Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

It’s time for Alphabet to spin off YouTube?

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 348 posts

Re: It’s time for Alphabet to spin off YouTube?

#81

Post by adrr »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #2

It's time for antitrust to hit Meta, Alphabet, and Amazon. At the very least. Amazon: AWS is one of the most valuable businesses ever created. You don't need the retail arm any more, now that it is enshitting itself. Also spin off the media company, comprising Audible and prime video, to make a Disney competitor. Amazon would absolutely be more valuable broken up. Meta: Meta has always run 3 separate products either…

Hitting companies with antitrust when consumers have is a terrible idea. Antitrust laws were made to prevent monopolies giving consumers choice and preventing them from getting screwed.

Amazon is e-commerce, i have multiple choices to shop on web. Amazon has even benefited the consumer by forcing retailers speed up shipping. For cloud hosting, there are alternatives to AWS. There’s healthy competition in both fields.

Meta the consumer is the advertiser. They are the ones spending the money. For advertising, there are different channel and mediums. You could buy billboard ads, tv/radio ads, direct mail etc. Competition is very healthy.

Google the same thing. The consumer are advertisers. Thats the market.

Lets compare major anti-trust actions. Standard oil was the pretty much the sole source of oil in the US. Consumers had no choice. ATT another major antitrust case where there was just one telecom company in the US. Kodak where they were controlled all the film market.

Re: It’s time for Alphabet to spin off YouTube?

#82

Post by crazygringo »

I can't agree.

Ultimately, the article argues for spinoff because of 1) focus, 2) more subscription experimentation, and 3) regulators.

But there's zero evidence YouTube is a distraction, it's already done lots of experimenation with subscriptions, and YouTube seems like the last of regulators' concerns with Alphabet.

I do think it's true there isn't a whole lot of strategic synergy between YouTube and Google or the rest of Alphabet. It's not like YouTube and Maps reinforce each other the way Docs and Slides do.

But the biggest argument for keeping them together is that there are large economies of scale, mainly regarding datacenters and edge nodes and all of the like, and that for this reason alone YouTube is an essentially perfect part of Alphabet's portfolio.

Re: It’s time for Alphabet to spin off YouTube?

#83

Post by judge2020 »

CydeWeys wrote: post #43
madeofpalk wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The services may not work a la carte If the service cannot compete on it's own merits, and is being propped up by an unrelated business, how competetive is it actually?

Also the most obvious split would be AWS and then everything else. What does AWS have to do with Prime?

AWS is only apart of Amazon for shareholder purposes. Even internally, word is that AWS bills all of Amazon's internal businesses similarly to how they bill external customers, so it's not like Amazon is getting super discounted/free hosting out of keeping them under the same unit.

Re: It’s time for Alphabet to spin off YouTube?

#84

Post by actuator »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #2

It's time for antitrust to hit Meta, Alphabet, and Amazon. At the very least. Amazon: AWS is one of the most valuable businesses ever created. You don't need the retail arm any more, now that it is enshitting itself. Also spin off the media company, comprising Audible and prime video, to make a Disney competitor. Amazon would absolutely be more valuable broken up. Meta: Meta has always run 3 separate products either…

IMO Apple should be the biggest target for antitrust right now looking at what they do on their platforms.

Re: It’s time for Alphabet to spin off YouTube?

#85

Post by edgyquant »

pier25 wrote: post #54
loloquwowndueo wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cue uBlock origin - I don’t recall the last time I watched an injected ad on YouTube. Of course most content these days is peddling some product, or has a quick word from sponsors - but at least I don’t have to put up with unrelated ads in the middle of a stream.

And so the creators don't get paid when you watch their content. I pay for YouTube Premium. Creators get paid and I don't watch ads. We have a family plan so this applies to the whole family. We spend way more time watching YouTube than Netflix but pay for both.

Nearly all of them shill some product in there video. They get paid.

Re: It’s time for Alphabet to spin off YouTube?

