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.
I think we should be precise. The badness began before generative AI. Generative AI makes things worse because now you are less sure when you’re looking at total junk, but the junk ratio itself doesn’t depend on that.
You’re not wrong. The mass proliferation of listacles with the same 5 advertised products stamped behind a novella of filler to appease SEO algorithms has been increasingly problematic for at least 10 years now. The issue has only been compounded with the flood of “AI” generated content and deceptive ads. I almost prefer when every website had sidebars full of blatant advertisements. Sure they were ever present, but they weren’t trying to literally trick you into buying something.
What you talking about as apathy, that’s not what’s happening. Google has 90% or more of the search market because it’s the default, because it pays to be the default, even when it’s worse than alternatives. The only people who are actually apathetic are the ones who know that alternative exist, are relatively easy to switch to, are superior, and still don’t. That’s not the majority of users.
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.
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.
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.
If Mozilla needs Google to survive, they can go down with the ship for all I care. Mozilla are bad actors anyways.
There’s a decent selection at the moment:
If you need javascript+css: qtwebkit, gtkwebkit, qtwebengine ( blink based :( ), Ladybird (I really don’t care if the dev sucks; goolag/mozilla’s browser monopoly is too important for me to care about some stupid idpol takes)
If you don’t need javascript but want css: netsurf (there is technically javascript support, but it’s worked absolutely nowhere in my experience)
If you’re an epic hackor that doesn’t need either: w3m, links2, links, lynx
I mostly use w3m, and qutebrowser (qtwebkit and qtwebengine) when I need js. I’ll probably replace qutebrowser with Ladybird once there’s a port for OpenBSD (trying to write my own at the moment).
If you just want to abandon www all together, check out gemini and gopher clients.
Maybe like a one million dollar fine? That’s a lot of money, you know.