Hacker News Reader

Comment by MichaelMoser123 | Hacker News Reader

I suspect they regard themself as 'too big to fail', in the sense that they might think that the practical implications of such a breakup would deter anyone from even considering this scenario.

View on HN

Interesting, I have never heard this argument before. I don’t think there is a case to be made that the individual entities that make up Google or Facebook couldn’t operate independently. Google Search, G Suite, Google Cloud Platform, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc. are all viable businesses in their own right. Many of them would still even qualify as “tech giants” eg WhatsApp is absolutely enormous with 2B monthly active users. In other words, a breakup wouldn’t result in failure and therefore wouldn’t satisfy the too big to fail criteria.

At least for Google, it would be interesting how much technical effort that would require. I don't work at Google, but lets say some large subset of their systems runs on Borg. The cost of separating out GCP and Gmail for example could be quite large. Not that that's necessarily a legal defense, but the technical ramifications of a breakup are interesting.

Dont you run the risk of creating a super monopoly if Gmail, Maps, Youtube etc that are split dont survive. The only choice is Apple and maybe thats why they are so keen on this, because the govt hands them ultimate control

Antitrust does not discriminate against a single company. If Apple is in violation of antitrust regulations either today or at some point in the future, regardless of how they got there, they would be subject to the same legal action. So no, theoretically speaking and practically speaking, this is not a risk.

That's not how it works in practice though. There's no US legal action against Apple, they can reap Billions and billions of dollars with their own monopoly before any action reaches them after Google and Facebook are crippled.

This is the big issue with targeted anti trust vs. industry wide regulation.

The government isn't suing apple for antitrust because someone else decided to do it for them: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/12/10/cydia-a...

The timing of this case, the Google case, and the FTC facebook investigation is interesting.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com