Technology @lemmy.world fossilesque @mander.xyz 1w ago

Google must sell Chrome to end search monopoly, justice department argues in court filing

www.theguardian.com Google must sell Chrome to end search monopoly, justice department argues in court filing

Justice department urges court to force Google to share data with rivals as part of wide-ranging changes to end online giant’s monopoly on web searching

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to me, shaving Android off their business (suggested next step if this fails) would be way more impactful
- if Google was to sell Android that would be like a nuclear bomb dropping. I mean aside from budget Android phones people are going more and more to apple devices just because of the stability.
- Why not both!
  
  good point, I guess one worry here is about the way in which this will affect Firefox (note Firefox here, not the Mozilla Fdn who have managed to Elon their own thing without help, seemingly)
- I'm worrying that whatever gets sold (Chrome or Android) might end up in the hands of someone even more scummy than Google.
  
  They would have to be more scummy and also at least similarly competent... Google can't innovate for crap, but they're pretty good at maintaining projects (when they don't randomly kill them off)
  
  If they stop work on chromium, or belief in the stewardship of chromium wanes, it'll fragment the ecosystem again. Which is sorely needed at this point - we need to get back to standards and away from centralized control
  
  Imagine Twitter/musk acquires them. Microsoft, Apple, and many other big companies directly or indirectly rely on a chain now controlled by a group known for mismanagement - are they going to wait and see, or are they going to diversify?
  
  Chrome, brought to you by Palantir, heck, what if Musk bought it?
  
  Is there any company more scummy than Google?
  
  All the big ones constantly trade blows for the no 1 spot.
  
  Oracle?
  
  Someone needs to compile an annual league table of the scummiest companies and their practices for that year.
  
  Chiquita and Nestlé come to mind. Within tech industry, I'd say Amazon and probably Microsoft are worse as well, and there's probably a ton of potentially even worse companies lurking in the shadows outside the top of the economic food chain.
  
  Id actually say Meta is the scummiest tech company thinking about it now.
  
  Adobe sucks pretty hard as well.
  
  I don't know man. There's a lot shittier business practices out there than paying to be the default search engine - which is laughably easy to change on any browser. Like marketplaces and services that pay to be exclusive sources of content and then use the fact that they're the only source for most content to force extortionate deals on content creators and enshitify every aspect of the end user experience. Just to name one.
  
  Did you know that paying to be default search engine isn't the only business practice that Google does.
  
  Google has enshitified every single one of its products or deprecated it and then released an inferior replacement.
  
  Is enshittification the scummiest thing you can think of? While other multinationals are paying for goon squads that kill people in other countries? While banks reorder daily transactions from largest to smallest so they can charge more overdraft fees, literally stealing from poor people? Even if enshittification is literally your biggest problem, you'd have to be living under a rock to think Google's products are the most enshitified of all the garbage out there. You've never heard of anything from Meta? Amazon? Netflix? Microsoft?
- I think Google is putting their eggs in one basket (Android) in preparation for them selling off chrome. They are already killing ChromeOS.
  
  https://www.androidauthority.com/chrome-os-becoming-android-3500661/
  
  Android also becoming chrome OS in light of recent news of developing Android desktop mode and native Android compatibility with Linux apps, looks like they make hybrid OS that could do it all

54 comments