The consumer are advertisers. Thats the market. Lets compare major anti-trust actions. Standard oil was the pretty much the sole source of oil in the US. Consumers had no choice. ATT another major antitrust case where there was just one telecom company in the US. Kodak where they were controlled all the film market.

actuator 4y ago

IMO Apple should be the biggest target for antitrust right now looking at what they do on their platforms.

lancesells 4y ago

> Spinning off the loser (Facebook) I'm not a Facebook user but it's not a loser. - 2.9B Monthly Users in 2022 - 5.3B People with Internet Access - 55% of the world uses Facebook. It seems both Instagram and Whatsapp have about ~2B monthly users. And sure, these numbers are juiced but none are losers.

chiefalchemist 4y ago

Last I read, which was a couple of years ago, after Google search, YouTube is the next most searched "search engine". It serves ads. Is it really, from Google's POV that different than it's core business? That aside, as we know now, Google wasted it's time with Plus. Instead it should have fleshed out YT's social aspects. While that's easy to say in retrospect, it's still not a bad idea if Google wanted to "social media" product.

WaitWaitWha 4y ago

The online retail portion of amazon.com would not survive such a split [0]. [0]: Most recent Amazon.com, Inc. 10-K https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001018724/d2fde7ee-05f7-419d-9ce8-186de4c96e25.pdf https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001018724/d2fde7e...

iaseiadit 4y ago

“Search, YouTube, ads, and technical infrastructure (cloud) can all easily be separated” At a product-level view from 10,000 feet, it might seem this way. In reality, these are deeply interconnected systems that are 15-20 years in the making. “Easily separated” are the last words I’d use.