I'm failing to see why "this product we built from the ground up integrates better with our other tools" is an anti trust problem
Isn't that what we want companies to do?
I have two frustrations with this kind of decision:
1. It's not clear to me that the judge has any interest in creating value.
2. It does feel a bit like being punished for success.
It's one thing when it's ill-gotten success, eg via coercive contracts (like Android has with play services), and we should aggressively deal with that sort of contract! However, what often seems to happen in these types of cases is the judge identifies a behavior they dislike and bans it without really considering more targeting / surgical treatments
What business model do we expect chrome to have? The same DOJ doesn't like Google giving Apple money for traffic acquisition. Why would that be allowed for spun-out chrome?
Why do we expect the rest of the ecosystem to remain static? What do you think Google's next move is if they sell chrome?
Who do you expect to buy Chrome? Not Facebook. Who else could and would want to?
This is a solution that has been proposed without really considering any second order effects. Or if they were considered, it was done badly (it would be easy to prove me wrong: they could just write up what they expect to happen, and it would have to be even mildly believable)
I would assume they would not want Facebook to buy it, obviously. Microsoft neither.
I do not have a solution for the business case I have to admit, but it has 60%+ market share I believe, I’m sure someone will figure out something to monetize this.
It might end up with chrome becoming a worse browser though, that’s not an unlikely outcome at all. But Internet as a whole would be better for it in my view, if google‘s grip got loosened a bit…
This is funny to me. I don't really trust Google's incentives in general, but unlike all of the social networks, Google benefits from a more open internet.
Sure, this has gotten worse over time (if Reddit is closed, goog can pay for access), but they've been a reasonable steward of the web. Chrome is good. I use it intentionally. (Generally, my devices do not come with it installed and I choose to install it)
There are lots of reasonable pieces of anti competitive behavior that we should be punishing. This one will make the internet worse for consumers
I think websites only working with chromium browsers is not making the internet better and is definitely not a more open internet.
I’m not saying they are the worse monopolists out there though, just that I find the logic of splitting chrome sound, in the interest of a more open internet.
Safari works fine?? It's web kit based and is better for both memory usage and battery life iiuc
I almost exclusively use it on my phone. I also use it on my laptop (I have chrome FF and safari but primary use safari and chrome because I prefer them)
This seems to be working as intended. Apple makes a great browser that runs great on their devices and is beautifully designed. Chrome works everywhere (that is important to Google!)
Safari is amazingly fast and energy efficient, but I really really like the total cookie protection feature of Firefox. It’s unique to Firefox and I wish it would become the standard.
I tend to agree. I struggle to understand how a company runs a browser product without being eventually seen as a monopoly. They’re making a unique product ecosystem of browser and apps, just like everyone else, no need to keep coming down on whoever is successful at it. People can vote with their feet and use a dozen other options.
> I struggle to understand how a company runs a browser product without being eventually seen as a monopoly.
Just like for example how a car company can make cars without being a monopoly. Not the best example, but we’re so used to a monopoly it’s tough to imagine what a competitive browser market would look like.
Browsers have never generated enough revenue directly to be competitive. Indirectly they help companies build platforms. When done well enough, we call it a monopoly. I’m actually in favor of restricting their use of tracking but I also think forcing them to divest from the browser business seems heavy handed.
Monopolies are bad for us. It's as simple as that really.
> It does feel a bit like being punished for success.
Nobody is being punished. Punishment would be like "you're going to prison because the thing you started turned into a monopoly". That's not what is happening. It's more like "whoops, you created a monopoly, time to reset, but you get to keep everything you reaped so far".
Why are monopolies bad? In general, monopolies are bad because they can leverage their power in ways that are worse for consumers - ie they make the usual market functions break down. (If the market continued to work correctly, consumers would be able to switch to a competitor)
There are many cases where we like monopolies because it's more efficient to only have one entity do a thing (eg build infrastructure)
It's useful to correctly punish illegal things monopolies do, but in this case, google has created a browser that is good! Better than alternatives!
If you spin that browser off, it will need to figure out how to monetize. It will get worse due to that monetization effort.
