>sell Chrome to open search monopoly
>Chrome isn’t a search engine but a web browser
Yeah, Google pays other companies lots of money to have its search engine enabled by default. That’s what the lawsuit argued, so I’m not sure how separating chrome from the company will change that…
It has massive market share and uses Google search by default. If another company owns the browser, they’ll likely change the default search engine, and since almost nobody changes the defaults, it’ll eat away at Google’s marketshare.
For example, Microsoft would be pretty interested in buying it to promote Bing search. Edge is already based on Chromium, so they could reuse their existing teams to offer support for it.
sell it to Microsoft so they can finally have a web browser that people use
Yes, the anti-trust lawsuit should culminate in one part of a tech giant being sold to another tech giant.
What the what?
“sell your browser, that’ll limit your search monopoly”
. . . HAH?
So it is on firefox as well . . ? And also with Edge, for those poor bastards.
Why not just force them to pick a different default? Or something meaningful like splitting them out of Alphabet entirely? Or stop sucking? Okay, well that last one may be hard to administrate.
It is on FF and Edge because Google pays them a ton of money. Every person who chooses Chrome instead of FF is more money for Google because they don’t need to pay themselves to make Google the default.
Hey look, some boomers who don’t understand tech are trying to do a thing with a tech company. Sell Chrome? What a stupid idea.
I’m afraid that this is a terrible take. There is nothing to stop them from making it into a separate company. It would break the monopoly because the same people making the browser won’t be the ones earning the ad revenue.
That isn’t the point, is it? Why does the government and the people care about the profits of some company?
There’s literally so much else they should do, google docs, sheets, drive, phones, maps, earth, calendar, play store, translate, etc.
Good work, continue please.
What is the issue with docs, sheets, drive, phones, calendar, play store?
There seems to be plenty of options in all of these spaces. Play store isn’t even on a lot of android devices.
Correct. My example for another necessary intervention would be YouTube. That’s a space in which Google does have a monopoly.
Exactly. There are workable alternatives to most of the others, but YouTube has a stranglehold on that type of content due to the network effect. Examples of alternatives:
- docs/sheets/drive - Microsoft Office 365, OnlyOffice, or self-host LibreOffice Online (through Collabora CODE builds); if you just need drive, there’s also BackBlaze, AWS, DropBox, etc
- phones - I use GrapheneOS on their Pixel devices, but plenty of other Android phones support LineageOS/DivestOS/CalyxOS
- calendar - still looking for a replacement for my smart watch, but I’ve been using my Nextcloud install; there are also some FOSS calendars that support CalDav as well, so look around
- maps - I’ve been using Organic Maps, which has been great; main problem is searching for addresses, but if it’s in there, the directions so far have worked fine; there’s also Apple maps, Bing maps, and probably some others
- translate - it’s built in to Firefox, and it seems to work well enough in a pinch
But there’s really not much for YouTube. I guess there’s Odyssee, Rumble, and a few others, but they don’t have anywhere near the content as YouTube, so they’re not really practical alternatives. I actually sub to Nebula which is the closest to a replacement so far, but there’s still a ton of content that doesn’t have a direct replacement there.
