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I have no idea about the utility of divesting YouTube but on this point... >YouTube clearly shares a lot of infrastructure with the rest of Google, especially

I have no idea about the utility of divesting YouTube but on this point... >YouTube clearly shares a lot of infrastructure with the rest of Google, especially datacenters and ads. I don't see this as a particularly thorny problem. Normally in a divestiture. Newcorp would just sign a 5 year infrastructure deal with Alphabet, and a 5 year deal for it's ad space. That is plenty of time to resolve any lingering issues. I wouldn't be surprised to see Alphabet divest some business, however I think it is unlikely to be for tech reasons. It is more likely to be financial engineering, as growth stalls and share prices need protecting.

danpalmer 4y ago
The problem is there’s no clear split. Some infra is owned and developed by YouTube teams, some by Google teams, and it’s hard to figure out the balance and usage and so on. I’m some case you might have a service used by a Google product, operated as a platform by a YouTube team, that uses Google Cloud services, and runs on Google infrastructure. And the SREs may be “paid for” with YouTube budgets. Who pays who? And how much? It’s not as clean as, say, treating these things all like cloud services provided by an infrastructure provider.