This has already been discussed extensively in prior threads, but the biggest question is, how does a spun-off Chrome get funded?
Chrome/Firefox/Safari all cost hundreds of millions of dollars a year to maintain. Currently, Safari and Firefox both make essentially all their revenue through default search agreements. Chrome, Edge, and now Brave are produced by companies that also own the search engines, so they're essentially a loss-generating product, that exist because they cancel out distribution costs that Google and Microsoft would otherwise have to pay other browsers.
But the DOJ order is also asking to ban payments between search engines and browser makers:
> As detailed in Section IV, the PFJ prohibits Google from providing third parties something of value (including financial payments) in order to make Google the default general search engine or otherwise discouraging those third parties from offering competing search products
With that revenue gone, the only real options to fund a browser are:
* Directly charge users for it. This is effectively a non-starter, because the vast majority of people aren't willing to pay for it.
* Insert ads or sell user data - users also hate this, it's probably not legal in the EU, and it may not be legal in most of the US in the future either.
* Use the browser as a platform to push some product that does make money - a non-Google search engine? A social network? An LLM interface?
Alternatively, a narrow reading of the proposed order is that this only applies to Google. In that case, perhaps Bing or OpenAI takes over all the distribution agreements and becomes the top search engine. Whether that's better for consumers seems fairly questionable.
The most likely answer is that it will take the Linux model, with a foundation put together to fund Chrome's development. Then all of the parties interested in people having access to the Web, including Google, will have an incentive to fund this without requiring it to push their specific products.
Chrome currently has far more paid full time engineers than the linux kernel does. I struggle to see how they get paid - except again, by charging search engines to be the default browser or something.
Chrome does a lot of things. I know there are downsides and many people don't agree, but I think overall the browser/internet experience would benefit from simpler browsers that don't move so fast.
> I think overall the browser/internet experience would benefit from simpler browsers that don't move so fast.
I wish browsers moved faster so that I don't have to download so many native apps. Native mobile apps are monitoring me continuously, and way more opaquely than web apps. More importantly, they can't be thwarted by plugins. As a mobile Firefox and Desktop Chrome user, I wish browsers (especially FF) moved faster.
So, no - for privacy reasons I don't agree with your view.
Simpler browsers sound not good to me. It's a bit of a rallying cry on HN it feels like, often in sharper terms.
But computing is so intermediated. There's so many checks to do anything on an iPhone that isn't in the dead code your phone already runs. An Oculus has cool experiences, but we can't shape and share our own easily. There's always someone else's data center between you and your device today.
The web is largely still an experience of data centers too. But it's a neutral platform. Where we can go to any data-center we please. Where anyone can tap the amazing web platform & it's amazing APIs to build all kinds of cool experiences.
In a world where tech defines what the user wants for them, I feel so much like the web & every web platform API is stealing just a little more fire from the gods. It's promethean, giving to humanity prowess & capabilities we wouldn't otherwise have.
The pace is confusing. Sometimes things happen fast. Often they are left sort of unfinished. Fast & slow, fast & slow. I'd love if there was a huge source of funding the societies of the world were putting up to help make this critical human capability, to to fund long careful slow healing and helping as well as fancy new features (es2015/esm modules in the browser tool sooo long & still has so much to fix for example). These things are hard, complicated, and we try so hard to keep going forward without causing too much unfixable undislodgesble bad. But this spirit of bravery is necessary, to keep going. Simpler isn't good. The versatility of the web is too important. There's no other viable substitutes for the capabilities being available on the web, no other paths we have to stealing fire from the gods, no other Promethean dreams. This platform is it, and we need the persistence & drive as a society to keep ourselves improving our shared interactive media form, to keep from being swallowed by the darkness that most computing brings in.
Google is entirely where they are because the web is a powerful capable rich interesting place, that was able to rise & grow & flourish without the typical platform gatekeepers.
In my view, Google's whole reason for making and continuing to fund Chrome have never ever changed: they want a great (and powerful, not small/retrogressive) open web. Because if the web falters, the proprietary platforms from yesterday can come back & reassert their control. Because if the web falters, information will be someplace where a Google can't index and link you to it.
