But that won’t happen because the politicians on both sides are firmly in the control of corporations.
Going after Google can also be profitable. Plenty of its competitors like Microsoft and Oracle have, in the past, teamed up to lobby against them.
FairSearch is one example of this.
Certainly this is a good “excuse”.
The problem is, there is always an excuse.
As someone who has done software development for a large tech company: This kind of stuff happens a lot.
While some bugs are found through monitoring, most software developers are more interested in developing new features than bug hunting and squashing. That’s why they need things like SRE teams to make sure that they aren’t so focused on new features that reliability gets lost. However, the bugs are generally brought up by customers and prioritized.
This is, as far as I’m aware, the first time that a bug affect Firefox has been brought up with YouTube’s use of Polymer. Perhaps Google knew of slower load times on Firefox and Edge, but when you’re at Google’s scale, bugs that no one is complaining about tend to have lower priority than those that are getting complaints.
If they had some real competition (if they were broken up) maybe this would be less apt to occur.
I’m not sure how breaking them up in this case would work.
Let’s say that, theoretically, YouTube is broken off from the rest of Google, and Alphabet can’t stop it by making YouTube its own organization under Alphabet. It’ll instantly become a major Google customer, since it will still probably run on Google Cloud. Sure, YouTube could decide to one day move to AWS or Azure, but that’s probably not going to happen.
Further, this is an issue of YouTube seeming to favor Chrome over other browser. Even if they weren’t part of Google, though, they’ll still prioritize Chrome development over Firefox and Edge. It isn’t a matter of anticompetitive practices. It’s a matter that Chrome is vastly more popular than those two combined!
Further, YouTube will still probably be all over Google. It’s the most popular video-sharing platform, so its videos will continue showing up in Google Search results. It’s a very popular app, so it will probably continue to ship with Android or get downloaded quickly, like with iOS. Signing in with a Google account is also something many non-Google websites already do, and YouTube could continue just using that itself without adding a separate user system. It could also continue using Google’s ad network
While I understand concerns regarding Google’s size, I don’t see how a breakup would immediately help this situation, should it help at all. I guess YouTube could be bought up at that point, but that’s probably going to leave us in the same situation we’re in now. It’ll just be someone like Microsoft or Amazon instead of Google.
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