But how to break it up? It’s not like Bell or Standard Oil, with properties and assets in regional areas.
Google gets broken up by Alphabet, alphabetically.
So searches from A-B go to company A, C-E to Company B, F-K to Company C etc. etc. until you get to X-Z. That company just gets screwed…. 🙂
I’d heard a few years after the Bell breakup that Bell really wanted to be broken up. I don’t know if that’s true at all, but it doesn’t bode well for a Google breakup if it took ten years for the government to break up a company that was cooperating.
IBM faced the same situation. It was claimed they had better lawyers.
They did. But, in the end, it wasn’t the DOJ that took down IBM, it was Bill Gates.
IBM corporate never took the PC seriously until it was too late. Gates made the deal of the Century when he got a non exclusive deal for MS-DOS. IBM mistakenly thought they could lock out competitors via a proprietary BIOS that was required to boot MS-DOS that they would license to 3rd parties. Phoenix Microsystems reversed engineered the IBM BIOS (all legal) and undercut IBM. IBM tried to go back to Gates for a proprietary OS but by then Gates knew where the market was going. IBM with no recourse tried to out muscle Microsoft with OS/2. Then Windows-95 was introduced. The rest is history.
Google is a lot worse than Ma Bell ever was. Ma Bell didn’t snoop on the traffic it carried for either pecuniary or political reasons.
But how to break it up? It’s not like Bell or Standard Oil, with properties and assets in regional areas.
Google gets broken up by Alphabet, alphabetically.
So searches from A-B go to company A, C-E to Company B, F-K to Company C etc. etc. until you get to X-Z. That company just gets screwed…. 🙂
I’d heard a few years after the Bell breakup that Bell really wanted to be broken up. I don’t know if that’s true at all, but it doesn’t bode well for a Google breakup if it took ten years for the government to break up a company that was cooperating.
IBM faced the same situation. It was claimed they had better lawyers.
They did. But, in the end, it wasn’t the DOJ that took down IBM, it was Bill Gates.
IBM corporate never took the PC seriously until it was too late. Gates made the deal of the Century when he got a non exclusive deal for MS-DOS. IBM mistakenly thought they could lock out competitors via a proprietary BIOS that was required to boot MS-DOS that they would license to 3rd parties. Phoenix Microsystems reversed engineered the IBM BIOS (all legal) and undercut IBM. IBM tried to go back to Gates for a proprietary OS but by then Gates knew where the market was going. IBM with no recourse tried to out muscle Microsoft with OS/2. Then Windows-95 was introduced. The rest is history.
Google is a lot worse than Ma Bell ever was. Ma Bell didn’t snoop on the traffic it carried for either pecuniary or political reasons.