I guess Google didn’t bribe hard enough
this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2025
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It's not done yet. I highly doubt it ever will be either.
There are still Trump critics on YouTube.
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.
Acceleration-ism does not work.
If the USA has not taught you this, after this reckless takeover, nothing will save you.
The more likely outcome is for Chrome to become a North Korea RedStar equivalent, where you cannot freely access the internet without Chrome. And if you visit a resource with wrongspeak, the resource will have all its finances taken away (see the legislation surrounding section 230); with you being sent to El Salvador.
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.
FF depends on google ad money, thats why FF is currently enshittifying right now.
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.
For a second, I read your fruit predilection literally and was like, "Is…watermelon controversial, now? Are they [the people who banned you] cartoonishly racist?"
I follow you, now; sucks but expected…
I still don't get it, can you clue me in?
Yeah; of course. Ze's referencing supporting Palestine (as the watermelon became more widely recognized as a symbol for them due to recent events).
Please, do it! That's going to eviscerate Chrome's userbase and push these Chromium browsers to fork so fast it'll make his head spin.
You're putting way too much faith in the typical consumer. Enshittifying Chrome even more would piss its users off, but inertia and its market dominance would keep most of them continuing to use it while complaining about how bad it is.
Remember: It took 8 years for Chrome to drag Internet Explorer to the point where less than 10% of people actually used it. And that's with Firefox already being a competitor to it for years.
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
The rest look like they got some boots to shine real good!
I guess for Trump they look shiny themselves, while the Google guy looks somehow not white nor orange enough.
They’re all dickheads, but he actually looks like one. So do his weird “space” ships.
Yeah, but we're not talking about Amazon guy, we're talking about Google guy.
Something about him is different, but I'm not white sure what it could be.
Bezos isn't the ceo of Google, Sundar Pichai is
I think this is good news which seems hard to believe right now. I'm sure someone will find a way to make this terrible but on it's face we are watching an important anti-trust ruling take place. Google's monopoly on the browser is dangerous and unhealthy. Taking it away from them is absolutely the right thing to do. Who inherits the power over the single browser used by most of the world remains to be seen though.
Who inherits the power over the single browser used by most of the world remains to be seen though.
Probably Musk or Thiel.
Solution: Create an open source foundation, cram the board with Google employees
Thus the price of collaboration. You are not rewarded, you simply draw attention to yourself as someone with wealth they can pillage.
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.
I don’t really get what selling Chrome and Android would accomplish.
There was a leak of Google's old page ranking algorithm (not PageRank, but how they change the order of results on search) - it looked like they used a bunch of signals from Chrome about the amount of time users spend on a page, how quickly they go back, etc. Chrome gives the search side of the business an advantage.
Conversely, Android feeds a bunch of extra data to the ad business about what people do in real life.
Both products give the rest of Alphabet a significant advantage over their competitors, and make it harder for new entrants to get a foothold.
requiring Google (and Facebook) to spin off their ad network businesses
That is their business. Everything else exists to bring more value to that business:
- AOSP - ads in the browser (search engine) and app store
- Chrome - ads in the search engine, and nudge people toward other Google products to hoover up data to serve more ads
And so on. Google and Meta are ad companies that drive traffic to their ads through software services.
The point in forcing them out of certain businesses is to open them up to more competition. They can keep ad margins high due to sheer volume of eyeballs coming from their other services. Gutting those services means they need to provide better value to stay competitive.
Idk if it'll work, but stripping out the browser is likely good overall for the open web.
Spinning them off into their own independent companies would make more sense than a sale to another party.
Google gets to control the source code, what additions are added, and what features don't get into it.
Yes technically some organization could fork it and then maintain a fork themselves. But it's a huge undertaking that almost nobody has the money to fund. Browsers are free so there's really not a lot of monetization schemes for browsers.
So nobody as far as I know has really been able to maintain a hard fork of chromium for very long. Remember, every change you make then has to be maintained by you and then you have to keep it up to date with the chromium master tree while also keeping all of your changes compatible. It is a big undertaking almost as big as modern operating systems. Browsers are just too complicated so Google in this position does still have a monopoly that's very hard to fight.
Almost all browsers other than Safari and Firefox are based on Chromium, which gives Google a ton of control.
I somehow don't believe this is going to happen. But if it does, sell it to Mozilla?
mozilla doesnt have money, they are so desperate now, they are lowkey selling some data.
Selling it means receiving money for it. Mozilla without Google support, which at that point would be lacking, wouldn't have the means.
They could sell it for $1 if they wanted to.
Also I think Mozilla is self sustainable from investment income from its endowment. Could be wrong.
I've been worried about this. I figured that Mozilla is funded by Google (so they can say that they've taken steps to avoid the perception that they are a Browser monopoly). Would Mozilla lose their funding of Google no longer has that Browser monopoly?
I meant that they no longer need Google's funding, however if Chrome becomes Mozilla, Google would have a real need to pay Mozilla to stay the default engine in Chrome.
How do they no longer need it? Isn't Google like 80% of their income? Mozilla was controlled opposition. This would be a historic moment in history though Like when Gates loaned his buddy Jobs money to help Apple launch the iPhone.