this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2024
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While I do think that many of these companies need regulation, I think it would be very easy for many of them to cut off a finger or two to save the body, especially when you factor in that many departments of these companies either operate at a loss, or are in positions where they are losing market share.
For Google, losing Chrome would do very little for them. Fill the board with several execs, and it'll be Google-aligned for the next decade or so. They could also kill off Music, Docs, Fit, Pay, Keep, almost a dozen products that could either be killed or spun off into separate businesses. The same goes for Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, countless businesses that have a finger in a lot of pies.
EDIT: This is why people on the fediverse don't like Lemmy...
There’s so much to chop off there. They’re an ad monopolist, cut that. Their YouTube business is self sufficient, cut that. Android and Play Store? Chop chop chop. Cloud Services? Chainsaw goes wrrr. Google, Chrome and assorted services could stay with Google for brand recognition. All of them would be still very big and dangerously influential.
Unless you spin off Youtube along with the ad business into their own company, YouTube dies. It is in no way self-sufficient without the ad network that literally supports it.
I’m happy enough with the discourse being „how would we chop Google into pieces”, I know my dream is probably just a dream haha.
YouTube is probably the biggest streaming service out there. They’d have no issues negotiating a sweet deal with some ad company, former Google or other. As of now most YouTube users are products sold to advertisers so we’d benefit from adjusting this a bit too.
No shit, good fucking luck getting a business to purposely neuter itself.
Any reduction in operations or separating into new businesses would almost certainly be an effort to trim expenses/fat, and not a realistic effort into creating multiple viable businesses.
With that said, I'd definitely cut Cloud. They're a distant and expensive third to AWS and Azure, and it probably doesn't make the kind of money that other arms will make.
At&t/pacbell basically just kept recombining after being repeatedly broken apart. The market is broken, not the company.