Structural Separation Is the Least Invasive Way of Creating Fairness and Legitimacy

Regulators are once again ready to impose some structural separation on giant tech companies. We have an intuitive sense that the losers in any such arrangement would never be able to trust the processes impartiality. A judge can't hear a case involving her mother, and a lawyer can't represent both sides of a dispute. It's not obvious to me where the separation line should run. I know for sure we can't trust tech giants to choose them, obviously. But as the economist ransey woodcock has pointed out to me, you can't tell a company it's not allowed to have any vertical integration. That's its point. The process will never feel fair.