I can envision a gnarly Venn diagram of search, ads, AI, analytics, Chrome. You could easily make this 5 separate companies (ads and analytics were acquired), but you probably just need to split it somewhere in the middle.
It is always the court's problem. A judge does not have arbitrary or absolute authority. If Google can convince an appeals court that the judge has imposed an impossible or unreasonable remedy it will be overturned.
So if you make your anticompetitive business a tangled hairball then you're immune from being broken up because it would be "too hard"? Genius strategy.
Search would just farm out ads or develop their own again: its two sides of the same paper, by necessity.
Chrome is a loss leader and if cut out to it’s own company will die, because browsers are not a business that can make money anymore (same with eg C compilers for x86), AI maybe, but the only advantage AI has at google is that it has a crap-ton of data to train it with. Without that? The market just has one less AI product.
Regardless of how you split it, whomever ends up with search ends up with the value. And I guess the only way to split search would be into a background service api you could query and then have the front page be its own business. Others could then buy access, but the problem with that is that you then have a supplier that has all the power…
But this verdict only involves the search business. All that other stuff is out of scope. And breaking it up like that leaves the search monopoly intact anyway.
