3 ms·

I can envision a gnarly Venn diagram of search, ads, AI, analytics, Chrome. You could easily make this 5 separate companies (ads and analytics were acquired), b

by tootie 2y ago

I can envision a gnarly Venn diagram of search, ads, AI, analytics, Chrome. You could easily make this 5 separate companies (ads and analytics were acquired), but you probably just need to split it somewhere in the middle.

pklausler 2y ago
"easily?" Which one would own Platforms? Which one would own the google3 monorepo?
- tootie 2y ago
  Haha, I mean they could easily survive as separate companies. Not that separating them would be easy.
- coliveira 2y ago
  This is not the courts problem. Google needs to solve this before the split.
  - fallingknife 2y ago
    It is always the court's problem. A judge does not have arbitrary or absolute authority. If Google can convince an appeals court that the judge has imposed an impossible or unreasonable remedy it will be overturned.
    - idle_zealot 2y ago
      So if you make your anticompetitive business a tangled hairball then you're immune from being broken up because it would be "too hard"? Genius strategy.
    - coliveira 2y ago
      All monopolies try this old scheme, that's why they became a monopoly in the first place. No reasonable judge will fall for this.
fallingknife 2y ago
But this verdict only involves the search business. All that other stuff is out of scope. And breaking it up like that leaves the search monopoly intact anyway.
tomjen3 2y ago
Search would just farm out ads or develop their own again: its two sides of the same paper, by necessity. Chrome is a loss leader and if cut out to it’s own company will die, because browsers are not a business that can make money anymore (same with eg C compilers for x86), AI maybe, but the only advantage AI has at google is that it has a crap-ton of data to train it with. Without that? The market just has one less AI product. Regardless of how you split it, whomever ends up with search ends up with the value. And I guess the only way to split search would be into a background service api you could query and then have the front page be its own business. Others could then buy access, but the problem with that is that you then have a supplier that has all the power…
- account42 2y ago
  > Chrome is a loss leader and if cut out to it’s own company will die, because browsers are not a business that can make money anymore That's the definition of anti-copetitive monopoly abuse, not an argument against doing something about it.
  - tomjen3 2y ago
    Except that Firefox was there first with a free unbundled browser.

by tootie 2y ago

pklausler 2y ago

"easily?" Which one would own Platforms? Which one would own the google3 monorepo?

tootie 2y ago
Haha, I mean they could easily survive as separate companies. Not that separating them would be easy.
coliveira 2y ago
This is not the courts problem. Google needs to solve this before the split.
- fallingknife 2y ago
  It is always the court's problem. A judge does not have arbitrary or absolute authority. If Google can convince an appeals court that the judge has imposed an impossible or unreasonable remedy it will be overturned.
  - idle_zealot 2y ago
    So if you make your anticompetitive business a tangled hairball then you're immune from being broken up because it would be "too hard"? Genius strategy.
  - coliveira 2y ago
    All monopolies try this old scheme, that's why they became a monopoly in the first place. No reasonable judge will fall for this.

fallingknife 2y ago

But this verdict only involves the search business. All that other stuff is out of scope. And breaking it up like that leaves the search monopoly intact anyway.

tomjen3 2y ago

Search would just farm out ads or develop their own again: its two sides of the same paper, by necessity. Chrome is a loss leader and if cut out to it’s own company will die, because browsers are not a business that can make money anymore (same with eg C compilers for x86), AI maybe, but the only advantage AI has at google is that it has a crap-ton of data to train it with. Without that? The market just has one less AI product. Regardless of how you split it, whomever ends up with search ends up with the value. And I guess the only way to split search would be into a background service api you could query and then have the front page be its own business. Others could then buy access, but the problem with that is that you then have a supplier that has all the power…

account42 2y ago
> Chrome is a loss leader and if cut out to it’s own company will die, because browsers are not a business that can make money anymore That's the definition of anti-copetitive monopoly abuse, not an argument against doing something about it.
- tomjen3 2y ago
  Except that Firefox was there first with a free unbundled browser.