Google Being Forced to Sell Chrome Is Not Good for the Web

Vertical integration was a huge part of what they went after historically, until a bunch of people "convinced" the US that the standard should be "consumer harm." The cool thing about consumer harm is that you can come up with any bullshit argument about how prices will go down and access and quality up in the future from some merger, and nobody can disprove it because it's a counterfactual (he said, she said.) And when prices go up, it's just , who could have known?

I know what vertical integration is today, though. It's not a hypothetical, it's a selling point to investors. I can just tell you no. Any clear metrics or standards for antitrust action can't be tolerated. The goal is to force us to go on vibes. Then they say we have bad vibes.

Competition brings down prices. Laissez-faire leads to pseudo-Communism with royal families, courtiers, and technicians making up the top 10%, and everybody else gets to be a (debt) slave i.e. feudalism.

We should err towards breaking more things up than would be ideal, not less. If I make you divest from something, you sell it and get whatever future value out of it today. It's not a punishment according to SCOTUS when they're looking at TikTok (which is why they said the TikTok ban wasn't a bill of attainder.) We charter these companies, and they operate for our benefit, which is why we grant them limited liability and a whole bunch of other treats. What you divest is going to go to somebody just like you, but someone who is not financially entangled with you. The only reason you want to keep it all is to do things that I don't want you to do with it, I don't want you doing unproductive market manipulation, I want you to put that energy into competing.

I’m no fan of Google, but—unless people really want browser subscriptions—I don’t see how you can have a browser company today. They exist better as a byproduct of some other business model.

Forcing Chrome to display a search engine choice doesn't even begin to solve the issue. Chrome spies on you regardless, and it also banned UBO and other ad-blocking extensions. It is a product made to deliberately spy on and harvest more data from you.

    You’ve got a monopoly on lemonade because you pay all the grocery stores to be the default lemonade.

    So we’re going to force you sell your car.

To put it another way, the problem is not so much that Google shouldn't be paying to be the default search engine, but that it shouldn't own both the browser and the search engine.

I think this harkens back to the anti-trust court case, United States v. Paramount Pictures, where the court ruled that the film studios cannot hold monopolies over the movie theatres, and that theatres must remain independent.

Similarly, browsers and search engines being independent is good for competition because the internet is too important to let a single company dictate how it is used.