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I don’t want to comment on if a breakup is a “good” thing for society, because I vaguely agree, but I’m not sure I agree with you on many points here.

> I think the valuation of a broken-up Google and Apple would exceed the monolithic conglomerates that they have become. So many of their business units and products don't even monetize because they're going for an intangible "platform value".

I think a lot of these products aren’t monetized because they’re actually bad businesses or failed ventures and companies have the free cash to support them. A lot more of Google’s (for example) random side projects seem to be getting subscriptions or collapses into existing ones. I also think that vertical integration creates unique value sometimes. I think spinning off these random side businesses could destroy the side businesses, but that this may still raise stock prices as the companies get better margins. I think a lot of these products are bad businesses because big tech salaries are high and that makes labor costs hard to account for.

I think the breakups obviously rectify consolidated power. 100%. But I don’t see more mobile phone operating systems coming from a breakup of Apple, for example. Gmail isn’t going to be replaced by a new email provider. Nor would we see a new YouTube, or other dominant businesses. Disrupting these massive aggregators won’t come from direct competition, but rather new product and service experiences. TikTok has shown that tech is already not impenetrable.

Finally, I totally agree that this would be a feeding frenzy for VCs, but VCs learned in the last decade how to rip off ICs even more through delaying IPOs and more aggressive dilution. So I wouldn’t be holding my breath as an IC that breaking up Google (or others) will make jobs better.

> I think the breakups obviously rectify consolidated power. 100%. But I don’t see more mobile phone operating systems coming from a breakup of Apple, for example. Gmail isn’t going to be replaced by a new email provider. Nor would we see a new YouTube, or other dominant businesses. Disrupting these massive aggregators won’t come from direct competition, but rather new product and service experiences.

Perhaps you're right. Perhaps breaking these products up would not create more competition.

But it would mean that these products must determine how to make money on their own merits. That might mean a better product overall. Or it might mean that the product really doesn't deserve to exist as a consumer product.

> Or it might mean that the product really doesn't deserve to exist as a consumer product.

Why?

If a product or experience is used by people, and enjoyed, and could not be monetized directly, why should it not exist?

I think of Alexa/Google Assistant/Siri as representative examples. Some set of execs decided to fund these voice assistants - now used by millions - and they obviously don’t make money. Would customers be better off if they were jettisoned to drown on their own?

I just don’t see why it’s wrong that businesses have these silly side projects. We seem to have competition even amongst the subsidized vanity projects.

Again, I think a breakup wouldn’t be bad overall, but I don’t think this is the thing missing in the industry.

> ....Alexa/Google Assistant/Siri... and they obviously don’t make money.

If you take a very narrow view of "make money"

They are immensely valuable to the owners and an important part of the systematic maintenance of people as "consumers" rather than "citizens".

We would be better off, over all, without the whole thing.

> If you take a very narrow view of "make money"

> They are immensely valuable to the owners

This is, of course, the entire point of this entire thread.

Its not a particularly "narrow" view, FWIW, because most businesses have a P&L sheet that will list expenses and revenues, and entire business units have big "costs" and not so big "revenue". Which is what "don't make money" means.

Agree. It is the exact same question again and again with bundling [1] and unbundling. I guess I will have to submit it again.

[1] https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2020/12/21/google-bu...

Apple would never have invested in Mx chips that are only 14% of Apple’s revenue - Macs + iPads. If it weren’t for the R&D from iPhone Ax chips and the volume.

So exactly who want Chrome? How would they monetize it and you can already get Chromium for free. Could Android not come with a browser? Chromebooks?

Who would fund Chromium development?

Yeah! Google maps should be independent and infested with obtrusive pop-up ads unless you subscribe!

> I think a lot of these products aren’t monetized because they’re actually bad businesses or failed venture

Gmail, for example, would be a fabulous standalone business with a normal (subscription) business model like other premium email services. I would love to run that spinoff.

YouTube: fabulous standalone company. Would love to be working there when they IPO. I’m sure there are more.

The business units that can’t survive except for “platform charity” should shutdown, go open source, sell their assets, etc. and the developers should move on to found new startups.

These big mega-platforms have sucked most of the oxygen out of the tech industry and it’s in the best interest of everyone except their major shareholders to break them up.

The examples you’ve provided aren’t “platform-charities”. They’re already massive businesses with healthy revenue streams that are aggressively monetized.

Look at Google Assistant or Alexa and their speakers. Losing Billions a year.

Look at smaller products like Google Fi or Fiber. Google Podcasts. Google Translate. Google Voice. WhatsApp. Quest/Oculus. Amazon Go stores. Apple HomeKit.

It’s the long-tail of small-use products that would be hurt. No one doubts that an ad-supported product with multiple billions of users would be a great standalone business.

Thank You. It is somewhat a lot of these are pointing out the obvious. But have to be written out.

99% of Gmail users would not pay for the service, and would just move to other provider. I don’t know how you can think they can operate as a subscription service and act like nothing changes.

