⚠️Dangerous situation: spin-offs at Alphabet / Google⚠️
Personally, I have the impression that many of you are taking this a little too lightly.
The arguments I've heard here so far range from "the USA won't harm itself" to "a spin-off can also have advantages". Both are wrong in my opinion.
First of all, the USA will not harm itself by breaking the Alphabet search engine monopoly, as the most important competitors are also other US companies.
However, I find the idea that shareholder value could be created through the spin-offs even more dangerous. This can certainly be the case for a company like Amazon, whose valuation is 90% based on AWS, but which also has many other exciting business areas that are often forgotten.
With Google, however, the situation is very different. The company consists of a number of business models, none of which make any sense in and of themselves and are only valuable in combination.
This applies in particular to the Chrome and Android divisions proposed for spin-off. These are completely free and their sole purpose is to collect data and place advertisements. However, if these are separated from the group, they are basically almost worthless. Google's products only work so well because they continue to expand the advertising and data network, but are not profitable as independent business entities. This is also the decisive difference to Amazon. They earn money in the retail sector with their online store and in the AWS sector with cloud computing. Both work perfectly well, completely independently of each other. At Meta and Alphabet, however, virtually all products in the group have exactly the same business model. You can really think of it like an amputation. If your arm is cut off, you continue to live and your arm no longer does. The arm doesn't simply become a second person who is also cool.
Sure, you can speculate that Trump will intervene, but otherwise it looks really grim. And although such a dismantling would theoretically speak against Trump's libertarian economic model, it is at least courageous to assume that he has a great interest in helping a diverse, sustainable and progressive company like Google (you could also call it "woke"). It's a bit like the German government under Scholz, which also thought it was positioning itself unilaterally in favor of Kamala and is now no longer politically viable.
