Note: Original report by Bloomberg, article by Reuters proxied by Neuters to bypass paywall.
Stock didn’t drop
It will never happen. But it would be a good thing for the openness of the web. More Firefox, less Chrome.
Yep.
Tech companies have extreme “Fuck You” money. They have learned a lot from the past two decades of Antitrust acts.
That politician is either going to quickly change their mind with some bribes, or watch their entire life disappear with an army of lawyers or paid off peers shutting them down.
Wouldn’t it put Firefox on a pickle? Say Chrome gets bought out of Google’s hands, would they still bother to pay half a billion to Firefox to stay as the default search engine? Could Firefox survive being financially independent?
I’d assume they would be willing to pay even more.
How do you force someone to sell something thats open source?
Can the government please force me to sell my open source software too? If they could be my sales department, I’d love that. Pretty please.
Chromium is open source, Google bases their Chrome off of it, but Chrome is not open source.
OK but 98% of chrome is open source then? Who would buy it?
I don’t see how a “Chrome” company would make any money. Now if the Chrome Company also owned ChromeOS and Chromebooks that might be interesting. But it could also be bad, because such a company would probably want to take a cut of every Chromebook in order to actually make money.
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[Google controls how people view the internet]
This doesn’t quite make sense. How does Chrome “control how people view the internet”? Isn’t html/css the main thing that controls how people view the internet?
[ and what ads they see in part through its Chrome browser, which typically uses Google search,]
But it is trivial to change your default search agent right?
Is this move something we should view as a good thing, and if so, then why?
Breaking up monopolies is a good thing, and Google arguably holds too much power. Chromium is being used in 70% of browsers, and the decision how to implement and develop web standards are all in the hand of one for profit company, which had little interest in keeping things open and accessible (and private).
A quote from this Register article sums it up nicely:
What we are forced to assume in turn is that Chrome is built by the professional developers working for an ad agency with the primary goal of building a web browser that serves the needs of other professional developers working for the ad agency’s prospective clients.
Chromium is being used in 70% of browsers
To me, I don’t think that should be an issue in anything. That’s up to browser makers. They are able to use whatever they want, and they will use whatever is easiest/best for their usage. They are also free to use WebKit (Safari’s engine), Gecko (Mozilla), or roll their own. This just sounds like you want to punish someone because they made something everyone preferred just because everyone preferred it.
It’s different when you are “forced” to use it (use ours or we won’t let you on our devices, like iOS, or use ours and we will lower/cut our fees for other things you want/need, like many different companies). But when the public is truly free to use what they want and they all want the same thing, then it shouldn’t be used as a reason to punish them.
Chrome has a massive market share and Google abuses that market share by breaking web standards, and pushing people towards Chrome because “the competition doesn’t work”.
They act in bad faith and abuse their position to more deeply entrench their position in anticompetitive monopolistic ways.
That’s the Crux of it.
Google abuses that market share by breaking web standards,
Has this actually happened? Are there examples?
Essentially, everything is Chrome, Firefox or Safari.
Brave, Edge etc are chrome.
Most people are using chrome.
Google controlling chrome controls what the vast majority of people use to see the internet, and then they change chrome to make it harder for you to block ads that they want to show.
There’s no reason for chrome to break ad blockers unless it’s owned by an ad company.
Edit: Google done some other shady things by owning it in the past as well.
Steam, Spotify, Discord. Whoops, all Chromium.
HA!
What a joke.
Yes, regulate the web browsers where you can just download librewolf or brave, but don’t do anything about the criminal ISPs and wireless network service providers.
I know, right? Why deal with Problem X when Problem Y also exists?
Except you’re not dealing with anything. What do you think happens once Google sells Chrome? They release a new browser a month later, and it will be better than Chrome because nobody has the manpower to develop a web browser at the same speed as Google. This is a waste of time.
I’d assume the ruling would also stipulate that they don’t develop a new browser for X years. Otherwise they could be right back in a day by forking Chromium.
So you’re saying a company should be prohibited from developing a product because it might be better than the competition? I don’t think you guys even realize what you’re advocating for.
I do. The exact reason this legal framework is in place
Can’t argue with that. Have a nice day.
And whoever buys it won’t also have some kind of ulterior motive? Chrome isn’t likely to be a money-maker on its own. If it were, Firefox would have less trouble staying afloat. Anyone who buys Chrome most likely will have plans for it that are no more in the end-user’s best interest than Google’s.
It’s not about dispelling any ulterior motive. The idea of anti-monopoly enforcement actions is that if the “business ecosystem” is good and healthy, then other companies who don’t own Chrome will be able to compete with whoever owns Chrome, giving the consumer choice that people who like the free market say will reduce consumer exploitation. (If you can’t tell from my tone, I am dubious, at best, of this logic)
Yeah any company controlled by the rich will act immorally
We can at least make sure it’s multiple companies who will fight each other instead of one supreme leader megacorp
Sprint merged with TMobile
Better hurry, Trump’s rubber stamp DOJ will kill this faster than a cop encountering a dog.
For the right price.
