DOJ calls for breakup of Google and sale of Chrome

[Loose]

Trump will reverse this directive

 

[Adeptus Astartes]

The last sentence is just monopoly-brain.

If these companies werent free to create crassly closed ecosystems then they would actually have to integrate and make integration work with other services.

These anticompetitive practices let them be like "Well you should've used Safari/Outlook/Chrome, dumbass."

No, they wouldn't. Apple does exactly the same as Google, but they don't get shyt for it because they don't have the market share.

 

[verbalkint]

Chrome literally has access to my whole life...

 

[bnew]

sell it to who, whose gonna take over chromium development?

did they say anything about web standards and how google deliberately breaks things on their sites to give users a pooper experience on youtube in browsers like Firefox?

not sure how I feel about the search deals that make them the default : patrice: , it's a real problem if users don't have options to change the default option.

they should get at them about the play store requirement and google search assistance.

 

[Dorian Breh]

No, they wouldn't. Apple does exactly the same as Google, but they don't get shyt for it because they don't have the market share.

Well not in America. The EU went after them successfully for the chargers.

And they arguably do have the market share from a vertical perspective, which is not the perspective that the laws are designed to handle at all.

And I absolutely believe Apple should absolutely be scrutinized for anti consumerist and anti competitive practices. But the protections are not designed for software and fail to handle it.

 

[Sir Richard Spirit]

I hate Chome, but if this goes through we lose DuckDuckGo. I read almost the entire budget is money from Google.

 

[Dorian Breh]

Competition and more businesses is ALWAYS good for the consumer.

This isn’t bad at all, the same thing probably needs to happen to Amazon, Apple, regional electricity companies that have a monopoly on certain regions, etc.

and internet providers!!

 

[bnew]

safari is more monopolistic than chrome. apple forces browsers to use their rendering engine. other browsers choose to build off chromium because rendering engine development is time consuming and costs a lot of money. microsoft gave up developing their own rendering engine and started using chromium instead too. I think things might change for the better though since the better AI/LLM's gets at coding and handling millions of tokens, developers and companies will likely develop new browser rendering engines to better compete with chromium(Blink) based browsers, webkit and gecko rendering engines.

 

[Still Benefited]

Trump will reverse this directive

Probably just wanted some cheap shares. My 10 shares took a hit today


Cant forget how Trump crashed the market last time he won and kept pumping it and dumping it through tweets. Still dont know how he never got caught up for market manipulation/insider trading of some kind. Seemed obvious as hell he was doing it,and had an interest in the performance of the stock market and its direction at particular times. The investegators were obviously barking up the wrong tree if he wasnt caught. Or maybe thats not illegal for politicians to do,wouldnt be suprised

 

[bnew]

Google to court: we’ll change our Apple deal, but please let us keep Chrome

It says the government is asking for far too much.

www.theverge.com

Google to court: we’ll change our Apple deal, but please let us keep Chrome​

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Google is offering a far more pared-down solution to the court’s ruling that it illegally monopolized search.​

By Lauren Feiner, a senior policy reporter at The Verge, covering the intersection of Silicon Valley and Capitol Hill. She spent 5 years covering tech policy at CNBC, writing about antitrust, privacy, and content moderation reform.
Dec 23, 2024, 3:46 PM EST

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images

After its victory against Google in an antitrust trial earlier this year, the Department of Justice recently proposed a sweeping set of changes its search business. The DOJ put a lot on the table, demanding that Google sell its Chrome browser, syndicate its search results, and avoid exclusive deals with companies like Apple for default search placement. It even kept open the possibility of forcing an Android sale.

Now, Google has responded with a far simpler proposal: prohibit those default placement deals, and only for three years.

A court found Google liable for unlawfully monopolizing online search, and its remedies are supposed to reset the market, letting rivals fairly compete. Google (obviously) disagrees that it’s running a monopoly, but before it can appeal that underlying conclusion, it’s trying to limit the fallout if it loses.

Google’s justification is that search deals were at the heart of the case, so they’re what a court should target. Under the proposal, Google couldn’t enter deals with Android phone manufacturers that require adding mobile search in exchange for access to other Google apps. It couldn’t require phone makers to exclude rival search engines or third-party browsers. Browser companies like Mozilla would be given more flexibility in setting rival search engines as defaults.

Perhaps the biggest concession is that this agreement would specifically end Google’s long-running multibillion-dollar search deal with Apple. It would bar Google from entering agreements that make Google Search the default engine on any “proprietary Apple feature or functionality, including Siri and Spotlight” in the US — unless the deal lets Apple choose a different default search engine on its browser annually and “expressly permits” it to promote other search engines.

And in a nod to some DOJ concerns about Google locking out rival AI-powered search tools and chatbots, Google proposes it should be disallowed from requiring phone makers to add its Gemini Assistant mobile app in order to access other Google offerings.

The government has proposed ten years of restrictions, but Google’s counterproposal is only three — it argues nothing more is necessary because “the pace of innovation in search has been extraordinary” and regulating a “fast-changing industry” like search would slow innovation.

If the court accepts Google’s streamlined proposal over the DOJ’s, the company could lose out on some lucrative or strategically advantageous deals, but its business would remain intact. It wouldn’t have to spin out its Chrome browser or have the threat of an Android divestment order hanging over it. And it wouldn’t need to share many of the underlying signals that help it figure out how to serve useful search results, so that rivals could catch up and serve as a true competitive pressure, as the DOJ hopes.

Both Google and the DOJ’s proposals are essentially starting points from which the judge can work. But Google is betting it could have an easier time selling a simple proposal that addresses a major, specific problem raised in the trial. It’s positioning the government’s proposals as extreme and reaching beyond the scope of the judge’s earlier decision, perhaps — Google will likely tell the court — even in a way that could get overturned on appeal.

This hasn’t been received well by at least one of Google’s rivals, the search engine company DuckDuckGo. “Google’s proposal attempts to maintain the status quo and change as little as possible,” spokesperson Kamyl Bazbaz said in a statement. Both sides will argue their case in a federal court in Washington, DC beginning on April 22.