It's such a ridiculous proposal that would completely destroy Google's business. If that's the goal fine, but let's not pretend that any of those remedies are anything beyond a death sentence.
If they're dominating or one of only two or three important options in multiple other areas and the index is the only reason... I mean, that's a strong argument both that they're monopolists and that they're terrible at allocating the enormous amount of capital they have. That's really the only thing keeping them around? All their other lines of business collectively aren't enough to keep them alive? Yikes, scathing indictment.
> It's such a ridiculous proposal that would completely destroy Google's business.
it won't. My bet is that bing and some other indexes are 95% Ok for average Joe. But relevance ranking is much tougher problem, and "google.com" is household brand with many other functions(maps, news, stocks, weather, knowledge graph, shopping, videos), and that's what is foundation of google monopoly.
I think this shared index thing will actually kill competition even more, since every players will use only index owned by google now.
I mean, they're still going to be the number 1 name in adtech and analytics. And they're still gonna have pretty decent personalized ads because of analytics.
Plus, that just one part of their business. There's also Android, which is a money printing machine with the Google Store (although that's under attack too).
Sorry, but corporations are not people despite what some people will tell you.
They would definitely NOT survive in any recognizable form with "only a few billion dollars", because the stock price is a function of profits. Take away most of the profits, and most of the company's value gets wiped out, most of the employees would leave or get laid off, and anything of value that remains would quickly become worthless. Users would all move to the government-sanctioned replacement monopoly, likely X. To say nothing about the thousands of ordinary people who have large Alphabet holdings in their retirement portfolios and would be wiped out.
Google is practically the definition of a "too big to fail" company. They need to be reigned in to allow more competition, but straight up destroying the company would be a move so colossally stupid I could just see the Trump regime doing it.
