
Ask HN: What would happen if a tech giant like Alphabet Inc decided to shutdown? - rajesh-s
Have consolidated tech companies created a risk of single point of failure OR are they safe to be considered too big to fail?<p>What would be the consequence of it on the internet as we know it? Are we prepared?<p>When it&#x27;s a company like Google you&#x27;re talking about, it&#x27;s just hard to imagine a day when platforms like YouTube or Gmail might be killed off.<p>Are there legal clauses that would prevent such a thing? Or does the corporation have complete freedom in such matters.
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TheGrumpyBrit
If Alphabet just "decided" to shut down - i.e. they didn't go bust, they
weren't attacked, they just woke up one day and said "We're ceasing trading
with immediate effect"?

In all likelihood, the internet as we know it would immediately cease to
exist. Huge chunks of infrastructure would immediately go down because they're
hosted on GCP. DNS servers which use Google as their root would stop updating.
The other FAANG companies would most likely go down too due to various
codependent services.

In other news, the stock market would collapse, cable and broadcast services
would go off the air, and we'd very quickly discover just how incredibly
reliant we are on this stuff. I don't think it would be a stretch to say that
governments would fall.

~~~
jfoster
I don't think that scenario would even be possible. Shareholders would seek an
injunction. They have to maximise shareholder value, and such a decision
clearly wouldn't be doing so.

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open-source-ux
If Alphabet was to shutdown, other compaines would fill the void with their
own products. Some will be existing companies, and some will be new companies.

There are lots of alternatives to many of Alphabet/Google's products but
people don't know about them because Google dominates so many product spaces.

There are other email providers to Gmail. There are other map options too.

I can easily believe companies will create their own mobile OS to fill the
absence of Android (Jolla already exists, maybe Windows Phone will make a
comeback?!)

There are other search engines too. We have a variety of web browsers.

We'll still have all the free fonts previously hosted at fonts.google. Someone
else will probably collect and host them in a central place or people might be
more likely to self-host them.

GSuite can be replaced by alternatives (they already exist).

Of course, there is a lot of back-end engineering that Google has contributed
to the internet infrastructure we don't see. But the web will continue to work
fine.

Two Google products I can't see being easily replaced:

\- Street View: this is something that needs the time and resources of a large
company.

\- YouTube: this has accumulated so much content it's hard to see this
replicated easily.

So, yes - a lot of the user-facing products from Alphabet/Google can be
provided by other companies, or can be created by other companies.

~~~
danny_sf45
Right. Street View would be a big loss, but YouTube has accumulated so much
(garbage) content that it wouldn't matter if it disappears. Good content would
find its way to be published somewhere else.

~~~
dilap
oh man, just for the number of amazing musical performances alone this isn't
true

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matt_s
Alphabet has a board of directors with 11 people [0]. They would have to
collectively decide to stop making billions of dollars. I don't think this
would ever happen. I don't think any publicly traded company that was
profitable has ever done this.

Pretend we are assuming something happened and the board agreed to dissolve
the corporation. They would need to sell assets, pay debts, layoff everyone
and pay stockholders. People that hold stock would probably make a lot of
money. Smaller/other services that exist now would swoop in for the market
share. It would be a feeding frenzy. Sure your Bing search results wouldn't be
the same as Google's but you bet Microsoft would amp up marketing and let the
tech catch up later.

One actual possibility is anti-trust laws kick in for something and Alphabet
is required to split up. Then you have a bunch of smaller Alphabets running
around and I bet the unprofitable things might get shut down as part of that.

[0]
[https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000130817916...](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000130817916000384/lgoog_def14a.htm)

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gitgud
Well I'm not any authority on the matter, but I'll say my piece.

Trillion dollar companies like Alphabet are very different from a traditional
mid-sized company, in that they have evolved into giant distributed failure-
tolerant entities. Every part of the business is designed with risk in mind.

Any product that has no direct or indirect ability to make profit is
extinguished before consuming more of the company's resources (see [1]
KilledByGoogle).

Youtube and Gmail have huge _indirect_ revenue streams, and are not likely to
be going any time soon. Youtube has advertisement and addictive content. Gmail
has [2] advertising and it keeps people close to the Google search-engine
which has more advertising.

I think a better question is what is an event which could decimate one of the
FAANG?... I can't think of any that also leave the rest of the world intact...

[1] [https://killedbygoogle.com/](https://killedbygoogle.com/)

[2] [https://securityboulevard.com/2019/11/does-google-read-
your-...](https://securityboulevard.com/2019/11/does-google-read-your-
email/#:~:text=Google's%20servers%20have%20access%20to,servers%20is%20available%20to%20them).

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jfoster
I think the most likely event that could decimate one of the FAANG would be
increased competition from another. For example, what happens to Amazon if
Google decides to get deadly serious about e-commerce? What happens to Google
if Apple & Microsoft decide to make Bing a joint venture? What happens to
Facebook if Apple launch a social network?

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danny_sf45
Only one tech giant? Not much, the other tech giants would take over.

Life without YouTube? It would take a week for most of us to recover. 99% of
the content in YouTube is garbage, and for the 1% content of quality, people
would find other platforms.

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samfisher83
Nokia used to be the biggest phone manufacturer in the world. Aol used to rule
the internet. IBM ruled the pcs. People would move to bing or ddg or whatever
new search engine and move on.

