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.
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.