DOJ: Google must sell Chrome, Android could be next(arstechnica.com) |
DOJ: Google must sell Chrome, Android could be next(arstechnica.com) |
People complain about whataboutism, but the Apple versus almost any other 'monopoly' is insane. You can switch browsers within the next 30s, you can't install an app from a third party vendor ever on iOS. [1]
[1] Yes I know you can pay $100 a year, and then compile your own/open source apps weekly and move them to your device. No this is not a reasonable solution.
Google on the other hand have a monolithic market share in a number of key markets. There's really no competition to them in search or video for instance, whereby they command extremely dominant market share.
Apple on the other hand do not dominate any markets, they just have a locked down product. Pretty similar to luxury cars, Nintendo, and other companies that think their customers value the integration over an open ecosystem.
Let's be real, this administration is just doing stock manipulations and looting the public purse while running a media circus to distract people.
If Google started ranking sites that use AdSense higher than other sites, you could probably prove that in court fairly easily — your lawyers would make them hand over their ranking code during discovery, and it would say `if (usesAdSense) score++`, and you'd win.
But if they made (are making) subtle web platform changes via their control of the browsing platform that hurt competitors and help Google, that's extremely difficult to prove. Look at third-party cookies, for example.
This first one is about dominant market position by paying for placement on all surfaces (iPhone, Firefox, etc.) plus chrome. So splitting off chrome and android make sense in the context of the suit.
On the other hand, Google would argue that Doubleclick is Google, and everything else Google does is just to create channels for ads, and acquire data for ad targeting and pricing.
I believe that this will happen though, at some point in the next few years.
Google will make their own proposal, I think. Then the judge will decide.
Then 50 years of appeals.
How does Chrome make income? Isn't it basically developed at a loss, but it makes money for Google's other business units?
Something tells me a product that can garner billions of dollars will do just fine if sliced away. If Google gives firefox $500million to be the default search at 5% user share, they should pay Chrome $20 billion for the same privilege.
The true damage that should be done is to separate Gmail + workspaces, Maps, Youtube, GCP, Android, and Search as their own separate entities then undo the DoubleClick merger.
That would be true justice.
"Similarly, Google would be prevented from pressuring its partners to use Google search or AI services over the competition."
The other alternative would be paying for search, in which case everyone would just leave for another search engine the next day.
Which is honestly why I have so much calling google search a monopoly. The switching cost is comically cheap and easy. You could cut out Google search within the next 5 minutes from the rest of your life.
"Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users...we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.
Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious."
Buying Chromium is a more interesting proposition, but you can't really "buy" it (aside from the trademark, infrastructure, domains) because the codebase isn't Google's to sell. Would the web coalesce around the new owners just because they inherit the CI and the repo?
It’s good to have a diversified portfolio of skills, and if Chrome should be sold and not sustainable, there is the possibility that the rollout of new features to the web will feel like an Internet Explorer era malaise. The web may very well become a mostly frozen platform; warts and all.
I’m also not interested in following the inevitable JavaScript framework attempts to overcome this. At least this time, we have Web Components, WASM, and Canvas, making polyfilling almost anything theoretically possible.
[0] https://www.justice.gov/atr/case/us-and-plaintiff-states-v-g...
How would you feel if Google shut down Chrome, and created an app called the Google Application Platform. (GAP). The GAP would be the only place you could use Search, Workspace, YouTube, Maps, and every other google website.
What would you think if Google just abandoned the open web entirely.
The artificial price point for GMail, GDocs, GMeet has killed so much competition.
Try pricing something against this insane dumping price Google sets - there is no TAM, the M does not payback enough to justify the effort.
The cross-financing with Ads would finally stop and fair pricing would come.
It literally led to the creation of Office 365 and broke open a market that had been closed to competition in the face of an unbreakable Microsoft Monopoly for decades! That sounds ridiculous on its face. Of all the product areas to complain about Google having a monopoly, you picked the office suite!?
HN tends strongly to one side of this argument, but really this is trending towards a "Google Derangement Syndrome" kind of analysis.
Office is Microsofts bread and butter, for Google its a side project that disrupts Microsofts business model.
> It literally led to the creation of Office 365 and broke open a market that had been closed to competition in the face of an unbreakable Microsoft Monopoly for decades
Both can be true at the same time. For example Tmobile and Sprint merging led to even more pressure on any new or existing networks that were/are not in the top 4. But it also led to increased competition with Verizon and AT&T.
Now, with Google as the entrenched incumbent in so many different spaces, what's good for the web is not necessarily good for Google anymore.
All developers I know build pretty much exclusively on Chrome desktop wise.
There's only one model that can work long-term here: collective ownership. The closest model is probably the Wikimedia Foundation. Firefox and the Mozilla Foundation are here, obviously, but they've tried to act like a corporation with rising costs and lower earnings going over years. The money Google pays them is basically poison.
