Apple the device manufacturer and iTunes (or whatever) the streaming content service provider.
> Or Facebook?
Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp.
> I guess you could break up Google
Alphabet makes this easy. YouTube, Cloud Compute and the other things.
> it's basically a natural monopoly
Natural monopolies don’t have to acquire potential competitors to protect their flanks. Facebook minus Instagram would be very different today.
The breakups you suggested would make them slightly smaller companies but wouldn't solve any of the problems. the problem with Google if there is one is that it's the only search engine anybody uses. It's 90% of the market. Taking away YouTube doesn't change that.
Instagram isn't really a competitor with Facebook. Facebook would still be an effective Monopoly. Same with apple without iTunes.
Of course it is. Facebook is losing certain demographics to Instagram. If they were separate companies, Facebook would be under far greater shareholder pressure.
You literally just proved the point of GP.
With Apple it would be the same. You would have several platforms competing with IOS. Eventually they will start to doffer on thier offerings.
Now we’re arbitrarily drawing lines. Platform-service separation, on the other hand, has precedent. (As does gobbling up up-and-coming competitors, as Facebook did with Instagram and WhatsApp.)
And how would breaking Apple up, help with hate messages being posted on twitter, facebook, and youtube?
Taking it a step further, I mean, what would even be the basis on which you order a breakup of Apple? It's pretty set in law from the telcos way back to the railroads that monopolies are the reason to break a company up. (At least, that's the law in the US.)
But how do you argue that a company with a minority market share in all of its product lines, is a monopoly???
People have not quite thought through all the nuts and bolts of this whole "break up tech companies" idea.
(Although, I think at this point, one could argue effectively, that Google and Facebook are monopolies. It'd just be more difficult with companies like Apple or Netflix or companies like that.)
Or Facebook? Two social networks that get half of the population each?
Breakups only make sense for vertically integrated companies. I guess you could break up Google (it's already done so itself to some extent with the Alphabet reorg) but not in a way that's meaningful, other than maybe requiring advertising to be its own company.
Also it neglects the fact that their biggest asset is their domain name. Google.com might be worth literally trillions of dollars. How do you break that up?
If anything, I'd argue the government could regulate Facebook since it's basically a natural monopoly, much the way it does the NFL or basic utilities.