Hacker News Reader

I suspect a large majority of the issues you brought up with splitting can be addressed by legislation.

Off the top of my head, something along the lines of having a mandatory period of time where the company being acquired must be kept separate enough that the merger can be dissolved in a timely manner should it be deemed necessary. How long that window should be would be up for debate but personally I'd argue the window should scale somehow based on things like the valuations of each company involved, headcounts, and maybe even competitive landscape.

An example would be requiring both companies to perform a pre-merger assessment to determine positions/roles, technology use and regulatory requirements that must be maintained for a clean separation and creating a plan that gets filed with the relevant agencies to be used if/when the merger needs dissolving. If the time comes that they need to dissolve the merger but they don't maintain that separation, they still have to do it and you slap a fine on them equal to some percentage of that mergers cost to be paid by the parent company.

Hell, that idea alone would accomplish both making it harder to merge and easier to dissolve the merger.

What can’t be solved with legislation?

Lots of shit can't be solved by legislation, what's your point?

crime

A malevolent electorate.

I think a better framing we should ask ourselves is why is the onus on the government to make sure a breakup is clean? Nothing in the constitution guarantees the rights of corporation.

I disagree with your premise that I shouldn’t express concern/opinions or point out problems with things that affect me simply because I’m not a trained expert in that thing.

"I think that the law should make this happen" without any thought for whether what you're proposing is possible or consistent with the laws of the universe is lazy.

This is similar to people who think we should just legislate secure encryption that has law enforcement backdoors. It's not possible, and people demanding it without an understanding of the area they're trying to regulate is lazy and insulting.

I think you should reread my post. My post is making a very specific point that your reaction tells me you get, but aren't applying.

Read it more like a poem and less like a proposed bill.

It's not really useful to write poems when proposing norms.

I have less sympathy for Facebook/Meta. Zuckerberg is on record as saying IG can hurt us. The Whatsapp co-founder Acton saying "it's time. delete Facebook". The fact Zuckerberg's engineers were apparently specifically asked to merge the backends to make them harder to break up. I have very little sympathy for that specifically. I'm not thrilled with a lot of the things Google has done with (say) Youtube - people LOST THEIR ACCOUNTS because of forcing the link to Google+ - but I don't think it's in the same league

Chrome is one of those nebulous areas. If they're dictating web standards they deserve at least an antitrust glance

> There's no such thing.

Spinning off companies happens all the time.

But what are you trying to say about the greater argument? The parent had two parts to it - make merging as difficult as unmerging, or make unmerging as easy as merging. While you're right that the wiggle room for making unmerging a lot easier is very constrained, this doesn't say anything about the feasibility of the other part of the 'or' and the actual argument they're putting forward. Unless you're trying to extrapolate this to saying that both these changes are impossible, it just comes off as being pedantic.

> Technologically it's somewhere between messy and impossible. Now you no longer have Google's build stack or monorepo. You have to rewrite everything. You can't just move some VMs to a cloud provider of choice

You could give a copy to both successors. Probably would want to excise some of the repo on both sides, but build tools for sure would be fine to have a second copy. There's no need to rewrite everything, especially if Parent and Child are barred by court decree from entering overlapping businesses.

For things that really need a single corporate owner, you could potentially spin that off as well and have both successors contract from that one or depending on the terms of separation have a joint partnership.

Hosting would be messy, yes. But somehow the tech world outside google manages to run systems without Google tools. It would be an adjustment, potentially a large adjustment and take a lot of hours.

> You need to hire all the roles that weren't part of that organization before (HR, legal, compliance, etc.)

> You need to register this new entity in all the countries it operates and/or has employees in

This costs money, people, and time, but it's straight forward. HR and legal would likely need some additional people, but likely you assign the people who work with the spinoff business to the spin off corporation and then back fill as needed.

Companies that spin off separate businesses do this stuff all the time, staff up the new business to fill the gaps, license tech from the parent to the new spinoff etc

I think most of these problems could be solved through contracts.

A contract for purchasing Parent Co.'s HR, legal, and compliance expertise for child co.

And a contract for sharing technology infrastructure.

The terms and pricing of the contract would likely be strictly regulated to prevent preferential treatment and encourage a clean separation over time.

I'm not a lawyer though, so who knows.

I worked at HP in 2015 during it's split into Inc and HPE.

I then worked at FireEye during it's split.

Fun times.

This is far from impossible, and happens all the time when, for example, a company spins off a subsidiary, or any number of other situations.

It's hard isn't really a blocker, it's just saying 'this isn't convenient for us', which is why it would have to be forced by legislation.

In none of those two cases is what's being proposed "as easy as a merger" - especially since those companies get to take as much time as they want without any court or law-enforced timeline.

And yet, Bell was split.