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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

#631
post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what your point is. Maybe it's not enough data to make search results 100% as good as Google's, but enough to make them 95% as good? And everyone on HN complains about the quality of Google results, so surely there are algorithmic opportunities for MS to do better, right? All we know is that Microsoft has decided not to compete seriously in search, but compete at a minimal level. There are a hundred diff…

My point is they did choose to compete, and still are. Bing is literally the only real competitor to Google Search. Your point seems to be they didn't spend enough money to be competitive. My point is, it simply did not make business sense to do so. Let's put some simplified numbers out there to illustrate. MSFT has spent 100 billion over the years on Bing. And Google spent more than half of that amount in 2024 alone…

You're missing the part where the money Google spends comes back to it in even more ad revenue. Google doesn't pay Apple for access to data. They pay it for traffic that makes them ad money.

If Microsoft spent those billions, it would be receiving ad revenue too.

It's not money thrown down the drain. And it's not for "data".

There's nothing anticompetitive here when it comes to Microsoft choosing whether or not to enter the market.

It's not about acquiring some magic level of data. A startup doesn't have data. Microsoft does. It's not an issue.

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

#632

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…

What distinguishes journalists from storytellers?

Journalists have an agenda. And they are not independent.

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

#633

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Post the checksum J/K. Court should maybe GPG sign it though.. something like that. So we can verify the creator of any particular document.

Who is this for though? Your average user would not be able to use it or understand the purpose of it. A big image of a padlock with a tick saying “SECURE AND VERIFIED” would be just as effective.

Have to start somewhere. Especially in this age of AI where everything can be faked. Put a "learn more" link that says how they can verify the authenticity. If people aren't interested in learning, that's on them. A padlock doesn't tell you anything. The padlock next the URL just says the connection is encrypted. You used to be able to pay $200 and the cert authority would make you send documents proving you are who you say you are, and it'd show your company name next to the address bar. I went through the process once. It was a good idea IMO, not sure why we got rid of it. Maybe shiesty authorities that weren't doing their due diligence.

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

#634
post #624

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The absence of a clear objective boundary of what can be taken and what cannot. I don't understand why this is an obstacle - this issue already exists with writing laws and various countries have different solutions, all of which seem to be working kinda ok. There's the USA's constitution which isn't working so well in most cases but working great in others (free speech for example, though this is now failing), whe…

>free speech for example, though this is now failing I don't quite understand what you mean. The great advantage of the American constitution in terms of freedom of speech is that it sets a relatively clear boundary. And it is obvious that in this regard the constitution copes with its task perfectly: freedom of speech in the USA is currently protected better than in any other country. It is so well protected that Am…

> freedom of speech in the USA is currently protected better than in any other country.

I don't know every country so I'm not sure if this is true, but it seems to me free speech was decently well protected up to a certain point and so long as you didn't threaten American hegemony. For example there was a long era where you were able to be jailed for being a communist or speaking out against American wars. Or often speech as protest, such as during the civil rights era, was violently put down.

Aesthetically Americans seem to enjoy decent free speech but only so long as it doesn't meaningfully challenge the government. Protests are almost always violently suppressed in America it seems.

Recently the Americans' free speech rights seem to be degrading even further with media being ejected from the press room or sued by the president. Not to mention the chilling effect of calls by prominent politicians to do violence (typically deportation) to various dissidents such as anti Israeli voices.

Other countries elect unpopular politicians, that's not really unique. The American right to call for violence or use slurs against minorities is I suppose unique, I'm not sure why someone would be proud that that right remains unsullied when the bits of free speech that actually matter are being stripped away but so it goes.

> Just to understand, if the government gets enough power to deprive capital of ability to influence politics - we get Nazi Germany or Russia. In the best case. At worst - the USSR, North Korea or Kampuchea

I find this very interesting because you're the first person I've met to openly defend corruption, or the American word for it, lobbying. Most neoliberals want to "keep the good parts of capitalism" but argue that money shouldn't be able to influence politics. Or maybe you draw the line somewhere between corruption and not corruption, when discussing money influencing politics? If so where's that line for you?

The PRC for a while had virtually 0 influence of capital against their government and now they're the second most powerful country on earth - arguably the most powerful, if we compare the ability of either executive leader to control the military (the parade comparison is... embarrassing to say the least). Of course capital still has some influence in the PRC but seems to be not as much as the USA given the PRC will happily nationalize things to this day, or chuck billionaires it doesn't like in prison.

