| > Are we really to assume that they just woke up and decided to turn their brain off? There's clearly going to be some actual change that attempts to satisfy regulators here. Though I don't claim to fully understand what the genuine legal ramifications would be (partly because the proposal, as described in the Ars article, is quite vague), saying that the only reasons someone would propose this would be if it's Totally Obviously Fine or if they need their heads examining seems quite naïve. First of all, we've seen plenty of instances of fairly high-profile companies trying to get around regulations in ways that are (effectively) laughed out of the room by regulators. We've also seem similar instances where we the tech-savvy (and largely non-lawyer) public would laugh them out of the room, but the regulators took them 100% seriously and didn't question their (to us) obvious deception at all. Given how vague the article is, this could even be an attempt to float this idea through the press to see how people and the DoJ react before making the proposal formally. I think in short, the problem is that decoupling anything from Google by putting it under Alphabet doesn't pass the sniff test, but if you're looking at things from a super pedantic perspective, you could think it might fly to a court. |