Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

cnbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

421–430 of 663 posts

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

#421

Post by brookst »

dragonwriter wrote: post #273
benoau wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, they pay $20 billion to Apple, Firefox etc to be default and now that can't be exclusive - but you could always change search engines so in practice perhaps nothing changes at all.

If it can't be exclusive, that means other providers must be allowed to pay to be default on some portion of installs? If so, wouldn't that result in the basis of payment changing to a basis which takes into account the number or (e.g., advertising demographics-based) desirability of the default installs that Google receives, rather than a global amount based on what is expected to be aggregate number and desirabilit…

Forbidding Google from requiring exclusivity is not the same thing as mandating that Apple accept payments from others.

Google can afford to pay more per user/click because of scale economies; their cost per user/click is lower. So, great, Google will pay Apple $20/user/year on a nonexclusive basis, and Firefox or whoever are free to match or exceed that, so long as they don't mind losing money on every user.

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

#422

Post by dns_snek »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #406
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree that ChatGPT gives an overall better experience than Google, let alone an actual good search engine like Kagi. It's very rare that I need to ask something in plain English because I just don't know what the keywords are, so the one edge the LLM might have is moot. Meanwhile, because it bullshits a lot (not just sometimes, a lot), I can't trust anything it tells me. At least with a search engine I can fi…

Chatgpt, Grok and the likes give an overall better experience than Google because they give you the answer, not links to some pages where you might find the answer. So unless I'm explicitly searching for something, like some article, asking Grok is faster and gets you an acceptable answer.

You get an acceptable answer maybe about 60% of the time, assuming most of your questions are really simple. The other 40% of the time it's complete nonsense dressed up as a reasonable answer.

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

#423

Post by harmmonica »

qnleigh wrote: post #401
harmmonica wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly this. Another way of putting it is that LLMs are doing all the clicking, reading, researching and many times even the "creating" for me. And I can watch it source things and when I need to question whether it's hallucinating I get a shortcut because I can see all the steps that went into finding the info it's presenting. And on top of it replacing Google Search it's now creating images, diagrams, drawings and…

> Structural load calculations for a post in a house You're relying on ChatGPT for this? How do you check the result? That sounds kind of dangerous...

Not dangerous in this implementation. I knew going in there was likely significant margin for error. I would not rely on ChatGPT if I was endangering myself, my people or anyone else for that matter (though this project is at my place).

That said, the word "relying" is taking it too far. I'm relying on myself to be able to vet what ChatGPT is telling me. And the great thing about ChatGPT and Gemini, at least the way I prompt, is that it gives me the entire path it took to get to the answer. So when it presents a "fact," in this example a load calculation or the relative strength of a wood species, for instance, I take the details of that, look it up on Google and make sure that the info it presented is accurate. If you ask yourself "how's that saving you time?" The answer is, in the past, I would've had to hire an engineer to get me the answer because I wouldn't even quite be sure how to get the answer. It's like the LLM is a thought partner that fills the gap in my ability to properly think about a problem, and then helps me understand and eventually solve the problem.

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

#424

Post by brookst »

socrateslee wrote: post #388

Just to think about the blocking of installing apps from unverified source on Android by Google, isn't this an exclusive contracts upon users?

The ruling is not that Google can never have exclusive contracts for anything. If they rent Moscone Center for an event, there's no requirement that others be allowed to use the same space at the same time.

And there is no exclusive contract between Google and users with regards to sources of apps. It's a change in technical requirements for the platform.

In law, the actual thing matters; just being able to draw vague parallels doesn't mean anything.

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

#425

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

dns_snek wrote: post #422
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chatgpt, Grok and the likes give an overall better experience than Google because they give you the answer, not links to some pages where you might find the answer. So unless I'm explicitly searching for something, like some article, asking Grok is faster and gets you an acceptable answer.

You get an acceptable answer maybe about 60% of the time, assuming most of your questions are really simple. The other 40% of the time it's complete nonsense dressed up as a reasonable answer.

In my experience I get acceptable answers in more than 95% of questions I ask. In fact, I rarely use search engines now. (btw I jumped off Google almost a decade ago now, have been using duckduckgo as my main search driver)

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

#426

Post by iamacyborg »

ehsankia wrote: post #381
upcoming-sesame wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Which store page should they be linking to? Inevitably what you’re asking for is how we’ve ended up with sites spinning off thousands of articles stuffed full of affiliate links.

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

#427

Post by ChaoPrayaWave »

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…

Maybe the media is just worried that if they include the original link, readers won’t bother with their few hundred words of ‘interpretation’ anymore.

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

#428

Post by robin_reala »

dawnerd wrote: post #345
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.

You should try out Firefox’s if you haven’t. It’s pretty good now and I haven’t found something that I’ve been like damn wish it was there. Lighthouse testing I guess?

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/google-lighth...

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

#429

Post by johncolanduoni »

johanyc wrote: post #246
mig39 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I don't think Google is the "exclusive" on either Apple OSes or Firefox. Just the default.

> The decision said that Apple's deal with Google to be the default search engine was "exclusive" because it established Google as the default out-of-the-box search engine. https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2025/09/02/apple-shares-rise-after-...

I’m confused what deals the court would accept as non-exclusive then. Do they have to randomize the default search engines when you first boot a new iPhone?

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

#430

Post by dns_snek »

yamazakiwi wrote: post #176
wiredpancake wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are losing braincells relying almost entirely on ChatGPT.

I'm losing braincells relying on Google Search shoving ad riddled trash in my face and even worse AI results. Gemini frequently just straight up lies to me. Saying the opposite of the truth so frequently I have experienced negative consequences in real life believing it. The only people who are being homogenized or "down-graded" by Chat GPT are people who wouldn't have sought other sophisticated strategies in the fir…

> Gemini frequently just straight up lies to me

I'm pretty sure they meant LLMs in general, not just ChatGPT. They all straight up lie to very similar degrees, no contest there.

> The only people who are being homogenized or "down-graded" by Chat GPT are people who wouldn't have sought other sophisticated strategies in the first place, and those who understand that Chat GPT is a tool and understand how it works, and it's context, can utilize it efficiently with great positive effect.

I know for a fact that this isn't true. I have a friend who was really smart, probably used to have an IQ of 120 and he would agree with all of this. But a few of us are noticing that he's essentially being lobotomized by LLMs and we've been trying to warn him but he just doesn't see it, he's under the impression that "he's using LLMs efficiently with great positive effect".

In reality his intellectual capabilities (which I used to really respect) have withered and he gets strangely argumentative about really basic concepts that he's absolutely wrong about. It seems like he won't accept it as true until an LLM says so. We used to laugh at those people together because this could never happen to us, so don't think that it can never happen to you.

Word of advice for anyone reading this: If multiple people in your life suddenly start warning you that your LLM interactions seem to be becoming a problem for one reason or another, make the best possible effort to hear them out and take them seriously. I know it probably sounds absurd from your point of view, but that's simply a flaw in our own perception of ourselves, we don't see ourselves objectively, we don't realize when we've changed.

Post reply on HN