Some google products could stand on their own (Google Cloud) but most would have a lot of trouble. The worst case is open-source offerings like Android and Chrome which only make sense as part of a wider corporate strategy.
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?
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.
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.
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.
What laws were passed to help G? What regulations changed to favor them?
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.
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.
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...
Microsoft would take over. They are in position already, contributing to Chromium.
Why not just bundle it in with the cost of the hardware like Apple does?
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 is a good example. they did a lot of innovation a Google like tyrant is not needed.
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.
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.
Yes. They can still sell ads, just not inhouse.
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.