Not OP, but Gmail is and could continue to be ad supported. Gmail also is a subscription service offered to enterprises, and it is a very lucrative service for Google.

Worse. A small but significant percentage would actually pay ransom for it, just because moving is a pain. No one new would join, though.

How much would YouTube Inc make without having its infrastructure subsidized by Google corporate and taking advantage of Google’s ad network

And you speak of “platform charity”. But not thinking about VC charity?

>And they're also a grocery store, for god's sake.

They're also your primary care doctor! Amazon OneMedical!

https://health.amazon.com/onemedical

Scroll down the page a bit.

Counter point: Would breaking up Meta, Google, Apple, Microsoft decrease the progress in AI since those major companies are forking over hundreds of billions to build out mega AI infraustructure?

Maybe, but why should we care? So far those billions haven't actually given us anything useful, it's all just toys. I'm not against research, but when the research hasn't yet produced a useful outcome then I don't feel like there is a strong societal good in keeping it going.

I don't think that's a fair assessment. I'm not anywhere near as high on LLMs as many, but Google and Meta's moonshot side projects and insane investments into infrastructure have given us Waymo, TensorFlow, PyTorch, Kubernetes, React, MapReduce, http2, the entire Go programming language, V8, all of Facebook's investments into improving PHP and OCaml.

We can quibble over how valuable each of these things individually is, but it's not just toys. It's foundational tooling used all over the place that the larger community pretty just got for free. They've also been some of the biggest contributors to the Linux kernel.

To be fair, I don't know that we needed Google et al for this. We used to get this kind of thing from DARPA and university researchers, but Google and Facebook and friends made so much money from ads that they hired away all the best researchers so they no longer work at universities, at the same time government was hollowing out funding for basic research.

We could get this thing from real public sources if we made the public investments, but I don't know that the political will or taxpayer willingness exists to do that now. We need to get it from somewhere.

Do you really think the government funding this would lead to better outcomes? We see the censorship that China is doing with DeepSeek and we just saw the dictator in chief freezing all spending unilaterally even though that wasn’t in his power

Google Translate (and all the new competing products) alone should be reason enough to demonstrate outstanding societal good.

You can now travel anywhere in the world and communicate in the local language. Using offline models that translate between any two languages. That’s almost literally biblical magic levels of social good.

(Plus we got amazing image recognition tech, LLMs, voice and NLU stuff, AlphaFold for protein analysis, etc)

If Google Translate was to disappear, I wonder if say Duolingo could create translation software with all of the linguistic data they’ve accumulated.

what data have they accumulated?

I'm a happy DuoLingo user, but educational software with an owl-with-a-BBL mascot is not going to be a trove of translation capabilities.

I’m not sure, but I thought their business model involved applying machine learning on user answers, like their translations of excerpts of written text / handwriting samples.

I'm pretty sure they just gamified mediocre language learning techniques to make it palatable for more people to consume.

I don't think they have any significant data collected, nor do they do any handwritten anything.

I think what I was recalling is the crowdsourcing translations mechanic, which is far more low tech:

> But wait – how could a beginner-level student translate advanced sentences? The solution that Duolingo employs uses the power of crowdsourcing, which involves many students offering their attempts at translating individual sentences. As each student submits a sentence, they can rate others’ translations, and the most highly rated translations “rise to the top.”

Over time, entire documents are translated and students gain many skill points for their language practice. It’s easy to see how the data collected from users could be useful to improve the algorithms that underly computer translation[…]

https://lile.duke.edu/blog/2012/11/duolingo-learning-a-new-l...

Duolingo has come a long way from those origins. It’s a gamified language learning app now, but with support of some languages reflecting that earlier crowd-sourced era. This video is a super interesting dive into the history and current state:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SoTT-GGmiXA

FWIW, I like Duolingo and think it is a healthy and productive use of gamification, but that does come at the cost of pure efficiency and comprehensive treatment of grammar. It’s best when paired with other tools.

Most people’s problem with learning a language is not speed, it’s the quit rate.

Wouldn’t this point have had greater resonance a week or two ago before recent news about entrants in the AI space?

DeepSeek is only thing because they used OpenAI for refinement.

"Apple only exists because they used Motorola IP" type comment

It wasn’t just IP though. DeepSeek actually used OpenAIs API and resources. I’m not saying it was unethical.

Almost all innovation is derivative or incremental in some way.

The difference is that DeepSeek couldn’t actually be created as cheaply as it was without using OpenAIs resources - not just IP.

It did refinement by using OpenAI to create synthetic data.

Ok.

But it now exists, and OpenAI seems to have no way to control Deepseek, or any legitimate claim they can enforce to stop it.

Oops.

Going from the breakup of AT&T to the reconstitution of AT&T took about 40 years. Standard Oil probably did the same, though I haven't seen any fancy charts showing it on a timeline like with AT&T. There's probably some useful lessons to pick up from that time if they go the breakup route.