DOJ: Google must sell Chrome, Android could be next

Yes. This is the DOJ’s proposal for what should happen now that Google was found guilty.

Google will make their own proposal, I think. Then the judge will decide.

Then 50 years of appeals.

The whole point is to introduce more players into the system so there is the possibility of competition. At present it is very efficient in the sense that you have a single company with monopolistic control over what content gets surfaced and how content gets monetised. That's a conflict of interest that's so obviously harmful to consumers Page and Brin actually call it out in the original "Anatomy of a Search Engine" paper.

    "Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users...we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.

    Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious."

http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf (see the whole section entitled "Advertising and Mixed Motives".

*Points at firefox*

> Instead of smashing up successful businesses, you should tax them, and use the tax revenue to improve deficiencies in the market.

The deficiency in the market is that laws exist that allow market concentration. Should we tax them to fund regulatory reform?

> If the government thinks there should be more browsers, (or mobile os's) they should tax the existing ones and pay folks to improve the open source alternatives.

Let's review the problem with Chrome.

Chromium is open source. Chrome is Chromium with some corporate misfeatures like DRM, but is also the thing with an advertising budget. Nobody notices that their browser quietly supports DRM, except that then more sites use it, and then open source browsers on open hardware cease to be viable because if you try to use it, it doesn't support the DRM, and then no matter how much better it is people won't use it because half the internet is broken.

If you made Chromium better, Google would just keep making Chrome based on Chromium and then Chrome would have all the improvements you made to Chromium and you've solved nothing. If you made a different open source browser under a license that didn't allow them to do that then they still have billions of dollars so if you do anything better then they can just add the same feature to Chrome. At which point people still don't use your thing because they want to watch Netflix, and Netflix continues to require windvine because the Judas browsers have the most market share so devices that support DRM are common and demanding it doesn't bankrupt them.

Or, you could fix the law that allows DRM to be used as a fig leaf for the true motivation of vendor lock-in and simply create an explicit adversarial interoperability exception to DMCA 1201, not only as a defense but as an affirmative right. Then the open source browser can legally break the DRM in order to implement an ad blocker and create a feature that Google won't put in Chrome, without giving Chrome any abilities the open alternative doesn't, allowing the alternative to gain market share.

> You _should_ outlaw behavior that creates monopolies, like predatory pricing etc

Predatory pricing isn't a cause of monopolies, it's a consequence. If it's happening, the last thing you want to do is ban it, because it's a red flag that tells you the market is broken and you need to fix it. If you leave the market broken, a company with enough market power to charge excessive margins has enough market power to screw the customer in a hundred other ways, and trying to ban every possible abuse of market power is a million times harder than smashing up monopolies.

Agreed. Would much rather pay $100-200/year for ad-free OS / productivity software that is patched and secure and doesn't sell my data.

Alas, very people put that high a value on their privacy.