opinion-10006

People on HN ask this question every time that the subject comes up, and I'm a bit confused as to whether it's genuine curiosity, or whether it's meant to show that breaking up Google would be impractical.

I don't know much about the internal structure of Google, but my naïve intuition is that it could be broken up into several profitable companies relatively easily a whole a bunch of different ways, given how many different products there are.

It seems like the first thing would be to split off Youtube, which is apparently already independent enough that it has its own CEO. Actually, I'd be comfortable arguing that Youtube is big enough by itself that breaking it up somehow would benefit consumers, but at least in that case it does seem hard to imagine how it would be done.

Then, I would guess the next step would be to split Google Search from everything else. As far as I can tell, it's mostly stand-alone, and most integration with other products seemes more harmful to consumers than beneficial.

After that, it gets harder, but I feel like you could do something like this:

1. Adsense 2. Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs 3. Android, Pixel / whatever other hardware Google makes. 4. Everything else