If Google doesn't survive being broken up, then this move would be essentially nuking a 2 TRILLION dollar company into the ground for zero gain. Again, that's 2 TRILLION DOLLARS worth of value getting thrown onto a garbage pile and burned up, just because "it seemed like a good idea at the time".
You can speculate that something better would emerge from the ashes. It's possible you're right. But you have to admit this would be a huge gamble.
This isn't like Bell where you can just split the company into geographically distinct regions and call it a day. Google's services are intricately linked together and tightly integrated, and you can argue that's a huge part of where their value lies.
I'm not entirely sure where I stand on this, but I think I'd be more in favor of laws to force interoperability and promote competition rather than a full fledged break up, at least in the short term. Or maybe a slow, carefully planned breakup where individual services get spun out one at a time over a few decades, with time to reverse course if that proves to be a bad idea.
You're missing the point. We're talking about the government potentially burning a 2 trillion dollar private company to the ground, and your response is to just shrug and say "oh well, the world will survive"? Yes, of course people will find alternatives. But you still just lit 2 trillion dollars of other people's private property on fire for no discernible benefit!
Your attribution of cause is wrong. We're talking about the government enforcing anti-trust provisions, and if the company is so broken that it cannot succeed without holding a monopoly, letting it fail.
Letting dysfunctional companies fail is supposedly a core tenet of capitalism.
I'm so tempted to just leave it at that, but in the interest of not contributing to HN's slow de-evolution into Reddit, I'll add that:
1. Google is arguably not a monopoly, all its products have at least some competition as you yourself already pointed out.
2. Whether Google is "dysfunctional" is a matter of opinion. It's not without problems certainly, but its also a highly successful company with millions (maybe billions) of satisfied customers.
3. A lot of the arguments for Google being a monopoly have less to do with market share and more to do with vertical integration. My point is that vertical integration has a lot of benefits. Trying to use anti-trust law to outlaw it would likely turn out to be very foolish.
You can speculate that something better would emerge from the ashes. It's possible you're right. But you have to admit this would be a huge gamble.
This isn't like Bell where you can just split the company into geographically distinct regions and call it a day. Google's services are intricately linked together and tightly integrated, and you can argue that's a huge part of where their value lies.
I'm not entirely sure where I stand on this, but I think I'd be more in favor of laws to force interoperability and promote competition rather than a full fledged break up, at least in the short term. Or maybe a slow, carefully planned breakup where individual services get spun out one at a time over a few decades, with time to reverse course if that proves to be a bad idea.