Linux has survived and thrived with something analagous to this but it's also dependent to an unsettling degree on one person (Linus Torvalds). I realize his power has decentralized over the years (intentionally, by Linus) but there's still the constnat risk of a schism.
Google and Chrome is just one small part of the problem. Apple's Safari monopoly on iOS is also a problem. Browsers really need to be a common good.
I suspect none of this will happen. Even though these efforts began in the Biden administration, I suspect this will now become a shakedown. This administration will look to Google to fall in line and kiss the ring. That is now the cost of doing business.
The only difference between Chrome without Google and Chromium is the name and logo. You lose all integration with Google services like sync, suggestions, etc.
You'd be stuck with only the captives that can't switch because they're using older appliances with Chrome baked in.
Look, I hate how dominant Chrome is. It’s basically a glorified data vacuum for Google—and it’s only getting worse. But at the end of the day, people choose to use Chrome, and I don’t see why Google shouldn’t be allowed to own and develop it. There are still plenty of other browsers people can switch to.
Now, what’s actually dangerous is the growing trend of sites blocking non-Google search engines from indexing their content. That’s a real issue—and it’s escalating fast. Selling Chrome won’t do a damn thing to fix that.
Besides, no other company has the budget or incentive to maintain Chrome at the level Google does. If they’re forced to give it up, then what? A half-baked, underfunded mess? A fragmented ecosystem? None of this feels like a win.
... unless your goal is to have Elon be able to pick up a new browser to go along with Twitter and TickTock.
Alas, very people put that high a value on their privacy.
That said, even well intentioned distros that don't sell your data will have some privacy issues, inherited from upstreams.
I'm not from the US, but it seems to me like the companies you mention stay in their respective market and don't try to destroy competition in other markets, like Walmart is a supermarket chain, UnitedHealth is just health insurance, Exxon just deals with gas, JPMorgan Chase is just a bank, etc...,
meanwhile Google operated YouTube, Chrome, Gmail and other services at significant losses for years up until the point where they basically have monopoly in those areas because the competition couldn't keep up with Google's free products, and now when the competition is destroyed, they are destroying these free services with increased pricing or ads, neither of which were there while they still had competition in those spheres...
If the feds kneecap US companies, it's not going to make the next generation of US companies stronger, just cede influence to worse jurisdictions.
It "works" in China where the government just stomps their feet if companies misbehave too much and everyone complies instantly or get replaced.
Edit: s/Amazon/Jeff Bezos/g?
We have megacorps in EU too, Airbus and Lidl comes to mind, though I don't think Lidl operates anything but their main business outside of Germany, in Sweden we have Lidl grocery stores however.
The common argument for breaking up monopolies is to provide more competition in the key area, since monopolies tend to focus efforts on things that don't benefit the consumer (like buying out smaller companies to stop them existing).
From that view, monopolies don't really benefit the US, if anything it stops the US market functioning competitively, and eventually running themselves into the ground.
I guess the other view is that "somebody is going to have a monopoly so why shouldn't it be my country?", but I'd say that ignores the fact that you can just curb other non-competitive behaviour fron foreign countries, like the EU has been trying to do with Apple and Google.
If other countries are doing something to advantage themselves relative to that, there’s tariffs or other ways to relevel the playing field.
Worked pretty well when they broke AT&T and not only got an extremely innovative lab full of small projects, but also kickstarted the internet era.
Smaller companies are faster, more agile, and hungry for success. This breeds market competition, spurring innovation and rendering better products for the consumer. The Amazons and Googles and Microsofts of the world have largely outlived their purpose and only exist to hoover up money in their cornered markets rather than innovate.
There's no reason why there can't be international co-operation on this subject.
The owner of Android could do the same. There is a long history of OS licensed to phone manufacturers. The incentive for manufacturers to keep using a common OS is probably much bigger than keep installing Chrome: nobody wants to sell phones without apps and nobody wants to pay developers to develop four or five versions of the same app. Think about home banking or games. Web apps might be enough and I very welcome that, but they are not enough for everything especially on low specs devices.
They developed Chrome because their business was web based and they wanted a solid platform for their apps.
And we all benefited from that stable platform. And it's mostly open source in Chromium. And they are paying Mozilla to stay in the game - an arms length, independent implementation of standards.
I think its wrong to suggest what they should have done is build an entire walled garden like Apple has done.
Update: I think the important part of your statement was "too keep out competition." I don't see how developing and giving away Chrome is stifling the browser market.
I can see how paying other people to make Google search default might stifling the search market, but that has nothing to do with Chrome.
Force Google to charge money for the service, or to pay a portion of imputed stolen revenue to competitors. But Chrome itself is not a viable business without the huge fountain of money that is search ads.
