Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suspect a large majority of the issues you brought up with splitting can be addressed by legislation. Off the top of my head, something along the lines of having a mandatory period of time where the company being acquired must be kept separate enough that the merger can be dissolved in a timely manner should it be deemed necessary. How long that window should be would be up for debate but personally I'd argue the w…
What can’t be solved with legislation?
Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business
201–210 of 383 posts
Re: Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, this, and we need to have this progressive tax be over the company's total assets, including subsidiaries.
Why assets and not existing antitrust metrics like market share? Assuming market share is reasonably defined
Re: Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business
#203https://patriot.university/knowledge-base/organizations/org-... "$22 million ballroom contribution — the largest single documented amount from any corporate donor — arising from a lawsuit settlement over YouTube’s content moderation decision to suspend Trump post-January 6. Settlement filed September 29, 2025, in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California (Trump v. YouTube, LLC et al.)."
Re: Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They have the ability to change name services in some database somewhere. But it's not actually an official name change. Is it Congress who officially holds that power, then? And are you saying that if Congressional Republicans passed a bill renaming whatever, and Trump signed it, you'd then acknowlege it? Given how vanishingly little they accomplish in Congress already, I'm not sure we'd be better off distracting…
Nobody officially holds that power. Names of geographic places are established by popular usage, not government fiat.
This is a pretty mushy area, philosophically. Is a name what you think something is called (I think our planet is called “Bloop”, but nobody cares) what a lot of people think something is called (“Indian” in reference to indigenous Americans is a famous example of that going poorly, as are many racist epithets), or what an official body says it should be called (“Palestine”, “New Zealand”, and “Taiwan” have entered the chat)?
I don’t think popular usage is any more “truly authoritative” for a name than other sources.
Re: Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
The money is nbd, but it's much more important to Google (same as it would be for any of the other tech giants) to keep a certain streak going - 42 years now and counting since the government forced a large or important company to do anything even resembling breaking up. A loss here would serve as precedent (either legally, or at minimum in people's emotions) that you CAN force a divestiture. If Google can be forced…
Microsoft got pretty close to getting broken up in 2000, but settled in time to avoid the split
Re: Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, because the difficulties in separating integrated pieces have nothing to do with a merger. What makes splitting a company out difficult isn't (directly) a financial or paperwork burden - it's that tightly integrated systems are very difficult to untangle. There is nothing analagous that could be introduced in the merger process. You could add a mandatory delay, but that's not making it "as hard", it's just makin…
The law could make mergers executed provisionally for up to X years, with a binding plan to "unmerge" that must be updated every Y months. The FTC already half-does this with post-merge divestiture requirements.
Re: Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business
#207Slightly tangential thought: My belief is: legislation needs to either make it just as hard to merge two companies as it is to unmerge them, or make it just as easy to unmerge two companies as it is to merge them. It's insane to me that for how often companies merge and cause competition issues, we effectively never see the opposite happen. I know there's a ceremonial approval for merging two companies (at least in t…
> or make it just as easy to unmerge two companies as it is to merge them. [Disclaimer: I work at Google, all words my own and not representative of anyone, etc.] There's no such thing. Let's stick to software since it's what HN knows best, but it's a universal truth. Merging two companies: you take the two sides and they keep running. You probably need some extra accounting work to make sure the mandatory reports fr…
You could give a copy to both successors. Probably would want to excise some of the repo on both sides, but build tools for sure would be fine to have a second copy. There's no need to rewrite everything, especially if Parent and Child are barred by court decree from entering overlapping businesses.
For things that really need a single corporate owner, you could potentially spin that off as well and have both successors contract from that one or depending on the terms of separation have a joint partnership.
Hosting would be messy, yes. But somehow the tech world outside google manages to run systems without Google tools. It would be an adjustment, potentially a large adjustment and take a lot of hours.
> You need to hire all the roles that weren't part of that organization before (HR, legal, compliance, etc.)
> You need to register this new entity in all the countries it operates and/or has employees in
This costs money, people, and time, but it's straight forward. HR and legal would likely need some additional people, but likely you assign the people who work with the spinoff business to the spin off corporation and then back fill as needed.
Re: Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business
#208Re: Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business
#209Re: Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business
#210The United States government is fractured and can't get its act together. No one has a credible plan to solve this. Electing your preferred president doesn't solve a broken Senate and other structural problems. The presidency is likely to keep bouncing between parties that care as much (if not more) about undoing the previous four years as they do sketching out a coherent plan for the future four. How is wielding thi…
Meta and Google gobble up an absolutely gobsmacking duopolist's share of western world's economy each year.
Meanwhile, two other American companies without monopolies are ahead of them in the frontier model race.
Why do you think that is?