Google's counteroffer to the government is unbundling Android apps

Not to me, it is not my wishlist. The tying of hosted services to exclusive client software is by far the bigger problem - the services are the things with significant unavoidable lock-in like Melcalfe's law for social services, or persistent identifiers for email or content hosting. There could be healthy markets for competing software clients made for each service, but for this anti-competitive tying between hosted services and the client software.

Splitting each service+client offering up into its own company won't do much to affect their gravity beyond diffusing it a little. A much better split would be to not worry about letting Google keep all the hosted services, but make it divest of all of the clients (eg Youtube web and mobile apps). And of course going forward insist that every client is equally welcome according to completely open APIs.

Android and Chrom(ium) operating systems are a distinct third category that probably shouldn't be bundled with either, given that they are both client software themselves, and orthogonal markets to other client software.

The Government's proposal https://coag.gov/app/uploads/2024/11/2024.11.20-Google-Plain...