> Some google products could stand on their own (Google Cloud) but most would have a lot of trouble.

Maybe I'm busting out my tinfoil hat, but I think that's the point. YouTube and other businesses wouldn't be able to survive without Google's ad money.

In my experience traditional media companies are the ones most heavily pushing for Google's breakup. Is this due to genuine fear of monopoly, or due to the desire to eliminate a competitor encroaching on their revenue sources?

I'm still confused at what exactly they're trying to accomplish.

So youtube and google drive basically die, some of the most useful free services available right now. I think this does more bad than good and I don't think any American citizen would support this given the effects.

YouTube is taking a lot of ad money that would go to cable and newspapers. People's attention is finite. Less competition for eyeballs.

I don't really want to go back to watching ads for heartburn meds and Chevy pickups. At least Google shows me something I might be interested in.

I'd rather have people pay for decent financially sustainable products rather than fueling surveillance capitalism and monopolies with their data.

You can pay for YouTube and it will remove ads. i don't think drive has ads to begin with.

..and you still tracked and your data is mined like anyone else.

There is just no incentive to pay money to big corporations now. I was paying $14.99 for play music and youtube red (ad free). At this time, I don't want my data to be collected and profiled against. But that is not possible. Same thing goes for Washington Post and NY times.

I canceled my subscriptions and enabled ad block via Pi hole.

If you wanna take it a step further, setting up Wireguard on a Raspberry Pi is super easy. it gives you remote access to your PiHole. Look up PiVPN.

I think it's time for tech to flex it's political muscle a bit. We're talking about humongous corporations with billions of dollars in cash silently giving to both Republican and Democratic super PACs since forever and the only political drama we had is Msft vs Amzn for the defence cloud contract. Media companies are puny by comparison.

The tech stance so far has been don't bother us and we'll continue to innovate, grow earnings and help users do cool things and investors make some money in the market. That has worked tremendously well for both the companies and their customers. I don't think changing that is in the users' interests at all.

I don't trust big media to provide accurate reporting here because they don't have the best of the relationships with G / FB.

Let's have privacy laws or platform regulation laws regarding censorship / free speech. Breaking big tech up is pointless.

Google is heavily involved in politics. You seem to be under the impression that they stay out of it but that isn't the case.

Need some references then. Other than some ineffective immigration lobbying, I don't see them doing much.

What laws were passed to help G? What regulations changed to favor them?

I think you’re missing the bigger picture here, google customers are marketers not gmail users.

The worst thing that google does imho is to subsidize YouTube, Gmail and other products using advertising money. They’re effectively selling your data to marketers while killing competitors.

It's the businessman siccing the government on his competition. It's nothing new. Uncle Sam needs to stay out of it.

Why couldn't Youtube just keep selling ads to the Google ad network? Existing websites make money off of advertising revenue that they get from Google, how would this be different?

It would accelerate the path to the google graveyard is all.

It would be really cool for people to be able to make money in those markets. It's really lame right now to face competing with free offerings. We're in a post chat client scarcity world.

Nobody has made serious money by selling browser because nobody is willing to pay for browsers. Without Chrome the web would just stagnate.

Nobody is willing to pay for mobile operating systems either. Maybe hardware manufacturers would pay to move Android forward as an open-source project but most likely outcome is a stagnant fragmented mess.

Microsoft used to have licensing deals with Android phone manufacturers for their use of FAT, it was just bundled in the cost of the phones sold.

With the choice of Android effectively costing them $5-15 per device sold, manufacturers still chose it.

https://www.howtogeek.com/183766/why-microsoft-makes-5-to-15...

> Without Chrome the web would just stagnate.

Microsoft would take over. They are in position already, contributing to Chromium.

> Nobody is willing to pay for mobile operating systems either.

Why not just bundle it in with the cost of the hardware like Apple does?

I don't know about other people but I would have no problem with the web stagnating. We don't need yet more complex HTML features.

>Without Chrome the web would just stagnate.

Some people would pay for a better browser. For example I pay for Intellij because for what I do is better then the free alternatives and honestly I am afraid if Microsoft would put them out of business with their free stuff we will get stagnation.

Opera tried that and never got beyond 5%.

But if it was profitable then it is enough, you don't have to kill the competition. The problem is when a corporation puts a lot of money and copies you then surpasses you and on top of the ton of developers Chrome had they used shitty tactics like promoting their browser on the google home page and bundling it with other programs.

Opera is a good example. they did a lot of innovation a Google like tyrant is not needed.

I actually think that that Chrome ad on the Google homepage was the most anti-competitive thing Google have ever done.

Like, no-one else in the world could possibly have gained access to that ad-space (possibly the most impactful ad-space in the world), and yet no-one even covers this in the anti-trust/competition investigations.

I got really sick of ignoring the constant prompts to install Chrome over the years (and I still use Firefox).

Mind you, at least the EU took them to task for Android service bundling, should be interesting to see what comes of that.

Google Ads will run on Google's infrastructure and pay a lot enough to subsidize all the other products. Basically, there will be some financial impacts but I don't expect any kinds of significant impacts on their business, which proves this attack to be pointless.

Android would probably be spin-offable via the same strategy that technically makes Mozilla independent: pay for search engine placement. And then pay for all the services it connects to like Maps, Gmail, etc.

It'd def be messy to untangle backends though. One imagines that the play store relies heavily on CDNs by Google, as one random small example from the haystack of papercuts.

A large part of commercial Android is part of the mysterious "Google Play Services." I'm sure that would be a nightmare to uncouple from Google.

Both Android and Chrome could be wildly successful independent companies. Android could charge a license fee to OEMs in addition to the app store business and Chrome could sell search default rights like Firefox does.

Apple makes billions of dollars off of Safari search rights, so I think you're right about Chrome

Almost no other service line other than Ads is profitable for Alphabet.

Maybe we shouldn't allow them to drive a bulldozer through other verticals then.

No. Google has always had a flawed business model. It’s been propped up by governments looking the other way for over 15 years.

Seems like a reasonable split would be third party ads, while allowing google to run its own ads on its own sites.

The biggest problem is that there isn't really a way to break up a data center. Unlike Amazon and Microsoft, Google doesn't use their own cloud.

That's Google's problem, not the legislator's.

> Would it just split off the ad business from ad-supported businesses like gmail and youtube?

Yes. They can still sell ads, just not inhouse.

The answer to this question will be endlessly fascinating.

To start somewhere, everything that was an acquisition 'should' stand on its own, because it began as a complete company. Of course things aren't that simple.

>To start somewhere, everything that was an acquisition 'should' stand on its own, because it began as a complete company. Of course things aren't that simple.

In many/most cases, "complete" companies that are losing money hand over fist or--in the better cases--have a business model but not great long-term prospects.