It’s the courts themselves that would have to break them up, so it’s not an issue there. It’s just a very high bar to clear because the courts don’t care about anticompetitive practices unless it has a detrimental effect on the consumer. You’d be hard pressed to argue that things like YouTube and Gmail coupled with the cloud service, the ad service and the phone service are causing actual harm to the consumer that competition wouldn’t. I don’t see how YouTube would survive in its current form if it used third party ads, hosting, and CDN, the same way prime video and twitch are very dependent on Amazon Web services. Back in the day, for example, interurban electric trolleys were often owned by power companies. They used the power company’s right of way for the electric lines for the tracks too and of course their power. That’s anticompetitive, but frankly good for the consumer. That said, I wouldn’t be sad to see it burn in a fire either.
It’s the courts themselves that would have to break them up, so it’s not an issue there. It’s just a very high bar to clear because the courts don’t care about anticompetitive practices unless it has a detrimental effect on the consumer. You’d be hard pressed to argue that things like YouTube and Gmail coupled with the cloud service, the ad service and the phone service are causing actual harm to the consumer that competition wouldn’t. I don’t see how YouTube would survive in its current form if it used third party ads, hosting, and CDN, the same way prime video and twitch are very dependent on Amazon Web services. Back in the day, for example, interurban electric trolleys were often owned by power companies. They used the power company’s right of way for the electric lines for the tracks too and of course their power. That’s anticompetitive, but frankly good for the consumer. That said, I wouldn’t be sad to see it burn in a fire either.