Justice Department is 100% lobbing this over to JD Vance’s buddy Peter Thiel who’s going to enshittify it even further and turn it with its massive install base into a tool for techno-fascism.
Justice Department asks judge to order Google the "immediate" sale of Chrome
Submitted 4 weeks ago by cm0002@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.techspot.com/news/107215-justice-department-asks-dc-judge-order-immediate-sale.html
Comments
TheTechnician27@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
biofaust@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
I must say that, as a European using a Firefox fork for my daily browsing while waiting for Ladybird, I don’t see that outcome as completely negative: Google, somehow, in America has kept a completely unjustified good vibes feeling surrounding itself. while Thiel is much more evil in the public eye.
If Chrome is associated with him in anyway it can become a more lucid image of itself.
TheTechnician27@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
I really don’t think this is true. It might push some politically engaged users to Firefox, but unlike Musk, most people don’t know who Thiel is, and as long as he keeps it that way, nobody will care.
green@feddit.nl 4 weeks ago
Acceleration"ism" does not work.
If the USA has not taught you this, after this reckless takeover, nothing will save you.
aeternum@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 weeks ago
Ladybird can’t come fast enough.
lemmeBe@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
Same workflow/expectation state. ⏳
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
Please, do it! That’s going to eviscerate Chrome’s userbase and push these Chromium browsers to fork so fast it’ll make his head spin.
pivot_root@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
You’re putting way too much faith in the typical consumer. Enshittifying Chrome even more would piss its users off, but inertia and its market dominance would keep most of them continuing to use it while complaining about how bad it is.
Remember: It took 8 years for Chrome to drag Internet Explorer to the point where less than 10% of people actually used it. And that’s with Firefox already being a competitor to it for years.
homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
einlander@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Look at all their lips. See how they look like they are ready to kiss or suck something? Now loon at Pichai. Just smiling instead of getting ready to receive a load. He bent the knee, but not far enough.
homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Yeah, that’s probably the difference
AtariDump@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
altima_neo@lemmy.zip 4 weeks ago
The rest look like they got some boots to shine real good!
floo@retrolemmy.com 4 weeks ago
They’re all dickhead, but he actually looks like one. So do his weird “space” ships.
FoxyFerengi@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
Bezos isn’t the ceo of Google, Sundar Pichai is
billiam0202@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Yeah, but we’re not talking about Amazon guy, we’re talking about Google guy.
Something about him is different, but I’m not white sure what it could be.
fuzzywombat@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Which company would buy Chrome from Google? I just can’t think of a single tech company that could be an improvement over Google owning Chrome.
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Amazon
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Apple
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Meta
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Microsoft
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Oracle
What about media companies? I don’t see consumers benefiting from this.
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Comcast
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Disney
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Netflix
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Viacom
What about telecom? I still don’t see consumers benefiting from this.
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AT&T
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T-Mobile
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Verizon
What about foreign companies? Will they be even allowed to buy Chrome? I’m not sure.
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LG
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Philips
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Samsung
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Sony
The more I think about it, this won’t end well.
jackyard@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Chromium is already there and companies like Microsoft have their own forks so… Yeah I think there’s no point of buying Chrome.
rob_t_firefly@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
It’s the most popular web browser in the world. Direct access to the browser windows and browsing data of the majority of Internet users would be the point.
rhadamanth_nemes@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Sell it to IBM so they can end all support lol
madis@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
Of those companies, Apple seems like the best option, though I am not fully sure why they’d want to, they already have a browser with a relative market share dominance.
gamer@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
Apple seems like the best option due to their business goals (privacy).
Lol. Lmao, even.
Sorry for the flippant comment, but it’s so incredibly wrong that I need to highlight the ridiculousness. TBF to you, it’s a common misconception due to Apple marketing’s lies, and our regulatory agencies unable/unwilling to do anything about companies that lie like Apple does.
Microsoft would be even worse.
The best outcome IMO is to kill Chrome, Edge, AND Safari, and force users to scatter and find an alternative on their own. There will need to be some way to prevent all big tech from trying to compete here too (Facebook, Amazon, etc), as those are incentivized to monopolize exactly like Google did, and we shouldn’t have to wait another 2 decades for the government to do something about it.