Google's existence depends entirely upon the web being a good place, a place for good sites, that people want to find & go to. The couple hundred million a year Google pays engineers to make the web good is a very affordable existential hedge, upon which the entire company of rests.
A corollary to this is that attempts to tilt the web towards themselves - to take advantage o Chrome - risk poisoning the web & killing the golden goose. Which is why - imo - Google has taken web standards so seriously, and gone to such lengths to create an air of transparency around browser standards, starting the Intent to Ship process.
Right, those would have the biggest incentive. But I'm sure good fundraisers will be bale to even get some large companies that aren't engaging in the standards at any level to throw some money to support a standard web browser, if they can convince everyone that without this there won't be a good way for people to access their web sites.
> Currently, Safari and Firefox both make essentially all their revenue through default search agreements.
Safari is funded by Apple's hardware sales. It can afford to develop its own browser because it's table stakes for devices and gives Apple the ability to do deeper integrations and targeted performance optimizations. The search revenue is the cherry on top.
There's always the Opera model: attempt to sell inserted ads, fail, sell it to a Chinese holding company, and have future development funded by the Russians. What could possibly go wrong?
> Alternatively, a narrow reading of the proposed order is that this only applies to Google.
That doesn't seem like a narrow reading, but the only possible one. How could the order be applying to deals strictly between companies neither of which was the party of the lawsuit? That doesn't seem like anything that could possibly be within the court's powers.
* Only operating system vendors can ship web browsers. (But not Google.)
The USG in general seems to love giving Apple more monopoly power. This will effectively constrain browser development to just Apple and Microsoft, since as you note, the DOJ is also trying to regulate Firefox out of existence; and Apple has huge incentives to simply pause browser feature development (and has been dragging its feet on Safari for years).
Incredibly, this will also hamstring Android even further, since its parent company can't even make a web browser for it anymore! Only Apple, the Biden administration's favorite company, can do that kind of thing.
Seriously, first Apple's App Store is declared not a monopoly while the Play Store is, despite Android allowing alternative stores while iOS doesn't. Now Google is forbidden from developing web browsers while Apple is free to continue monopolizing browser engines on iOS and holding back the web from competing with native apps?
> Seriously, first Apple's App Store is declared not a monopoly while the Play Store is, despite Android allowing alternative stores while iOS doesn't.
1)Because Apple didn't conspire with (potential) competitors to Google Play - both cellular providers and device manufacturers - bribing them with payments and revenue sharing agreements on condition they not pre-load their own app stores, thus maintaining a monopoly that caused injury to Epic. Motorola is a competitor to Google Play. F-droid and whatever other alternative app stores are out there, are not. https://mashable.com/article/google-epic-antitrust-play-stor...
Nobody, and I mean nobody, considers "you can install non-play-store apps if you go deep into menus, click past scary warnings, and the app developer will not get access to a huge swath of APIs and toolkits" to be "competition" to Google Play.
2)The matter in Epic v. Google was about Epic's app being removed after they added in-app payments - forced to use Google for in-app payments because of the monopoly Google was actively maintaining - not "Google won't let us run an alternative app store."
3)Apple was not a defendant in Epic v Google. That was a separate case. In Epic v Apple, Epic lost on all but one of their claims - Apple was found to have violated California's Unfair Competition Law in barring app developers from "steering" users to purchase content in places other than in-app (and thus through Apple's payment processing and their 30% cut etc.)
Maybe the next time you can't figure out why something is the way it is, your reaction should be "I should try to learn about why this is, see what experts in this incredibly complicated field have to say on the matter, or at least google it and read major tech industry news coverage" instead of forming an incredibly strong opinion rooted in complete and total ignorance of the matter at hand.
> Chrome/Firefox/Safari all cost hundreds of millions of dollars a year to maintain.
The reason? Infinite[1] complexity. To Google that is a feature: as long as they can outspend competitors, they can control the complexity in their favor.
The question should not be "how do we fund development of operating system in a trench coat?", but rather "how much do we actually need to fetch and render HTML?" and the answer is in the ballpark of single digit FTEs.
