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There would be so much opportunity in breaking up Apple and Google. And Amazon and Meta. Just think of all the new startups and money to be made by breaking up

There would be so much opportunity in breaking up Apple and Google. And Amazon and Meta. Just think of all the new startups and money to be made by breaking up big tech. I think the valuation of a broken-up Google and Apple would exceed the monolithic conglomerates that they have become. So many of their business units and products don't even monetize because they're going for an intangible "platform value" that is only achievable at obscene scale. In this hulking form, they can reach into new markets and charge nothing, killing off all the incumbents, just so that they can grow their empires larger and tighten their grips on your attentions and wallets. Amazon gives away Hollywood movies for free because it keeps your eyeballs glued to them. And they're also a grocery store, for god's sake. A big tech breakup would provide much needed oxygen to the ecosystem, lift a bunch of impossible to beat barriers, and result in far more competition and money making. Imagine a web that isn't dominated by Google or a phone market that isn't controlled by a duopoly. Imagine if we could suddenly launch iPhone and Gmail and YouTube competitors. The energy barriers are too high today because the big players have consolidated every angle of attack. No wonder Peter Thiel and Vance want it. This would turn the big tech money siphons over to venture capital, entrepreneurs, and engineering ICs again. We should all be 100% for this.

tedd4u 2y ago
>And they're also a grocery store, for god's sake. They're also your primary care doctor! Amazon OneMedical! https://health.amazon.com/onemedical https://health.amazon.com/onemedical Scroll down the page a bit.
aurareturn 2y ago
Counter point: Would breaking up Meta, Google, Apple, Microsoft decrease the progress in AI since those major companies are forking over hundreds of billions to build out mega AI infraustructure?
- bigstrat2003 2y ago
  Maybe, but why should we care? So far those billions haven't actually given us anything useful, it's all just toys. I'm not against research, but when the research hasn't yet produced a useful outcome then I don't feel like there is a strong societal good in keeping it going.
  - nonameiguess 2y ago
    I don't think that's a fair assessment. I'm not anywhere near as high on LLMs as many, but Google and Meta's moonshot side projects and insane investments into infrastructure have given us Waymo, TensorFlow, PyTorch, Kubernetes, React, MapReduce, http2, the entire Go programming language, V8, all of Facebook's investments into improving PHP and OCaml. We can quibble over how valuable each of these things individually is, but it's not just toys. It's foundational tooling used all over the place that the larger community pretty just got for free. They've also been some of the biggest contributors to the Linux kernel. To be fair, I don't know that we needed Google et al for this. We used to get this kind of thing from DARPA and university researchers, but Google and Facebook and friends made so much money from ads that they hired away all the best researchers so they no longer work at universities, at the same time government was hollowing out funding for basic research. We could get this thing from real public sources if we made the public investments, but I don't know that the political will or taxpayer willingness exists to do that now. We need to get it from somewhere.
    - scarface_74 2y ago
      Do you really think the government funding this would lead to better outcomes? We see the censorship that China is doing with DeepSeek and we just saw the dictator in chief freezing all spending unilaterally even though that wasn’t in his power
  - vineyardmike 2y ago
    Google Translate (and all the new competing products) alone should be reason enough to demonstrate outstanding societal good. You can now travel anywhere in the world and communicate in the local language. Using offline models that translate between any two languages. That’s almost literally biblical magic levels of social good. (Plus we got amazing image recognition tech, LLMs, voice and NLU stuff, AlphaFold for protein analysis, etc)
