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Comment by matwood

6 days ago

Splitting off Chrome doesn't make any sense as a stand alone business. Anyone who could buy Chrome would immediately cause other anti-trust issues. This solution for Google is probably bad for consumers.

What the DoJ should be pursuing is having Google divest YouTube. Now we're talking real change.

9 comments

matwood

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forgotoldacc  6 days ago

And if they sold off Youtube, we'd have 500 comments saying, "This is a bad idea. They can't make a profit. They should divest from Chrome."

Splitting Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, etc up all at once and into multiple separate pieces each would be great for consumers. But that's a huge undertaking, and the bigger the changes required, the less likely they are to happen. Taking it one step at a time, with the first step being Chrome and Google search (two products that strongly push users of one to use the other) being split up, is better than no progress at all.

At the very least, the biggest force in killing adblockers (Google gradually gutting them in Chrome) will have fewer means to kill them in browsers. That's a win for consumers.

  • matwood  6 days ago

    Not sell YT to another company, but split off likely in an IPO. The big difference is that YT is a stand alone business that could function on it's own.

    • sofixa  6 days ago

      > The big difference is that YT is a stand alone business that could function on it's own.

      We (public) don't know that. Google never splits YouTube's costs out, only revenue, and the only reason I can think of is that it's losing money. IMO it's highly likely that YouTube costs a lot to run (just imagine the costs of storing zettabytes of videos, 99.9% of which will get watched less than 10 times ever, in 4K, and be ready to quickly stream them anywhere in the world) and Google lose money on it, but compensate with user data they use for their wider ad business. People complain about YouTube ads today, and how expensive Premium is; maybe a future independent YouTube can cut costs, shed some old/unwatched content, and become profitable.

  • dataviz1000  5 days ago

    Splitting these companies would also be good for people like Bezos and Gates as splitting Standard Oil was good for Rockefeller. They don't lose their interest in the companies and the newly formed companies likely will benefit from the competition creating much more aggregated wealth. In the end, the breakup of Standard Oil made Rockefeller wealthier. He gained from owning shares in the spinoff companies, their rising market value because competition, diversified investments, and the growing demand for oil.

Certhas  6 days ago

Firefox is massively profitable. Why couldn't Chrome be?

Goggle would compete with other search engines for being the default search. So this would have knock on effects on search as well.

  • sofixa  6 days ago

    Firefox is profitable thanks to Google's money, and Google are probably so generous with them to ensure they have some competition. In the EU, OSes and browsers have to ask the user which browser and search engine they want to use, and an independent Chrome might be forced to follow the same logic. Then Google would have little incentive to splash as much money.