In theory, we should expect browser complexity to converge on available funding, with the upside that webpages created two hours ago would continue working. In reality, some foundation, funded by majority chromium supporters, will be set up and distribute compensation for Google employees working on open-source Chromium "totally on their free time, mr. prosecutor".
Parity with other application platforms demands more than just showing static HTML. Imagine the world with no XMLHTTPRequest because Microsoft wasn't allowed to innovate on the web.
> Directly charge users for it. This is effectively a non-starter, because the vast majority of people aren't willing to pay for it.
I would gladly pay for Firefox, but I only found a way to donate to Mozilla, which also finances many other things that I am not interested in.
> Insert ads or sell user data - users also hate this, it's probably not legal in the EU, and it may not be legal in most of the US in the future either.
Adds are legal, but "selling user data" is more tricky. Many news websites are currently paywalling access to their website unless a monthly fee is paid. As far as I know, there has been no ruling yet whether that is legal.
> Use the browser as a platform to push some product that does make money - a non-Google search engine? A social network? An LLM interface?
Firefox tried to sell a VPN product that way, but it was not priced competitively.
Just like scraping the entire Web for AI training is totally fair use? Enjoy ten years of lawsuits to prove it. Web sites would never tolerate ads being inserted that don't pay them.
Page 12 is also very interesting to me personally, as it contains orders mandating the opening of Google’s search index to their competitors. I had been wondering if that would make it in there and am happy to see it land.
Of course these are things they'll say publicly. And they'll point out all the bad results and none of the good ones. None of what they wrote should be surprising, but also it's not particularly novel/interesting. (Also they're framing a few good things as if they're bad for the users...)
I agree. The DOJ should stick to imposing fines or enforcing rules on things like bundling or pricing. Not arbitrarily breaking companies up where there's no clear business model.
It's all part of an ecosystem. Chrome is a vehicle in which users are roped into their search engine and ads. And their search engine and ads also push users into Chrome. It's all cyclical.
Breaking off any chunk weakens the link between them and locks users into their ecosystem less. Rome wasn't built in a day, and monopolies aren't destroyed in one either.
Apple's VP literally said that no amount of money would make them choose Bing over Google because Google is the best search engine...
Lets be real, no one needs to be "roped into" using Google search. People have Bing and Edge shoved down their throats and still use Chrome and Google...
A company that operates a monopoly having massive advantages against competitors isn't the argument you think it is. Courts in every developed country on earth see your statement and say "That's precisely why we're breaking this company up."
Every single time a monopoly forms, people say "It's not a monopoly. They're just better than the others and nobody wants the competition." They never realize that's the textbook example of a monopoly.
So what advantages does Google have over Bing apart from simply being a better product?
Microsoft is worth almost double what Google/Alphabet is, has larger desktop operating market share than Chrome has browser market share, forces Edge and Bing down their users throats leveraging their operating system yet has far less traction. Surely MS should be able to outspend and outcompete because they're bigger and a monopolist as well, right?
I believe the point OP is trying to make is, Google Search and Google Ads are a better product _because_ they're a monopoly.
For both search and ads, user data is what improves the quality and revenue earned. Microsoft, with its small percentage of search queries overall, doesn't have that data and could never get as good as Google in those markets.
Because MS and Apple ran a bunch of ads painting Google as untrustworthy custodians of user data and that unsubstantiated claim stuck with certain segments of the population?
I'm quite weirded out about the part about sharing google's data with other companies to allow competition. Yes, sharing my data allows other companies to advertise to me and to monetize my interests. No, I don't want that. I don't even want google to do that.
Technically he can't run again so he doesn't need any money for his own campaign. However, he might reward donations to his friends in the MAGA Cinematic Universe.
The US constitution would allow him to "run" ( usually it's coast ) as Vice President to the next POTUS .. and that would also allow him one day less than two years as POTUS should the VP be required to take over for the sitting President.
Realistically Trump most likely lacks any interest once his various and sundry pending felony and other charges have been quashed or voided by immunity grants, etc.
If he were to do a Medvedev/Putin-style ticket, the least he could do by way of acknowledgement would be to have his loyal "President" get filmed dancing to Kombinatsiya's "Russian Girls" (1989).
