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?

What would be the consequence of it on the internet as we know it? Are we prepared?

When it's a company like Google you're talking about, it's just hard to imagine a day when platforms like YouTube or Gmail might be killed off.

Are there legal clauses that would prevent such a thing? Or does the corporation have complete freedom in such matters.

[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.

[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

[mattbrewsbytes]

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...

[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/

[2] https://securityboulevard.com/2019/11/does-google-read-your-....

[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?

[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.

[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.