Comment by jdoliner

Alphabet wants Waymo to become a company that can make it on its own steam, rather than be dependent on the Google revenue stream. For the first several years of Waymo's life they did exactly what your describing, but now they're at a point where they want to "push it out of the nest" a little bit. Sharing the profits is probably not much of a concern, if Waymo doesn't manage to become self sustaining there won't be any profits to split, so it makes sense to optimize for that.