I can't say for certain, I'm Australian and don't work with the US political admin (ie no inside line) but there's certainly been US insiders that have strongly hinted dodging massive mounting legal trouble was a major motivation for Trump to run again.
To be clear they may have been deadly serious, seriously joking, or both at the same time .. it's just that good a fit as a theory.
- All Google consumer devices and products (Pixel, Chrome, Android, Nest)
- Search
- Ads
- YouTube
Search, Ads and YouTube could all survive and prosper on their own and then the Google devices company can pursue a similar strategy to Apple, have devices pay for software.
The way you write this implies that it is somehow an intrinsic fault of the DoJ and not the fault of monopolists like Google with the massive resources to slow walk these kinds of things, or the effective lobbying of the Obama administration followed by four chaotic years of Trump.
Never forget that corruption is always to blame for these failures, not the noble people who try and fix these things with flawed institutions.
> Never forget that corruption is always to blame for these failures, not the noble people who try and fix these things with flawed institutions.
This is dogmatism. You're implying that those working for the government are inherently more noble than the rest, and that only private enterprise is flawed. To the contrary, I am implying nothing, just pointing out that the DOJ is late to the game. This would have meant something a decade ago when Google absolutely dominated. But they're being nipped at by a thousand different companies right now.
The solution should just be to force browsers to support profile migration from one browser to another.
And generally, they should just pass laws that enforce interoperability in the software world, from OS to social networks, users should always be allowed to easily migrate.
The government has so many tools for enforcement it's puzzling why they insist on arbitrarily breaking up and creating new companies as if they're capable of determining what business models will work or not.
Here's a bet: they are offloading a legal liability. Within 12 months someone reverse engineers the binaries and show that they were siphoning out all keystroke data, or it has an official remote backdoor or something equally horrendous.
This has already been discussed extensively in prior threads, but the biggest question is, how does a spun-off Chrome get funded?
Chrome/Firefox/Safari all cost hundreds of millions of dollars a year to maintain. Currently, Safari and Firefox both make essentially all their revenue through default search agreements. Chrome, Edge, and now Brave are produced by companies that also own the search engines, so they're essentially a loss-generating product, that exist because they cancel out distribution costs that Google and Microsoft would otherwise have to pay other browsers.
But the DOJ order is also asking to ban payments between search engines and browser makers: > As detailed in Section IV, the PFJ prohibits Google from providing third parties something of value (including financial payments) in order to make Google the default general search engine or otherwise discouraging those third parties from offering competing search products
With that revenue gone, the only real options to fund a browser are:
* Directly charge users for it. This is effectively a non-starter, because the vast majority of people aren't willing to pay for it.
* Insert ads or sell user data - users also hate this, it's probably not legal in the EU, and it may not be legal in most of the US in the future either.
* Use the browser as a platform to push some product that does make money - a non-Google search engine? A social network? An LLM interface?
Alternatively, a narrow reading of the proposed order is that this only applies to Google. In that case, perhaps Bing or OpenAI takes over all the distribution agreements and becomes the top search engine. Whether that's better for consumers seems fairly questionable.
The most likely answer is that it will take the Linux model, with a foundation put together to fund Chrome's development. Then all of the parties interested in people having access to the Web, including Google, will have an incentive to fund this without requiring it to push their specific products.
Chrome currently has far more paid full time engineers than the linux kernel does. I struggle to see how they get paid - except again, by charging search engines to be the default browser or something.
Chrome does a lot of things. I know there are downsides and many people don't agree, but I think overall the browser/internet experience would benefit from simpler browsers that don't move so fast.
> I think overall the browser/internet experience would benefit from simpler browsers that don't move so fast.
I wish browsers moved faster so that I don't have to download so many native apps. Native mobile apps are monitoring me continuously, and way more opaquely than web apps. More importantly, they can't be thwarted by plugins. As a mobile Firefox and Desktop Chrome user, I wish browsers (especially FF) moved faster.
So, no - for privacy reasons I don't agree with your view.
IMO, Chrome does not move fast enough.
The fact of the matter is that the web has been dying because people have moved to mobile devices, where they prefer native apps.
If you're advocating for slower development of browsers, you're also advocating for the death of the open web.
