It’s time for Alphabet to spin off YouTube?

Post by ericmay » Fri, Feb 24, 2023, 2:12 PM UTC

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?

Post by londons_explore » Fri, Feb 24, 2023, 2:13 PM UTC

hnbad wrote: post #26

kyrra wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google side: from maybe a business idea, you could have it work. But from a technical perspective, it would be near impossible without years of engineering effort. Google has a ton of core internal infra that is shared between all the business units at Google. The only reason this is feasible is that the cost of running it is shared between the units. (Googler opinions are my own).

The fun thing about antitrust is that this is entirely Google's problem.

Post by bpodgursky » Fri, Feb 24, 2023, 2:16 PM UTC

Aromasin wrote: post #13

jl6 wrote: post #7

I always assumed YouTube’s technical foundations were significantly subsidized by the mothership, but I have no data to base that on other than looking at the $29bn/year revenue figure and wondering whether that amount of money would be enough to provision the amount of compute, storage and bandwidth that YouTube needs, plus all other expenses (including revenue sharing with uploaders). Yes, $29bn is a lot of money,…

From what I'm aware, a lot of these larger companies basically treat other parts of the business the same they would customers; very important customers, but customers all the same. If YouTube wants more cloud budget, it comes out of their budget and goes into revenues of the Cloud business unit. Not quite that simplistic of course, but in essence it's meant to drive competitiveness. No special privilege's just becau…

Post by Scarblac » Fri, Feb 24, 2023, 2:18 PM UTC

capitalsigma wrote: post #10

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…

It's unclear to me how making these divisions dramatically increase their infrastructure costs (by either pulling them in-house or paying a premium to the original parent company) will "help them compete"

Post by runako » Fri, Feb 24, 2023, 2:20 PM UTC

vidarh wrote: post #37

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 They don't need to. Prime could still offer Prime Video / Music as a membership perk. But if the media services are independent, maybe it'd turn out offering one or more of the others, or letting customer pick and choose, would end up making more financial sense (FireTV can already be used to subscribe to competing services in addition ) I'm not saying it's necessarily a good id…