A federal judge has ruled that Google has an illegal monopoly in the US. “The market reality is that Google is the only real choice” as the default search engine, Judge Amit Mehta said in his decision, and he determined it had gotten that way unfairly. It’s a ruling that could portend big changes for the company, but we yet don’t know how big, and we might not for years.
Mehta declared on Monday that Google was liable for violating antitrust laws, vindicating the Department of Justice and a coalition of states that sued the tech giant in 2020. The next step — deciding on remedies for its illegal conduct — begins next month. Both parties must submit a proposed schedule for remedy proceedings by September 4th and then appear at a status conference on September 6th.
What happens now is that Google appeals and then the case will bounce around different courts for years to come, and maybe one day the supreme court will hear it assuming that US lasts that long as a country.
Yip. I took the government what, 17 years…? from suing to breaking up AT+T, and they were the largest company in America that entire time.
At+t tried to slap em with some exorbitant long distance charges and Uncle Sam got tired of the fuck around.
To today; Google’s been showing the wrong people the wrong kind of ads. Showing representatives ads for laundromats and daycares that offer drivinga ed after looking up how to launder money and traffic children. NO google, I did NOT mean THAT
I have used Google, DDG, Bing and Ecosia (which is basically Bing) at this point and ingl, none of them really stands out for its results. If anything, I think DDG and Bing beat Google.
Google might be the first company to create a monopoly out money and apathy. The apathy of users who don’t care about their search engine enough to even change the default.
Honeslty all search engines have gone to shit since the internet got polluted with AI-generated nonsense. Its a very hard problem to solve.
Have you tried Kagi?
this could be bad for mozilla / firefox.
if Google can’t continue to try to increase / sustain their market share, they may stop paying mozilla to be thw default.
If they do and Firefox dies, they’re getting ANOTHER Antitrust trial (hopefully).
On what grounds would that trial exist?
They’re the only rendering engine? Oh because they stopped paying Mozilla? Due to a court order?
It’s a complicated situation.
Because with the Chromium engine becoming the only engine, they can decide which features they want to support and which they don’t, thus, combined with their ad business, they will have no opposition to Manifest v3 and can even do Manifest v3.1 or Manifest v4 which leaves adblockers completely powerless against Google Ads.
And can essentially deprecate all browser addons forever.
Right but you said “hopefully” and “can”.
They haven’t actually done that yet.
I do think the Manifest v2 situation is interesting, but keep in mind the Chromium/Blink engine is fully open source.
It’s a trickier sell to say they have complete control when anyone is free to fork it.
Ain’t nobody forking Chromium, and realistically speaking, everyone will just follow whatever standards Google pushes via the Blink engine. It’s the truth, no matter the copium. Maybe Vivaldi and Brave will try to oppose any bad changes, but they will kneel eventually.
default what?
Google pays Firefox a lot of cash to be the default search engine on their browser.
So now we need to make sure we keep supporting Firefox. I have a feeling that most people who can choose, do in fact coose firefox, and the majority of chrome users do so because it’s on their business or student computers.
How does one support Firefox in a post Google paying them world?
I know the Mozilla foundation takes donations but it doesn’t seem like those go to Firefox development. Maybe I’m wrong though.
Some of it does. But currently a lot of it doesn’t because they can rely on the google funding. You can also donate volunteering time to Mozilla projects you want to support like Firefox or Thunderbird
A lot goes on the CEO’s $7,000,000 salary.
Yeah. The CEO class needs to be eliminated from the upper stratus of society. If you think monetary donations to Mozilla aren’t worth it as a result, I get it, and I’m right there with you. I don’t donate money. But also… In the browser space if money is what you want to donate, it might be the best route.
I’m not sure, but non profits have made millions in the past, and they were supposed to pass the money on to someone else, such as the corrupt Susan G. Komen, but did not. So yeah, Mozilla could be supported by donations alone.
I thought the money was to protect their monopoly status.
That’s saying the quiet part loud
It’s important though because if that’s the real reason Google pays them, they could come up with some other excuse to give them the money.
Do you really think Google will give up on their pole position because of this verdict?
Default search engine on their browser?
You can easily change the default.
That’s not the point. The point is Google is paying Mozilla to be the default. Google pays them 500M per year to be the default. If at some point Google legally isn’t allowed to do so, Mozilla can say bye bye to 500M/year.
Mozilla already started sending your data to advertisers by default in firefox 128. If Google’s money dries up, I can’t even begin to imagine what fucked up shit they’ll do.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attribution
Hardly qualifies as “sending your data to advertisers”.
Read the Pocket and Mozilla FakeSpot privacy policies. They collect a lot if data, including browsing history, and do so via Google Analytics. They then share that data with advertisers.
Okay? What does that have to do with the new advertising API the added support for in 128?
I wish I could be that naive.
You certainly seem to lack reading comprehension.
You’re seriously going to believe that an “aggregation service” isn’t going to be misused? No wonder there’s no privacy when people are this naive.
Very persuasive argument, definitely shows a strong grasp of the technical matters.
Because naiveté is technical. Sure buddy.
Maybe like a one million dollar fine? That’s a lot of money, you know.
Does anyone have a (link to a) good summary of the ruling and rationale?
I find the idea that “Google is the only real choice” kind of odd. There are other perfectly functional and user-friendly search engines. It’s not like other monopolies, say, Youtube, where there’s no realistic alternative. (I’m not denying that search is a monopoly too.)
Practices like getting Reddit to only work with Google instead of Bing are probably a big part of it.
Especially since Google search sucks these days.
Google search opens up to more corps so everyone can get in on the enshittification
Kill Chrome/Chromium and Firefox by proxy. Revert back to pure html websites, live a free life.
Great, so now we get a Microsoft/Google duopoly. Rejoice… /sigh
You’d complain about a ton of gold being too heavy wouldn’t you?
I’m complaining about the lack of something real ever happening to these companies. Just because you’re too ignorant to understand what is(n’t) going on here, doesn’t mean that I’m complaining just for the sake of it.
Duopolys aren’t any better than Monopolies, except for the illusion of choice. They’ll move lock-step in line with one another, just like duopolys do, they’ll still use the same anticompetitive practices, but instead of getting fucked by one dick, now you’re getting fucked by two.
I’m glad you like being fucked so much that you’re rejoicing over this news, but I’d rather there be real competition.
As soon as a company puts forth a superior search engine. We’re all waiting…
How many companies does it take to not become an -opoly anymore?
It’s not really the number of companies that determines this, but rather the lack of any real competition. A small enough number of companies makes this more likely, so there’s not likely a hard number of say…over 5 companies isn’t an oligopoly, they can still be - so long as they’re all focused on each other. If you see 1 company raise it’s prices and all 4 others do too, then it’s still an oligopoly. Because even though they aren’t actively getting together, and saying “hey let’s all raise our prices!”, (collusion) - the effect is the same.
It ceases to be that when barriers to entry don’t stop new competition from entering, and competition is active. (at least, that’s the simplified answer; there’s some more nuance to it, but that should at least give an overall understanding)