    - Apocryphon 2y ago
      If Google Translate was to disappear, I wonder if say Duolingo could create translation software with all of the linguistic data they’ve accumulated.
- Apocryphon 2y ago
  Wouldn’t this point have had greater resonance a week or two ago before recent news about entrants in the AI space?
  - scarface_74 2y ago
    DeepSeek is only thing because they used OpenAI for refinement.
    - talldayo 2y ago
      "Apple only exists because they used Motorola IP" type comment
      - scarface_74 2y ago
        It wasn’t just IP though. DeepSeek actually used OpenAIs API and resources. I’m not saying it was unethical.
    - snake42 2y ago
      Almost all innovation is derivative or incremental in some way.
      - scarface_74 2y ago
        The difference is that DeepSeek couldn’t actually be created as cheaply as it was without using OpenAIs resources - not just IP. It did refinement by using OpenAI to create synthetic data.
        lazide 2y ago
        Ok. But it now exists, and OpenAI seems to have no way to control Deepseek, or any legitimate claim they can enforce to stop it. Oops.
vineyardmike 2y ago
I don’t want to comment on if a breakup is a “good” thing for society, because I vaguely agree, but I’m not sure I agree with you on many points here. > I think the valuation of a broken-up Google and Apple would exceed the monolithic conglomerates that they have become. So many of their business units and products don't even monetize because they're going for an intangible "platform value". I think a lot of these products aren’t monetized because they’re actually bad businesses or failed ventures and companies have the free cash to support them. A lot more of Google’s (for example) random side projects seem to be getting subscriptions or collapses into existing ones. I also think that vertical integration creates unique value sometimes. I think spinning off these random side businesses could destroy the side businesses, but that this may still raise stock prices as the companies get better margins. I think a lot of these products are bad businesses because big tech salaries are high and that makes labor costs hard to account for. I think the breakups obviously rectify consolidated power. 100%. But I don’t see more mobile phone operating systems coming from a breakup of Apple, for example. Gmail isn’t going to be replaced by a new email provider. Nor would we see a new YouTube, or other dominant businesses. Disrupting these massive aggregators won’t come from direct competition, but rather new product and service experiences. TikTok has shown that tech is already not impenetrable. Finally, I totally agree that this would be a feeding frenzy for VCs, but VCs learned in the last decade how to rip off ICs even more through delaying IPOs and more aggressive dilution. So I wouldn’t be holding my breath as an IC that breaking up Google (or others) will make jobs better.
- inetknght 2y ago
  > I think the breakups obviously rectify consolidated power. 100%. But I don’t see more mobile phone operating systems coming from a breakup of Apple, for example. Gmail isn’t going to be replaced by a new email provider. Nor would we see a new YouTube, or other dominant businesses. Disrupting these massive aggregators won’t come from direct competition, but rather new product and service experiences. Perhaps you're right. Perhaps breaking these products up would not create more competition. But it would mean that these products must determine how to make money on their own merits. That might mean a better product overall. Or it might mean that the product really doesn't deserve to exist as a consumer product.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Kye 2y ago
Going from the breakup of AT&T to the reconstitution of AT&T took about 40 years. Standard Oil probably did the same, though I haven't seen any fancy charts showing it on a timeline like with AT&T. There's probably some useful lessons to pick up from that time if they go the breakup route.

