Submitted 4 weeks ago by lemmee_in@lemm.ee to technology@lemmy.zip
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy4g193qezno
Lol… it’s funny how sometimes the reality seems like a simulation or a comic movie. The judge deciding against the Google monopoly is called Mehta. Remove the letter “h” to see this fun fact.
It’s just a curiosity I had to point out. Good thing that Google’s influence will become smaller. I mean, in a scale between 0 and 10, Google’s power is going from 10 to 9.5 (Google still has Android, Google search, Google ads, among many other things), but it’s better than 10.
The judge deciding is called Mehta
Ah man, the writers are being too on the nose this season
I am curious how selling it would even work when Chromium is a BSD license. Or do they only have to sell Chrome and not Chromium?
If it’s chrominum that might explain the announcement that they’re killing chromeOS.
chromium is the problem.
TL;DR;
They have an effective monopoly and have repeatedly shown they will use it to serve their needs.
One concrete way is the level of control that google has over the inner workings on the rendering engine giving it significant control over web standards.
A real life example fo this is the controversy around the JPEG-XL format, google decides to drop support for it, doing so removes support for every single browser based on the rendering engine in chromium (eventually).
Now, other browsers ( firefox for example) have to decide if it’s worth it to add in and maintain support for a format that will only work in their rendering engine.
Sounds like a win right? now firefox has a feature that chrome doesn’t.
Now, developers/businesses have a choice.
In almost all circumstances, B is the fiscally responsible option, which means that google has effective control over web standards and their implementation.
A non rendering engine example is ad-blockers, google decides there are underlying security issues with how some integrations with the web browser works, this “just so happens” to break how almost all decent adblocking is done at a browser level.
They go ahead and create an updated version of the specification that describes how this interaction works, implement this upstream and suddenly all chromium based browsers now can’t use the most effective adblockers.
Technically the downstream browsers could do some shenanigans to keep the ability to block ads effectively , but the technical and monetary barriers to such an endeavour are so high it is absolutely not worth it.
There is more technical nuance to this story, the security issues are real in V2 but the need to break adblockers in process of fixing these issues is debatable.
yep, that’s why I don’t think selling chrome will fix the issue.
In what way, do you think?
most browsers are based on chromium. if Google sells Chrome they still control chromium, and through chromium they control chrome, brave, Edge etc.
hightrix@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Good. I want them to be angry about having to break up search and ads so they have to compete like everyone else again.
SquatDingloid@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Lets hope Lina Khan can force these antitrust suits through before Trump fires her
Because monopolies are only going to get worse under his rule