That would be silly. If both entities (e.g. YouTube Music and Google Search) are owned by the same company, to whom would you pay a fee? It doesn’t make sense.
In big corpos such departments usually have their very own budget, and operate as a quasi-separate entity from the others. Paying fees inter-departments is a very common thing.
Hm yes but in general if this happens too much it's frowned upon. Because all the bookkeeping to shift money within the same company actually costs money for no real reason.
If this happens a lot the department bearing the cost is usually compensated with a bigger budget.
Yeah but it's often not real billing. It's just to put a price on it so internal departments don't waste a ton of company resources because it's 'free'.
I work for a very large enterprise also and we've been instructed to stop internal billing for everyhing less than 10k, and everything above 100k must be compensated in other ways, like shifting of responsibilities or personnel between teams. This was done because various departmental interests were basically trying to 'make money' at the expense of other internal departments and creating a complex mesh of internal contracts that was only wasting a huge amount of overhead :)
The problem with this thing is that it can become a goal of its own and some departments think they are making a ton of money even though they're only shifting internal funds and causing huge expenses in finance.
In which case the post I responded to is a red herring because they claim (without evidence) that the transfer pricing is happening in the case of YouTube Music and Apple Music.
Still applies. Apple Music and YouTube Music may show losses because of the transfer fees they pay. But Apple & Google can then decide to keep them around even with their paper losses because they make other divisions more profitable.
Why would it be silly? One division paying another division for resources. That happens a lot and it makes sense in that it helps to figure out just how much resources are needed.
This is a solved problem. Google may not care but in general companies want to know if one of their businesses is actually making money or just a perceived success because of the conglomerate. Of course a company may fudge the figures to lean the calculations one way or the other but enough theoretical and practical data exists for accounting costs.
