
What Years of Emails and Texts Reveal About Your Friendly Tech Companies - boh
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/04/opinion/amazon-facebook-congressional-hearings.html
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RestlessMind
To counter the dominance of "Big Tech", the governments should seriously start
breaking chunks out of them. For many giants, there are some obvious break-up
ideas:

1\. Amazon: AWS, Hardware/Alexa and Retail. Ads may belong to Retail or may be
a separate entity.

2\. Google: (Apart from all the non-Google Alphabet companies which are
already separate) YouTube, GCP/Apps, Hardware, Search (Web, Image, Maps, etc).
Ads should be split between YT and Search.

3\. Facebook: Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, VR. Ads can be split (or copied)
to each of the first 3.

4\. Microsoft: Windows, Azure/Office, Gaming, Bing / Ads, LinkedIn.

5\. Apple: While hard to disentangle, Apple's control over App store and iOS
(30% cut, forbidding competing browsers etc) should be weakened.

I am willing to bet my personal money that such break-up or weakening of Big
Tech will generate far more value in the tech sector in long run (say by
buying NASDAQ and holding it for the next 10 years).

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adamsea
From TFA:

"Early on, because of low pricing, Amazon lost more than $200 million from
diaper products in a single month. It ran its chief competitor, Quidsi, into
the ground. (Quidsi owned Diapers.com.) Then Amazon bought the weakened
company. This approach, like Facebook’s acquiring of competitors, is how John
D. Rockefeller built up Standard Oil in the 1870s. It’s “join us — or face
extermination.” Likewise, Amazon has admitted to sometimes selling its smart
speaker, Echo, below cost, presumably on the theory that collecting huge
amounts of data on users and securing direct access to their homes will
present an insurmountable barrier to potential rivals."

