Welcome to Google’s nightmare: US reveals plan to destroy search monopoly
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His "I may be up for scratching your back" hinting, of course, means "How much are you willing to scratch mine?"
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I would assume, possibly erroneously, that they didn't start out with an endless supply of cash to push that advantage and to get there they had to provide significant value to someone, somewhere in the past.
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Ughhhhh.
For readers who weren't of age in the 90's: I can confirm that IE truly sucked.
Developers essentially had to create two websites, with all sorts of IE-accommodating kludges. Nightmare.
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During a college class, I got interested in how IE handled pop-ups. Turned out to be sufficiently bad enough to turn quitting IE into a forkbomb.
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It'll take a minimum of two years - and probably much longer - to get this through the courts and appeals process.
Even if the incoming Administration decides to back off, there are a fair load of states involved in this action who can independently continue to push it forward. I think it will be decided by the courts in the end, not by other branches of government.
Edit: Wow, it's more than a fair load of states; looks like more states have joined the suit and there are now something like 38 states who are party to this suit.
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Then why is Google paying so much to be the default?
It absolutely is the responsibility of government to stop anti-competitive behavior, like Google purchasing their way as the default.
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Then they can continue to use it. But that's not what they're expressing. They're expressing a desire that anti competitive behavior continue.
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You know what's being discussed. You're deliberately being obtuse in an act of bad faith.
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There's literally a story on the front page about them also going after Microsoft.
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Or force the lazy option and just spin it off to the shareholders, though then that risks them doing a bad sale of the spinoff after the fact
That's how most divestitures have worked in the past, the shareholders get shares in the spinoffs based on their value and stock held of the pre breakup entity
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It seems wrong that you would need root privileges to change your browser settings. Why wouldn’t that be an ordinary user-level setting?
Of course, I totally believe that some work environments have policy set by petty tyrants who ludicrously micro-manage regular user’s desktop settings out of some misguided ideas about security risks or support costs. And, of course, some users definitely exist who will manage to turn any freedom extended to them into a security incident or support call….
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But imagine if someone else had been the default on Mobile Safari. Do you not think that would eat into Google's coffers and marketshare a bit?
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And the rest of humanity's boon. Google's hypothetical perspective on this is the last thing anyone should care about. Let's hope DoJ can get something effective done before the Anus puts a stop to it and turns the entire federal government back into the predator parasite class' whorehouse.
Consider that the device on which you're reading this exists in very large part due to DoJ taking Ma Bell apart with a crow bar in 1982. Previous to that, AT&T utterly stifled innovation in telecommunications for most of a century. But for that sane and effective act, I'd be ranting this into two pounds of plastic chained to the wall. Google is a similar pox on IT and by extension, humanity.
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Most companies I've worked for or dealt with have browsers that are locked down to varying degrees. It's not so much petty tyranny - although there is some of that - as it is an IT department that wants every single system and every bit of software to be identical because it makes their job easier if everything's the same. If an application like Chrome is acting up, they do the equivalent of a board-level replacement - uninstall/reinstall - to fix it.
Not saying that's good or bad, just noting it's common.
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Yep It's Me
Ars Praetorian
Well, first let me re-state that I can envision a particular future. I didn't say I have a roadmap or backlog to make it happen. It's not my area of expertise.
That said, my understanding of existing local LLMs is they're somewhat pre-trained and the user fine-tunes them. I'd imagine a personal search LLM would start out in a similar state, and learn / fine-tune over time.
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There literally isn't. I see stories about full screen ads, quantum error correction, Flight Sim, and Windows 365 Link. And a couple pages later something about the FTC, not the DoJ.
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Spin off Android - Yes please.
But I think something more impactful would be to prohibit them from collecting user identifiable data. Even without it, they would still be one of the most profitable companies in the world. Then it wouldnt matter as much if they retained ownership. (It would still matter, I know I know. But its not going to be a perfect solution.)
But I think something more impactful would be to prohibit them from collecting user identifiable data. Even without it, they would still be one of the most profitable companies in the world. Then it wouldnt matter as much if they retained ownership. (It would still matter, I know I know. But its not going to be a perfect solution.)
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Spinning of Android or Chrome is not really solving the monopoly and abuse of it. If the DOJ was serious about making any inroads, they would have split google in 3-4 mini-googles. All getting the same technologies to start with and then let these new companies compete with each other with an explicit rule they are not allowed to buy each other for 10 years.
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Because for most people, it’s a service that they have gotten used to being there for them to use free of direct monetary charge. Most people probably don’t give the inner workings of FAANG a second thought.
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Ars explicitly offers you that option - to subscribe and avoid ads. Yet as much as you apparently want to buy internet services instead of having ads, you don’t take that option.
