[izacus]

Dismember into what? Except for a lot of ranting and stamping of feet on HN, I don't see a lot of HNers jumping in and providing free alternative services for Google services?

There is a lot of DEMAND for free services for sure, but doesn't seem a lot of people are putting their money where their mouth is? Kagi hasn't grown all that much, neither have services like Nebula?

[fidotron]

Android, cloud, email, youtube, maps, search and advertising could all be entirely separate businesses in an actual sense.

[avidiax]

Android -- a cost center. No viable business model. Maybe Samsung would fork AOSP for their phones.

Cloud -- has to run at a loss in the immediate future to capture marketshare

Email -- nobody pays for email. Get ready for a much smaller mailbox and ads targeted by email contents. Get "sponsored" emails in your feed.

YouTube -- was a separate company before

Maps -- will become a free tourist map, may have to pay to unlock any zone except your home.

Search -- if it can sell ads independently, could be a viable business.

Advertising -- all the other units need advertising to survive. This could be a clearinghouse

In short, not clear that the pieces make sense as independent businesses with some exceptions.

[fdw]

But isn't that the very problem?

The market for these loss-leading services is skewed because Google subsidizes their free offerings so that they improve their ads branch. Because it is hard to compete with a free (actually money-losing) service, it is very hard for competitors to spring up. And thus the whole thing is anti-competitive.

If they were separate companies and had to compete on their own merit, not subsidized by the ads division, they'd have to ask for money too. Then, competitors actually have a chance to offer something better. And through that, the reach of the ads business is limited unless they start to work with the competing services. This opens up the market for other ad markets, too.

And then we are a step closer to the free market that is efficient and good for consumers.

[danaris]

Precisely.

The argument "but if you spin off this major part of the company, it wouldn't be profitable enough to survive on its own" is the whole damn point. Using your monopoly in one area to prop up an otherwise-unprofitable arm controlling another area is exactly the kind of behavior antitrust law is designed to combat.

Too many people (especially around here) seem to forget that.

[izacus]

> And then we are a step closer to the free market that is efficient and good for consumers.

With Apple, Amazon and Microsoft doing the same in same markets... are we? Because it doesn't seem like "whap the random company that didn't pay enough for marketing" strategy isn't really working into establishing proper competition that benefits society.

Maybe... a different approach needs to be taken? How about starting to talk about legislation which would force large companies to allow competition into their vertical integrations - ALL of them, not just the single pet megacorp we hate this week. Level playing field and all that.

[wuschel]

You cut off one head ...

How would the market change in the wake of such a move? I can imagine that other companies will try to rebuild what Google was in other form. And these companies might not be US entities.

[grotorea]

> Android -- a cost center. No viable business model. Maybe Samsung would fork AOSP for their phones.

The Android company could simply get paid licensing fees for its OS and extras like Microsoft? Or maybe AOSP would instead continue as a intercompany project somewhat similar to Linux (the kernel).

> Cloud -- has to run at a loss in the immediate future to capture marketshare

That's dumping and I don't think it should be allowed so routinely anyway.

> Email -- nobody pays for email. Get ready for a much smaller mailbox and ads targeted by email contents. Get "sponsored" emails in your feed.

So, if people care they can pay for the paid service.

> YouTube -- was a separate company before

Was it profitable through? I see Alphabet published revenue numbers but I didn't find profit numbers. So maybe it would be hit by costcutting like limiting video length in some cases.

> Maps -- will become a free tourist map, may have to pay to unlock any zone except your home.

OpenStreetMaps exists, so an independent Google Maps company would have to compete with that.

> Search -- if it can sell ads independently, could be a viable business.

It's the starting and most profitable part that paid for all the rest, no? How it could not be viable.

> Advertising -- all the other units need advertising to survive. This could be a clearinghouse

But is the profit in the clearinghouse part or the selling ad space part? I'm guessing both.

[epolanski]

> It's the starting and most profitable part that paid for all the rest, no? How it could not be viable.

It relies on your information taken from your phone/email/search/youtube history/etc. Without all that data the value of ads is much lower.

[fidotron]

You mean the ad people may have to explicitly pay for information they want to use? Horrifying stuff.

[bongobingo1]

Is it possible to do that without there just being implicit back channels between the businesses, and they continue to operate as before?

I guess you could enforce some kind of open-tender requirements on their projects or something but that seems extremely difficult.

[Scarblac]

There is anti-cartel legislation that should prevent that, I think.

And why would it be in the interest of shareholders of the parts to only do business with the other old Google parts?

[BitPolice]

I don't have the answers here any more than anyone; but I notice that most approaches tend to cut along the existing verticals (e.g. the product areas).

The break-up of AT&T provides another perhaps more viable arena for thought...

There the breakup resulted in multiple, independent competing companies cleaved from AT&T. Three organically produced combinations now remain of the original 7: 1. Verizon is what was the north eastern region (Bell Atlantic + NYNEX). 2. The now reunited trademark AT&T started as the western ones (Pacific Telesis and Ameritech) then added the southwest (Southwestern Bell/SBC) in 2005 and the southern states' one (BellSouth) in 2006. 3. The midwestern region was Qwest which is still around in some form as CenturyLink/Lumen.

From one massive company which did everything you got a bunch of companies that actually competed with each other in the main and market dominant sector. The market continued to evolve and real market forces forced combinations among them; IMO this is a good and natural thing.

Remember MCI and Sprint? Did you know they were already around pre-breakup as starving competitors of the monopoly? Suddenly they became national brands and introduced their own leaderships' priorities into the consumer marketplace (MCI in particular was early in seeing the importance of several early Internet packet-based technologies and in consumer email).

Prior to the breakup did you know that the domestic television networks (ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, there wasn't Fox yet) had long-term contracts to send their signals over AT&T's terrestrial network? Almost immediately after the breakup (this is not a causal thing, but there is a lot of correlation) they all switched almost immediately thereafter to sattelite distribution (which had been available for nearly a decade).

-- The point I'm making is that you don't have to just draw inside the preexisting lines. The goal isn't the punish Alphabet, but to maximize competition in the market to the benefit of the nation (externalities positive and negative) and its consumers (first-order real good). Promoting competition may result in 2 search companies that can't reunite or something equally unthinkable...