Almost nothing Google ships at neck-breaking speed makes the web better, or faster, or a better open web.
Simpler browsers sound not good to me. It's a bit of a rallying cry on HN it feels like, often in sharper terms.
But computing is so intermediated. There's so many checks to do anything on an iPhone that isn't in the dead code your phone already runs. An Oculus has cool experiences, but we can't shape and share our own easily. There's always someone else's data center between you and your device today.
The web is largely still an experience of data centers too. But it's a neutral platform. Where we can go to any data-center we please. Where anyone can tap the amazing web platform & it's amazing APIs to build all kinds of cool experiences.
In a world where tech defines what the user wants for them, I feel so much like the web & every web platform API is stealing just a little more fire from the gods. It's promethean, giving to humanity prowess & capabilities we wouldn't otherwise have.
The pace is confusing. Sometimes things happen fast. Often they are left sort of unfinished. Fast & slow, fast & slow. I'd love if there was a huge source of funding the societies of the world were putting up to help make this critical human capability, to to fund long careful slow healing and helping as well as fancy new features (es2015/esm modules in the browser tool sooo long & still has so much to fix for example). These things are hard, complicated, and we try so hard to keep going forward without causing too much unfixable undislodgesble bad. But this spirit of bravery is necessary, to keep going. Simpler isn't good. The versatility of the web is too important. There's no other viable substitutes for the capabilities being available on the web, no other paths we have to stealing fire from the gods, no other Promethean dreams. This platform is it, and we need the persistence & drive as a society to keep ourselves improving our shared interactive media form, to keep from being swallowed by the darkness that most computing brings in.
I am not sure that is a good thing. Do we really need so many people working on it, or adding more and more features?
IMO more engineers = more bloat, rather than more engineers = a better product.
At the same time, if every company that actively make money from the web where to pitch in, we would have the most funded foundation in the world.
Google can keep engineers working on Chrome employed without having control over Chrome.
But why would they if they're forbidden from getting any benefit from Chrome?
A huge amount of their products require browser access, having a good UX to access them off in their best interest.
Why does everyone contribute to Linux?
Maybe AI changed this, but..
Google is entirely where they are because the web is a powerful capable rich interesting place, that was able to rise & grow & flourish without the typical platform gatekeepers.
In my view, Google's whole reason for making and continuing to fund Chrome have never ever changed: they want a great (and powerful, not small/retrogressive) open web. Because if the web falters, the proprietary platforms from yesterday can come back & reassert their control. Because if the web falters, information will be someplace where a Google can't index and link you to it.
Google's existence depends entirely upon the web being a good place, a place for good sites, that people want to find & go to. The couple hundred million a year Google pays engineers to make the web good is a very affordable existential hedge, upon which the entire company of rests.
A corollary to this is that attempts to tilt the web towards themselves - to take advantage o Chrome - risk poisoning the web & killing the golden goose. Which is why - imo - Google has taken web standards so seriously, and gone to such lengths to create an air of transparency around browser standards, starting the Intent to Ship process.
One minor nit, it will be all parties interested in influence over future web standards and their eventual implementation.
Right, those would have the biggest incentive. But I'm sure good fundraisers will be bale to even get some large companies that aren't engaging in the standards at any level to throw some money to support a standard web browser, if they can convince everyone that without this there won't be a good way for people to access their web sites.
> Currently, Safari and Firefox both make essentially all their revenue through default search agreements.
Safari is funded by Apple's hardware sales. It can afford to develop its own browser because it's table stakes for devices and gives Apple the ability to do deeper integrations and targeted performance optimizations. The search revenue is the cherry on top.
There's always the Opera model: attempt to sell inserted ads, fail, sell it to a Chinese holding company, and have future development funded by the Russians. What could possibly go wrong?
Can you please share a details about the part related to Russians? I used to be big fan of Opera browser, but don't follow theirs recent news
> Alternatively, a narrow reading of the proposed order is that this only applies to Google.
That doesn't seem like a narrow reading, but the only possible one. How could the order be applying to deals strictly between companies neither of which was the party of the lawsuit? That doesn't seem like anything that could possibly be within the court's powers.
Advertising deal with google/others to pay for full time staff along with volunteers?
