[kediz]

How do you achieve this technically? Monorepo would be a pain to break.

Or just break up Google into two but let both of them keep the access to the same repo? Then what would this achieve?

[mayank]

> Monorepo would be a pain to break.

It's generally acknowledged in technical circles that antitrust action is a highly effective way to break up a monorepo.

[kediz]

It would be a case of LDD (Lawsuit driven development). The engineers would need to redo a lot of the infra and products

[toast0]

At the time of the breakup AlphabetCereal gets a copy and AlphabetSoup gets a copy. If they care, make Soup and Cereal pledge to purge the Soup specific or the Cereal specific parts. Either way, ban the soup company from selling cereal by consent decree and vice versa.

Splitting the datacenters might be trickier, but worst case, operate them jointly for 12-18 months, and at the end, each datacenter and the contents thereof are the exclusive property of one or the other. Or enact a third company to own and operate the datacenter under FRAND terms.

[coldtea]

>How do you achieve this technically? Monorepo would be a pain to break.

Well, that's Google's problem... Plus, it's not like they can't follow an API and versioned libs and have to have it all bundled...

[duskwuff]

The big question would be how you deal with shared infrastructure -- compute, data storage, logging, etc. Google has a significant amount of highly proprietary code in those areas which they're undoubtedly using within their ads product; it'd be tricky to figure out how to deal with that in a split.

[alecb]

They should have spun off DoubleClick for Publishers and other server/ad mediation into separate companies and is likely what will happen if the government is successful in their case.

[jrockway]

To some extent, Google broke themselves up when it became Alphabet.