We had a glimpse of that antitrust future on the horizon with the previous admin. This spooked all the big tech weirdos so much that they put their weight behind the other guy and, well, they won. Antitrust is dead for another generation. Yay.

I think there's a remarkably clear precedent at least for browsers, which is having Android users pick from a list of browsers instead of having Chrome as the pre installed default. That's already been done previously with Microsoft and I believe with search on Apple, andI think it would reverse the Mozilla market share trend overnight.

I don't think Chrome being spun off as a company leaves them with a realistic path to revenue unless, ironically, they do something like what Mozilla does, and strike a search licensing agreement albeit a much bigger one proportionate to their share of users.

I also don't think it should just be Alphabet/Google because at full strength they are an important check against the power of Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and arguably Facebook. Weakening Alphabet while leaving them unchecked could have the net effect of increasing monopoly power of the other giants. I think the order of operations would go something like (1) Amazon (online retail), (2) Google (search and web), (3) Facebook (social media). Microsoft and Apple are giants but I don't think they are strategically cornering any particular tech markets right now (though I could be wrong).

And I think international competition is complicating the picture of how close to monopolies they really are, though Google at least is clearly abusing its position in the browser and web standards space.

I look forward to a new era of trust busting.

It's an old American Tradition in need of revival

We've done this in the past. AT&T was broken up into the regional baby bells. Eventually, the baby bells started to get absorbed back into the monolith AT&T again. Nobody stopped it. I assume that the fact that few people use landlines and there are more than one provider of communication services where the AT&T voltron is no longer a monopoly.

The point? Not really sure, but as much as I'm all for breaking up Alphabet, I'm not convinced it will work. I'm willing to give it a go though

> Alphabet needs to be broken up. Chrome, Search, Android need to be separate companies.

As well as youtube, and the combination of google drive/docs.

This type of populist message seems like such an easy path to popularity for an aspiring politician. You don't have to be a leftist like Bernie Sanders to be a trust buster. Just acknowledge that almost every large corporation has seemingly made it their mission to make life worse for the citizenry in the name of profit and vow to fight it.

Would Chrome, Android, and YouTube be viable companies without the money-printing engine that is Google’s ad business? I’m for less consolidation in the tech industry, but I wonder whether a good balance could be struck between great services like these versus how they actually make money.

This won't ever happen, the US and the US government can't afford to weaken its corporations and risk impact their data collection, social control, influence and profitability world-wide.

I'm quite torn on this.

The United States needs a strong economy to counter China and keep Europe safe.

In the short term, this might be nice, but in the medium term these moves might cause significant disruption to what makes the United States the highest gdp in the world.

I'm unsure what the polymarket on this post is will be flagged. It's kind of surprising for HN to be so educated but not know (academic) international relations Realism.