And the underlying chromium will be maintained by all the browser companies that are using it
> Directly charge users for it. This is effectively a non-starter, because the vast majority of people aren't willing to pay for it.
Chrome already has paid offerings - chrome enterprise and educational products. It's quite common for enterprise customers to subsidize free tiers.
> This has already been discussed extensively in prior threads, but the biggest question is, how does a spun-off Chrome get funded?
How about... just don't fund them and let it "die"?
Everybody is using Chromium -- Microsoft, Google, Opera, Electron, etc.. Some of them will step up and fork chromium.
Or just don't fork Chromium at all and Google can make the upstream their recommended browser.
Unfortunately the real answer is:
* Only operating system vendors can ship web browsers. (But not Google.)
The USG in general seems to love giving Apple more monopoly power. This will effectively constrain browser development to just Apple and Microsoft, since as you note, the DOJ is also trying to regulate Firefox out of existence; and Apple has huge incentives to simply pause browser feature development (and has been dragging its feet on Safari for years).
Incredibly, this will also hamstring Android even further, since its parent company can't even make a web browser for it anymore! Only Apple, the Biden administration's favorite company, can do that kind of thing.
Seriously, first Apple's App Store is declared not a monopoly while the Play Store is, despite Android allowing alternative stores while iOS doesn't. Now Google is forbidden from developing web browsers while Apple is free to continue monopolizing browser engines on iOS and holding back the web from competing with native apps?
> Seriously, first Apple's App Store is declared not a monopoly while the Play Store is, despite Android allowing alternative stores while iOS doesn't.
1)Because Apple didn't conspire with (potential) competitors to Google Play - both cellular providers and device manufacturers - bribing them with payments and revenue sharing agreements on condition they not pre-load their own app stores, thus maintaining a monopoly that caused injury to Epic. Motorola is a competitor to Google Play. F-droid and whatever other alternative app stores are out there, are not. https://mashable.com/article/google-epic-antitrust-play-stor...
Nobody, and I mean nobody, considers "you can install non-play-store apps if you go deep into menus, click past scary warnings, and the app developer will not get access to a huge swath of APIs and toolkits" to be "competition" to Google Play.
2)The matter in Epic v. Google was about Epic's app being removed after they added in-app payments - forced to use Google for in-app payments because of the monopoly Google was actively maintaining - not "Google won't let us run an alternative app store."
3)Apple was not a defendant in Epic v Google. That was a separate case. In Epic v Apple, Epic lost on all but one of their claims - Apple was found to have violated California's Unfair Competition Law in barring app developers from "steering" users to purchase content in places other than in-app (and thus through Apple's payment processing and their 30% cut etc.)
Maybe the next time you can't figure out why something is the way it is, your reaction should be "I should try to learn about why this is, see what experts in this incredibly complicated field have to say on the matter, or at least google it and read major tech industry news coverage" instead of forming an incredibly strong opinion rooted in complete and total ignorance of the matter at hand.
> Chrome/Firefox/Safari all cost hundreds of millions of dollars a year to maintain.
The reason? Infinite[1] complexity. To Google that is a feature: as long as they can outspend competitors, they can control the complexity in their favor.
The question should not be "how do we fund development of operating system in a trench coat?", but rather "how much do we actually need to fetch and render HTML?" and the answer is in the ballpark of single digit FTEs.
In theory, we should expect browser complexity to converge on available funding, with the upside that webpages created two hours ago would continue working. In reality, some foundation, funded by majority chromium supporters, will be set up and distribute compensation for Google employees working on open-source Chromium "totally on their free time, mr. prosecutor".
[1]: https://xkcd.com/285/
Parity with other application platforms demands more than just showing static HTML. Imagine the world with no XMLHTTPRequest because Microsoft wasn't allowed to innovate on the web.
The same way ff does. Google will pay to be the main search engine and to ensure all their Web apps continue to work performantly.
> Directly charge users for it. This is effectively a non-starter, because the vast majority of people aren't willing to pay for it.
I would gladly pay for Firefox, but I only found a way to donate to Mozilla, which also finances many other things that I am not interested in.
