The U.S. Department of Justice is ramping up its case against Google’s alleged monopoly, suggesting the government could eventually force the company to sell its widely-used Chrome browser. The move is part of the DoJ’s push to challenge Google’s hold over the digital advertising and search engine markets.
The Justice Department’s latest legal action accuses Google of engaging in anticompetitive behavior by unfairly using its dominance in search and advertising to prop up its other services, most notably Chrome. The government argues that Google’s browser and vast data ecosystem have given the company an outsized advantage over competitors, stifling innovation and harming consumers. By bundling Chrome with its Android operating system, Google has built an extensive network that could limit consumer choice and make it difficult for smaller firms to compete.
Which tech 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.
Chromium is already there and companies like Microsoft have their own forks so… Yeah I think there’s no point of buying Chrome.
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.
Sell it to IBM so they can end all support lol
Of those companies, Apple seems like the best option due to their business goals (privacy). Though I am not fully sure why they’d want to as they already have a browser with a relative market share dominance and ecosystem.
Realistically, it would make sense to see Microsoft try again, it would instantly get 70% of the world to use “Edge”, so their goals are met. Chrome already has the modern web standards, so it might just mean slower progression of the web in the future.
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.
Apples business isn’t privacy. Apples business is selling privacy.
I don’t disagree, it’s more of a matter of least evil.
Is Microsoft even eligible? Wasn’t their anti-trust suit over IE basically about this same thing?
Sell it to Canonical
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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.
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.
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.
That’s when we come onto the scene.
I am continuously “translating” news and opinions from here on LinkedIn. Already got banned from a professional Slack that contains most people in my industry for saying in a private conversation that I like watermelon.
Not gonna stop. People are not politically inclined because we kept our knowledge to ourselves for too long.
FF depends on google ad money, thats why FF is currently enshittifying right now.
A direct “donation” to Trump would instantly fix this.
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.
or pay a generous fee of %0.00001 of your yearly earnings to make it go away
Why, what, is there something different about the Google guy?
Look at all their lips. See how they look like they are ready to kiss or suck something? Now look at Pichai. Just smiling instead of getting ready to receive a load. He bent the knee, but not far enough.
Yeah, that’s probably the difference
It would be better to not allow Google to have a major stake 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.
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).
I never had problems with banking apps on GrapheneOS, 3 different apps, all work totally fine.
Google should do the power play and completely open source the browser.
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?
Solution: Create an open source foundation, cram the board with Google employees
As long as they are doing the browser work independently from Google (meaning no Google integration), doesn’t sound like a bad thing. Kind of like they already present their work (Chromium and Chrome)
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
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.
Spinning them off into their own independent companies would make more sense than a sale to another party.
Just make them put support for manifest v2 back.
Thus the price of collaboration. You are not rewarded, you simply draw attention to yourself as someone with wealth they can pillage.
