321–330 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?
As an American there is nothing I would love to see more than Google broken up into a thousand pieces and their stock reduced to negative amounts to atone for all the damage wrought upon the web in the past two decades.
I genuinely can't think of anyone, of any political stripe, outside of Google and its employees and investors, who thinks Google should have the power it has now. Honestly, the degree of pushback this is getting on HN is shocking to me. Google is massively anti-competitive and spends a ton of energy hurting startups to its own benefit.
I hope the DOJ gets its way on this, and I hope they aggressively pursue anti-trust actions against other organizations in similar positions - Oracle, Epic Systems, and Meta all come to mind.
How about Amazon buying Firefox instead?
Here's something I don't understand. If you want to switch your search engine for Safari on iOS, you open Settings, tap Safari, tap Search Engine, and tap your preferred search engine. Not many users do this, and the conclusion is that the default has an unfair advantage. If you want to make Chrome your desktop browser, you open the default browser, search for Chrome, click the correct result, download the installer,…
Look at what Google does with Chrome and how it harms the internet, they literally just disabled an ad blocker and then offered a new tier of ad free Youtube for $8 a month.
Then think about the power it gives them for tracking, remember they tried to replace tracking cookies with their own standard?
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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course they could. They could just cancel Chrome, shut the whole browser down and reassign all the staff, and the DOJ would be fine with that. Cancelling it, or selling while keeping 100% of the employees are in no way counter to the proposed remedies.
We don’t know what proposals the court will accept.
A company owning a web browser isn't the problem. A company owning a web browser, OS and search engine shouldn't be a problem either. I don't know why the remedy can't actually address the problem, and the DOJ can't move more quickly to address antitrust across the industry. This feels like randomly cutting a baby in half, while the rest of the thieves, even those in the same family, are not deterred.
It's already bad enough they are removing ad block functionality and then a day later rolling out new ad-free plans for YouTube, what a cawinky dink
Here's something I don't understand. If you want to switch your search engine for Safari on iOS, you open Settings, tap Safari, tap Search Engine, and tap your preferred search engine. Not many users do this, and the conclusion is that the default has an unfair advantage. If you want to make Chrome your desktop browser, you open the default browser, search for Chrome, click the correct result, download the installer,…
Most of that advantage comes from an unfair practice, of Google making consumers think that their choice of browser was in someway inferior (which could be true) and thus they should prefer Chrome (which is not true). If Chrome won market dominance using this method, then it becomes an unfair practice. Same thing with Microsoft Edge, Apple's App Store, etc. You can't use your market power in one market to influence another.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It will hurt but it won’t be their death. They have been saving up a bit last year if you see the financial reports their reserves are just above $1B now and there are others who paid in the past (like Yahoo did till 2017) who will pay Firefox a decent amount if not like Google does . My guess it is likely be Bing or probably a new generation AI company like OpenAI who will replace Google and perhaps even pay similar…
They can start by reducing their CEO salary from check notes $6.9 million in 2022. It increased by millions in just a decade while their market share declined and they layed off hundreds.
Or are you suggesting that none of these CEOs should be compensated at current rates? If so, hate the game and not the player my friend.
Here's something I don't understand. If you want to switch your search engine for Safari on iOS, you open Settings, tap Safari, tap Search Engine, and tap your preferred search engine. Not many users do this, and the conclusion is that the default has an unfair advantage. If you want to make Chrome your desktop browser, you open the default browser, search for Chrome, click the correct result, download the installer,…
The mere existence of a competitor is not the spirit of antitrust. Look at what Google does with Chrome and how it harms the internet, they literally just disabled an ad blocker and then offered a new tier of ad free Youtube for $8 a month. Then think about the power it gives them for tracking, remember they tried to replace tracking cookies with their own standard?
I worry as part of Google, chrome is just an open source project with profit as a secondary motive, while as it’s own company they’ll probably try to make it more profitable and it’ll become worse and closed down.