I feel like if you broke up the browser from search then the elimination of third party cookies will magically fall off the table because you break the browser'

I feel like if you broke up the browser from search then the elimination of third party cookies will magically fall off the table because you break the browser's integration with the engine and the ad platform which made that elimination profitable for Alphabet (and a knife in the lungs for "open web" advertisers). I hate web advertising but it's the model we've got so bear with me. Once third party cookies are back on the table it helps level the playing field. Programmatic advertising becomes profitable again and all those small players can get back to competing. Only this time they're just competing with each other and doubleclick. Maybe momentum carries forward and third party cookies are eliminated anyway (such faith in humanity). If that's the case then once again the playing field levels a bit more and everybody is working with the same blinders on. Search will still be awful because of google.com's market share and its enablement of click bait and echo chambers, but search will always be awful and five years from now everybody will have their own LLM instead of search anyway (and five years after that LLMs will suck because there's no new data to train against but that's another rant). Analytics will change a lot. Google not legally being able to integrate the data it scrapes from GA into its own products means that there's a lot less of a reason to stick just with their ecosystem. They'll still lag behind as far as privacy goes, so third party analytics providers will actually be able to get their toes in the door. Anyway like you I agree that a breakup probably isn't going to happen. Most of the people who would legislate a break-up don't even understand the internet or what alphabet is, or what google does.