LoL they won’t, even if they buy it for 1 trillion dollar
If this happens, I’d be interested in seeing how this effects ChromeOS. I don’t use it but my mom does.
Also, if you’re confused as to why ChromeOS would be effected, while it’s based on Gentoo Linux, ChromeOS uses a modified version of Chrome as it’s Desktop Environment.
Its based on debian now :(
Depending on what version
According to Wikipedia, it’s still based on Gentoo, it just uses Debian for running Linux applications in Crostini.
Oh go figure, my bad :P
Yes I would like to know what that means for ChromeOS and Chromebooks. If the new “Chrome” company got ChromeOS also that would be huge. But if that is not a requirement Google could just put another Chromium browser in ChromeOS. They could also continue to sell Chromebooks but based on a ChromiumOS fork.
Lit. It’s a good ask although it’s not clear what separation means here. Not going to hold my breath, the big corpos seem to usually win these kind of games.
Chrome is now owned by a company, owned by a company, owned by another company, that is owned by Google.
And even in the case where there is actual separation, and competition, it will only be temporary!
If they split Google, MS, Apple, Meta and Amazon all simultaneously, with some condition for the splinters to not merge back, and that contaminating the results of their allowed mergers, there may be good outcomes.
Or there may not. It’s about people, not laws, after all.
Why doesn’t this have sprint?
Sprint was not a splinter of ATT.
Thanks to this thread TIL it was one of the few serious competitors to ATTs monopoly.
Southern Pacific Communications and introduction of Sprint
Sprint also traces its roots back to the Southern Pacific Railroad (SPR), which was founded in the 1860s as a subsidiary of the Southern Pacific Company (SPC). The company operated thousands of miles of track as well as telegraph wire that ran along those tracks. In the early 1970s, the company began looking for ways to use its existing communications lines for long-distance calling. This division of the business was named the Southern Pacific Communications Company. By the mid 1970s, SPC was beginning to take business away from AT&T, which held a monopoly at the time. A number of lawsuits between SPC and AT&T took place throughout the 1970s; the majority were decided in favor of increased competition.Prior attempts at offering long-distance voice services had not been approved by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC), although a fax service (called SpeedFAX) was permitted..
In the mid-1970s, SPC held a contest to select a new name for the company. The winning entry was “SPRINT”, an acronym for “Southern Pacific Railroad Internal Networking Telephony”.
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It’s like they’re a company pretending to be another company, disguised as another company. Tropic Thunder all the way down.
Ugh. Just link to Reuters.
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Then leave that to every one else to deal with; don’t make other people wear your tin-foil hat. Or just start your own community and call it “Dot’s Offbrand Extravaganza” or something.
don’t make other people wear your tin-foil hat
The words, they mean nothing!
Pretty sure this is more about access and performance than privacy. I never knew about this site before, but damn, a news article that only contains words on a page and loads quickly? I thought news websites were supposed to be hostile to users?
🥴
It has a soft paywall.
I think the common practice is to link to the original in the URL bar and then use the body text to do paywall/loginwall removals.
I heard the same for Android and I was pretty supportive of the sentiment until I listened to the Android Faithful podcast episode discussing it…
If Google doesn’t develop Android, nobody will. Whoever buys Android, we don’t know if they will maintain the AOSP. Android has been an equal parts rollercoaster of good and bad ideas thanks to Google, but it has had someone do that…
Maybe LineageOS could take over, but that’s just insane wishful thinking.
Nokia, Siemens, Oracle, Linux Foundation, Tesla, IBM, OpenAI…there a hundreds of companies wealthy enough in that space that would not pose a consumer protection issue.
Fair point. I don’t think I thought of this lol.
Google will bribe trump and this’ll be undone immediately
That would be the logical thing according to common sense and probably according to pichai a few weeks ago, but trump just nominated an anti big tech and musk friend to the FCC. musk is behind almost everybody in ai and autonomous cars so he’ll definitely push to hamper all competitors.
Sure, we don’t know how far would they go or how long will musk keep having white house influence and I personally think breaking up google is now off the table, but I don’t think they will get off the hook too easily.
So surely a very big bribe.
Google is such a good company, one the best. Everybody says it. I was just talking to John Google the other day, and he tells me, no really he did, he tells me we’re going to do amazing things together. Oogles of googles. That’s what we’ll sell. Everybody will know about google by this time next year. It’s true.
God damnit.
<Fellates microphone>
…I mean, you do you buddy.
But (s)he is doing the microphone!
Oogles of googles
Google: furiously writing down cereal ideas
You forgot the unrelated rant in the middle about toasters being too dark these days or some shit.
And a series of words that sounds kinda like a complex sentence when you listen to it, but actually means nothing whatsoever
And he says to me… a very smart guy, Mark, he’s really doing… he’s really got to show… when he does things he really does them, you know, like he really does, very impressive, very modern
He also didn’t say his name three times in 10 seconds. Then sort of fade off and vaguely look off into the distance.
They said to me Donald, Donald, they said Donald, they do amazing things, real bigly things, my father, my father, said to me Donald, they do big things Google land. Really good things… Yeah… Big things…
I love to see professionals in action.
That’s craft(wo)manship right there.
Username checks out
