DOJ pushes for Google to sell Chrome to break search monopoly
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is intensifying its efforts to compel Google to divest its browser Chrome, potentially including Android, in a bid to dismantle the company's perceived monopoly in the search engine market. In a recent revised filing submitted to Judge Amit Mehta, the DOJ, alongside a coalition of 38 state attorneys general, is laying out pivotal steps aimed at promoting fair competition and addressing Google's dominance in online search.
The updated filing closely aligns with a previous proposal issued last November, which followed Judge Mehta's landmark ruling affirming Google's monopolistic status. The DOJ asserts that forcing the sale of Chrome is crucial to breaking Google’s hold over a critical gateway for online searches, thereby fostering an environment conducive to genuine competition.
A notable change in this latest proposal is the removal of the demand that Google divest its investments in artificial intelligence. The DOJ has shifted its strategy to a more supervisory stance, requiring Google to inform regulators before pursuing any significant changes in its AI operations. This marks a significant pivot that reflects a desire to keep innovative assets in play while ensuring regulatory oversight.
While the DOJ has opted not to push for the immediate sale of Android, it is keeping the option open for future action if the current measures do not successfully enhance competition. Google, for its part, is gearing up to refute the proposals, characterizing them as excessively interventionist and beyond the scope of the court’s initial ruling. The tech giant has emphasized that the matter concerns its existing partnerships, rather than the sweeping changes proposed by the DOJ.
As this legal saga unfolds, the stakes are high for both Google and the landscape of online search, with potential ramifications that could reshape the competition dynamics in the tech industry.
source: Android Central
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Didn’t this get discussed and commented to death here and elsewhere a while back?
Even if you agree that forced splitting of Chrome is the right medicine (or punishment?), you have to care about the fallout.
And that means talking about the ‘to who?’ situation.
Who is going to run that show then? And the chromium and electron stuff that goes with it, which is used “everywhere”. Certainly in more places and more common that vast majority of non-IT people understand. Messing with that can hardly be understated.
And how badly are they going to run that, from the point of view of everyone else?
You’ve probably all heard about what happens to abandoned apps or sellouts. Obviously those paying to take over have motives, usually fucking dark and greedy motives.
Whether we like it or not, chrome/chromium/electron is defacto critical infrastustructure in this webified IT world. It is beyond extremely foolish to indiscriminately say ‘sell it’.
It is beginning to reek of corruption. Easy to suspect that some big PE interests and other large moneybags behind the new administration are drooling over the potential for abuse and gouging from a more or less captive market, so the ‘sell it’ mandate is being upheld.
Thought experiment. Imagine MS being ordered to sell windows. To something like Broadcom or Oracle or some horrid PE amalgam. Scary, right? It is about that dangerous.
Remember the stink about Unity last year? The PE and VC controllers demanding worse licensing to get more profit. And that was just a game engine with competitors.
I’m calling it. DOJ can at this point no longer hide behind ignorance. It looks willful. With intent.
Either that or it is extortionate methods for “negotiating” a “deal”, in the country of “plea bargains” under duress.
Wanting “competition” is one thing, but demanding that the defining object be sold off is just passing the parcel. New (and likely worse) owner, but at least same lack of competition but quite possibly worse as the dark side temptation is astounding at that scale.
And without the ad-business to carry it as is currently the case, it will need deep monetization. Which may drive *some* competition midterm, but we got here because two reasons:
IT gravitates towards shared monoculture or a few dominant monocultures: it has the least friction.
Money and power tends to also aggregate towards monopoly situations, each leveraging the other to gain more.
So that little competition will get eliminated and we end back with another duopoly like android/ios, with maybe some things hanging on in the fringes on lifesupport from the big players who could easily snuff them out but do not, for “look, we have competition” claims.
Like firefox. Or “desktop linux”. People with the capacity to do something to make them great are also bright enough to realise that it is a few hairwidths from suicide to do so, without the protection and backing of a powerful foreign government, to protect them from MS and Apple or as the case may be, google/alphabet. Currently only China appears to be big enough and motivated enough to want to roll their own for strategic security reasons.
Don’t even get started on the idea of threatening to force sale of Android. That has to be the epitome of maga gone bad right now, a sort of insane move to try to decimate any competition that iphone has, just because many of those android devices are not produced by US-owned companies.
Search. It’s not a monopoly. It’s a market choice by users.
On the other hand, Manifest v3 is a monopolistic feature restricting choice. Remove Google’s control of Chromium.
Choice by seach function users? Not necessarily. If the operating system is preloaded with a google search function, the tendency is that consumers will exclusively use that search function to the detriment of any other. Consumers are not so wise as you think.
@efromme,
> “Consumers are not so wise as you think.”
Not so wise, not so honest. Global assertions are always a challenge to truth given generalization is. Yet need to say that the world in not divided between the good consumers and the bad, naughty, evil sellers, corporations on the other. Emphasizing on drug dealers but seldom on drug addicts, on corporate crooks but seldom on individuals, consumers who trespass themselves legitimate law and basic ethics. Contradiction between one’s faulty behaviors and one’s legitimate rights to assault the lack of corporations’ ethics. What would we do, what would I do had I the intelligence of the powerful, is my morality tied to my insufficiency or is it constitutive of my deep soul ? I’m not sure I’ll ever get an answer to that.
This was what I was going to say. I barely use Google to search as AI can do more. Still Google is a household name we use it because it works. Now if they split it up then we will have a bunch of little fragmented search engines competing with no real winner. They think that the smaller guys will make bigger profits, we will just have a bunch of engines that eventually cater to certain style of search, making it worse off instead of centralized. Look at all the subscription services now, that did not make cutting the cord cheaper, that is where search will end up.
DOJ should break up Microsoft, remember when that was supposed to happen? Yeah, about that….
We will only have a FREE future when M$ has been crushed.