Google has other services that would be competitive without Google: drive, YouTube are easy examples.
If we made them spin off Gmail just because Google is too big, that doesn't make sense! Gmail is useful to Google in its current form, but there's no way it's pulling in significant profit (possibly as part of drive - I'm not certain).
You can't just pick a company you don't like and attack it with a hatchet. That's worse for consumers than the thing you're attacking, and the number one rule here should be for regulators to make things better, not worse!
> 1) does it though? It seems like the Google-specific parts of it are pretty ancillary to the whole experience
You're unwittingly describing the textbook definition of anticompetitive practices only made possible by abusing a dominant position.
> 2) how is it different to Apples integration with Safari?
Safari does not represent >65% of all web traffic. Also, there's the major liability of having a single ad company controlling the browser that the average internet user uses to browse the web.
As a firefox user, that copy/paste drives me insane, but I think you're making a logic leap here along with assuming the worst. It's very possible (and likely) that there are API deficiencies that break their ability to offer this when overriding the right-click menu. For example, Firefox not allowing javascript in random tabs from writing to the system clipboard.
You can still use Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V (and in fact the UI will (or at least used to) tell you that).
JupyterLab also doesn't have copy paste in right click menu. I figured it's probably a security feature (preventing malicious JavaScript from harvesting clipboard content).
> how is it different to Apples integration with Safari?
It’s not, other than Google has a way larger market share (especially if you count Edge/Opera/Brave/etc.) and has been (ab)using that position to push web standards in a direction that favors their business and that other browser vendors have to follow to keep up.
If Safari had Chrome’s market share and was throwing their weight around like Google does and Microsoft did with IE, it’d be the same argument and I’d also personally support forcing them to divest it.
I think you mean order of magnitude, which means 10x. Magnitude just means size. Chrome's market share is not an order of magnitude higher than Safari.
In the business world it is, because going from 18% to 65% market share is much more than a 4X improvement. Market share progress is highly non-linear in cost/investment/strategy. There are network effects at play favoring a winner-takes-all.
A (truly) clever argument! Def seems like a stretch though, especially if you're hoping to save GP's comment by suggesting that this is what they had in mind :-)
No, that might be the word origin but not how it is actually used. Just like "decimate" nowadays does not require a factor 10.
So instead of "10x" substitute "by a large enough factor or margin to make a significant difference". That is totally true globally speaking. Locally, in the US, you could however argue that apple abuses it's iPhone market share to sabotage competition (e.g. streaming, webstandards,etc). That just means you should sue both not neither.
So why are those standards impossible to keep up with and we already see plenty of sites break under Firefox? Which by the way is the only independent browser remaining in game, even goddamn Microsoft leaving the domain behind?
Because development costs money. Your "impossible to keep up" here is easily explained by Google simply investing more money in development and thus being able to "innovate" faster. The only way to compete is to invest more, but where do you get that money from?
The easy fix is to make them slow down development, but I fail to see how that's a good thing.
Sure. Continuing my analogy to the British empire's rule over the seas has also surely resulted in technological improvements, but that is not the only way to achieve that.
For a more practical example, Linux is also developed mostly by paid employees, but they are from many different companies and thus improvements can't be weaponized as easily.
Maybe if Mozilla spent more money on development and less money trying to be an NGO they could keep up... Mozilla gets more than enough revenue (from Google ironically), they just spend it poorly.
Or they could do what Brave, Vivaldi and others do and simply use Chromium as a base.
Again, how can it be a proprietary web if everything is open source and available to every other vendor?
Not sure if you remember all the "native" applets that actually were proprietary before Chrome came on the scene and made JS fast enough to kill them... ActiveX, Flash, Java... Those were the dark ages, because of Google the web is more open and better than ever...
More like there were actually multiple vendors that would have to agree on a common thing, but they died out so the single leftover can do whatever it wants...
Miro board is simply unusably slow, but plenty of other commonly used websites have annoying breakages, like login screen not actually logging in and the others.
The DOJ is weird. They're so concerned with whether or not a company is a monopoly, not whether or not they're abusing their power.
