When they contemplate breaking up a tech company, this is how you should do it. Find the component of the company that really is open tech. Something that was open before they came along, that they foreclosed on, and used their monopoly to put everyone else out of business.#
That's where you draw the line of separation. The core should be spun off into a new company that's well funded, with a charter to commercialize the tech while maintaining zero lock-in. Totally replaceable. Defined APIs that don't break.#
If the company is viable with these constraints, great. If not, they have enough money to plan their own demise. The key thing is they cannot use their dominance to launch new products. Just the open tech.#
You would find people willing to staff such a company, there are lots of idealistic developers, still, who believe in the open internet.#
In Microsoft's case, in the 90s this would have meant spinning out the browser. #
Today with Facebook it would mean spinning out the open graph.#
With Google, it would have to be at least the core search engine. If Alphabet wanted to run ads on search, they'd have to get in line and compete with others who did. This is the price they pay for trying to use their dominance in search to control everything.#
Google would also have to spin out Chrome, same way Microsoft would have spun out MSIE in the 90s.#
That's the basic idea. Look for the old open tech buried in the company, that is the source of their monopolistic control, and extract it. Hopefully it's very painful, to keep successors from tying to do it in the future.#
Last update: Thursday October 8, 2020; 11:32 AM EDT.
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