Hacker News Reader

Comment by BlueTemplar | Hacker News Reader

How would one even break up Google ? You can only shut it down (which would allow competitors to emerge again).

Spin off the major parts of their business into genuinely separate companies - search, cloud compute, advertising, SaaS, Android and Chrome. With Google as a monolith, it's far too easy for them to bundle products and cross-subsidise unprofitable parts of their business to achieve dominance. Those independent companies can make deals that are mutually beneficial, but they'll have to answer to their shareholders and the FTC.

Of all the tech companies people advocate breaking up Google is by far the most reasonable.

Yeah I'm not even sure how you would break up facebook, other than facebook/instagram . It would make you extremely unpopular if they forced FB to break up it's userbase into thirds or something as they'd all just flock to one third and it would just be the same thing again within a few months

I think a more effective solution than a breakup would be requiring Facebook to interoperate with other social networks. We could force them to implement APIs which would let users from other platforms chat with and send posts to Facebook users. Imagine a tweet or a snap showing up in your Facebook feed, and vice versa. ActivityPub[0] is already a protocol which tries to solve this, but Facebook would never freely implement it because it would breach their walled garden. We might be able to regulate them into doing it.

[0]: https://activitypub.rocks/

As other suggested, forcing interoperability would go a long way (it should be noted that e.g. facebook messenger WAS interoperable when Facebook wasn't as large, but they stopped it when they became the leader).

Additionally, separate to instagram / facebook / whatsapp ; possibly also facebook social / facebook marketplace / facebook events ; They should have a level of access that others have. Imagine Yahoo users could subscribe to Facebook events without ever setting foot in facebook.com ... I know it sounds like science fiction, but it's possible. like email....

You can break it up geographically. Advertising is still very local.

Or you could break up search / browser / advertising / mobile; search and browser would need to invent other ways to monetize themselves.

Search could still be funded by search advertising. It just wouldn't be combined with AdWords/DoubleClick/etc. Same idea for other products that have their own ads like GMail and YouTube.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com