Look at the EU, levying multiple billion dollar fines against Apple. But in the US, Apple is free to abuse customers since their market share is a few % short of a monopoly...
I mentioned elsewhere, but the EU wrote an entirely new law to designate some companies as 'gate keepers'. A company no longer has to be a monopoly in the EU to fall under the new law. The DoJ is operating under US law where Apple has largely come out unscathed in any cases brought so far (like Epic).
So far the US has had little desire to regulate big tech in any significant manner.
The EU laws make sense. If you buy something in the EU, you own it. You should be able to do what you want with it. They also have great laws to protect consumers WRT warranties and service and even their AI law is pretty good.
2) consumers cannot use products like Safari as their exclusive web browser. The web has decided that Chrome is the only browser worth supporting and the world needs to keep Chrome at-the-ready for when the alternative browser eventually breaks.
For example, Chrome has replaced IE as the corporate browser, due to the integrations with Workspace accounts and Authentication mechanisms. In order to use the fingerID on my/employer's macbook pro, I have to give my employer root/sync access to Google Chrome.
"The web has decided that Chrome is the only browser worth supporting…"
That only tells me that governments can no longer leave technical aspects of the internet (standards/APIs, etc.) to market forces. There are many historical precedents for such action such as flight/aircraft, RF spectrum management, road and maritime regulations, health/food standards, etc. There's a myriad of them.
Regulations would enforce interoperability and uniformity. To say this would stifle innovation is nonsense, it would be like saying that road rules and maritime law have stifled the development of motor vehicles and shipbuilding.
Try using a miro board. Unfortunately many sites have started breaking under Firefox, and it's a shame that web devs don't test under the 3 remaining browser, at least on a surface-level, before release.
It's not like supporting a completely different OS..
> 2) how is it different to Apples integration with Safari?
It's only different in the share of the overall market they hold - and it's notable that the EU has already acted to break Apple's monopoly over specifically the iOS browser market.
Yeah, and the effectiveness of the enforcement still remains to be seen - Apple is sure making every effort possible to adhere to the letter rather than the spirit of the law, and to isolate any changes they make exclusively to the EU. But I think it's a positive signal that we might see the decline of the big platform monopolies in our lifetime.
If Apple can do that then it's a problem with the law. You can't really make a law and then argue "we're angry that people are complying with what we said, not what we meant to say".
But then again, I wonder if part of the reason is that they can't make the law too prescriptive because that would create other problems politically (especially if it ever got pointed towards European companies)...
Well, it's also not generally very clear whether a geographical political entity like the EU actually has the ability to legislate what occurs outside its borders
re: 1) logging into a Google domain in a chrome browser, logs the browser into the Google account [auto-profile-login] [gSignin], and by default, syncs browser history to the cloud, cloud-readable [gSync]. Google's own docs describe that you can add a passphrase "so Google can't read it". While Google can read it, they have an arguable duty to shareholders to read it.
> Keep your info private with a passphrase
With a passphrase, you can use Google's cloud to store and sync your Chrome data without letting Google read it.
Thank you appealing to reasonable expectations, but Google, as their own docs make clear, ties uses together quite aggressively^W conveniently.
2) Whatabout Apple and Safari? Apple doesn't offer an email service supported in part by scanning email content for ads.
Apple has gone to some lengths to engineer a system where they can credibly(-ish) claim to "protect your privacy when you browse the web in Safari," [Apple private relay].
There's really no rational reason for third-party cookies to still exist. The only reason they're still around is because an advertising company's browser has like 97% market share.
I might make some sense. However, not everyone uses Facebook or Instagram; it's not quite like Google where just about everyone uses some of their services, if not many.
I suppose it would help Meta greatly expand their ad business, to places far beyond FB/IG.
It would be nice to have a completely open source browser that can be built with a simple one liner from cargo.
Having several thousands of eyes on the code daily to check for telemetry violations, privacy issues, security, and performance daily in mostly a single language, small, and well structured browser repo would be phenomenal compared to the disjoint jumbled messes we have today.
