The U.S. Department of Justice is ramping up its case against Google’s alleged monopoly, suggesting the government could eventually force the company to sell its widely-used Chrome browser. The move is part of the DoJ’s push to challenge Google’s hold over the digital advertising and search engine markets.
The Justice Department’s latest legal action accuses Google of engaging in anticompetitive behavior by unfairly using its dominance in search and advertising to prop up its other services, most notably Chrome. The government argues that Google’s browser and vast data ecosystem have given the company an outsized advantage over competitors, stifling innovation and harming consumers. By bundling Chrome with its Android operating system, Google has built an extensive network that could limit consumer choice and make it difficult for smaller firms to compete.
I guess Google didn’t bribe hard enough
Justice Department is 100% lobbing this over to JD Vance’s buddy Peter Thiel who’s going to enshittify it even further and turn it with its massive install base into a tool for techno-fascism.
I must say that, as a European using a Firefox fork for my daily browsing while waiting for Ladybird, I don’t see that outcome as completely negative: Google, somehow, in America has kept a completely unjustified good vibes feeling surrounding itself, while Thiel is much more evil in the public eye.
If Chrome is associated with him in anyway it can become a more lucid image of itself.
I really don’t think this is true. It might push some politically engaged users to Firefox, but unlike Musk, most people don’t know who Thiel is, and as long as he keeps it that way, nobody will care.
That’s when we come onto the scene.
I am continuously “translating” news and opinions from here on LinkedIn. Already got banned from a professional Slack that contains most people in my industry for saying in a private conversation that I like watermelon.
Not gonna stop. People are not politically inclined because we kept our knowledge to ourselves for too long.
For a second, I read your fruit predilection literally and was like, “Is…watermelon controversial, now? Are they [the people who banned you] cartoonishly racist?”
I follow you, now; sucks but expected…
I still don’t get it, can you clue me in?
Yeah; of course. Ze’s referencing supporting Palestine (as the watermelon became more widely recognized as a symbol for them due to recent events).
FF depends on google ad money, thats why FF is currently enshittifying right now.
Same workflow/expectation state. ⏳
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I am not sure about that within US Law, but given what it usually sums up to, yes, it is a risk, which would make things even faster, possibly.
Please, do it! That’s going to eviscerate Chrome’s userbase and push these Chromium browsers to fork so fast it’ll make his head spin.
You’re putting way too much faith in the typical consumer. Enshittifying Chrome even more would piss its users off, but inertia and its market dominance would keep most of them continuing to use it while complaining about how bad it is.
Remember: It took 8 years for Chrome to drag Internet Explorer to the point where less than 10% of people actually used it. And that’s with Firefox already being a competitor to it for years.
Google would still own android and may not be inclined to keep chrome as the default. That is a significant portion of the browser’s user base.
With default search engine agreements being threatened, it may shake out where Google and Firefox agreed to make Firefox the default android browser in exchange for keeping Google their default search engine.
Why, what, is there something different about the Google guy?
Look at all their lips. See how they look like they are ready to kiss or suck something? Now look at Pichai. Just smiling instead of getting ready to receive a load. He bent the knee, but not far enough.
Yeah, that’s probably the difference
Which tech company would buy Chrome from Google? I just can’t think of a single tech company that could be an improvement over Google owning Chrome.
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Amazon
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Apple
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Meta
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Microsoft
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Oracle
What about media companies? I don’t see consumers benefiting from this.
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Comcast
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Disney
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Netflix
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Viacom
What about telecom? I still don’t see consumers benefiting from this.
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AT&T
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T-Mobile
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Verizon
What about foreign companies? Will they be even allowed to buy Chrome? I’m not sure.
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LG
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Philips
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Samsung
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Sony
The more I think about it, this won’t end well.
Chromium is already there and companies like Microsoft have their own forks so… Yeah I think there’s no point of buying Chrome.
It’s the most popular web browser in the world. Direct access to the browser windows and browsing data of the majority of Internet users would be the point.
Sell it to IBM so they can end all support lol
Sell it to Canonical
Of those companies, Apple seems like the best option due to their business goals (privacy). Though I am not fully sure why they’d want to as they already have a browser with a relative market share dominance and ecosystem.
Realistically, it would make sense to see Microsoft try again, it would instantly get 70% of the world to use “Edge”, so their goals are met. Chrome already has the modern web standards, so it might just mean slower progression of the web in the future.
Apples business isn’t privacy. Apples business is selling privacy.
I don’t disagree, it’s more of a matter of least evil.
Apple seems like the best option due to their business goals (privacy).
Lol. Lmao, even.
Sorry for the flippant comment, but it’s so incredibly wrong that I need to highlight the ridiculousness. TBF to you, it’s a common misconception due to Apple marketing’s lies, and our regulatory agencies unable/unwilling to do anything about companies that lie like Apple does.
Microsoft would be even worse.
The best outcome IMO is to kill Chrome, Edge, AND Safari, and force users to scatter and find an alternative on their own. There will need to be some way to prevent all big tech from trying to compete here too (Facebook, Amazon, etc), as those are incentivized to monopolize exactly like Google did, and we shouldn’t have to wait another 2 decades for the government to do something about it.
There will be some growing pains as people initially end up on shitty/scammy browsers, but eventually the market will do its thing and browser devs will compete for marketshare.
Is Microsoft even eligible? Wasn’t their anti-trust suit over IE basically about this same thing?
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Solution: Create an open source foundation, cram the board with Google employees
As long as they are doing the browser work independently from Google (meaning no Google integration), doesn’t sound like a bad thing. Kind of like they already present their work (Chromium and Chrome)
Microsoft Chrome
Meta Chrome
Amazon Chrome
Apple Chrome
Sell to who though
X Chrome
Ughhhhhhh
That…makes a horrible amount of sense.