There will be some growing pains as people initially end up on shitty/scammy browsers, but eventually the market will do its thing and browser devs will compete for marketshare.
Smokeless7048@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Apples business isn’t privacy. Apples business is selling privacy.
rothaine@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
Is Microsoft even eligible? Wasn’t their anti-trust suit over IE basically about this same thing?
rippersnapper@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
Sell it to Canonical
CCMan1701A@startrek.website 4 weeks ago
Stellantis
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cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 weeks ago
the doj doesn’t care about monopolies; the doj just wants to punish people who don’t push fascist agendas.
RightEdofer@lemmy.ca 4 weeks ago
Google’s ad network and YouTube are pushing the agenda more than pretty much everyone.
finitebanjo@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
I thought so too because I only get horrific conservative nonsense from their platforms but turns out they’ve been vearing left lately, delisting conservative news and banning far right advertisers.
Xanza@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
They’re an open platform. Anyone can buy ad time on their platforms. It has nothing to do with Google and everything to do with people buying ad time.
If you’re going to be pissed, then be pissed. Just be right.
gamer@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
Not true. This lawsuit has been in the works for a long time. IIRC the investigation started towards the end up the first Trump admin, was completed, brought to trial, and won by the Biden admin, and now is being completed under Trump again.
Don’t believe the MAGA lies about government agencies being partisan hacks. They’re generally staffed by people who believe in the mission and put that ahead of politics. Under Trump, a lot of good people are leaving, but the ones playing the loyalty game can stay and keep working.
Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Solution: Create an open source foundation, cram the board with Google employees
madis@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
As long as they are doing the browser work independently from Google (meaning no Google integration), doesn’t sound like a bad thing.
theterrasque@infosec.pub 4 weeks ago
And then they can brand a version of chromium, call it shiny or something
boughtmysoul@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
A direct “donation” to Trump would instantly fix this.
InFerNo@lemmy.ml 4 weeks ago
Microsoft Chrome
Meta Chrome
Amazon Chrome
Apple Chrome
Sell to who though
brygphilomena@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 weeks ago
X Chrome
Ughhhhhhh
Mbourgon@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
That…makes a horrible amount of sense.
ZombiFrancis@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
ByteDance shell company Chrome.
Geodad@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
Google should do the power play and completely open source the browser.
madis@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
But Chrome is already just Chromium with some binary blobs. Chromium itself even has sync and Google services at this point.
Besides, what would that change in regards to who develops it?
barkingspiders@infosec.pub 4 weeks ago
I think this is good news which seems hard to believe right now. I’m sure someone will find a way to make this terrible but on it’s face we are watching an important anti-trust ruling take place. Google’s monopoly on the browser is dangerous and unhealthy. Taking it away from them is absolutely the right thing to do. Who inherits the power over the single browser used by most of the world remains to be seen though.
ikidd@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
I’d cheer if I thought this was anything except a blackmail play when a Trump administration is now involved. They’ll buy him off and it’ll all be back to status quo by fall.
iAvicenna@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
or pay a generous fee of %0.00001 of your yearly earnings to make it go away
singletona@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Thus the price of collaboration. You are not rewarded, you simply draw attention to yourself as someone with wealth they can pillage.
ShittyBeatlesFCPres@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
I don’t really get what selling Chrome and Android would accomplish. I’m all for breaking up tech monopolies but both of those projects are mostly open source that get proprietary Google crap and (for Android, at least, some monopolistic behavior like requiring what’s preinstalled, which is fine to ban).
I don’t work on ad-supported projects so I may be out of my element but it seems like what would actually help end the monopolistic behavior is requiring Google (and Facebook) to spin off their ad network businesses. The monopoly problem isn’t Chromium or AOSP or that Google runs ad-supported search. It’s that if [insert random site] wants ads, they typically use AdSense. If Facebook and Google want to run ad-supported services, fine. But they shouldn’t also also be the middlemen for advertisers who want to run ads on third party sites. That’s a recipe for monopolistic behavior.
In my ideal world, there would be no targeted ads at all and advertisers had to sponsor — and were so partly responsible for — the specific content they want to be associated with. But that probably isn’t going to happen since every politician is an advertiser that wants to launder their sponsorships through a middleman.
sbv@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
I don’t really get what selling Chrome and Android would accomplish.
