People on HN ask this question every time that the subject comes up, and I'm a bit confused as to whether it's genuine curiosity, or whether it's meant to show that breaking up Google would be impractical.
I don't know much about the internal structure of Google, but my naïve intuition is that it could be broken up into several profitable companies relatively easily a whole a bunch of different ways, given how many different products there are.
It seems like the first thing would be to split off Youtube, which is apparently already independent enough that it has its own CEO. Actually, I'd be comfortable arguing that Youtube is big enough by itself that breaking it up somehow would benefit consumers, but at least in that case it does seem hard to imagine how it would be done.
Then, I would guess the next step would be to split Google Search from everything else. As far as I can tell, it's mostly stand-alone, and most integration with other products seemes more harmful to consumers than beneficial.
After that, it gets harder, but I feel like you could do something like this:
1. Adsense
2. Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs
3. Android, Pixel / whatever other hardware Google makes.
4. Everything else
Wouldn't breaking up Google into companies with complete control over their respective markets not really achieve the desired goal?
E.g. If Android becomes it's own company, it's still the only player in the mobile operating system space. If search was it's own company, it's still the dominant search engine.
Admittedly, I wasn't around at the time, but what use was breaking up Ma-bell into the sub companies, from a choice perspective? I certainly understand that from a telephony devices perspective, consumer choice drastically increased, since third parties could now make telephones, but you still ended up with local monopolies for all of the fractured components.
Also, how is search's integration into other products harmful in all circumstances? It's extremely convenient that typing the name of a restaurant into Google search gives me reviews, the menu, directions, etc.
> Wouldn't breaking up Google into companies with complete control over their respective markets not really achieve the desired goal?
As I understand, the desired goal is to stop the dominant player in one domain (search) from getting an unfair competitive advantage in another (advertising backends). It might also be true that allowing one company to have complete dominance in a particular domain stifles competition within that domain, but that's a seperate problem.
> Admittedly, I wasn't around at the time, but what use was breaking up Ma-bell into the sub companies, from a choice perspective? I certainly understand that from a telephony devices perspective, consumer choice drastically increased, since third parties could now make telephones, but you still ended up with local monopolies for all of the fractured components.
I know nothing at all about this particular topic, but I have two immediate thoughts:
1. It would be easier to break a monopoly held by a company that made just one component, because once you finished your replacement for that component, you'd be able to ship a product, whereas if one company had a monopoly on every component, you'd need to make replacements for every component.
2. I don't find "It might stay just as bad as it is now" to be a very strong criticism if the alternative is doing nothing.
> Also, how is search's integration into other products harmful in all circumstances? It's extremely convenient that typing the name of a restaurant into Google search gives me reviews, the menu, directions, etc.
Sure, but Duckduckgo does those things as well and doesn't own any products that do those things. Whereas there are some google products that seem really tightly coupled, like Drive and Docs that I can't really imagine working as well if they came from different companies. As for harming consumers, I was mostly thinking about search data → advertising.
