Note: Original report by Bloomberg, article by Reuters proxied by Neuters to bypass paywall.
They are going to ask a judge like they have no fucking balls.
It’s called “Distribution of Power”.
We should be thankful it’s still here.Distribution of power into corporate hands. Oh, im willing to bet it is here to stay.
HA!
What a joke.
Sell off? So who will buy
The Onion
Microsoft
doubtful. they replaced trident (in house engine) with chromium for edge because of the cost of maintenance.
they wouldn’t need edge anymore if they bought Chrome. The decades long struggle to make people use a Microsoft web browser would be over
Sprint merged with TMobile
[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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
Google: Sure, we’ll sell it to anyone who pays off our Russian Govt fine.
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The Lemmy web client, same as Reddit, allows you to de-upvote your posts.
It feels weird to upvote your own post anyway and I don’t do so unless I am asking for help and want it seen more, urgently.That is so odd, if you dont think what you are saying is relevant or necessary why say it?
Your conscientiousness will be lost in a sea of others self importance, at least level the playing field and support yourself.
if you dont think what you are saying is relevant or necessary why say it?
If I worried about necessity, I would probably not have a Lemmy account.
level the playing field
I’m not playing dependent upon others, just upon my own ideals. I feel like an upvote needs to mean something. In my case, it means, I need more people to see it, for me.
In most cases, the feeling behind my posts/comments are: If someone sees it, good, have fun.Your own upvote on your own comment doesn’t mean anything, because every single comment starts with one upvote by default, not zero. All you’re doing is moving your comments below everyone else’s.
Sometimes I downvote my own comment just to add a little chaos.
I see you being Chaotic-Chaotic over here.
Your own upvote on your own comment doesn’t mean anything
Neither do words, or little magnetic particles lain down nicely on a polymer disc, until people decide they mean something.
I don’t think anybody decided that an upvote count of 1 means anything.
I‘ve actually when something like this will happen. A few years ago German energy providers and distributors needed to split, because it gives you an unfair advantage if you own both. Whole companies were split in two. People working for years together would no longer work together. In the end consumer were much better off after the split. I feel the same way with internet browser. It is unfair if you own the infrastructure (Chrome, energy grid) and the services that run on it (YouTube, power plants).
The US did this to AT&T. It was broken up into dozens of “baby bells”. Then it gradually bought them all back up and now it’s as big as it ever was
Bell telephone. AT&T was one of the resulting companies.
Thats stupid of the US to not block the merges again then… :p
Well this process also spawned Verizon, so they do have legitimate competition now and that’s what matters to antitrust actions
Very true, but in due time verizon could also be bought. Hence fcc should technically block it, like the nvidia and arm merge.
Or microsoft and activision ( which was heavily contested ).
Both were heavily contested worldwide
Better hurry, Trump’s rubber stamp DOJ will kill this faster than a cop encountering a dog.
For the right price.
Ugh. Just link to Reuters.
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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.
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.
🥴
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?
don’t make other people wear your tin-foil hat
The words, they mean nothing!
This is probably the real reason corporate America had no interest in endorsing Harris.
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!
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”.
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.
Chrome is now owned by a separate conpany with the same major stock holders.
It’s like they’re a company pretending to be another company, disguised as another company. Tropic Thunder all the way down.
What’s to stop them just making another browser?
With blackjack and hookers?
I’m 40% internet browser.
Potentially.
Not needed. Internet Explorer existed for years after the 90s. It wasn’t killed by the courts. It was killed by the fact that it’s only function was to install a better browser on first boot.
I think you are severely underestimating how many people don’t even understand the difference between windows, explorer, a web browser and even the Internet itself during the 90’s well into the 2000’s even 2010’s.
That’s who kept IE alive
No offense but it was the US Government. Most of their websites were coded for it, and quite a few of them didn’t work properly or reliably in other browsers as a result. This was true up until it was sunsetted and they were forced to update to Edge and some of the websites still haven’t been properly moved over to Chromium. When the pandemic hit and the Armed Forces had to setup remote work for thousands of people Microsoft basically built them a fork of Teams. The US Government is kind of running hand in hand with Microsoft on a lot of stuff if you just hazard a cursory look.
They didn’t make the first one! They got it from Apple, who themselves got it from KDE.
What’s to stop them just making another browser?
Nothing. Chromium is open source. So they could just fork it and declare a new “official” google browser and it would be a lot like Chrome.
I’m not sure why the govt thinks forcing google to give up a particular fork/branch of an open source browser is all that meaningful. It might make more sense if Chrome was a closed source one of a kind browser.
I’ve worked in the aftermath of DoJ agreements like this one. The DoJ is not stupid (or at least didn’t used to be) and will have stipulations about removing Google employees from governance/write permissions to the project, with follow up check-ins every few months to make sure any shenanigans aren’t occurring.
…none of that matters though now that the DoJ is going to be dissolved.
They need to ban them from forking the browser. Google has the ability to get people to install the new Google totally-not-chrome browser. Especially if they keep Android as well.
That’s exactly what I was thinking. It also makes Chrome essentially worthless to anyone except Google.
Maybe as a whole package, but node.js servers are ubiquitous and have a ton of stakeholders that have nothing to do with web browsers.
What does Chrome have to do with a node.js server?
Same JS engine, same maintainers, same iron-grip control by Google.
Are you saying Google funds node.js development?
I’ve got no idea what you’re talking about here.
The JavaScript (code) engine that powers Chrome is the same JavaScript (code) engine that powers Node servers. Node is used to power a large portion of web applications and internal corporate tools. The Chromium/Node project is under the tight control of Google engineers.
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.
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.
<Fellates microphone>
…I mean, you do you buddy.
But (s)he is doing the microphone!
Username checks out
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.
God damnit.
