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Comment by sensanaty | Hacker News Reader

I'm fully onboard, but only if it's not only Google being broken up here. M$, Apple, Meta (!!!!!!!!) and all the other big tech companies all need to be nuked from orbit.

I'm worried that what's actually going to happen is Google getting broken up and M$ just swooping in to feast on the carcass, leaving us in an even shittier position. Out of all the evils coming from the FAANG world, M$ and Meta are by far the worst IMO, so not breaking them up alongside google is just idiocy

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You can just type MS. I understand that it was cool to use M$ in the 90s, but like, all the tech giants are bad at this point and M$ looks silly.

I’m happy for people to keep writing M$. It’s a great way to quickly identify comments to scroll past.

The irony is begging....

I think it’s an excellent comment, and I’m very happy with it.

Law doesn't work that way. They have to break up the first company THEN using that precedent, they can start on other monopolies.

You're forgetting Apple. What happens if breaking Google up ends up destroying Android?

How would that even work? (I'm not being difficult here, I just don't understand).

Assume Google is split up, Android is not maintained because doing so is not profitable. Each handset manufacture still needs an OS, and will just make custom forks or whole OS. They're not going to wind down operations because Android stops being a thing

I don't think it meaningfully increases IOS market share?

If Android splinters into a bunch of separate incompatible forks, then no one's going to bother writing apps for these phones (because they'd have to separately maintain a dozen different versions of them), and will just concentrate on iOS. No one will want a phone that doesn't have the most popular apps, unless they're just really cheap. The only reason Android survives is because you can get an Android version of just about any app, and if that goes away, most of the value of having an Android phone disappears. I know a lot of HN old-timers just don't understand this at all because they don't use apps and only use a phone for calling the phone numbers of people they already know, but apps are the real reason smartphones became popular in the first place. So this will turn Apple into a true monopoly vendor, owning virtually all the smartphone market.

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