Taiwan seems to have less corruption the USA. The KMT are obscenely wealthy and yet still struggle to get their policy through, and have had a couple of their media stations pulled off air for corruption.

The EU seems to often act against the interests of capital, as well as member nations to a certain degree. I'd be surprised if you denied this since capitalists often use this as evidence FOR the superiority of capitalism against socialism, since America's gdp is so high and businesses prefer to incorporate there.

So it seems to me that Nazi Germany, Russia, USSR, North Korea are more political failures than economic ones. The Soviet Union after all did industrialize the entire empire and was the only serious challenger to American hegemony for decades. Not that I'm a fan but it was hardly a failure until it dissolved - a fate which may befall the United States after all.

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

#635
post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is they did choose to compete, and still are. Bing is literally the only real competitor to Google Search. Your point seems to be they didn't spend enough money to be competitive. My point is, it simply did not make business sense to do so. Let's put some simplified numbers out there to illustrate. MSFT has spent 100 billion over the years on Bing. And Google spent more than half of that amount in 2024 alone…

You're missing the part where the money Google spends comes back to it in even more ad revenue. Google doesn't pay Apple for access to data . They pay it for traffic that makes them ad money . If Microsoft spent those billions, it would be receiving ad revenue too. It's not money thrown down the drain. And it's not for "data". There's nothing anticompetitive here when it comes to Microsoft choosing whether or not to…

At this point we are just re-litigating all the things that came out in the trial. Yes, traffic comes with ad revenue, but it also comes with user interaction data which helps it improve its results and maintain its monopoly. Without this data, a competitor cannot offer competitive search results and hence will not be able to command the same ad revenues and hence cannot sustain the level of traffic acquisition costs that Google's monopoly profits can. Google has built an amazing self-reinforcing money-generating flywheel which is effectively a chicken-and-egg problem for everybody else.

Again, the court specifically called this out as a key pillar underpinning Google's monopoly, and this is why the proposed remedies, such as they may be, are all around sharing search and user interaction data.

I'm not sure on what empirical basis you keep asserting that Microsoft has the necessary money and data, but the court's findings, based on tons of evidence, indicate otherwise.

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

#636
post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any source for that? https://www.browserating.com/ doesn't put it in top5 on any non-ios platform?

Chrome caught up in the last year or so, but also speedometer is also fairly arbitrary. Open/close, tab open/close, tab switch, scroll, initial load, resizing all still far better. Actual app performance depends on the app but for a few years Safari was clearly better.

So your source is your personal opinion. Got it.

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

#637
post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Search engines have been good at answering those kinds of questions for the last decade. SEO spam often answers simple questions like that.

You can find the answer this way if the query is simple enough, but in general, if you are asking for something specific or trying to retrieve a piece of information based on keywords it's not usually indexed by, AI will do better. For example, "how are large concrete piers supporting a roadway constructed on a 45 degree slope?" Claude gave me an answer immediately, most Google results for my first two queries weren'…

I would not call that example simple, that's a pretty complex question.

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

#638

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's true that they do this sort of thing for political reasons, but it sounds like the original NYT report wasn't meant to be merely a paraphrase of a specific UN report? In which case, it would be legitimate to cite other sources and report that they disagree?

No it was a paraphrase of the report and cited no sources that disagreed. It simply sneakily misrepresented the contents and buried the links to the actual report.

Then yes, that's very bad.

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

#639
post #514

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”.

They certainly can put links in stories and frequently do, just not to primary sources.

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

#640
post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm honestly out of the loop, what are they doing?

Paying their executives exorbitant salaries

$6.9M to the CEO, to be precise, which is roughly the same amount as the total of all private donations, grants and government funding they receive. It's bizarre.

Meanwhile they're cutting down on devs, killing products like Pocket and Fakespot, ignoring user feedback, driving strange and off-putting community engagement, and introducing eye candy BS nobody asked for.

In short, they appear to be doing anything but advancing the brand and actually, you know, competing in the browser market. Note that I'm not shitting on the poor devs, I still think they are delivering a great core product despite it all. But market shares and even absolute user counts keep dwindling. What is management doing about that?

And all this would seem like a case of simple mismanagement, if one weren't to reflect the fact that the overwhelming majority of their income comes from Google. The way they're behaving is suspiciously convenient to the entity that is their main revenue source. One could resonably suspect they serve primarily as an antitrust litigation sponge.

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