It’s supposed to increase competition, but I’m skeptical. I think a lot of the winners will be the other mega-companies, but there will be a lot of loss across the industry. I don’t think the goal should be to punish Google for the sake of punishment, and I see that as happening.
I agree it might increase competition in all the future businesses that Google doesn’t enter, but not in the businesses many complain about Google today.
1. Ending the default-search payments will take away 20% of apples profits, and most of Mozilla’s revenue. Everyone but Apple already uses the chrome rendering engine. This is purely a value-destroyer.
2. Chrome certainly wouldn’t survive a breakup in its current form. There is no way a child company can afford to pay this many engineers, especially if the DOJ adds restrictions like they can’t make money from Google-search defaults. This might kill open-source chromium in the process.
3. Fitbit and nest are some examples of product lines that probably won’t be sustainable on their own. But certainly there is more (Fi?). Any company that ends up with them would probably shutter it for the savings. This would cede both their markets to Chinese crap and other American monopolies. Plus all the random projects people mention like Google Fonts. I’m guessing there are a ton of things in this bucket.
4. We certainly are not about to see a variety in phone operating systems. If Google is chopped up, the new android (parent) company certainly will be far poorer and have far less resources than Apple. This will cause the entire android ecosystem to languishing as new features slow and shift power back to Samsung and existing companies that can afford to push features without Google.
5. Google Cloud Platform would likely be a rare winner here. Theyre profitable (barely) and suddenly getting a whole new massive customer on the books (remaining Google parts) would give them a massive boost.
6. Whatever business owns Gmail in the end will keep those customers. Customers probably won’t change email providers.
7. This would probably accelerate the “new feature not available in Europe” trend, as existing Google had a lot of agreements with EU to maintain old features for “anticompetitive” reasons. The leaner and more competitive businesses certainly would ditch that market to better compete elsewhere.
Personally, I think a better approach is to treat Google more like infrastructure and require them to share their efforts. Open up the search index to others (paid, but for any use). Force their accounting to “buy” it internally with the same public margin. This would allow competitors in AI training, in search engine algos, UX, etc.
Similarly, you can do a similar thing for Maps, YouTube, Play Store, etc. They show off which services they maintain that have billions of users. Target those, not all the markets they still compete in.