[px43]

So you think they should split up harder?

What would that look like? Phone companies make some sense because they have to serve certain geographic regions which can't compete or collude with each other. Google serves the world, of which the US population is only 5%. Do you think the US government is going to split up Google such that "South American Google" is totally independent and brings back no revenue to the US? Same with "European Google"?

Or you you want it split up by US region? Maybe "US-East Google" gets to make money from Europe, "US-West Google" gets to make money from Asian countries, and "US-Texas Google" gets to make money from services provided to South America?

Is the goal to cripple Google so hard that companies like Baidu and Yandex can overtake the search market globally? Is that why the US congress should split up Google?

The only people who have a rational argument for another Google split up are governments of non-US regions that are financially invested in competing services.

[_-david-_]

Alphabet and Google is not really a split in the sense people are talking about.

Typically when people say Google should be split up they mean different parts of Google should split. Google has search, ads, Youtube, Gmail, cloud, Android, etc. These parts would be split into different companies. Some parts "go together" like search and ads so they may be allowed to be one company, but YouTube and Search don't go together so they would be separate companies.

[thatguy0900]

But YouTube and ads do go together. Gmail would also presumably have to be Gmail and ads if it wasn't operated for data to feed to the ads engine. I could see Android becoming a product for carriers without ads, cloud doesn't need ads, how would Chrome operate as its own business without ads? Firefox is just paid for by Google search, would Chrome be the same, and would that be different enough to satisfy a breakup? Would you just split the ads team and data among multiple new companies and tell them they arnt allowed to talk to each other anymore?

[true_religion]

YouTube could buy ads from a source which isn't Google. It's not immediately obvious that YouTube which uses full video ads is best served by getting ads from a company that focuses on text ads (Google) or banner ads (Google's DoubleClick).

Gmail could charge for account features like Yahoo mail and Fastmail do.

Android could be legitimately open source, like Linux is. Or they could sell carrier specific distributions, which is something carriers are doing themselves right now but badly.

Chrome would need to operate under the aegis of some company, but that needn't be the same company that runs Google search and Google ads. If that were the case, their abusive ad experiences code may actually be good and not merely reflect a desire to destroy ad companies that aren't Google's DoubleClick. Chrome could also then allow browser login integration into other companies. I'd prefer of Chrome integrated with my Apple accounts, not my Google accounts for example.

Ads itself could be split into two companies---Google search ads (which may or may no be owned by Google search), and DoubleClick which was its own company to begin with before Google bought them.

[_-david-_]

I was just providing an example of the different products vs a geographical split. How things actually are split would be up in the air.

Of course YouTube would need ads. My point was that YouTube doesn't need to be in the same company as search, not that YouTube doesn't need ads. The ad network would likely need to be split into the new companies that are formed so all the parts that need their own ad network could have it.

Chrome likely could not survive on its own unless search paid for it like they do with Firefox. I am not sure all the products/services that Google has and their individual ability to survive without Google. That is something that would need to be determined by the people involved with a breakup.

[toast0]

A geographic split of Google doesn't make sense. The right thing to do is to take each of the areas where Google is a monopoly and break them out, and prevent the broken up pieces from providing overlapping services (at least for 20/30/50 years).

I would break out at least:

Ad network Web search Operating systems

And put everything else in a separate company. That would contain their other consumer services (gmail, finance, docs), whatever g-suite is called now, cloud services (until they shut down), their internet balloons and what not and maybe Waymo.

You can allow the baby-Gs to contract with each other (web search needs an ad network), but require the terms to be public and frand; maybe with some sort of second source requirements.

This doesn't eliminate any of the monopolies, but it eliminates the use of one monopoly to entrench another.

[kube-system]

I am not the person who said they should be split up.

I am pointing out that they haven't currently been split up at all. They are still a part of the same company.

Most people who have proposed a splitting up Google have obviously not suggested splitting it on geographical lines, because most of them understand how the internet works. Typically, the suggestions have been to split on product line -- not unlike how Alphabet has internally organized their divisions.