> Insert ads or sell user data - users also hate this, it's probably not legal in the EU, and it may not be legal in most of the US in the future either.
Adds are legal, but "selling user data" is more tricky. Many news websites are currently paywalling access to their website unless a monthly fee is paid. As far as I know, there has been no ruling yet whether that is legal.
> Use the browser as a platform to push some product that does make money - a non-Google search engine? A social network? An LLM interface?
Firefox tried to sell a VPN product that way, but it was not priced competitively.
Display ad insertion would be legal and there are definitely ways to do it all client side.
Just like scraping the entire Web for AI training is totally fair use? Enjoy ten years of lawsuits to prove it. Web sites would never tolerate ads being inserted that don't pay them.
Page 12 is also very interesting to me personally, as it contains orders mandating the opening of Google’s search index to their competitors. I had been wondering if that would make it in there and am happy to see it land.
Google's response: "DOJ’s staggering proposal would hurt consumers and America’s global technological leadership" https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/public-policy/doj-s...
Of course these are things they'll say publicly. And they'll point out all the bad results and none of the good ones. None of what they wrote should be surprising, but also it's not particularly novel/interesting. (Also they're framing a few good things as if they're bad for the users...)
I wholeheartedly agree. What the hell is the DOJ thinking?
I agree. The DOJ should stick to imposing fines or enforcing rules on things like bundling or pricing. Not arbitrarily breaking companies up where there's no clear business model.
Would've been believable before the MV3 adblock ban fiasco. Now it's clear this browser doesn't care about the users.
Chrome is not the problem. Chrome is not even a symptom.
The problem is that the world's largest search engine is also the world's largest ad distributor.
Chopping off tentacles like Android or Chrome does nothing to slay the two-headed beast.
It's all part of an ecosystem. Chrome is a vehicle in which users are roped into their search engine and ads. And their search engine and ads also push users into Chrome. It's all cyclical.
Breaking off any chunk weakens the link between them and locks users into their ecosystem less. Rome wasn't built in a day, and monopolies aren't destroyed in one either.
Apple's VP literally said that no amount of money would make them choose Bing over Google because Google is the best search engine...
Lets be real, no one needs to be "roped into" using Google search. People have Bing and Edge shoved down their throats and still use Chrome and Google...
A company that operates a monopoly having massive advantages against competitors isn't the argument you think it is. Courts in every developed country on earth see your statement and say "That's precisely why we're breaking this company up."
Every single time a monopoly forms, people say "It's not a monopoly. They're just better than the others and nobody wants the competition." They never realize that's the textbook example of a monopoly.
So what advantages does Google have over Bing apart from simply being a better product?
Microsoft is worth almost double what Google/Alphabet is, has larger desktop operating market share than Chrome has browser market share, forces Edge and Bing down their users throats leveraging their operating system yet has far less traction. Surely MS should be able to outspend and outcompete because they're bigger and a monopolist as well, right?
I believe the point OP is trying to make is, Google Search and Google Ads are a better product _because_ they're a monopoly.
For both search and ads, user data is what improves the quality and revenue earned. Microsoft, with its small percentage of search queries overall, doesn't have that data and could never get as good as Google in those markets.
There's a bunch of other stuff in there about syndicating data (which admittedly I don't understand) that takes aim at the heart of search and ads.
Why would I want to slay one of our greatest technological companies?
Because MS and Apple ran a bunch of ads painting Google as untrustworthy custodians of user data and that unsubstantiated claim stuck with certain segments of the population?
I'm quite weirded out about the part about sharing google's data with other companies to allow competition. Yes, sharing my data allows other companies to advertise to me and to monetize my interests. No, I don't want that. I don't even want google to do that.
This will quietly die off after Jan 20. Nothing to see here.
Yep. Even if there were a case, it would be litigated in the courts for years.
The case is over. Are you even paying attention? They were found guilty. This is "sentencing" basically, the penalty phase.
They need to pay their tithe/donation to the administration first.
Trump is a lame duck. Donating to his campaign is useless.
They have one path for political redemption, and it’s to acquire Trump annd his allies’ companies and/or invest in their funds.
I wonder if a big enough ad spend at X would be enough.
How is he a lame duck?
