Except with all the various products Google has, search is likely the only one that could stand on its own financially.

That for one. And products like Assistant would become pretty much useless.

Brin and Page always stated that search is not the end goal. A real AI is. If these actions happen, it‘s pretty much guaranteed that China will get there first. We don‘t have the global regulations in place yet to discourage that arms race.

There’s no indication they are capable of this.

Not yet. But they are doing everything possible to lay the groundwork. As much accurate data as possible, hire all the best AI talent, pioneering work on quantum computing and constantly improving tooling.

2030 to 2040 will be the earliest AGI could happen realistically.

Feels like Youtube and Maps have a pretty solid foothold given how very few products can compete at that level. I’m not sure how much they rely on data from other Google divisions but even without it I don’t see why they would fare worse than any other map service.

That’s google’s problem for picking a delicate business model.

So you’re fine with YouTube failing because Google got broken up?

Absolutely.

Sounds like a big negative for the average consumer

> tracking will continue until people regulate it

How are you going to stop tracking?

Whenever you interact with a business, online or offline, you're supplying information that can be tracked.

I think there's a difference between gathering information that's necessary for the service at hand (giving your IP address to a server, or your current location to a cell phone network) and milking the user for all identifying information that can be gathered (asking for the user's gender to create a shop account, browser fingerprinting by scanning plugins and canvas hashing, etc).

Regardless, how is breaking up Google going to stop such tracking?

I've asked this question twice now. We can't just break up companies because they collect data. That's not anti-trust.

Well that's a question for SomeOldThrow, I don't know how breaking up Google would help either.

You’d need something like the GDPR I imagine.

While tracking and anti-trust are only loosely coupled, both are symptoms of an anti-social company.