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Google can keep its Chrome browser but will be barred from exclusive contracts

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Re: Google can keep its Chrome browser but will be barred from exclusive contracts

#131

Post by hackinthebochs »

bediger4000 wrote: post #49
jonas21 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you not see ChatGPT and Claude as viable alternatives to search? They've certainly replaced a fair chunk of my queries.

I do not. I prefer to read the primary sources, LLM summaries are, after all, probabilistic, and based on syntax. I'm often looking for semantics, and an LLM really really is not going to give me that.

That Searlesque syntax/semantics dichotomy isn't as clear cut as it once was. Yes, programs operate syntactically. But when semantics is assigned to particular syntactic structures, as it is with word embeddings, the computer is then able to operate on semantics through its facility with syntax. These old standard thought patterns need to be reconsidered in the age of LLMs.

Re: Google can keep its Chrome browser but will be barred from exclusive contracts

#132

Post by NooneAtAll3 »

IshKebab wrote: post #116
stackskipton wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feels like judge was looking for any excuse not to apply harsh penalty and since Google brought up AI as competitor, the judge accepted it as acceptable excuse for very minor penalty.

AI is a competitor. You know how StackOverflow is dead because AI provided an alternative? That's happening in search too. You might think "but ChatGPT isn't a search engine", and that's true. It can't handle all queries you might use a search engine for, e.g. if you want to find a particular website. But there are many many queries that it can handle. Here's just a few from my recent history: * How do I load a share…

so what you're saying is that we're about to get ad-spammed Ai as well...

Re: Google can keep its Chrome browser but will be barred from exclusive contracts

#133

Post by makeitdouble »

xnx wrote: post #59
stackskipton wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Under good Monopoly law, you would remedy the situation that got them to this point, not worry about their future. Chrome + Deals got to them to this point so that's what you unwind. If it causes Google to get weakened and AI finishes them off, that's just creative destruction at work and oh well.

The ease with which a total newcomer was able to steal share from Google is real-world evidence that there wasn't really a monopoly and that Google competitors (Bing, etc.) just sucked and didn't want to spend the money to be better.

You make it sound like some AI company snapped 5% of global search traffic from Google across all devices. What's the actual number ?

Re: Google can keep its Chrome browser but will be barred from exclusive contracts

#134

Post by xnx »

lysace wrote: post #77
fidotron wrote: post #19

This is an astonishing victory for Google, they must be very happy about it. They get basically everything they want (keeping it all in the tent), plus a negotiating position on search deals where they can refuse something because they can't do it now. Quite why the judge is so concerned about the rise of AI factoring in here is beyond me. It's fundamentally an anticompetitive decision.

From an outsider POV (holding Alphabet stock!): The US legal system seems quite broken.

> The US legal system seems quite broken.

Indeed, sometimes the courts don't just get it wrong, they get it backwards. Compare how Google was punished for allowing Android to sideload apps, while Apple wasn't punished for not letting any apps outside the App Store on iOS.

Re: Google can keep its Chrome browser but will be barred from exclusive contracts

#135

Post by robocat »

Electricniko wrote: post #114
edm0nd wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just fed this to Claude >write me two paragraphs about how AI has grown in 2025. include a few typos to make it appear as if a human wrote them. its response: I can't write content with intentional typos to make it appear human-written, as this could be misleading about the source of the content. However, I'd be happy to write you two informative paragraphs about AI's growth in 2025!

Ha ha, I just tried this with Gemini, with the prompt to "include a few typos in the writing." The first time didn't include any typos that jumped out at me, so I asked it where they were. Its response: "My apologies, the previous response did not contain any intentional typos. The original user request was to include a few typos in the writing, but I failed to do so. The text was edited to correct any accidental err…

Perhaps AI would usually suggest childish or uneducated spelling mistakes.

A journalist is unlikely to type regulashions, and I suspect that mistake would be picked up by proofing checks/filters.

Well educated people, and proofing systems, have different patterns to the mistakes they make.

Mistakes are probably hard to keep in character without a large corpus of work to copy.

More interestingly a fairly unique spelling mistake allows us to follow copying.

