Technically true but practically irrelevant in terms of consumer impact. The number of Android devices in the US without Google services is easily a rounding error. ~100% of the Android handsets in the US have Google's software preinstalled.
This is a fair point, yet I don't think it's good to disparage what's technically true here.
There are people attempting to take advantage of the fact that Android remains free and open source, and they need support. Perhaps I should have included that in my comment above.
It's not obvious to me that a legal solution would be better.
I think Google's bundled services cements their grip on AOSP more than it supports it being independent. All Android handset OEMs basically have no choice to install Google services because AOSP isn't mass marketable on its own, and nobody can really compete with Google's combination of Play/Gmail/YouTube/Chrome/search. Once you have a Google account, you get funneled into these other services, and it makes it difficult for any other services to gain traction. If we want AOSP to truly be free, then it has to be useable outside of the Google ecosystem.
Android is like a club with free drinks, but Google Services are the $150 cover charge.
It's not impossible to execute: You order them to do it, and it's on them to develop anything necessary to make it happen. And yes, that might entail having to split up Google accounts into different accounts for different services, uncoupling products, removing exclusive integrations, and in the end, the consumer will benefit.
I was at Netflix when we decided to undertake splitting DVD and Streaming. We had chosen to make that change, and had high motivation to do it. It still took about seven years to finish that task.
Google is even more entangled than Netflix was. I suspect it would take them at least a decade to execute a split like that.
It's likely such an order would include a deadline for compliance and a cost for noncompliance after that. I suspect that it would happen faster than you think.
Furthermore, companies like Facebook have actually made a point to deeply integrate otherwise disparate products (Instagram), solely to later claim it'd be "too hard" to spin them off if the court orders them to.
The simple answer is to continue to fine them until they accomplish the task: If a company goes bankrupt trying to comply with the court, perhaps they shouldn't have violated the law so flagrantly in the first place.
I think people are too hesitant to admit that companies that violate the law should be eligible for the "death penalty". It's absolutely fine for a very bad company to explode and die once brought to court.
I'm sure it would include a deadline. My point is the government's deadline would surely be unreasonable.
> I think people are too hesitant to admit that companies that violate the law should be eligible for the "death penalty".
I don't believe in the death penalty for people, and I don't believe in it for companies either. I certainly think that companies get away with too much, and that their leadership should be more personally accountable for fragrant violations of the law. But death is too extreme a punishment.
But at the same time it's the limited liability that allows for innovation. Companies would take far fewer risks, both good and bad, if the people running them were personally liable.
I am pretty against the death penalty for people too. But corporations are particularly immoral, and I feel that if anything, we should be vastly more comfortable executing companies than people.
I think personal accountability for CEOs and executives would help a lot. A CEO who knew an illegal business move might land them in jail would be much more hesitant to do it than a CEO that knew that move might cost investors some stock value.
But I also think a company's behavior can be endemic and cultural, and that perhaps rather than trying to turn them around, we should just "execute" them. Shut down operations, auction off property to pay any debtors and assist employees with the transition elsewhere.
One of the things I think about with Big Tech is that they are incredibly overvalued on their "too big to fail" status... that and the current reality that their illegal gains won't be meaningfully seized. If a company could be "executed" for it's misdeeds, investors would need to be real about the value of "rulebreaker" type companies, and the additional risk they carry. We'd not be in the situation we are now, where the crimes of Google and it's executives keep racking up... but so is it's stock price.
I don't buy the claim that we need to limit liability in order to foster innovation, because our limited regulation has led these companies to squander so much innovation, it's insane. For every innovative thing one of these tech companies has done, it's killed dozens or hundreds of startups that were doing something more innovative and not focused on circling the wagons around their core stock value.
Even if Google (or Facebook) are split into pieces many people will still do social logins, so no different accounts for different services. I don't do social login and I don't like the very idea of centralizing authentication and profile managment (probably also some of authorization) but I also don't think that there is any legal ground to forbid it.
That actually will likely be a short-term solution if companies are forced to unbundle.
Say Google is required to sell Chrome and/or Android. Problem is, billion people's Google accounts are signed into those devices. Solution is, you replace the "Google account" on an Android device with an "Android account" that uses Google auth for login. Then, if a user wants after that point, they can detach that, set different credentials, whatever.
How about legislation that enforces the availability of third party app stores or something?