Technically he can't run again so he doesn't need any money for his own campaign. However, he might reward donations to his friends in the MAGA Cinematic Universe.
The past 8 years have been a nonstop stream of "he can't" and "that'll cause a civil war."
I'm not sure why people are still expecting normalcy.
Where’s Warren G Harding when you need him!
I’m sure the constitution will be changed to allow Trump to remain President, one way or the other way.
Almost certainly not. If he runs it will be by ignoring the Constitution, and at that point we’re legitimately in civil war territory.
Exactly. He is not going to and he will not.
By the next election and after his second term ends, we'll see that all the extremely wild claims of:
"Trump is ending the constitution!"
"This will be the last election if Trump wins!"
"Trump will be a dictator!"
"Civil war is going to happen under Trump!"
All of this repeated ad-nauseam, will be forgotten and dismissed as complete hysterical nonsense.
The US constitution would allow him to "run" ( usually it's coast ) as Vice President to the next POTUS .. and that would also allow him one day less than two years as POTUS should the VP be required to take over for the sitting President.
Realistically Trump most likely lacks any interest once his various and sundry pending felony and other charges have been quashed or voided by immunity grants, etc.
If he were to do a Medvedev/Putin-style ticket, the least he could do by way of acknowledgement would be to have his loyal "President" get filmed dancing to Kombinatsiya's "Russian Girls" (1989).
Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6QLO7wXLKk
Does this mean he wouldn't have run this time if it weren't for his legal troubles?
I can't say for certain, I'm Australian and don't work with the US political admin (ie no inside line) but there's certainly been US insiders that have strongly hinted dodging massive mounting legal trouble was a major motivation for Trump to run again.
To be clear they may have been deadly serious, seriously joking, or both at the same time .. it's just that good a fit as a theory.
The Machiavellian move by Biden would have been a pardon conditioned on retiring from public service.
Many people are saying.
To ask the judge to force Google to spin off Chrome.
The judge still has to agree to it.
Discussion (1171 points, 2 days ago, 1387 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42177767
I wonder what’s going to happen to ChromeOS
If ChromeOS and Android end up in different companies it might prevent them from merging and thus lead to greater OS diversity.
A much better split would be:
Chrome + Display Ads Android + Playstore + App Ads
IMO the best split would be:
- All Google consumer devices and products (Pixel, Chrome, Android, Nest)
- Search
- Ads
- YouTube
Search, Ads and YouTube could all survive and prosper on their own and then the Google devices company can pursue a similar strategy to Apple, have devices pay for software.
How could search survive without ads? Charge users per search?
Search could still serve ads. It would just have to integrate with Google Ads in the same way a non-Google user would.
As usual DOJ is late to the party. Google is already facing competition and as it falters, the doj will use this as 'evidence' it was effective.
The way you write this implies that it is somehow an intrinsic fault of the DoJ and not the fault of monopolists like Google with the massive resources to slow walk these kinds of things, or the effective lobbying of the Obama administration followed by four chaotic years of Trump.
Never forget that corruption is always to blame for these failures, not the noble people who try and fix these things with flawed institutions.
It's fair to criticize the DoJ if they're enforcing anti-trust laws in a poor manner.
> Never forget that corruption is always to blame for these failures, not the noble people who try and fix these things with flawed institutions.
This is dogmatism. You're implying that those working for the government are inherently more noble than the rest, and that only private enterprise is flawed. To the contrary, I am implying nothing, just pointing out that the DOJ is late to the game. This would have meant something a decade ago when Google absolutely dominated. But they're being nipped at by a thousand different companies right now.
The solution should just be to force browsers to support profile migration from one browser to another.
And generally, they should just pass laws that enforce interoperability in the software world, from OS to social networks, users should always be allowed to easily migrate.
Totally agree.
The government has so many tools for enforcement it's puzzling why they insist on arbitrarily breaking up and creating new companies as if they're capable of determining what business models will work or not.
Weird that a Biden DOJ would do this.
Here's a bet: they are offloading a legal liability. Within 12 months someone reverse engineers the binaries and show that they were siphoning out all keystroke data, or it has an official remote backdoor or something equally horrendous.