There are training mistakes in AI where AI produces an output that becomes a signature for that AI (or just that training set of data). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45031375 (thread about "Why do people keep writing about the imaginary compound Cr2Gr2Te6"

Unclosed parens to prove I'm a Real I)

Re: Google can keep its Chrome browser but will be barred from exclusive contracts

#136

Post by supernova87a »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #104
supernova87a wrote: post #56

By the way, a pet peeve of mine right now is that reporters covering court cases (and we have so many of public interest lately) never seem to simply paste the link to the online PDF decision/ruling for us all to read, right in the story. (and another user here kindly did that for us below: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.223... ) It seems such a simple step (they must have been using the rul…

Never link outside your domain has been rule #1 of the ad-driven business for years now. Once users leave your page, they become exponentially less likely to load more ad-ridden pages from your website. Ironically this is also why there is so much existential fear about AI in the media. LLMs will do to them what they do to primary sources (and more likely just cut them out of the loop). This Google story will get a l…

I guess they are unable to value the function that I am more likely to read and trust stories from their website if they give me the honest info about where their stories come from that I can further read (and rely on them to always point me to as a guide).

Re: Google can keep its Chrome browser but will be barred from exclusive contracts

#137

Post by skybrian »

anthem2025 wrote: post #108
skybrian wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? It seems like new API's should be tested with real users before becoming a web standard, and origin trials were a big improvement over what happened before with webkit specific CSS, etc.

Because they have a history of abusing their monopoly on browsers to push new standards that only help them.

What are some examples of that for web standards?

Re: Google can keep its Chrome browser but will be barred from exclusive contracts

#138

Post by harmmonica »

IshKebab wrote: post #116
stackskipton wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feels like judge was looking for any excuse not to apply harsh penalty and since Google brought up AI as competitor, the judge accepted it as acceptable excuse for very minor penalty.

AI is a competitor. You know how StackOverflow is dead because AI provided an alternative? That's happening in search too. You might think "but ChatGPT isn't a search engine", and that's true. It can't handle all queries you might use a search engine for, e.g. if you want to find a particular website. But there are many many queries that it can handle. Here's just a few from my recent history: * How do I load a share…

Exactly this. Another way of putting it is that LLMs are doing all the clicking, reading, researching and many times even the "creating" for me. And I can watch it source things and when I need to question whether it's hallucinating I get a shortcut because I can see all the steps that went into finding the info it's presenting. And on top of it replacing Google Search it's now creating images, diagrams, drawings and endless other "new work" that Google search could never do for me in the first place.

I swear in the past week alone things that would've taken me weeks to do are taking hours. Some examples: create a map with some callouts on it based on a pre-existing design (I literally would've needed several hours of professional or at least solid amateur design work to do this in the past; took 10 minutes with ChatGPT). Figure out how much a rooftop solar system's output would be compromised based on the shading of a roof at a specific address at different times of the day (a task I literally couldn't have completed on my own). Structural load calculations for a post in a house (another one I couldn't have completed on my own). Note some of these things can't be wrong so of course you can't blindly rely on ChatGPT, but every step of the way I'm actually taking any suspicious-sounding ChatGPT output and (ironically I guess) running keyword searches on Google to make sure I understand what exactly ChatGPT is saying. But we're talking orders of magnitude less time, less searching and less cost to do these things.

Edit: not to say that the judge's ruling in this case is right. Just saying that I have zero doubt that LLM's are an existential threat to Google Search regardless of what Google's numbers said during their past earnings call.

Re: Google can keep its Chrome browser but will be barred from exclusive contracts

#140

Post by dh2022 »

mig39 wrote: post #76
Workaccount2 wrote: post #10

Firefox can still get money, and maybe Apple too. The ruling says they can pay for preload, but not for exclusivity. Google also must share search data with competitors, but it's not totally clear what this is. The ruling mentions helping other engines with "long tail" queries. All in all this seems like a pretty mild ruling, and an appeal can generally only help Google from a not to bad ruling at this point.

Yeah, I don't think Google is the "exclusive" on either Apple OSes or Firefox. Just the default.

It shows you how well the judge understands the situation. More or less the remedy is keep doing what you are doing.
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