Google Faces Off With US Government in Attempt To Break Up Company in Search Monopoly Case (apnews.com) 16
Google is confronting an existential threat as the U.S. government tries to break up the company as punishment for turning its revolutionary search engine into an illegal monopoly. From a report: The drama began to unfold Monday in a Washington courtroom as three weeks of hearings kicked off to determine how the company should be penalized for operating a monopoly in search. In its opening arguments, federal antitrust enforcers also urged the court to impose forward-looking remedies to prevent Google from using artificial intelligence to further its dominance. "This is a moment in time, we're at an inflection point, will we abandon the search market and surrender them to control of the monopolists or will we let competition prevail and give choice to future generations," said Justice Department attorney David Dahlquist.
The proceedings, known in legal parlance as a "remedy hearing," are set to feature a parade of witnesses that includes Google CEO Sundar Pichai. The U.S. Department of Justice is asking a federal judge to order a radical shake-up that would ban Google from striking the multibillion dollar deals with Apple and other tech companies that shield its search engine from competition, share its repository of valuable user data with rivals and force a sale of its popular Chrome browser. Google's attorney, John Schmidtlein, said in his opening statement that the court should take a much lighter touch. He said the government's heavy-handed proposed remedies wouldn't boost competition but instead unfairly reward lesser rivals with inferior technology. "Google won its place in the market fair and square," Schmidtlein said.
The proceedings, known in legal parlance as a "remedy hearing," are set to feature a parade of witnesses that includes Google CEO Sundar Pichai. The U.S. Department of Justice is asking a federal judge to order a radical shake-up that would ban Google from striking the multibillion dollar deals with Apple and other tech companies that shield its search engine from competition, share its repository of valuable user data with rivals and force a sale of its popular Chrome browser. Google's attorney, John Schmidtlein, said in his opening statement that the court should take a much lighter touch. He said the government's heavy-handed proposed remedies wouldn't boost competition but instead unfairly reward lesser rivals with inferior technology. "Google won its place in the market fair and square," Schmidtlein said.
Re: (Score:2)
>And nothing of value will be lost
No, unfortunately if Google search becomes less successfull, all the SEOs will target the other search engines more and thus make it more likely they will turn to trash too.
I hope they lose chrome. (Score:2, Insightful)
The problem with chrome is that it's built with spyware included, and they put a lot of effort to hide that by making them mostly in the dependencies but you should understand that because there is a 150,000,000 lines of code in the chromium code base that there's a lot of remote access tools and a lot of security issues just plain as day added as services that self update, create telemetry, etc.
I would absolutely love it if they went over this in the court and actively called that out.
Call out how the buil
Re: (Score:2)
... and then they'll fuck with the search engine to make it less useful to anyone using products that they haven't made deals with.
Already working on that. Google Search in LibreWolf has recently started throwing a bunch of captchas saying "We've detected unusual traffic from your network." Sometimes solving one captcha gets you search results, sometimes it just keeps throwing more. I assume I'm supposed to use a more tracking-friendly browser, but I typically just use a less tracking-oriented search en
It's not 'search' but 'online ads' (Score:4, Insightful)
It might fit Google's narrative to define this as "US going after the best search engine", but if you actually read the ruling, it's clear the illegal monopoly is in how Google has set up mechanisms to sell, distribute and display ads, and they did so in a way that gave their own 'selling software' an advantage in the auctions. https://www.documentcloud.org/... [documentcloud.org]
So no, this is not about "the success of Google search", despite what they want you to think. It's about how Google built the ad empire, laying it on top of Google Search and expanding it to most other commercial websites.
Re: (Score:2)
There's actually two DOJ cases. One is regarding Google's search offering, the second is regarding Google's adtech offering.
The article above is regarding the former. What you linked is regarding the latter.
Tracking (Score:2)
Maybe they should bring up all the insane tracking that Alphabet, Meta, et al do. I use Brave mostly, and some websites I go are filtered of like 100 trackers, ads, and crap. The count right now on this Slashdot page is 13.
I'd be curious to learn of peoples' favorite browsers, search engines, and plugins at this point.
IF YOU CAN'T COMPETE, LOBBY THE FEDS (Score:1)
If you want to be a competitor of Google but YOU'RE NOT THAT GOOD then what you do is hire lobbyists, buy some congress-critters (not hard nowadays when the top criminal in charge encourages corruption, destruction, and devastation) and then get them to say:
"Google. You're too good so you have to change to NOT BE SO GOOD!"
and for good measure add:
"And one day AI may be a thing YOU WILL BE GOOD AT so none of that either."
Corrupt government. Inept competition. Somehow this is Google's fault and they, their
Re: (Score:2)
Sure, but google is giving their own products top billing on their monopolistic search engine. Maybe instead of automatically putting gmail at the top of the search results for "email", google could make a good web-based email client and write a few blog posts about it to increase its page rank.
No, they are not. (Score:2)
Google is confronting an existential threat
Fuck no they are not.
If they got split up there would still be a Google. It would only be a smaller Google. And, it would still have the money it got from selling off whatever pieces they were not allowed to keep.
Whoever wrote that summary has a notable taste for boot leather.
Let's make a deal (Score:2)
'Cause that's how the fair playing field in the land of the free works now.
Microsoft (Score:2)
Why aren't they getting prosecuted and split up?
I mean, they're actively sabotaging competition, bribing government officials, buying out competition, making it impossible for competition to be compatible, commit industrial sabotage, and the list goes on and on.
Walk into a given office, odds are good you'll see:
- Windows
- MS Office
They haven't reached this position through playing it nice. When will they be appropriately punished?
I can't believe (Score:2)
I can't believe I once fell for Google's "do no evil" bullshit. This fucker was the devil in plain sight.