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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

#361

Post by conartist6 »

thayne wrote: post #83
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.

> The ruling says they can pay for preload, but not for exclusivity. From what I understand Google could pay for Firefox to install a Google search extension, but they can't pay Firefox to make Google the default search engine. Even if they get google to pay for just pre-installing it, it's not going to be anywhere near what Google currently pays to be the default.

I read that part. The court mandates a search engine choice screen initially for each device, then once a year afterwards. Google is allowed to pay for advertising on this screen.

It seems to me that at very least Mozilla will have to renegotiate a contract and it's not clear what they might make off selling ads in that space. Google will presumably not value the lesser advantage as highly, but if the other provisions create more search engine competition there could be growing value to Mozilla in that ad real estate in theory

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

#362

Post by Chinjut »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #207
IshKebab wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

StackOverflow is dead because its rules are nonsensical and many of its users are dicks. It's going to be a real problem going forward, because if AI hadn't killed them something else would have, and now it's questionable whether that "something else" will ever emerge. The need for something like SO is never going to go away as long as new technologies, algorithms, languages and libraries continue to be created.

A scary (if not particularly original) thought: If people become utterly reliant on LLMs and no longer embrace any new language etc for which there is insufficient LLM training, new languages etc will no longer continue to be created.

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

#363

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

justinclift wrote: post #265
nradov wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of that stuff like court decisions and patents isn't copyrighted anyway. They can host a copy on their own site and display ads around it if they want to.

Sure, but if they're hosting it on their own site then who's to know it hasn't been modified by them for some reason? ie it's no longer a "source of truth"

Post the checksum J/K. Court should maybe GPG sign it though.. something like that. So we can verify the creator of any particular document.

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

#364

Post by pfg_ »

overfeed wrote: post #319
pinkmuffinere wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google started, developed, and built Chrome into the best browser available today I don’t think this is as settled as you imply. I tend to like Google products, and do almost everything in the Google ecosystem. But my browser is normally brave or Firefox, because better Adblock is so so impactful. I feel that chrome is a valid alternative, but that no browser is really clearly “the best”. In your view, what is it t…

> In your view, what is it that makes chrome the best? As a former Firebug fan: Chrome/Chromium has had superior browser dev-tools experience for over a decade now.

Whenever I use chrome, I'm missing the style editor and multi-line repl mode from firefox. When I switched to firefox from chrome, I didn't miss anything. There might be new features chrome has added since that I would want if I knew about them

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

#365

Post by safety1st »

girvo wrote: post #340
Eji1700 wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much like microsoft, it's really the best possible outcome. Winning a case is one thing, as they can find other reasons to come back. Losing, and saying "but we were already punished, you got what you want" is such a barrier to EVER putting any sort of realistic reigns on them. They might as well just bury antitrust now and stop pretending.

Antitrust is and has been dead for a long time at this point. It’s not coming back, to the detriment of society.

What's so mind boggling about this decision is that if there's one thing virtually all of America agrees upon, it's that Google needs to be reined in.

The Trump administration initiated this lawsuit. The Biden administration took it over and won the case. It's back on the Trump administration now and they wanted structural remedies.

The majority of Americans when polled express concerns about data privacy, security and monopoly in relation to Google - things Americans generally don't get that worked up about, but with Google, they know there's a problem.

Amit Mehta sold them all out with the most favorable outcome for Google that one could imagine. This guy, literally sold everyone in America out, the left, the right and the middle, except for Google management of course.

(This decision probably isn't even good for Google shareholders -- historically breakups of monopolies create shareholder value!)

I think Amit Mehta's impartiality here needs to be the subject of a Congressional investigation. I personally don't feel this guy should be a judge anymore after this.

If his decision stands this is going to be a landmark in American history, one of the points where historians look back and say "this is when American democracy really died and got replaced with a kleptocratic state." The will of everyone, people, the Congress, the Executive branch, all defied by one judge who sold out.

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

#366

Post by roywiggins »

AlienRobot wrote: post #293
Hard_Space wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By the way, a pet peeve of mine right now is that reporters covering court cases never seem to simply paste the link to the online PDF decision/ruling for us all to read right in the story. I presume that this falls under the same consideration as direct links to science papers in articles that are covering those releases. Far as I can tell, the central tactic for lowering bounce rate and increasing 'engagement' is…

It's depressing how much of the web didn't work the way it was supposed to. Attention is centralized on news websites because news can be posted on social media feeds every day. Those news articles never link to other websites due to arbitrary SEO considerations. Google's pagerank which was once based on backlinks can't function if the only links come from social media feeds in 3 websites and none of them come from a…

It's worse now with Instagram and other video apps that don't even let you link out. "link in bio" is killing the web.

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

#367

Post by coro_1 »

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…

> 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).

Maybe.. not. LLMs may just flow where the money goes. Open AI has a deal with the FT, etc.

The AI platforms haven't touched any UI devolution at all because they're a hot commodity.

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

#368

Post by tokioyoyo »

RachelF wrote: post #342

How corrupt are judges in the USA? Are their any measures that audit their finances or stop them or their relations from taking work with companies they have issued judgements on? I'm not saying this is the case here, it is a general question.

US laws are very corporate-friendly.

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

#369

Post by Jensson »

chillfox wrote: post #291
rprend wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google sucking isn’t google’s algorithm getting worse; it’s the internet getting more competitive and polluted. If you magically turned on the recommendation algorithm from 2010 but with today’s internet, the results would be far far worse.

It's their algo getting worse. They have pushed search results below the fold and filled the whole top part of the page up with ads. They are optimizing for engagement, you searching repeatedly trying to find the right keywords/phrase is better for them than you actually finding what you are after. There are many search engines that don't have an issue with the internet being "competitive and polluted". So you want m…

That is like computer viruses, the biggest vendors get the most attacks targeted at them, so using a less well known OS makes you safer even though the big vendors spends way more on safety.

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

#370

Post by goopypoop »

robocat wrote: post #135
Electricniko wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 spelli…

"Caterpillar" was a spelling mistake in Dr Johnson's dictionary
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