181–190 of 718 posts
At this point, tech's major competitors are overseas. Never thought I'd be making this argument, but does breaking up the search monopoly help America or up and comers?
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If chrome is no longer owned by Google I'll use it. That's the reason I switched to firefox in the first place.
In my opinion Firefox is better in all the ways except speed - Chrome still feels faster on old computers. And I prefer the browser market to still have some technical diversity no matter who actually runs it.
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Another perspective is Google is stifling American innovation by its megalithic presence in markets. Suppressing local growth in exchange for short term profitability. Separately, why is having tech giants a pure advantage? These companies got big by innovating, but the innovation slows down when they are big. Sounds to me that we should be regularly clearing old growth to let new ideas break through
Some things can only be done at scale, or are a side effect of solving problems at scale. It’s not quite so simple as “big is bad”. Also, it’s harder for international companies to buy, say, Google, than a browser-only company, just through the amount of capital needed to put up a credible offer.
These trillion-dollar companies only focus on billion-dollar markets and kill their own products that are deemed unable to scale at a planetary level
If you look carefully at the Chromium project, it’s made up of teams that specialize in different components. The majority of the members of those teams are in turn Google employees. Presumably they have the best qualifications to be on those teams. I don’t see how a DOJ decision against Google would change any of that. Ban Google employees from participating in the project? And then who would replace them?
Firefox seems to do fine without Google employees.
“When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.”
First I don't believe this is an effective remedy to break up a Google monopoly, but I have no influence on the DOJ. I'm curious though, if Google can no longer pay browsers for search engine traffic what is the business model that will sustain development and advancement in the space? How does a non Google owned Chrome support itself and continue development? What happens to all the applications that rely on Chrome…
You call them Chrome extensions, but they're really Chromium extensions that work on Edge, Opera, Brave, Vivaldi, Arc, etc. Those teams contribute code to the Chromium open source project too. Sure, whoever takes over Chrome won't have Googles juggernaut team pushing Chromium development forward, and maybe that will lead to degradation over time, but it's not like it would cause immediate ecosystem collapse. For all…
Does Google have undue influence now? Sure. But I’m not so sanguine about the alternatives either.
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There is no foundation with the budget to even maintain a web browser, let alone keep developing. If Google is not footing the bill then Safari will become the torch bearer, and Apple has no incentive to make Safari become more capable to threaten that sweet IAP revenue.
Have there been meaningful changes to the browser spec since ES2015 support was baked in? Chrome, Safari etc. are not developing their browsers for the betterment of the web. One company wants to shove ads in your face, the other wants you out of the web entirely and into their walled garden of apps and ads. From a security standpoint, I'm sure it's more complicated, but UBO and warning dialog boxes about downloading…
All that rather pathetic grovelling and kowtowing to Trump, for naught.
It doesn't matter if they actually go through with it or greatly inflate the number like OpenAI, Softbank and co did.
Google has to sell Chrome, a completely optional browser, and stop supporting Firefox, the best Chrome alternative, while Apple is allowed to completely lock down iOS without allowing installing alternatives to Safari, or any third party app stores. Not to mention that Apple for years exploited its dominant market position in the US by resisting messaging RCS Android compatibility, and pressuring teens into either bu…
For Google search, the quality has gone down enormously and yet it has lost approximately 0 market share. It is still utterly dominant. This was used to push people to Chrome, and still is. It was used to dominate the web ads market. And so on: market power used to increase market power in other markets. Classic anticompetitive behaviour.
Apple doesn't have anything like a monopoly in any market. Even in the US, where their position is strongest relative to Android, it still isnt even close to a monopoly.
iOS isn't a monopoly so there is nothing wrong with it being locked down. It doesn't pressure "teens" into anything. Teenagers will pick up on anything they can to create peer pressure themselves. They would just say "lol nice loser android phone" when they saw the phone in person anyway lol.