The parent's point was that breaking up Alphabet in any way that leaves Google Ads contiguous is insignificant. When you go to the barbershop and get a haircut, you've broken up your person into 100,001 individual pieces, but that hasn't solved your weight loss problem, because the 100,000 bits of hair are only a few hundred micrograms each and the one piece that is your body still weighs 90 kg.

Google Cloud is big enough to be significant in terms of revenue, but AFAIK is only maybe breaking even in terms of profit. If you break up Alphabet into 26 or more different companies, you haven't broken up the monolith into non-problematic small companies 1/26th the size of the original, you've got 25 irrelevant companies and then one subsidiary that gets Ads which is almost as big as the original. Google even says as much in their financial statements, most of those listed companies are listed as 'other bets' and are a tiny fraction of the main line item that represents ads.

> Google Cloud is big enough to be significant in terms of revenue, but AFAIK is only maybe breaking even in terms of profit.

Google cloud gotten profitable enough that they only spent $5B to earn $4B in revenue last quarter. After a dozen years that's the best ever (classic case of monopoly leverage to get into a different market).

Advertising is "only" 81% of revenue but almost 100% of profit.

Some other commenters have proposed that properties like YT and Android drive ad traffic but when I looked at the last 10Q it looked like YT was about 10% of ad revenues. I believe Android is a net loss but worth it in that it's an offset to reduce payments to Apple. But I just skimmed the filing because this is just an HN comment.

Isn’t the problem also that they use the massive profit in search to go into other areas and distort the market there by being able to subsidise losses with search income?

It would also stop them favouring their own products in search results

> I think the suggestion is breaking up alphabet, which is quite literally loads of companies.

Few, if any of those companies would be viable on their own. They require monopoly support. For example Google Cloud loses a billion a quarter (they spent $5B last quarter total in $4B).

As far as the cloud market goes there's really only one player, the profitable, pure play AWS. Everybody else is losing money, and mostly fudging the numbers (Google "cloud" includes Gmail, Google Workspace etc; MS's cloud includes running Windows for big customers, Office 360 etc etc).

Nest is marginally profitable.

Otherwise it's pretty thin gruel.

That’s kind of the point though isn’t it?

Which accomplishes what, exactly?

Perhaps Google Search, Chrome, and the advertising business could be split. Or Google Search could be split into Google Search 1 and Google Search 2.

If an advertising company didn't have access to your search history, there would be a more level playing field

Breaks it up into smaller business models, each of which makes it easier for companies with a more narrow, yet aligned, focus to compete with.

And it will have literally zero impacts on its business practices. They can simply form a "Google/Alphabet cartel" via preferential treatments, and will be structured and operating effectively in the same way and then eventually get merged together. If you want to attack Google and other big techs' monopoly, you need to design a precise regulation on very specific anti-competitive behaviors.

it'll be 'easy to break up' because that's what Alphabet was created to do - back in 2015 they knew antitrust and a monopoly break-up was going to happen at some point, so they made these companies largely operationally separate so that they have very little hiccup when it is required. The only one that'd be hard is YouTube where they might require spending some millions reworking the ad model, but otherwise they'll have little issues continuing business as usual. YouTube is likely profitable[0], so it's not like their monopoly over free video content is going to cease.

0: https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-al...