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

cnbc.com

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

#381

Post by ehsankia »

upcoming-sesame wrote: post #184
Workaccount2 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is one of the practices I hate the most on the internet. Sometimes it's so ridiculous that a news site will report about some company and will not have a single link to the company page or will have a link that just points to another previous article about that company. How fuxking insecure are you ??

It has gotten absolutely out of control. I will be reading an article about a new game, and the article won't even have a link to the store page to buy the game...

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

#382

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

VoidWhisperer wrote: post #357
tyingq wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting example, as Google used to link to Wikipedia much more prominently, then stopped doing that, which dropped Wikipedia's visitor counts a lot. A very large percentage of Wikipedia's visits are Google referrals. Google shifted views that used to go to Wikipedia first to their in-house knowledge graph (high percentages of which are just Wikipedia content), then to the AI produced snippets. All to say, yes...W…

I would argue that this is less an example of why linking out may be bad for engagement and more an example of google abusing its intermediary/market position to keep users on their own pages longer

I'd argue that a user not having to click through is clearly a better result for the user, and that alone would be sufficient motivation to do it.

In terms of a single search, I don't think Google really benefits from preventing a click-through - the journey is over once the user has their information. If anything, making them click through to an ad-infested page would probably get a few fractions of a cent extra given how deeply Google is embedded in the ads ecosystem.

But giving the user the result faster means they're more likely to come back when they need the next piece of information, and give them more time to search for the next information. That benefits Google, but only because it benefits the user.

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

#383

Post by ehsankia »

pinkmuffinere wrote: post #181
Hansenq wrote: post #31

This seems like a very sensible and logical conclusion by the judge to me. An exclusive contract with Apple/Samsung isn't great, but even Apple testified that they would not have accepted any other searcch engine because everyone else was worse. You can't make restrictions on what Apple is allowed to do because Google violated some law--if Apple wants to make Google the default, they should be allowed to do so! The b…

> 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…

1. It might not be the best across all metrics today, but it definitely was a few years ago.

2. While it's true that other browsers like Firefox have been catching up to Chrome in speed, it's still true that Chrome help lead the way and if not for it, the web would've likely been far slower today.

3. There has been an explosion in other browsers in the past few years, but admittedly they're all chromium-based, so even that wouldn't have been possible without Chrome

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

#384

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

rendaw wrote: post #380
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…

Is StackOverflow dead now? And because of AI? It still usually has the standard quality of answers for most questions I google. I google fewer questions because modern languages have better documentation cultures.

All my stackoverflow-style queries are now going to whatever AI chatbot is most accessible when I need my answer.

They tend to provide answers that are at least as correct as StackOverflow (i.e. not perfect but good enough to be useful in most cases), generally more specific (the first/only answer is the one I want, I don't have to find the right one first), and the examples are tailored to my use case to the point where even if I know the exact command/syntax, it's often easier to have one of the chatbots "refactor" it for me.

You still want to only use them when you can verify the answer and verifying won't take more time. I recently asked a bot to explain a rsync command line, then finding myself verifying the answers against the man page anyways (i.e. I could have used the manpage instead from the start) - and while the first half of the answer was spot on, the second contained complete hallucinations about what the arguments meant.

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

#385

Post by TJSomething »

pfg_ wrote: post #364
overfeed wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

While I agree on those counts, the debugger in Chrome handles large files of minified code, deep framework stack traces, and stopping in dysfunctional code better.

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

#386

Post by BrenBarn »

robocat wrote: post #14
LeoPanthera wrote: post #9

The BBC is reporting the exact opposite of this headline. "It's also free to keep making payments to partners such as Apple, to secure placement of its browser - another closely watched and contentious part of the case." https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cg50dlj9gm4t Edit: Even the CNBC body text contradicts its own headline. The confusion seems to be what "exclusive" means. "The company can make payments to preload prod…

CNBC also says "illegally held a monopololy". When they can't spell, it's a sign the article was poorly rushed?

They put the LOL in monopololy.

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

#389

Post by unethical_ban »

ryandrake wrote: post #260
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…

Is it common to use Internet search like that??? You're typing in literal questions to a search box rather than keywords, the name of the site you're looking for, or topics you want to read about. Maybe I'm just too old school, from the time where internet searches were essentially keyword searches, but it would have never occurred to me to type an actual english question as a full sentence into a search box. If that…

The questions above would be changed up for a Google search. The point is that LLMs can answer those questions pretty accurately now. I'm using LLMs to write technical cheat sheets for Linux sysadmin stuff, and to write a hobby website. I'm using search far less than before.

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

#390

Post by BrenBarn »

> Plaintiffs overreached in seeking forced divestiture of these key assets, which Google did not use to effect any illegal restraints.

This is the problem. It doesn't matter if they used those specific assets to perpetrate these specific acts. The overall market power derived from those assets (and many others) taints everything they do.

There is no way to effectively curtail monopoly power by selectively limiting the actions of monopolists in certain specific domains. It's like thinking you can stop a rampaging 500-pound gorilla by tying two of its fingers together because those were the two fingers that were at the leading edge of its blow when it crushed someone's skull with a punch.

Once a company has monopoly power of any kind, it is useless to try to stop it from using that power to do certain things. It will always find a way to use its power to get around any restrictions. The problem isn't what the monopoly does, it's that the monopoly exists. The only surefire way is to destroy the monopoly itself by shattering the company into tiny pieces so that no entity holds monopoly power at all.

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