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Comment by erellsworth | Hacker News Reader

> We urge the court to consider remedies that achieve its goals without harming independent browsers, browser engines and ultimately without harming the web.

Such as? I have no idea what the solution to this issue is and, it seems, neither does Mozilla.

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If you have a monopoly, the only way to handle it is to split the company down the middle. Give both full rights to all the contained IP except the name of the original company. Google.com would redirect to the two resulting companies randomly. Maybe after this split stabilizes you need to split the resulting companies again.

Markets need to emulate evolution. Consolidation is emulating invasive clonal individuals that eventually crash. We need to emulate offspring and the death of the parent.

…this might be the worst possible solution for all parties involved. How do I handle my own credentials when I have no idea which way a coin toss is going to go when I reach the site? How are certs handled? What would anyone gain from one Google becoming two, identical and indistinguishable Googles?

> How do I handle my own credentials when I have no idea which way a coin toss is going to go when I reach the site?

You'll notice which one you got to after the redirect obviously. Reset credentials isn't a huge deal either, it happens after hacking attacks all the time.

> How are certs handled?

I don't understand this question. There are two different companies afterwards, with their own certs and their own name. No problem at all.

> What would anyone gain from one Google becoming two, identical and indistinguishable Googles?

Indistinguishable? No. They must rename. And they will diverge over time as they try to compete. You know.. like markets are supposed to work.

That’s an interesting idea. I would think that trying to do a second split would have significant challenges because the monopoly has already been turned into a duopoly, so now you have to do the work against two rich companies. Looking at the two most famous breakups of monopolies, Standard Oil and AT&T, where each was broken into multiple entities, I would argue that the resulting “children” were still far too powerful. Maybe these monopolies need to be broken into 10+ separate businesses for it to be truly effective.

In the case of AT&T the problem was that 100% of the children were (regional) monopolies. This won't be the case for an internet based organization like google.

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