tedd4u 2y ago

>And they're also a grocery store, for god's sake. They're also your primary care doctor! Amazon OneMedical! https://health.amazon.com/onemedical https://health.amazon.com/onemedical Scroll down the page a bit.

aurareturn 2y ago

Counter point: Would breaking up Meta, Google, Apple, Microsoft decrease the progress in AI since those major companies are forking over hundreds of billions to build out mega AI infraustructure?

bigstrat2003 2y ago
Maybe, but why should we care? So far those billions haven't actually given us anything useful, it's all just toys. I'm not against research, but when the research hasn't yet produced a useful outcome then I don't feel like there is a strong societal good in keeping it going.
- nonameiguess 2y ago
  I don't think that's a fair assessment. I'm not anywhere near as high on LLMs as many, but Google and Meta's moonshot side projects and insane investments into infrastructure have given us Waymo, TensorFlow, PyTorch, Kubernetes, React, MapReduce, http2, the entire Go programming language, V8, all of Facebook's investments into improving PHP and OCaml. We can quibble over how valuable each of these things individually is, but it's not just toys. It's foundational tooling used all over the place that the larger community pretty just got for free. They've also been some of the biggest contributors to the Linux kernel. To be fair, I don't know that we needed Google et al for this. We used to get this kind of thing from DARPA and university researchers, but Google and Facebook and friends made so much money from ads that they hired away all the best researchers so they no longer work at universities, at the same time government was hollowing out funding for basic research. We could get this thing from real public sources if we made the public investments, but I don't know that the political will or taxpayer willingness exists to do that now. We need to get it from somewhere.
  - scarface_74 2y ago
    Do you really think the government funding this would lead to better outcomes? We see the censorship that China is doing with DeepSeek and we just saw the dictator in chief freezing all spending unilaterally even though that wasn’t in his power
- vineyardmike 2y ago
  Google Translate (and all the new competing products) alone should be reason enough to demonstrate outstanding societal good. You can now travel anywhere in the world and communicate in the local language. Using offline models that translate between any two languages. That’s almost literally biblical magic levels of social good. (Plus we got amazing image recognition tech, LLMs, voice and NLU stuff, AlphaFold for protein analysis, etc)
  - Apocryphon 2y ago
    If Google Translate was to disappear, I wonder if say Duolingo could create translation software with all of the linguistic data they’ve accumulated.
Apocryphon 2y ago
Wouldn’t this point have had greater resonance a week or two ago before recent news about entrants in the AI space?
- scarface_74 2y ago
  DeepSeek is only thing because they used OpenAI for refinement.
  - talldayo 2y ago
    "Apple only exists because they used Motorola IP" type comment
    - scarface_74 2y ago
      It wasn’t just IP though. DeepSeek actually used OpenAIs API and resources. I’m not saying it was unethical.
  - snake42 2y ago
    Almost all innovation is derivative or incremental in some way.
    - scarface_74 2y ago
      The difference is that DeepSeek couldn’t actually be created as cheaply as it was without using OpenAIs resources - not just IP. It did refinement by using OpenAI to create synthetic data.
      - lazide 2y ago
        Ok. But it now exists, and OpenAI seems to have no way to control Deepseek, or any legitimate claim they can enforce to stop it. Oops.

vineyardmike 2y ago

I don’t want to comment on if a breakup is a “good” thing for society, because I vaguely agree, but I’m not sure I agree with you on many points here. > I think the valuation of a broken-up Google and Apple would exceed the monolithic conglomerates that they have become. So many of their business units and products don't even monetize because they're going for an intangible "platform value". I think a lot of these products aren’t monetized because they’re actually bad businesses or failed ventures and companies have the free cash to support them. A lot more of Google’s (for example) random side projects seem to be getting subscriptions or collapses into existing ones. I also think that vertical integration creates unique value sometimes. I think spinning off these random side businesses could destroy the side businesses, but that this may still raise stock prices as the companies get better margins. I think a lot of these products are bad businesses because big tech salaries are high and that makes labor costs hard to account for. I think the breakups obviously rectify consolidated power. 100%. But I don’t see more mobile phone operating systems coming from a breakup of Apple, for example. Gmail isn’t going to be replaced by a new email provider. Nor would we see a new YouTube, or other dominant businesses. Disrupting these massive aggregators won’t come from direct competition, but rather new product and service experiences. TikTok has shown that tech is already not impenetrable. Finally, I totally agree that this would be a feeding frenzy for VCs, but VCs learned in the last decade how to rip off ICs even more through delaying IPOs and more aggressive dilution. So I wouldn’t be holding my breath as an IC that breaking up Google (or others) will make jobs better.

inetknght 2y ago
> I think the breakups obviously rectify consolidated power. 100%. But I don’t see more mobile phone operating systems coming from a breakup of Apple, for example. Gmail isn’t going to be replaced by a new email provider. Nor would we see a new YouTube, or other dominant businesses. Disrupting these massive aggregators won’t come from direct competition, but rather new product and service experiences. Perhaps you're right. Perhaps breaking these products up would not create more competition. But it would mean that these products must determine how to make money on their own merits. That might mean a better product overall. Or it might mean that the product really doesn't deserve to exist as a consumer product.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

Kye 2y ago

Going from the breakup of AT&T to the reconstitution of AT&T took about 40 years. Standard Oil probably did the same, though I haven't seen any fancy charts showing it on a timeline like with AT&T. There's probably some useful lessons to pick up from that time if they go the breakup route.