Leaving aside HN loving the idea of Big Tech being weakened by becoming Relatively Small Tech, I don’t see how this is in Alphabet’s or YouTube’s interest.
The article assumes that such a divorce would be simple and it would allow YouTube to focus on taking on TikTok. It sounds like the exact opposite to me. YouTube clearly shares a lot of infrastructure with the rest of Google, especially datacenters and ads. Instead of focusing on high leverage activity like improving product, they would spend their time figuring out how to split datacenters, ads products, internal tooling etc. Almost all of their software stack is maintained internally. They would need to fork it and staff all of these teams. All of this is time wasted, work duplication and cost increases.
Most of the rest is questionable claims. Like the claim that a post-divorce YouTube would be able to focus on subscription revenue. You mean like YouTube Premium, a subscription they’ve had for years? They’re not replacing ads with subscription, they need both, so they need to recreate whatever ads infra they were sharing.
The only argument that made any sense was that it would buy goodwill with regulators. This is because regulators also like the idea of Relatively Small Tech.
I feel like this article was started with that Wall St mentality of “I wish I could invest in YouTube without investing in the rest of it” and it somehow tries to justify the rest the divorce.
Really, if I had to think about what YouTube wants to do I’d say they have to beat TikTok at the recommendation game. To do that they need as much data as possible (even if that sounds distasteful to HN), meaning the entire profile that Google has built on each person. In what world does YouTube build better recommendations after voluntarily giving up access to this data?
I’m keen to read an argument that argues this is in the best interests of Alphabet and YouTube. Ideally something that goes into specifics rather than vague notions of “focus”.