"Facebook could be forced to get rid of Instagram and WhatsApp, Amazon might divest Zappos and Whole Foods, Google may lose YouTube, and Apple could part with its App Store."
If you were going to bother, you'd split Amazon and AWS. Amazon becomes mostly a retail company again. Without the AWS subsidy margins, they'll be down to retail margins and the ad business (with ads, it's plenty). They can perhaps keep the gadgets, splitting every major aspect apart might be going too far.
AWS is a $400 to $600 billion market cap company right now if it were trading on its own, based on its operating income and the insatiatable market demand for anything cloud. The ticker is even available conveniently. They'll get to $150+ billion in sales and $25+ billion in operating profit in the next six to seven years (average of 21% annual growth over seven years; very much within reach). It might approach being a trillion dollar company a decade from now (at MSFT type multiples).
You'd split Facebook and Instagram as the most obvious separation line (and then do something with WhatsApp, it can be spun off or go with either or; FB already has messenger, so it probably shouldn't go with that entity).
Instagram is a $100+ billion publicly traded company on its own plausibly. There is some question on erosion in both FB and Instagram once you detach them from eachother. They both lose a huge protective moat and cross promotion (Instagram has become a lot more mature at this point, it'll be more at risk to userbase erosion going forward, versus say five years ago; and FB is definitely at high risk for userbase erosion with fewer moats).
They could also spin off Amazon's patent portfolio into its own company that would license the patents back to Amazon and anyone else who wants to compete in the ecommerce market.
AWS, Amazon Studios, Amazon the online marketplace, Amazon the producer of goods sold on that marketplace, Whole Foods, Ring, Twitch, whatever else they own
Amazon Studios would be the same business model as any other independent TV/film production company.
Amazon marketplace operates on very slim margins to stay competitive, but it's hard to believe it couldn't be profitable on its own. Maybe it would have to settle for slightly less universal domination.
Many businesses make money by exclusively selling through Amazon, so there's no reason they couldn't spin off a profitable business that sells Amazon Basics and whatever other store brands they produce.
Whole Foods is obviously a viable business.
I doubt Ring was profitable but it was clearly capable of getting VC money on its own. If it can't be a viable business, why did they start it? And why did VCs invest in it?
FYI, there is a project for that [0] of which Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter are a part of. It's not forced and is still in development but it's something.
Consider that Facebook has 3 different messaging apps, and Google has an unknown number of messaging apps. Both companies have strong internal incentives to consolidate their own messaging apps and yet these efforts have never succeeded. I'm not sure if having a single universal protocol is the best idea.
I believe the idea is that, if those companies can't do it, even though they want to, then it may be hard to do (or at least to do well/cleanly). Requiring it to be done may therefore be a bad idea.
Well conceivably you could separate out the Facebook ad network and the Facebook social media, and possibly also maybe the IM systems (FB Chat/Whatsapp).
I know virtually nothing about antitrust law, and I'm not a lawyer, so I'm speaking largely out of my behind, but those seem like logical-enough divisions.