As indicated by the explanation, better for people who believe in FOSS rather than closed corporate software.
Most developers work with a Unix mindset (do one thing well, with focus on simple and easily managed code), which tyically means telemetry is _wildly_ out of line (offers no real benefit for the basics while adding huge complexity), so privacy and security are naturally far better.
Lynx like TUI browsers are a nice idea, but unfortunately sometimes an image is desired to be manually viewed, or javascript is required. It would be wonderful if javascript were simply dropped from most websites, but we don't live in that world, so we're stuck with the next best thing (disabling all js until explicitly allowed by the user).
These are the types of things people in software devs typically care about, which there are many in HN.
Wouldn't consumer like it if they could use Google services on any browser with the same experience without having to give up other browsers? I use firefox mainly but I have to use Chrome when I use Google Meet because Google provide more features and better performance when you are on Chrome (intentionally, not because of other browsers limitations)
This is from the DOJ's page on the Clayton Act, where they give two statements of purpose for the antitrust law.
>This law aims to promote fair competition and prevent unfair business practices that could harm consumers. It prohibits certain actions that might restrict competition, like tying agreements, predatory pricing, and mergers that could lessen competition.
>The Antitrust Division enforces federal antitrust and competition laws. These laws prohibit anticompetitive conduct and mergers that deprive American consumers, taxpayers, and workers of the benefits of competition.
Both are aimed squarely at consumer benefit. Restrictions on anticompetitive behaviour and mergers *where those things impact consumer benefit.*.
Mergers and actions against competitors are obviously allowed in the normal course of business.
Lots of people have other ideas about what kind of antitrust law they'd like to see, but such a law has not passed the US Congress.
> prevent unfair business practices that could harm consumers. It prohibits certain actions that might restrict competition, like tying agreements
So, it's plainly written - ations don't have to actually harm consumers, the fact they could do so is enough - and the key criteria is that they might restrict competition.
The second one points to taxpayers and workers as well. This is especially important when it comes to antitrust action regarding workers rights. Actions which could lead to worse consumer experiences (at least if you consider price to be the end all)
“Taxpayers” is an extremely broad category as well, though you need an appetite for it to argue through that clause.
Though I think you can easily make a consumer argument for Chrome being unbundled (competition for Chromes default search engine pick)
...and competition is going so well in the browser market. The dedicated browser businesses (mozilla, opera, etc) are all tiny and/or struggling mightily. All of the biggest browsers are side-projects of larger tech firms.
Monetizing browsers requires either subscriptions or (further) enshittification of the web experience. Forcing /market/ competition into the space will not be great for consumers, IMO.
Perhaps the fact that large companies can subsidize their browser operations through their huge war chest and large presence on the web or in the operating system space is indicative of them using market power to crowd out competition and make paid offerings less sustainable!
Perhaps some antitrust action would help with this.
> Restrictions on anticompetitive behaviour and mergers where those things impact consumer benefit..
You paraphrased incorrectly. The correct paraphrasing would be, “Restrictions on anticompetitive behaviour and mergers where those things deprive consumers of the benefits of competition.”
About seven different things. The whole oversimplification that it has to be one single thing has been a drift in policy (over a few decades) in combination with trying to rewrite history books. The fact that you are even asking the question that way shows how successful that rewriting was.
Start with the Sherman act and then see that "what antitrust means" has had a long, changing history. By the way, the European understanding of antitrust still includes harm to competition as well, which often pops up on HN (e.g. how does Facebook's action harm consumers? That was not the question!).
Yet, you have lots of people in this thread claim that we have always been at war with Eastasia.
Out of all the parts of Google that take advantage of integration to pump up ad revenues, I'd say Chrome is the least of them?
If we're serious about this, separate search and ads. Force ads-Google to pay search-Google for data on the open market, and let other people pay for the same data, make it transparent, and let consumers see exactly what's happening.
While we're at it, separate Google's display ad network from its RTB facilities, basically carving DoubleClick back out again.
This is the point. Google's products integrate with Chrome better than non-Google products. Including its ad platform.