Business mostly thinks the new look is smart. But regulators and privacy campaigners are not so sure

Google is the same size today as it was at the start of the week, it just doesn’t feel like that. The behemoth that is valued on Wall Street, give or take a few dollars, at $350bn is to be reconfigured so that its big money-spinning Google-related businesses like Search, YouTube, Chrome, Android and GoogleMaps remain part of Google, and its proliferating “moonshot” projects like its high-speed Fiber network or its anti-aging project Calico, or its self-driving car are each contained in separate companies. They will all be part of a giant umbrella group called Alphabet – which after another twist or two, will also contain Google. As the Twitter gag asked, can 26 letters possibly be enough?

Ever since the restructuring was announced in a Larry Page blog at the close of trading in New York on Monday evening, the tech and business worlds have been trying to work out what it means. On balance, business has concluded that it is a smart move (although one or two observers wonder if there is less to it than meets the eye). Google’s share price jumped 5% on the news. But China had blocked the Alphabet website (abc.xyz) within 24 hours of its launch. And some of the world’s regulators and many consumers are looking sceptically at the impact that it might have on data protection, privacy, tax liabilities and the impact of the reorganisation on the megalith’s power to monetise the data of its billions of users.