- ecom (amazon?)
- AI (openai?)
People keep saying this, but everybody I have spoken to dont care about that. They are just used to pressing the coloured circle icon to get on the internet. That muscle memory and brand recognition will be around for many years to come.
The market share will drop, but slowly and over decades. That will give some greedy company plenty of time to milk it for all its worth.
Have a look at the list of services offered: https://www.walmart.com/services
They're not all over the place, but definitely expanding to what's interesting to them.
So... you're saying the presence in the market of a viable competitor improved the value provided to consumers? Who knew!
Chrome is keeping the pressure on Apple to actually invest in the web. Without Chrome, the web withers and Apple reenforces their walled app garden.
It really doesnt. The current pace of new web standards and browser features mean frameworks and code need to constantly be checking if each browser supports the new thing, and not releasing said feature until enough versions of browsers support the thing to make it widespread enough to use. Even then, people in lesser developed countries that are using older devices with older versions of browsers on them are seeing broken and unuseable versions of the web, just because big companies are racing to 'push the web forward'.
As a web developer who wants to see the rate of new standards and features slow down so that all browsers can adopt them safely at a sensible pace without needing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on development, I really hope for this outcome.
These countries are not different from any other in the world. The US also has anti-monopoly laws exactly for this reason: nobody wants a corporation that can compete with the government, be it democratic or not.
Should FedEx not compete with USPS on parcel delivery?
If the government thinks there should be more browsers, (or mobile os's) they should tax the existing ones and pay folks to improve the open source alternatives.
You _should_ outlaw behavior that creates monopolies, like predatory pricing etc
The result is higher prices for consumers and taxpayer money flowing into zombie companies that just happen be in regions where the party in power needs votes.
The deficiency in the market is that laws exist that allow market concentration. Should we tax them to fund regulatory reform?
> If the government thinks there should be more browsers, (or mobile os's) they should tax the existing ones and pay folks to improve the open source alternatives.
Let's review the problem with Chrome.
Chromium is open source. Chrome is Chromium with some corporate misfeatures like DRM, but is also the thing with an advertising budget. Nobody notices that their browser quietly supports DRM, except that then more sites use it, and then open source browsers on open hardware cease to be viable because if you try to use it, it doesn't support the DRM, and then no matter how much better it is people won't use it because half the internet is broken.
If you made Chromium better, Google would just keep making Chrome based on Chromium and then Chrome would have all the improvements you made to Chromium and you've solved nothing. If you made a different open source browser under a license that didn't allow them to do that then they still have billions of dollars so if you do anything better then they can just add the same feature to Chrome. At which point people still don't use your thing because they want to watch Netflix, and Netflix continues to require windvine because the Judas browsers have the most market share so devices that support DRM are common and demanding it doesn't bankrupt them.
Or, you could fix the law that allows DRM to be used as a fig leaf for the true motivation of vendor lock-in and simply create an explicit adversarial interoperability exception to DMCA 1201, not only as a defense but as an affirmative right. Then the open source browser can legally break the DRM in order to implement an ad blocker and create a feature that Google won't put in Chrome, without giving Chrome any abilities the open alternative doesn't, allowing the alternative to gain market share.
> You _should_ outlaw behavior that creates monopolies, like predatory pricing etc
Predatory pricing isn't a cause of monopolies, it's a consequence. If it's happening, the last thing you want to do is ban it, because it's a red flag that tells you the market is broken and you need to fix it. If you leave the market broken, a company with enough market power to charge excessive margins has enough market power to screw the customer in a hundred other ways, and trying to ban every possible abuse of market power is a million times harder than smashing up monopolies.
The _cause_ of monopolies are successful businesses. I don't have a problem with successful businesses. I also don't have a problem with monopolies per se. If I invent some cool thing and I'm the only person in the world doing it, I have a monopoly - good for me. If I can deliver a product better than everybody else, and everybody else chooses to not compete with me any more, also good for me.
The crime is when you use your power "unfairly" to drive others out of business. (So that you can create or maintain a monopoly). Predatory pricing or agreements that restrict who can use your product, or what others can do.
What will end up happening is not that Amazon will have to compete with others on video game streaming for example, what will happen is that video game streaming will disappear because not viable.
Browsers won't suddenly flourish when Google cannot finance browsers anymore, they'll just turn to shit.
People won't spend $50 a month to subscribe to what Google currently provides for free, they will just lose access.
In the end the users will just flock to the Chinese equivalents which will be happy to steal all of the western data for the low cost of providing file hosting.
Maybe what will happen is there will be a slowdown of new browser standards as Google wont have the muscle to push things through in the browser space anymore. This would be a great thing, as it would stop the moving target of web standards and would allow other browsers to catch up.
It would also stop google being able to do things like force Manifest V2 out of Chromium just because it serves their own purpose.
