392
Google must sell Chrome to end search monopoly, justice department argues in court filing
(www.theguardian.com)
Google doesn't have to do shit. Ffs
this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2024
392 points (99.2% liked)
Technology
59517 readers
3121 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
I'll give them 5 bucks.
The next day, the Chrome division is sold off to a new company "Bloogle" and we're back to square dumb.
And before you think about applying for a job there, know that the new company is still demanding mandatory 5 days in the office
Why does it need to be sold to another big company, why can't they just break Google up so chrome becomes its own business?
Chrome by itself would likely cost 100 billion dollars to sell, and then more to maintain, without any clear revenue except selling user data. Chrome is not a profitable product on its own. Not many companies can afford that.
Well shucks, I guess it should just be made fully open source, the code distributed, and the business dissolved. Womp wooomp.
The overwhelming majority of development to Chromium is done by Google and not the open source contributors to the project. Maintaining a browser is not something that can be done for free as a hobby. It requires an army of full-time developers to sustain.
Given all of the browsers except Firefox are using Chromium, the best case scenario for spinning off Chrome is that Microsoft would pick up the lion’s share of development to keep Edge up to date.
This is the same reason that all of the major Linux distributions have large foundations to support them.
The DoJ would do less harm to the internet if they just forced Google to sell off Search instead. Then they’d be an advertising and cloud services company that happens to maintain a major browser to serve their ads.
There are multiple other browser startups in development that are not Chromium based. Like LadyBird (which is completely independant), and Zen browser (which started as a FF fork)
Ehh, I wouldn’t consider Safari “using chromium” at this point. It has been hard forked for years. Chrome could disappear tomorrow and it wouldn’t affect Safari development.
Because chrome doesn't make any money
If Google does not set the price for 200 trillion USD and it can be really bought, then it will be probably M$ and they will change the search engine to Bing and integrate Coplilot or whatever the fuck it is called now into it.
Pretty sure that would count as monopoly as well and the sale wouldn't be approved.
And I was pretty sure them aquiring Activision Blizzard would count as monopolizing but here we are.
Imagine being a monopoly and still being 3rd place out of three in your field.
Did you consider that Microsoft lawyers said prices wouldn't go up? Cause they did, they did say that, which is why the merger was approved. Do you think lawyers can just lie? Don't you think it's much more fair now that companies can make pinky promises that prices won't go up before they become more monopolistic. That's just good business for both customers and businesses /s
You had me bad in the beginning there haha, thanks for the chuckle.
Well he is called chuckleslord for a reason.
to me, shaving Android off their business (suggested next step if this fails) would be way more impactful
I'm worrying that whatever gets sold (Chrome or Android) might end up in the hands of someone even more scummy than Google.
They would have to be more scummy and also at least similarly competent... Google can't innovate for crap, but they're pretty good at maintaining projects (when they don't randomly kill them off)
If they stop work on chromium, or belief in the stewardship of chromium wanes, it'll fragment the ecosystem again. Which is sorely needed at this point - we need to get back to standards and away from centralized control
Imagine Twitter/musk acquires them. Microsoft, Apple, and many other big companies directly or indirectly rely on a chain now controlled by a group known for mismanagement - are they going to wait and see, or are they going to diversify?
Is there any company more scummy than Google?
Chiquita and Nestlé come to mind. Within tech industry, I'd say Amazon and probably Microsoft are worse as well, and there's probably a ton of potentially even worse companies lurking in the shadows outside the top of the economic food chain.
Adobe sucks pretty hard as well.
Oracle?
I don't know man. There's a lot shittier business practices out there than paying to be the default search engine - which is laughably easy to change on any browser. Like marketplaces and services that pay to be exclusive sources of content and then use the fact that they're the only source for most content to force extortionate deals on content creators and enshitify every aspect of the end user experience. Just to name one.
Why not both!
I think Google is putting their eggs in one basket (Android) in preparation for them selling off chrome. They are already killing ChromeOS.
https://www.androidauthority.com/chrome-os-becoming-android-3500661/
Android also becoming chrome OS in light of recent news of developing Android desktop mode and native Android compatibility with Linux apps, looks like they make hybrid OS that could do it all
It will be another tech giant probably amazon or something.
Enshittification intensifies
And what's to stop it from continuing to monopolize search engine usage just because it'll be owned by another company? Wouldn't whoever purchases it just continue operating it the same way, banking on the name recognition?
MS is both wet and salivating right now.
The buyer of chrome could make bing the default search engine and re-enable whatever broke Ublock origin (the ad blocker)
They could also cripple gapps and gmail a bit. It would also be harder for google to unilaterally develop new web standards.
That would no doubt consternate a few at Google and knee cap them forcing web shit down our throats that only improves their ad business.
Good news, but does someone more knowleagable of these things know the likelihood of a Trump DOJ derailing this? I am hopefully as the original case was brought in 2017 under Trump, and his relationship with Big Tech is at best strained, but I truly don't know what to expect moving forward.
according to Cory doctorow (pluralistic), trumps gouvernement will likely selectively enforce antitrust, so the Google case would go through, but cases against, say, tesla would be dropped.