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Comment by SoftTalker | Hacker News Reader

I'd split it into at least:

    Advertising
    Google Search
    Google Drive/Docs/Gmail/Gemini/Maps i.e. apps and office productivity
    Google Cloud
    VC activities
    Waymo and Robotics
    Health Care/Drugs

And I'd do the same with Meta, Apple, etc.

There's just no good reason to have mega-conglomerates that own such huge shares of the market. It leads to regulatory capture and locks out potential new competitors.

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> And I'd do the same with Meta, Apple, etc.

When I worked at Apple in SWE I worked on macOS and iOS (and tvOS and ipadOS). None of the things I worked on were sold as individual SKUs. The money came from selling hardware. Software was a thing that helped sell the hardware since the OS turned it from a hunk of electronics into a product.

How could you possibly propose Apple be split up? The same base OS is used in all their products so you can't split out macOS and iOS. The hardware all comes out of the same hardware engineering group.

All splitting up Apple does is reduce competition because there would be the iPhone company that takes all the engineering resources. The remaining rump companies would need to back fill engineering resources at great expense. If the rump companies "partner" with the iPhone company they're just less efficient versions of the old similar company. Either that or they just get bought by another company and there's less competition or ownership by a geopolitical rival.

The break-ups of Standard Oil and AT&T were workable because they could easily be split among divisional or geographic lines. Splitting up Google or Apple is either completely ineffective as it's just creating "partners" or the rump companies die out because they can't leverage higher margin parts of the larger company.

The way to hit Apple with antitrust is to break off the App Stores themselves, since that's the point of monopolization.

Make Apple's apps all operate by exactly the same rules as everyone else's—including rules governing private APIs.

Make the formerly-Apple App Store compete with other App Stores in a similar way to what they've introduced in the EU, but on a more even footing.

Personally, I'm still not entirely sold on this being a good idea—but IMO it's the one way of breaking up Apple that actually makes any sense.

Same, the services and hardware businesses are the only valid breakup case and it’s true that Apple favors its own services.

I’m also in agreement that it’s not clear such a break up would be beneficial.

Services like Apple Music where they're currently able to leverage their ownership of the app store to give themselves a competitive advantage can be spilt off quite easily (in conceptual terms) and stand by themselves. If they can't stand by themselves then they're being bolstered by their market position thus the reason

> And I'd do the same with Meta, Apple, etc.

I agree re Meta, but I am not sure Apple should be in the same category. I think Google and Meta use a small subset of golden goose businesses to subsidize perpetual money losers that prevent competition and actual self sufficient business models from emerging, all for the sake of preventing the emergence of another conglomerate that might come for the original golden goose. Apple doesn’t seem to fit this model - all of its businesses more than 3-5 years old seem to be wildly profitable. It isn’t like the iPhone is subsidizing the Watch, or Services. They are all successful, self sufficient businesses.

I think yes and no for Apple. It's certainly making a ton of money off of each of its devices (Watch, iPad, Mac, etc.), but none of those devices (with the exception of the Mac, probably) would sell as well without the iPhone's ecosystem.

In some hypothetical universe where the Watch and iPad were from distinct companies, they might have to force interoperability with other products like the Pixel or Galaxy Watch to make the iPhone a compelling product.

I think the only case for Apple exerting monopoly power is in the App Store and the iOS walled garden model. If the EU DMA was brought to the US, I don’t see a valid antitrust case against Apple for any other business they do.

You could argue separating the services components (App Store, TV+, Apple Music) from the devices business, but I don’t think there’s any validity in segmenting iPhone from anything else or any of their hardware business as a whole.

With iOS I think it is just enough to prohibit Apple from taking 30% cut from App Store installations. Similar how Microsoft cannot ask for 30% from any app installed in Windows (unless it is done from the store). In case of Apple, AppStore is basically Windows comparison - the only way to access "internet" so to say.

I think you have that the wrong way around, artificially limiting their %cut would be a kludge (who even decides what's fair?) and it wouldn't resolve other issues related to their death grip over app distribution such as arbitrary rules and censorship.

In this case there's a perfectly usable market solution to the problem.

Apple should be allowed to ask for any %cut they want, but others should be allowed to compete on equal footing and without Apple positioning themselves in the middle of every transaction, which is how they're trying to work around the EU DMA using notarization requirements and their "core technology" fee.

Meta only wishes they were impactful enough to be broken up. Their products aren’t really that important and it’s really easy to avoid them. If all of Meta’s products disappeared they would be replaced in a day.

It’s a little harder to avoid Google or Amazon or Apple in one’s everyday life. If one of these companies disappeared, it would take some time to fill that hole in the market.

Split off Chrome too, they have already proven it's going to be ugly having them control the most popular browser.

How could the advertising service be uncoupled from search? How would search make money?

Search would sell ad space to whatever company offers the best rate. If it's currently profitable for Google, it still would be, just other ad companies would have the option to offer a better rate.

It was over 10 years ago, but Google did almost exactly this with small experiment Google did (probably related to some suit) where Dealtime (BizRate?) product ads were shown in Google Search results in place of [what was then called] Product Listing Ads.

Charge money to use it.

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