Only a short time ago, if you had drawn a Venn diagram of Rupert Murdoch and Elizabeth Warren's policy interests and concerns, it would have looked something like two discrete circles with no overlap. But that changed last week when the conservative, Australian-born media magnate and the left-wing US senator became unlikely allies in a quest to rein in America's tech giants.

Murdoch’s Australian publishing house, News Corp, created global headlines when it provocatively called for search advertising giant Google to be broken up. The suggestion - made in a submission to the Australian competition regulator's inquiry into digital platforms - surfaced just days after Warren unveiled her own plan to break up Google (and fellow internet giants Facebook and Amazon) at the high-profile South by Southwest conference in Texas.

What are Rupert Murdoch and News Corp really up to? Credit:AP

Disclosure: News Corp is the owner of newspapers that compete with the news publication you are reading right now. And The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age have an advertising partnership with Google.

Before going any further it is worth making one thing clear: the likelihood that Google (or any of its Big Tech peers) is actually forcibly broken apart in Australia probably falls somewhere between remote and non-existent.