Google reacts angrily to report it will have to sell Chrome
Google reacts angrily to report it will have to sell Chrome
It's reported the US government wants the world's most popular web browser to be sold off to address monopoly concerns.
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…
28Lets hope Lina Khan can force these antitrust suits through before Trump fires her
Because monopolies are only going to get worse under his rule
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"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.
28If 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.
21Fair 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.
10I’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.
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Google is a faceless corporation, how can it be angry?
9Because your oligarchy has deemed companies are people, and you just haven't read the memo
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Oh no! Anyways...
9Lol... 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.
8The judge deciding is called Mehta
Ah man, the writers are being too on the nose this season
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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?
4If it's chrominum that might explain the announcement that they're killing chromeOS.
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chromium is the problem.
-1TL;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.
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