Good. I want them to be angry about having to break up search and ads so they have to compete like everyone else again.
A man can dream…
this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2024
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Lets hope Lina Khan can force these antitrust suits through before Trump fires her
Because monopolies are only going to get worse under his rule
"Breaking them off would change their business models, raise the cost of devices, and undermine Android and Google Play in their robust competition with Apple’s iPhone and App Store," the company said.
Honestly I kind of agree. I think Apple needs breaking up too, or at least some serious regulation about their walled garden. Google needs to be broken up, but it does seem unfair without touching Apple.
If you look at how many things Google is dominating, it makes sense. You probably don't even think about how dominating they are, but they have global search, global email, global Android, global maps, global tracking of cars, global video service (YouTube), global language translate, global chrome os... It's really hard to even see anything Google is not dominating.
Apple... What, makes the best hardware and makes it's own operating system? That's about it.
The amount of data Google has on us is much worse than that science function has imagined. They are the big brother, knowing every intimate detail about billions of people.
And they have ties to the US intelligence service, and probably have given them direct access to all that data through some patriot act or whatever. It's fine but make no mistake here, apple is nothing compared to that.
"The government having unadulterated access to everyone's intimate data is fine."
Said 1984
Didn't really mean it's fine. More that I've accepted it. I really hope it changes but almost nobody cares enough about these things to stop using Google. Even when better alternatives exist, they rather have the convenience of default options.
Microsoft built their empire on simular foundations. Made a product that is pre-installed on all computers, forcing everyone to pay them money to own a laptop. It's brilliant financially. Windows is even free now, and it's funded by the collection of people's private, sensitive data.
It is 1984 but we don't actually care. :)
Is this a meme account?
Fair point but I think the unfairness to these companies is small potatoes compared to the unfairness to consumers with these companies’ monopolistic, anticompetitive, consumer-hostile behaviors.
I’m not so worried about unfairness to the companies. They have many billions of dollars in the bank. Even after breaking them up all the pieces would still have billions of dollars.
What I’m not so much worried about but puzzled at is exactly how you would break up something like Google or Apple. Do you make every single app its own company?
So for Google you would have Chrome, Android (sans Chrome), the Google Play Store, Google Search, YouTube, Google Cloud, Gmail, Google Ads… Making all of these into separate companies feels right but I don’t know how they would operate. Chrome on its own doesn’t make any money, for example, it’s just a free browser they use to steer people into their other services. Gmail also doesn’t make any money either, it’s just a vehicle for Google’s ads. Same goes for Search and YouTube. They’re all integrated into the same ad platform. Would each piece have to break off and start selling their own ads individually?
Also Android without Chrome sounds pretty bad. Tons of Android apps are using Chrome under the hood, so they would just stop working altogether.
I think the same story applies to Apple and their operating systems and services. Break them up and iOS just doesn’t work anymore. It would have to be completely rewritten and a lot of apps would as well.
I mostly disagree. I think most parts of Google would do fine on their own. And for something like Chrome, it's Chromium that really matters, which is open source. If Chrome as a separate entity can't survive (despite plenty of other browser companies existing), let it die. However I do think Google could just be split into a few companies, rather than each individual product.
Fundamentally, though, I think the strategies that companies like Google and Apple use are inherently anticompetitive. Using the resources of a large corporation to prop up a service or product means that nobody can compete in that space
If a service is necessary, but is only exists because a large corporation is using it for data extraction, then we need a better alternative.
I think the most difficult piece is something like YouTube. Personally, I think we need something open source and publicly funded to replace it.
Would you split the ad division apart from all the rest? Or would each piece (Chrome, Android, Search, YouTube) get part of the ad business?
The issue is that ads are the only thing that makes Google any money. Essentially everything Google does has only one purpose: to drive ad revenues.
And I flat out disagree that Chrome could make any money on its own. It is absolutely mediocre without all the integration into Google services. It would not be able to compete with Firefox on a level playing field.
