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A comment on Tim Berners-Lee says tech giants may have to be split up. Parent comment

Re:Tim Berners-Lee says tech giants may have to be split up by JumpCrisscross on Thursday November 01, 2018 @10:50AM (#18354395)
> What would you break Apple up into?

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.

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Re:Tim Berners-Lee says tech giants may have to be split up by mattmaroon on Thursday November 01, 2018 @02:01PM (#18356656)
Neither do the people above. Apple isn't acquiring any other phone makers. Google isn't acquiring any other search engines.

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.

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Re:Tim Berners-Lee says tech giants may have to be split up by JumpCrisscross on Thursday November 01, 2018 @02:09PM (#18356741)
> Instagram isn't really a competitor with Facebook

Of course it is. Facebook is losing certain demographics to Instagram. If they were separate companies, Facebook would be under far greater shareholder pressure.

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Re:Tim Berners-Lee says tech giants may have to be split up by mattmaroon on Thursday November 01, 2018 @03:27PM (#18357530)
I don't think that's true. I think Facebook is losing customers due to its own downsides, and Instagram is gaining customers on its own Merit. I don't think that there is a zero-sum competition between the two
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Re:Tim Berners-Lee says tech giants may have to be split up by craftyguy on Thursday November 01, 2018 @08:28PM (#18359772)
> I think Facebook is losing customers due to its own downsides, and Instagram is gaining customers on its own Merit

You literally just proved the point of GP.

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Re:Tim Berners-Lee says tech giants may have to be split up by ummonk on Friday November 02, 2018 @06:33PM (#18367276)
Instagram is definitely a competitor with Facebook; indeed its founders recently quit because some of their desired projects (such as long form video) were being quashed to limit competition with the main Facebook platform.
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Re:Tim Berners-Lee says tech giants may have to be split up by uxhack on Thursday November 01, 2018 @11:10AM (#18354632)
Why not break them up with identical tech stack to start off with. So you could have 10 Google Search engines. Then let them inovate from there.

With Apple it would be the same. You would have several platforms competing with IOS. Eventually they will start to doffer on thier offerings.

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Re:Tim Berners-Lee says tech giants may have to be split up by JumpCrisscross on Thursday November 01, 2018 @11:13AM (#18354669)
> Why not break them up with identical tech stack to start off with

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.)

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Re:Tim Berners-Lee says tech giants may have to be split up by mattmaroon on Thursday November 01, 2018 @06:53PM (#18359202)
Because whichever identical tech stack got the domain name Google.com would win. Do you know if Google is even the best search engine anymore? If Bing had gotten better would you know? Most people wouldn't.
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