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

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

#511

Post by 0dayz »

Jensson wrote: post #372
al_borland wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everywhere I look people are complaining about how awful the internet is now. That is largely due to Google influence and dominance over the past 15 years. People see ads as the only way to monetize a product, attention is the currency of the internet, and all original utility from many sites has been stripped away to prioritize addiction and attention. Since these things are all that matters, bots and AI generated c…

All other corporations have tried to funnel users to app stores away from websites, their internet is just an app store without any internet. I take Googles internet over Microsofts or Apples any day. Google made chrome to avoid such a thing, without chrome its likely the internet as a set of websites humans visit would be all but dead today. It is already a marginal part of traffic, 90% of mobile time is spent on ap…

Who controls the biggest app store?

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

#512

Post by conartist6 »

the_other wrote: post #495
conartist6 wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read that part. The court mandates a search engine choice screen initially for each device, then once a year afterwards. Google is allowed to pay for advertising on this screen. It seems to me that at very least Mozilla will have to renegotiate a contract and it's not clear what they might make off selling ads in that space. Google will presumably not value the lesser advantage as highly, but if the other provision…

How much could a slot that shows up at most twice per year for ~20s, for ~2% of web users, be worth, and where does that sit in the market? It sounds tiny, to me.

Yeah it sounds tiny to me too. I strongly doubt that many people will change their choice after the first time so the only way it's worth as much to Google is if they think they can keep the market mostly as anti-competitive, which the government is indicating they should not try.

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

#513

Post by 63stack »

madaxe_again wrote: post #434
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’s not about insecurity - it’s more like a user will accidentally click on the link, end up on the company’s site, not realise they’ve left the news site, be confused as to why the news site is trying so hard to sell them a dishwasher, not remember they were just reading an article about them, and will be scared and alienated.

Oh my god, the horror! The user will be confused, not remember, and they will be gasp scared? Alienated?? After accidentally clicking a link??? Jesus Christ the internet is such a scary place.

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

#514

Post by gnz11 »

mike_hearn wrote: post #472
Hard_Space wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By the way, a pet peeve of mine right now is that reporters covering court cases never seem to simply paste the link to the online PDF decision/ruling for us all to read right in the story. I presume that this falls under the same consideration as direct links to science papers in articles that are covering those releases. Far as I can tell, the central tactic for lowering bounce rate and increasing 'engagement' is…

They didn't cited papers directly even before the web. It's not a bounce or engagement issue. Journalists don't make it easy for you to access primary sources because of a mentality and culture issue. They see themselves as gatekeepers of information and convince themselves that readers can't handle the raw material. From their perspective, making it easy to read primary sources is pure downside: • Most readers don't…

That’s not how it works at large news orgs. Journalists will enter their articles in a CMS. From there it will get put into a workflow and seen by one or several editors who will edit things for clarity, grammar, style, etc. Links will get added at some point by an editor or automated system. There is no cabal of journalists scheming to keep links out of articles because “culture”.

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

#515

Post by quitit »

jonas21 wrote: post #46
fidotron wrote: post #19

This is an astonishing victory for Google, they must be very happy about it. They get basically everything they want (keeping it all in the tent), plus a negotiating position on search deals where they can refuse something because they can't do it now. Quite why the judge is so concerned about the rise of AI factoring in here is beyond me. It's fundamentally an anticompetitive decision.

Do you not see ChatGPT and Claude as viable alternatives to search? They've certainly replaced a fair chunk of my queries.

I'm noticing that newer computer users seek information exclusively from chatgpt and that they don't google at all. They want the answer right away and aren't usually aware or bothered with the hallucination problem.

While that's concerning, my own experience in seeking information using this approach has been positive: it provides a fast, fully customised answer that easily outweighs the mistakes it makes. This flattens the learning curve on a new subject and with that saved time I am able to confirm important details to weed out the mistakes/hallucinations. Whereas with Googling I'd be reading technical documentation, blog posts and whatever else I could find, and -crucially- I'd still need to be confirming the important details because that step was never optional. Another plus is that I'm now not subjected to low quality ai-generated blog spam when seeking information.

I foresee Google search losing relevance rapidly, chatbots are the path of least resistance and "good enough" for most tasks, but I also am aware that Google's surveillance-based data collection will continue to be fruitful for them regardless if I use Google search or not.

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

#516

Post by skinnymuch »

eclipxe wrote: post #84
skinnymuch wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vast majority of users are not technically literate enough to know what is a good browser. They would have no clue why Chrome is better or not. They definitely don’t know what Blink is.

Why does that matter?

Consumers aren’t using chrome in 2025 because it’s the best. Not that the vast majority of people would know minor differences. This isn’t when Chrome came out and the differences between other browsers was large.

Monopolies usually don’t maintain their status because they are “the best” and as if consumers also are informed enough to know that. Similar arguments can be made to allow basically all of big tech.

In a better system instead of talking about allowing everything as if corporations are precious individuals, the govt should be creating funded competitors and being much more firm with monopolistic behavior (even if they aren’t legally monopolies)

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

#517

Post by molf »

gnz11 wrote: post #514
mike_hearn wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They didn't cited papers directly even before the web. It's not a bounce or engagement issue. Journalists don't make it easy for you to access primary sources because of a mentality and culture issue. They see themselves as gatekeepers of information and convince themselves that readers can't handle the raw material. From their perspective, making it easy to read primary sources is pure downside: • Most readers don't…

That’s not how it works at large news orgs. Journalists will enter their articles in a CMS. From there it will get put into a workflow and seen by one or several editors who will edit things for clarity, grammar, style, etc. Links will get added at some point by an editor or automated system. There is no cabal of journalists scheming to keep links out of articles because “culture”.

If there were a culture of always including the original source, or journalists massively advocating to include the original source, then surely the CMS would cater to it. I think it's safe to draw the conclusion that most journalists don't care about it.

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

#518

Post by sumedh »

raincole wrote: post #174
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…

> Users can switch to Firefox/Safari (Mac default)/Edge (Windows default); they don't because Chrome is better. Forcing Google to give up one of its best products is effectively eminent domain by the government to a private company. Yeah. People on HN just don't use Windows, at least not a freshly installed one. Windows does nudge you to use Edge [0]. On PC, Chrome is not just competing fairly: it's competing at a di…

> they don't because Chrome is better.

That was because of marketing not because Chrome was better.

The Google.com homepage telling you to use Chrome is one of the best marketing campaign in the world.

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

#519

Post by computerthings »

halJordan wrote: post #270
bc569a80a344f9c wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But it is easy to see a near future where an AI agent just retrieves and summarizes the case for you. And does a much better job too. I am significantly less confident that an LLM is going to be any good at putting a raw source like a court ruling PDF into context and adequately explain to readers why - and what details - of the decision matter, and what impact they will have. They can probably do an OK job summari…

Llms are already incredibly able to be great at contextualizing and explaining things. HNs is so allergic to AI, it's incredible. And leaving you behind

[dead]

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

#520

Post by shmeeed »

OvbiousError wrote: post #448
raincole wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Users can switch to Firefox/Safari (Mac default)/Edge (Windows default); they don't because Chrome is better. Forcing Google to give up one of its best products is effectively eminent domain by the government to a private company. Yeah. People on HN just don't use Windows, at least not a freshly installed one. Windows does nudge you to use Edge [0]. On PC, Chrome is not just competing fairly: it's competing at a di…

The regularly flood youtube with advertisments for chrome, I've yet to see my first youtube ad for firefox.

That's an interesting observation. If they don't even use it for advertising, what _IS_ Mozilla doing with all those Google millions?

JK, we all know what they're doing with them...

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