DOJ Wants Google To Sell Chrome To Break Search Monopoly (9to5google.com) 43
According to Bloomberg, the U.S. Justice Department wants Google to sell off its Chrome browser as part of its ongoing search monopoly case. The recommendations will be made official on Wednesday. 9to5Google reports: At the top of the list is having Google sell Chrome "because it represents a key access point through which many people use its search engine." There are many questions about how that works, including what the impact on the underlying Chromium codebase would be. Would Google still be allowed to develop the open-source project by which many other browsers, like Microsoft Edge use? "The government has the option to decide whether a Chrome sale is necessary at a later date if some of the other aspects of the remedy create a more competitive market," reports Bloomberg. Google, which plans to appeal, previously said that "splitting off Chrome or Android would break them."
Bloomberg reports that "antitrust officials pulled back from a more severe option that would have forced Google to sell off Android." However, the government wants Google to "uncouple its Android smartphone operating system from its other products, including search and its Google Play mobile app store, which are now sold as a bundle." Meanwhile, other recommendations include licensing Google Search data and results, as well as allowing websites that are indexed for Search to opt out of AI training.
Bloomberg reports that "antitrust officials pulled back from a more severe option that would have forced Google to sell off Android." However, the government wants Google to "uncouple its Android smartphone operating system from its other products, including search and its Google Play mobile app store, which are now sold as a bundle." Meanwhile, other recommendations include licensing Google Search data and results, as well as allowing websites that are indexed for Search to opt out of AI training.
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If an individual is too fucking stupid to use the internet without being exploited by large corporations that have a Monopoly on the infrastructure then fuck them.
Survival of the fittest bitches!
If you're too stupid or ignorant to navigate how the modern world works without getting fucked in the ass by people that are smarter than you then you can be exploited by others and die in poverty.
This is coming from somebody that used to identify as an authoritarian communist. Now I don't fucking care.
The past few
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But it defaults to using one. Which is the point. Try to pay attention.
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Most users don't know that it's even possible to change the default search from Google to something else, so being the default in Chrome gives them a massive advantage over the competition. Why deny this simple and obvious fact?
Chrome didn't come to dominate on merit alone either. In addition to being bundled with many popular applications, it was ruthlessly promoted across Google's services, including search. It's so bad that many users actually think they need to use Chrome to use Google services. If
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Um, you don't need to "change" anything. You just type in the URL of whatever search engine you want. Does the government really need to get involved in this?
LOL. You still think you still think that browser bars are for "typing URLs".
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Chrome didn't come to dominate on merit alone either.
Chrome became the preferred browser because Firefox (it may have still been Mozilla at that time) became overly bloated and no one trusted IE. Opera was just an oddity. It became the preferred browser completely based on merit. it was simple with a clean interface and faster than the competition. It was not bundled. The first thing people were doing with brand new Windows installs was starting IE to download Chrome (all manually by their own choice).
Some of the things stated came true in later years, b
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Chrome became the preferred browser because Firefox (it may have still been Mozilla at that time) became overly bloated
Reality tells a very different story.
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Also, didn't they just decide Google isn't allowed to pay to be default search?
How is Chrome supposed to live on its own?
Been there a got the T-Shirt (Score:2, Interesting)
This sounds great, but I heard this story before.
25 years ago Microsoft lost an anti-trust case and in the year 2001 the GOP took over. Guess what happened ? The case was dropped.
So we all know what will happen now that Trump will be taking over.
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The funniest part is that they did this openly and publicly, starting from infamous public crying session in 2016, and culminating is "all of our search errors that guide Trump autofills to Biden and later Harris sites are totally accidental, please ignore that we are on the record stating that we will not allow Trump to win again".
But you are trained to not believe the evidence of your lying eyes and ears. So your cognition doesn't allow you to recognize it.
And so you also ignore evidence of the fact that
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Of course! and once Google gets scared enough they'll be happy to hand over their most precious secrets and lots, and lots, of money to Trump and Putin in exchange for the case being dropped.
It's the same play every time: Strong arm people into giving something and you might be nice to them.
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google was one of the companies that colluded against Trump for last eight years
LOL! What? Have any evidence for that?
Here in reality, it would appear that the opposite [nbcnews.com] is true.
Typical.
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It will be trivial to stall the court battle for four years. And in 2028, after four (more) years of Trump, the Democrats will be able to win back the White House if their candidate is Biden again, even if he dies of old age in the meantime. All Google has to do is make a few very large contributions to the Democratic candidate, and it all evaporates.
Just like it did with Microsoft.
It isn't the corruption that keeps these huge companies from being called to account, it's the length of time it takes for the
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Man the doublethink with you guys is wild. "colluded against trump". My dude, a search engine showing results that criticize someone isn't collusion its just the search engine doing its job. Guess what else shows up on the results? shit that criticizes democrats.
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If this story was posted three months from now the comments would be very different.
chromium (Score:3)
who is going to buy it when you can already download the source code and fork it
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Somebody who wants others to download their source code and fork it, because they have the master key to the base?
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Re: chromium (Score:2)
Is default search still an advantage? (Score:2)
Does google actually get any meaningful traffic purely because they are the default in Firefox or on the iPhone or whatever or do people specifically use Google over the alternatives *cough*Bing*cough* because Google is better? I know I specifically use Google because it's better.
Yes (Score:3)
If you cared exclusively about the quality of the results you'd probably be using one of the meta engines that works with google (i.e. startpage). You're not so far away from the unwashed masses who definitely just use whatever is the default.
sell an open source project? (Score:1)
does the DOJ not realize that makes zero sense?
brought to u by people who think the internet is a series of tubes!
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Open source of not, somebody is still in control of it. And Google certainly benefits from controlling defaults that very few people ever bother to change.
Re: sell an open source project? (Score:3)
Chrome is not open source. Chromium is open source but Google takes Chromium and adds non-open bits to it to make Chrome.
Chrome is not a browser to Google (Score:5, Insightful)
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Google's tracking of Chrome users in incognito mode from the server-side is not something nefarious, it's the same tracking they do to every browser. They got sued for not detecting incognito mode, something they can't do. It would be more anti-competitive if they gave themselves a way to detect incognito mode and not track Chrome's incognito users but still tracked every other browsers' equivalent.
Anyone can get the source code and build their own (Score:2)
WHOA! The DOJ has this kind of long game!? (Score:1)
Electron (Score:2)
Google is going to break their own monopoly (Score:2)
by slowly turning into hot garbage.
People still use Google search? (Score:2)
Have they somehow not noticed it has turned to utter crap?
It works (Score:2)
People use the Chrome web browser because it works well.
I've tried Firefox, Brave and the obsolete Internet Explorer. Chrome is easier to use.
What are they going to do? Force us to migrate to Microsoft Edge (barf)?
I doubt the Justice Department doesn't even know the difference between the Chrome OS and the Chrome browser. Last I looked, a lot of them were still on AOL.