Ads are not new to the internet - “free” radio and television have had them from the start. Most periodicals (newspapers and magazines) have always had them, in addition to subscription fees, because few subscribers would be willing to pay subscription fees high enough to actually support things. (When newspaper advertising tanked because of the web, the local newspaper subscription prices skyrocketed, massively reducing subscription levels, and many newspapers and magazines have folded due to this.)
The ad supported (or supplemented) model is what makes the availability of internet info and services sites possible for most users - they couldn’t afford to subscribe to all the sites they’d want to make use of, which would end up killing most sites. (The streaming video marketplace is facing this issue now.)
The harvesting of user data in support of targeted advertising (and other consumers of that data) is obviously a problem. The claim is that without targeting, the ads wouldn’t bring in enough to support the services, or would have to be so voluminous as to overwhelm the “useful” parts of a site. I don’t know if that’s true, but I’m pretty sure that without advertising of some sort, the web as we know it would be much smaller and less valuable than it currently is.
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Monetize it by doing search deals same way mozilla do I would assume, if Google pay Apple $20B a year for search and Safari is roughly half the market share of Chrome (in the US, Safari's best market) thats a huge asset.
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Very well put. Most of the "I hate ads" folks actually don't hate them enough to pay for a paid alternative. humans are emotional monkeys at the end of the day and say all sorts of stuff in an anonymous forum but when it comes to action you can filter out the noise
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There is no reason to split up a company that's done the right things.
Which is why these measures are aimed squarely at google, who absolutely has NOT done the right things. For example, they have deliberately made their search engine worse for a decade now (search the internet if you want to learn more, we have the email chains and accounts of many different engineers who quit). They have protected their (no longer good, btw) search engine monopoly by pushing their browser (defaults to their search engine), pushing their mobile OS (defaults to their search engine) and paid off everybody else they could to default to their search engine.
I'm not sure splitting Chrome off from Google is actually viable for Chrome - it is probably going to be gobbled up by some other horrible company. But it's pretty clear something has to be done.
When a company goes out of their way to make their own products worse, you know it's way past time to be breaking them up.
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They can make Google sell it (not that it’s obvious there’d be a buyer unless a clear path to monetization could be found). But I don’t think they could force Google to just give it away - that would seem to be equivalent to a government seizure without compensation, which would violate the 5th amendment. (Note: IANAL - while this is a civil rather than criminal case and decision, such a forfeiture might be a legitimate penalty.)
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The problem, ironically, is that Google is such a powerhouse in the ad space that you have to play by their rules. Sound familiar?
If Google says "you must do this or this ad doesn't count" you do it. Because you have very little choice.
It's more complicated than just that, and many, many problems are of the ad industry's own making. But it's not a healthy ecosystem where sites can just "choose to be more ethical" easily. Not at scale at least. It's fine if you're Daring Fireball and can get clever with selling a sponsorship every week or the like. But that kind of thing doesn't scale up to support a site the size of Ars, let alone actual large news organizations.
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Focusing on a Chrome divestiture is odd because the browser market is pretty darn competitive, at least on most platforms. There are lots of good options, and of course, Chrome isn’t bundled with the most popular OS for either desktop (windows) or mobile (iOS).
If the theory of this case is true, and browser defaults really do distort competition in search (and/or any other web service), then sure, make each user choose which browser they want, without bundling. But this remedy should apply not only to Chrome in Android, but also to Edge/Windows and Safari/Apple.
If the theory of this case is true, and browser defaults really do distort competition in search (and/or any other web service), then sure, make each user choose which browser they want, without bundling. But this remedy should apply not only to Chrome in Android, but also to Edge/Windows and Safari/Apple.
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Except those deals are part of what got Google in trouble in this case, and their only major search competitor is Microsoft Bing, who are monopolists in their own right and may not be inclined to paint a fresh target on themselves. Plus if Google's banned from bidding, MS doesn't need to offer nearly as much, since there's nobody else with deep pockets to drive up the bid.
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Google has better indexing than anybody else, but indexing isn’t the search tool itself, it’s the data input. If we’re just talking UI and features then Kagi is far superior to Google Search.
And if Kagi had full access to Google’s indexing then Kagi would be superior in every way (well, besides Google’s tightly integrated features with other Google products like Maps and Shopping).
This is why I’d like to see Google’s indexing separated from their search product. They can monetise the index as a service to other search engines (including Google Search), and monetise their search through advertising.
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If internet ads weren't a monopoly (outside of running your own), then competitive forces would mean that websites running ads would select the advertisers with the best returns for them. Usually that would mean the ones that give them the largest share of the ad prices.
Google, being a monopoly in the space, gets to keep as much of the ad money as they want for themselves. Websites get whatever Google allows them. Advertisers pay whatever Google wants from them.
IMO there's no reason an ad click should cost more than $2. And no real reason websites shouldn't get >70% of the money from running the ad.
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