Oh no! Anyways...
Google is a faceless corporation, how can it be angry?
Because your oligarchy has deemed companies are people, and you just haven't read the memo
Lol... it's funny how sometimes the reality seems like a simulation or a comic movie. The judge deciding against the Google monopoly is called Mehta. Remove the letter "h" to see this fun fact.
It's just a curiosity I had to point out. Good thing that Google's influence will become smaller. I mean, in a scale between 0 and 10, Google's power is going from 10 to 9.5 (Google still has Android, Google search, Google ads, among many other things), but it's better than 10.
The judge deciding is called Mehta
Ah man, the writers are being too on the nose this season
I am curious how selling it would even work when Chromium is a BSD license. Or do they only have to sell Chrome and not Chromium?
If it's chrominum that might explain the announcement that they're killing chromeOS.
chromium is the problem.
TL;DR;
They have an effective monopoly and have repeatedly shown they will use it to serve their needs.
One concrete way is the level of control that google has over the inner workings on the rendering engine giving it significant control over web standards.
A real life example fo this is the controversy around the JPEG-XL format, google decides to drop support for it, doing so removes support for every single browser based on the rendering engine in chromium (eventually).
Now, other browsers ( firefox for example) have to decide if it's worth it to add in and maintain support for a format that will only work in their rendering engine.
Sounds like a win right? now firefox has a feature that chrome doesn't.
Now, developers/businesses have a choice.
- A: Add/Maintain/Test features that use the JPEG-XL format exclusively, this feature is only available to the Y% of people not using a chromium based browser.
- B: Use some other format that is supported in chrome (and other browser).
- C: Do A with B as a fail-over, adding additional cost to development/maintenance and testing.
In almost all circumstances, B is the fiscally responsible option, which means that google has effective control over web standards and their implementation.
A non rendering engine example is ad-blockers, google decides there are underlying security issues with how some integrations with the web browser works, this "just so happens" to break how almost all decent adblocking is done at a browser level.
They go ahead and create an updated version of the specification that describes how this interaction works, implement this upstream and suddenly all chromium based browsers now can't use the most effective adblockers.
Technically the downstream browsers could do some shenanigans to keep the ability to block ads effectively , but the technical and monetary barriers to such an endeavour are so high it is absolutely not worth it.
There is more technical nuance to this story, the security issues are real in V2 but the need to break adblockers in process of fixing these issues is debatable.
yep, that's why I don't think selling chrome will fix the issue.
Depends on what issue they are trying to fix.
Chromium is a problem but it doesn't seem like that's what they are trying to address here.
I was talking about the technical monopoly wrt to rendering engines and web standards, Chromium is a problem but it doesn't seem like that's what they are trying to address here.
From that article it seems like they might be trying to separate chrome in hopes that that will enable the new owners to "decouple" it from google search.
If that's the case it's a dumb move if it's the only move they make, all that would happen is google would just build the new owners a scrooge mcduck swimming pool to make google the default search. Same thing they do with firefox.
It even says that in the article.
It would be interesting to see how they'd deal with the decoupling of the built in google proprietary panopticon bullshit.
They'd struggle to shift that over to chromium without upsetting...well..everyone.
In what way, do you think?
most browsers are based on chromium. if Google sells Chrome they still control chromium, and through chromium they control chrome, brave, Edge etc. what I'm saying is that Google selling chrome won't really fix anything.
I'm curious about this analysis, because as a lay person to the business and its relationship to the tech, I have no opinion either way currently. That is to say, I neither agree nor disagree with what you're saying.
What I am is interested in why this string of comments is being down voted without comment, and I'd love to hear a bit more as to why from anyone who has some more to contribute.
I'm not sure myself what people disagree about. I'd celebrate if Google loses chrome, but I don't think it would fix the problem of Google seemingly controlling all Browsers except Firefox and Safari. if I'm wrong about something id love to hear about it, I try to be open-minded and I have to admit I don't know /that/ much about this topic.