There was a leak of Google’s old page ranking algorithm (not PageRank, but how they change the order of results on search) - it looked like they used a bunch of signals from Chrome about the amount of time users spend on a page, how quickly they go back, etc. Chrome gives the search side of the business an advantage.
Conversely, Android feeds a bunch of extra data to the ad business about what people do in real life.
Both products give the rest of Alphabet a significant advantage over their competitors, and make it harder for new entrants to get a foothold.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
requiring Google (and Facebook) to spin off their ad network businesses
That is their business. Everything else exists to bring more value to that business:
- AOSP - ads in the browser (search engine) and app store
- Chrome - ads in the search engine, and nudge people toward other Google products to hoover up data to serve more ads
And so on. Google and Meta are ad companies that drive traffic to their ads through software services.
The point in forcing them out of certain businesses is to open them up to more competition. They can keep ad margins high due to sheer volume of eyeballs coming from their other services. Gutting those services means they need to provide better value to stay competitive.
Idk if it’ll work, but stripping out the browser is likely good overall for the open web.
bdonvr@thelemmy.club 4 weeks ago
Google gets to control the source code, what additions are added, and what features don’t get into it.
Yes technically some organization could fork it and then maintain a fork themselves. But it’s a huge undertaking that almost nobody has the money to fund. Browsers are free so there’s really not a lot of monetization schemes for browsers.
So nobody as far as I know has really been able to maintain a hard fork of chromium for very long. Remember, every change you make then has to be maintained by you and then you have to keep it up to date with the chromium master tree while also keeping all of your changes compatible. It is a big undertaking almost as big as modern operating systems. Browsers are just too complicated so Google in this position does still have a monopoly that’s very hard to fight.
Almost all browsers other than Safari and Firefox are based on Chromium, which gives Google a ton of control.
reddig33@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Spinning them off into their own independent companies would make more sense than a sale to another party.
flop_leash_973@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
It would be better to not allow Google to have a major stack in the control of the Chromium project itself. Same for Android, force them to spin AOSP off into a nonprofit or sell it to EFF or something and forbid them from having a huge stake in it.
Let them use it for their own products, but remove their financial influence over the underlying software.
rippersnapper@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
Spinning off AOSP into something like Mozilla would massively boost its appeal. I myself left android cuz of privacy issues (no I can’t use GrapheneOS, I need access to my banking apps).
LoveSausage@discuss.tchncs.de 4 weeks ago
Use shit banking apps on GOS from 6 of them from 3 countries , no issus what so ever.
synapse1278@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
I never had problems with banking apps on GrapheneOS, 3 different apps, all work totally fine.
avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 4 weeks ago
I somehow don’t believe this is going to happen. But if it does, sell it to Mozilla?
biofaust@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Selling it means receiving money for it. Mozilla without Google support, which at that point would be lacking, wouldn’t have the means.
avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 4 weeks ago
They could sell it for $1 if they wanted to.
Also I think Mozilla is self sustainable from investment income from its endowment. Could be wrong.
Ledericas@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
mozilla doesnt have money, they are so desperate now, they are lowkey selling some data.
WormFood@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
the browser itself doesn’t matter. Google have had 10 years to do what they want with the specs for html, CSS and JavaScript, to define everything from browser extension APIs to the http protocol itself. they have won. not only have they spent a decade architecting the web in a way that mostly benefits them, they have made those specifications so bloated and complicated that nobody can develop a competitor from scratch. it took years to undo the damage wrought by ie6’s stagnation but this is different. this shit can’t be undone. it’s fucked forever
spark947@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
Just make them put support for manifest v2 back.
Reverendender@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
I guess Google didn’t bribe hard enough
DarkDarkHouse@lemmy.sdf.org 4 weeks ago
There are still Trump critics on YouTube.
finitebanjo@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
You know, I always assumed they were conservative biased because for me personally they always pushed the most disgusting far right garbage in reccomended and adverts for over a decade, but I looked it up and I guess Google does have an anti-conservative bias in their news listings.
TIL.
Ulrich@feddit.org 4 weeks ago
It’s not done yet. I highly doubt it ever will be either.