A rare bid to break up Alphabet Inc.’s Google is one of the options being considered by the Justice Department after a landmark court ruling found that the company monopolized the online search market, according to people with knowledge of the deliberations.
Do they need to split off different departments? Since most of the stuff that Google dabbles in is digital, can't they just start a few new companies with the exact same IP and split up the work force instead?
"Sharing" the IP wouldn't really work. The point is to have multiple companies that are either not overlapping, or are competing with each other. If they're all working on the same IP but with different work forces, then you either have single products that diverge as multiple teams independently develop them (No longer the same product) or you just have a single large company with extra steps.
But if you split Chrome and the browser team, from the Search Engine team, and from the Advertising team, then all of a sudden they're not all just one stacked product anymore, and so while Chrome may currently have the lions share of the market, it's now competing on the same footing as Firefox and the rest.
It would start at 90%, but drop for reasons the other reply said
Also: no longer would it be advertised as a browser to everyone who visits the Google search page. No longer will a conglomerate of what should be like 20 different companies in 14 different sectors be able to easily manipulate every website into optimizing for their products, so the average user will feel far less inclined to stay with them if there's an alternative that works better for them