#86

Post by SilverBirch »

sofixa wrote: post #58
pclmulqdq wrote: post #2

It's time for antitrust to hit Meta, Alphabet, and Amazon. At the very least. Amazon: AWS is one of the most valuable businesses ever created. You don't need the retail arm any more, now that it is enshitting itself. Also spin off the media company, comprising Audible and prime video, to make a Disney competitor. Amazon would absolutely be more valuable broken up. Meta: Meta has always run 3 separate products either…

> Amazon would absolutely be more valuable broken up That is total nonsense, completely irrelevant, and true. Conglomerates being worth less than the sum of all parts is one of the stupidest parts of Wall Street. There is no actual rationale for this besides maybe it being easier to evaluate a company doing only a single thing? Specifically with regards to the examples given - Amazon, Meta, Google - it's the cross-su…

It's pretty wild that your example of a good conglomerate is GE considering GE's a perfect of example of why conglomerates don't work. Gee I sure wish I could invest in that great GE Aerospace division, too bad if I do the jokers over at GE Capital are going to snort half of it and place the rest on black. GE was the notorious exception to conglomerates being terrible right up until it also turned into a massive shit show.

Re: It’s time for Alphabet to spin off YouTube?

#87

Post by lancesells »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #2

It's time for antitrust to hit Meta, Alphabet, and Amazon. At the very least. Amazon: AWS is one of the most valuable businesses ever created. You don't need the retail arm any more, now that it is enshitting itself. Also spin off the media company, comprising Audible and prime video, to make a Disney competitor. Amazon would absolutely be more valuable broken up. Meta: Meta has always run 3 separate products either…

> Spinning off the loser (Facebook) I'm not a Facebook user but it's not a loser.

- 2.9B Monthly Users in 2022 - 5.3B People with Internet Access - 55% of the world uses Facebook.

It seems both Instagram and Whatsapp have about ~2B monthly users. And sure, these numbers are juiced but none are losers.

Re: It’s time for Alphabet to spin off YouTube?

#88

Post by MichaelZuo »

fisf wrote: post #68
kevincox wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I worked at Google I definitely noticed that YouTube was great at (ab)using untracked or very cheap resources. They definitely get huge benifits of otherwise idle data centers in sleeping regions. As the regular service traffic died off YouTube would put those idle cores to work transcoding video. It is definitely the case that YouTube gets lots of really cheap compute by being part of Google. But that isn't a b…

You are basically making the case for the anti-trust case here. i.e. it is very hard for another company to compete without "free compute".

But it's not like there will be a free competitor in any case? The closest might be peertube but that's nowhere near as reliable.

Vimeo is paid. None of the other big companies seem willing to subsidize an online video service to the tune of tens of billions per annum.

Re: It’s time for Alphabet to spin off YouTube?

#89

Post by dahfizz »

madeofpalk wrote: post #38
runako wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These hypothetical splits show the perils of having outsiders (including regulators) make decisions like these. Just some quick notes: > You don't need the retail arm any more [...] spin off the media company, comprising Audible and prime video, to make a Disney competitor The whole point of the conglomerate model they use (following Costco) is that the membership fee grants consumers access to a bevy of services. Th…

> The services may not work a la carte If the service cannot compete on it's own merits, and is being propped up by an unrelated business, how competetive is it actually?

Who decides what is unrelated or not?

Amazon's whole retail business started by selling paper books. Extending that to kindle and audio books doesn't seem so outrageously "unrelated". Its more of an ecosystem which has legitimate benefits to the consumer. And once you have audio books, music and video doesn't seem like a huge stretch.... etc etc.

Apple is the obvious example of this. Do you think every single service apple offers should be broken into a separate company? Apple pay, apple music, icloud all seem to be "unrelated" but the consumer legitimately benefits from these things being bundled into a cohesive ecosystem.

Breaking these things into individual companies which has to be profitable based on just their one product would lead to higher prices and worse user experience, IMO.

For non-consumer facing products, the case is clearer. AWS / GCP could be split out nicely. The ad networks of meta and google could be independent without hurting the consumer at all.

Re: It’s time for Alphabet to spin off YouTube?

#90

Post by ydnaclementine »

It's time for Android to spin off google too. Their new "Did you know google made a PHONE?" commercial feels like terrible marketing. They should market it something like: "Android, powered by Google", and take advantage of the view that google is at least seen as a modern bell labs (by normals at least), so people can get the feeling that smart people are working on android. Otherwise I don't think anyone really knows android and google are the same (present company excluded).
Post reply on HN