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Comment by YetAnotherNick | Hacker News Reader

Google will rather split up the internet by pulling out of Europe than follow this. And isn't ads the only profitable business Google has? If they sell it, there Google search, Gmail etc couldn't exist.

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EMEA is Google's second largest market, and it's not even close for competition. There is no way Google would be willing to cut revenue by $90 billion annually. It would be corporate suicide. The single greatest loss event of investor capital in history.

They'll comply, just like Apple will comply with the DMA. They have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders. Unlike the U.S., E.U lawmakers can't be bought.

> Unlike the U.S., E.U lawmakers can't be bought.

I'm curious if you're so naive to believe that or if you were trolling and wrote that with a straight face. Because cronies like Ursula Von Der Leyen would like to disagree with you.

if EU lawmakers could be bought in the same way US ones can, there is absolutely no way that GDPR or the DMA would have been enacted. this isn't to say that they are completely unbuyable, but look at how much the companies affected had to lose. literally tens of billions in some cases. there's evidence online that they were pumping money into any channel possible to try and stop the DMA, but they failed

If US lawmakers could be bought the same way that EU ones can, there is absolutely no way that they would have increased the corporate tax rate from 19% to 25%.

that's a false equivalence and you know it

But how much is it from the ad business that the EU is breaking up in this hypothetical?

Why does that matter?

You are including an entire continent and countries like UK, UAE, Saudi for coming up with this revenue number for EU. Also my guess would be that profit margin will be much lower than US due to all the regulations like GDPR.

Google's overall ad revenue is 4x greater than EU total revenue. It will definitely loose EU business than it will loose ads business. But yeah there are always legal loophole in things like this and likely it could keep both.

> Unlike the U.S., E.U lawmakers can't be bought.

My sides.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qatar_corruption_scandal_at_th...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/23/world/europe/schroder-ger...

Bullshit. See Facebook in Australia or Hongkong. See every company that went into china anyway. For the EU, google leaving would be a feature.

Breaking out the ad business doesn't mean selling it, it means creating red tape through layers of indirection between the ad business and the rest of the company. In essence, this would be no different than the split between Alphabet and Google (or Waymo, even): https://www.kamilfranek.com/what-companies-alphabet-google-o...

"Pulling out" would be a massive blow to Google's revenue and shareholder value, even compared to the massive costs of restructuring the business to comply with the breakup. It would be economical suicide and career suicide for the CEO.

If Google's ad business was split from the rest, it would mean the ad business having to pay the search engine business and other Google businesses to advertise on them.

This is about ads on non-Google websites. That business could be spun off without making Search/Gmail/YouTube/etc non-viable.

> Google will rather split up the internet by pulling out of Europe than follow this.

Citation needed.

They already have a lot of their revenue tied up in their Irish entity. An exit might not be feasible.

Sure, they'd rather lose 50B+ than do this...

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