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US Considers a Rare Antitrust Move: Breaking Up Google(finance.yahoo.com)
3 commentsbyPenthouseREIT
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[-]x0x7-1(0|-1)

I'm against monopolies but I always find the process of breaking up a company a little funny. It's funny because it's almost always along lines that don't end up reducing the monopoly.

For example, if you break up google's products into separate companies their search engine will still have +90% of the traffic, eliminating zero monopolies.

Or when they broke up Bell. They broke it up geographically. Meaning that every phone customer still only had one option, still meaning they experienced a monopoly.

I think a better move would be instead of breaking up a company would be one of two things. Either require them for a short time to advertise their competitors. A ton of investment would then flow into the competitors hoping to take advantage of the free advertising.

Or to make it so the government cannot accept any contract bids from companies labeled monopolies. Companies would see the disadvantage in becoming a monopoly, which is already a challenge to become one, and instead apply efforts to other challenges that are definite upsides. "Do we want to spend X dollars more on advertising product Y and risk loosing contracts, or do we spend X dollars on promoting product B that isn't close to being market dominant and reduce someone else's market dominance by doing so?"

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[-]LarrySwinger1(+1|0)

The latter option seems better since no coercion is involved.

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[-]x0x70(0|0)

I agree. Plus if you did it the current standard way of breaking up products into separate companies, all of those companies would still be owned by Alphabet. So what's the point?

Or alternately you could exclude them from having IP. That's kind of what they did with Bell and resulted in us having Unix. Open sourcing the most powerful operating system at the time really opened up a lot of opportunities for new startups. What if we open sourced the top search engine?

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