I'd like to see this outcome.
Great! Let's go back to actual applications.
I think Chrome on Android is already pretty "shit" these days, because it doesn't support ad blocking at all.
Example: Right now if you want to create a competing phone without Google, you lose most of the apps in the Play Store because they're encouraged to have dependencies on Google services. If that was prohibited in a large market then app developers couldn't assume those dependencies are available and the APIs would either have to become an open source part of stock Android or developers would use platform-independent third party libraries. Then the apps made for that market could run on a third party device -- but developers aren't going to make separate apps for different markets, they're just going to avoid the proprietary APIs that aren't available in a major market, and then those apps don't have those proprietary dependencies in the other markets either and your domestic competitor can compete there too.
Also, the whole world outside the US and China wouldn't even have the excuse of protecting domestic megacorps as a reason not to have strong antitrust laws themselves.
¿Por qué no los dos?
Baby steps bro, they will all have their moment in the sun soon enough.
This also works for Amazon retail, they should not be allowed to sell on their own marketplace (they have to choose, they are either a marketplace or a seller)
(PlayStation is almost in the same boat, except they have significant sales in regions where PC gaming is much smaller than in the US.)
Not that it matters.,Microsoft has done a spectacular job of killing Xbox even with its ability to sustain setting money on fire for the past decade. Xbox has been an unmitigated disaster since Xbox One.
If you take Google out of it, Chromium gets to be its own thing. Then Chromium and Firefox compete with each other on equal footing and people use whichever one is better, but they're both actually open source instead of "Chromium is open source but everybody actually uses Chrome" and the latter isn't controlled by the company trying to break ad blocking and push DRM.
Firefox on Android is sadly not great either -- it regularly drops frames on my 120Hz Pixel 9 Pro. Firefox on iOS doesn't have extension support.
I hear Edge Canary on Android has extension support.
The people to blame for DRM are the legislators who created laws allowing DRM to be used for anti-competitive lock-in, which is its primary purpose.
> The _cause_ of monopolies are successful businesses.
That doesn't track. Costco is a successful business, does it have a monopoly? Starbucks? Honda? Dell? McDonald's? Adidas?
> If I invent some cool thing and I'm the only person in the world doing it, I have a monopoly - good for me. If I can deliver a product better than everybody else, and everybody else chooses to not compete with me any more, also good for me.
The only time this happens for a non-trivial period of time in the absence of anti-competitive practices or regulations is for so-called natural monopolies. Otherwise there would be low barriers to entry and correspondingly someone else wanting to make some money by entering the market.
And even natural monopolies are extremely narrow. They tend to get drawn with thick lines because whoever holds the natural monopoly will be trying to tie all kinds of other services to it through vertical integration, e.g. the natural monopoly is "roadside fiber conduit" rather than "internet service" no matter how much the utility company wants to insist that you should have to buy internet service from the company that digs the trench or installs the utility poles.
> Predatory pricing or agreements that restrict who can use your product, or what others can do.
Oh, you meant predatory pricing in terms of dumping rather than charging monopoly rents.
The problem is that's basically not a thing for digital goods because dumping is selling below the marginal cost and the marginal cost for digital goods is zero.
And corporations are sneaky. To reiterate the DRM point, what Google does with remote attestation is extremely nefarious, not least because it's simultaneously subtle and effective.
What they do is, provide remote attestation services to third parties for Google-approved devices. Then things like bank apps require them, even though they provide no real benefit, because they're marketed as providing "security" and risk-averse bank managers don't want to be seen not using a hypothetical security feature. But now anyone who wants to make a competing device that isn't approved by Google can't pass attestation and therefore can't get customers because customers expect their bank app to work.
Then it's the banks rather than Google requiring you to use a Google-approved Android device and Google will claim they didn't require anything even though Google providing that otherwise-useless feature has in reality created a large anti-competitive barrier for anyone trying to make a competing device without Google's approval.
Gmail is free, Docs is free, Maps is free, lots of google apps are free. This makes it very difficult few a new player to enter the market. This is predatory pricing.
Nothing else you said is really relevant to the forced sale of Chrome.
It isn't. Things with ~0 marginal cost end up being free or free-with-ads. Webmail was free before Gmail, OpenOffice was free before Google Docs, MapQuest was free before Google Maps, because that's the market price for those things.
> Nothing else you said is really relevant to the forced sale of Chrome.
Because we're talking about the forced sale of Android. The title of the article is:
> DOJ: Google must sell Chrome, Android could be next
But exactly the same argument applies to Chrome anyway. Google puts DRM in Chrome, allowing third party sites to take a dependency on DRM, and then competing browsers/devices without Google's approval get locked out because users want a browser and device that works with the whole web.
Not to mention the obvious conflict of interest that DRM is used to prevent ad blocking.