ByteDance shell company Chrome.
A direct “donation” to Trump would instantly fix this.
Google should do the power play and completely open source the browser.
But Chrome is already just Chromium with some binary blobs. Chromium itself even has sync and Google services at this point.
Besides, what would that change in regards to who develops it?
I’d cheer if I thought this was anything except a blackmail play when a Trump administration is now involved. They’ll buy him off and it’ll all be back to status quo by fall.
or pay a generous fee of %0.00001 of your yearly earnings to make it go away
Thus the price of collaboration. You are not rewarded, you simply draw attention to yourself as someone with wealth they can pillage.
It would be better to not allow Google to have a major stake in the control of the Chromium project itself. Same for Android, force them to spin AOSP off into a nonprofit or sell it to EFF or something and forbid them from having a huge stake in it.
Let them use it for their own products, but remove their financial influence over the underlying software.
Spinning off AOSP into something like Mozilla would massively boost its appeal. I myself left android cuz of privacy issues (no I can’t use GrapheneOS, I need access to my banking apps).
Use shit banking apps on GOS from 6 of them from 3 countries , no issus what so ever. Apple has privacy issues as well. You can also use other roms with microG and aurorastore
I never had problems with banking apps on GrapheneOS, 3 different apps, all work totally fine.
I don’t really get what selling Chrome and Android would accomplish. I’m all for breaking up tech monopolies but both of those projects are mostly open source that get proprietary Google crap and (for Android, at least, some monopolistic behavior like requiring what’s preinstalled, which is fine to ban).
I don’t work on ad-supported projects so I may be out of my element but it seems like what would actually help end the monopolistic behavior is requiring Google (and Facebook) to spin off their ad network businesses. The monopoly problem isn’t Chromium or AOSP or that Google runs ad-supported search. It’s that if [insert random site] wants ads, they typically use AdSense. If Facebook and Google want to run ad-supported services, fine. But they shouldn’t also also be the middlemen for advertisers who want to run ads on third party sites. That’s a recipe for monopolistic behavior.
In my ideal world, there would be no targeted ads at all and advertisers had to sponsor — and were so partly responsible for — the specific content they want to be associated with. But that probably isn’t going to happen since every politician is an advertiser that wants to launder their sponsorships through a middleman.
I don’t really get what selling Chrome and Android would accomplish.
There was a leak of Google’s old page ranking algorithm (not PageRank, but how they change the order of results on search) - it looked like they used a bunch of signals from Chrome about the amount of time users spend on a page, how quickly they go back, etc. Chrome gives the search side of the business an advantage.
Conversely, Android feeds a bunch of extra data to the ad business about what people do in real life.
Both products give the rest of Alphabet a significant advantage over their competitors, and make it harder for new entrants to get a foothold.
requiring Google (and Facebook) to spin off their ad network businesses
That is their business. Everything else exists to bring more value to that business:
- AOSP - ads in the browser (search engine) and app store
- Chrome - ads in the search engine, and nudge people toward other Google products to hoover up data to serve more ads
And so on. Google and Meta are ad companies that drive traffic to their ads through software services.
The point in forcing them out of certain businesses is to open them up to more competition. They can keep ad margins high due to sheer volume of eyeballs coming from their other services. Gutting those services means they need to provide better value to stay competitive.
Idk if it’ll work, but stripping out the browser is likely good overall for the open web.
Spinning them off into their own independent companies would make more sense than a sale to another party.
Google gets to control the source code, what additions are added, and what features don’t get into it.
Yes technically some organization could fork it and then maintain a fork themselves. But it’s a huge undertaking that almost nobody has the money to fund. Browsers are free so there’s really not a lot of monetization schemes for browsers.
So nobody as far as I know has really been able to maintain a hard fork of chromium for very long. Remember, every change you make then has to be maintained by you and then you have to keep it up to date with the chromium master tree while also keeping all of your changes compatible. It is a big undertaking almost as big as modern operating systems. Browsers are just too complicated so Google in this position does still have a monopoly that’s very hard to fight.
Almost all browsers other than Safari and Firefox are based on Chromium, which gives Google a ton of control.
the browser itself doesn’t matter. Google have had 10 years to do what they want with the specs for html, CSS and JavaScript, to define everything from browser extension APIs to the http protocol itself. they have won. not only have they spent a decade architecting the web in a way that mostly benefits them, they have made those specifications so bloated and complicated that nobody can develop a competitor from scratch. it took years to undo the damage wrought by ie6’s stagnation but this is different. this shit can’t be undone. it’s fucked forever
I somehow don’t believe this is going to happen. But if it does, sell it to Mozilla?
Selling it means receiving money for it. Mozilla without Google support, which at that point would be lacking, wouldn’t have the means.
They could sell it for $1 if they wanted to.
Also I think Mozilla is self sustainable from investment income from its endowment. Could be wrong.
I’ve been worried about this. I figured that Mozilla is funded by Google (so they can say that they’ve taken steps to avoid the perception that they are a Browser monopoly). Would Mozilla lose their funding of Google no longer has that Browser monopoly?
I meant that they no longer need Google’s funding, however if Chrome becomes Mozilla, Google would have a real need to pay Mozilla to stay the default engine in Chrome.
How do they no longer need it? Isn’t Google like 80% of their income? Mozilla was controlled opposition. This would be a historic moment in history though Like when Gates loaned his buddy Jobs money to help Apple launch the iPhone.
Yeah, I don’t believe that Mozilla could afford to lose that funding.
Your income went from 100k a year to 20k, how are you doing? Well we fired most everybody and are considering a shut down. Lol. Most owners would just sell out.
mozilla doesnt have money, they are so desperate now, they are lowkey selling some data.
