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Right but chrome is able to use to use the backing of google to enforce web standards for everyone. If it didn’t affect open web standards sure. But google has a hand in every aspect of the internet. Their power alongside apple needs to be reduced. We can’t keep allowing oligopolies to take over every institution of our lives. Techno feudalism is end stage capitalism. Keep an open mind. Respect your opinion.
Ohh God, I hate webp with a passion. I'd love to watch google burn for that alone.
 
If we're talking about antitrust, meta should be forced to sell off whatsapp and facebook where innovation has stagnated. zuckerberg should also be removed. he is a bad actor and his influence is overbearing.
 
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This is soooooooo not going to help ANYTHING. First they forced MS to decouple IE from Windows. MS did. Which allowed Chrome and FireFox to grow. Back then we also had Opera (now a Chromium browser), IE (now replaced by a Chromium browser) and Safari (no longer on Windows). Now we have Chrome (-ium) and FireFox (and Safari on Mac / iOS ). Google also pays Mozilla and Apple millions per year to be the default search engine.

If you sell of Chrome, it's development will slow down. And there will be A LOT more ads in the browser. (Since there is no primary revenue stream coming from Google). If Google isn't allowed to sponser Mozilla then FireFox development will stop entirely. In the end one of the Chromium forks will replace Chrome, and then well.. we're back at Edge / Microsoft. And everything will start again.

So in the end for the consumer:
1. No more FireFox or a lot of ads in the browser.
2. A lot more ads in Chrome.
3. Microsoft taking over the web with Edge, repeating IE6.

No, this is not going to work. There is always going to be one browser that the majority of the population uses. And that browser will require a major development budget to keep safe. Which would always lead into what happed with IE6 or now with Chrome. And everytime you force a change, it will have an affect on other browsers as well. This went from bad to terrible and it's going to get a lot worse.
 
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I'm curious about this. Which web standards (I'm not being nitpicky) and if Chrome didn't do this, what do you think the real world results would be?
Like webp. A huge pain in the behind as a user, but google prioritizes pages implementing it over the ones who doesn't.
Common web standard standardization sounds like it would help make web pages consistently render correctly in a range of browsers and discourage fragmentation of the market.
Yeah, sounds like, but since google deleted the "don't be evil" part.
 
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While I understand your point, it sounds dangerously like we're proposing that we outlaw winning in a capitalist system where customers choose the winners. Don't dare let your product achieve a 70%+ market share or you'll be forced to sell it.
It's not just about a single product's market share, but how they use the synergies between their products to unethically, and often unlawfully hinder their competition.
 
Is Trump's DOJ picked in already? The only reason I ask is because the right complained how Google search and other search even AIs give liberal news.

Let us all not forget Liberals are also for censorship. What a country we are living in now.
 
The DOJ is trying to figure out something... Google has had the search market locked up for over 20 years, and the nearest competitor is only getting 5% of the pie. As mentioned earlier in this thread, Chrome is just the new internet explorer. The only reason Chrome doesn’t have more usage is because iPhones in particular are driving up Safari usage. YouTube is around 80% market share, with Vimeo taking the next 15%. Google Docs is ubiquitous among US schools. Android is the dominant mobile operating system in the world (~70%).

Google controls A LOT, and they are not going to willingly hand over their dominant position because they care about ingenuity and competition. All of these services were intentionally weaved within one another so it would be extremely difficult to split. If you break Google into its dominant businesses, they would all need to survive with independent management, financials, and business models. Many contracts would likely need to be renegotiated in instances where more than one segment are involved. It would be a mess, and that’s exactly how it was designed.

Forcing Google to sell Chrome seems like a petty conquest, but it may be the lowest hanging fruit which allows the DOJ to claim any sort of victory.
That's why I think forcing it to sell youtube would be a better first step. Then make algorithms controlling feeds and recommendations turned off by default everywhere - youtube, facebook, insta. Outlaw discriminating users based on their choices - like what instagram does. Finally, forbid companies from collecting and storing any user data that's not required by law or for the service they provide to the users.
 
No problem in Google having Chrome as I know it - but that it keeps asking me if I'm sure I want to continue on Safari when googling something on my iPhone - THAT should stop!
Also the sign in with google prompts at random websites.
 
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Well, I’m not sure what’s gonna happen first—Musk or Ramaswamy firing them, or this whole thing going down...
 
They want them to sell off Chrome, which is a fork of an open source browser?

So the DoJ want them to profit from open source software, albeit modified?

Google can literally fork it again and add an 's' to the end of the name and ship the same product. Only to be told after a 4 years trial to sell that too.

Google Search isn't a monopoly because of Google, it's a monopoly because the people made it so. No one wants to use Bing or Duckduckgo.
 
So they are going after Google..hmmm...I wonder if Google will do as well as Gates did with the antitrust suit against Microsoft. Truth is that Microsoft was guilty as all hell but got away with it. IBM previously was not so lucky and was forced to sell a part of itself for the very same reason.
 
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Google Chrome is fine but we need better alternatives to Google search. At the moments it's a nightmare mix of incorrect AI generated nonsense and advertising. Apple should do an advertising free search engine as part of their subscription service.
 
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Nobody should use Chrome. The Chromium browser engine works great and fast, but there are tons of third party browsers that use that engine while collection MUCH less user data than Chrome and requiring less RAM. My main browser is Vivaldi for example. It is very customizable and has a built in ad blocker. That is something Chrome will never have, as ads are the main business of Google. The whole reason why Chrome was developed is collecting data for personalized ads.

Brave also is a great browser and even Opera has some nice feature. You should only use Google products when there is no clearly better alternative. Google Earth for example does not have a good alternative. I never understood though why some people still use Google Mail. We know for years that Google even "reads" emails to collect data for personalized ads.

I tried Chrome once and it struggled when I opened twenty of so tabs. At Vivaldi I have usually 100 tabs open on three screens.
 
This make no sense. Chrome isn't really a stand alone business, and anyone big enough to buy it would trigger more anti-trust issues. What the DoJ should do is force Google to divest YouTube.


your typing about YouTube sparked a bit of a tangential brainstorm in my brain, if that's ok. (related to google's single sign on [SSO] login system)

while its "nice" that we can login once and then be automatically signed in to all the other Google services on iPhone/android/chromeos etc, I also strongly believe that there should most definitely be the *option* for it to *not* behave this way. basically, I believe that users should have the choice.

I think that it would be nice to have the option to login to certain Google properties (Nest, Gemini, Fit, Google chat, etc to name a few) alternative means whether it’s a separate SSO like "login/continue with Microsoft/Apple" or the ability to add an alternative email and password login that triggers a login to *only* the one app, without auto-logging into dozens of other google apps, people should have that choice when using an omnipresent service like google. I do like google services, but we need options for logging into apps in a singular manner instead of always logging us into everything else. In terms of an SSO, Microsoft would be *my* top choice because it seems the most "platform/device agnostic" to me, but others may have their own choices. and then of course, the ability to add an alternative email+password login would negate the issues with Google having to add another SSO.

Another idea i had would be a checkbox *on the login page* - something to the effect “do not login to other google apps (only login to [google service name]).

*yet another* thought related to this is the google apps account switcher security. idea - the account switcher for android / iPhone Google apps works well, but for added privacy/security, maybe there could be an option to require authentication (password, fingerprint etc..) when switching accounts. again, it could just be an *option* for users who want extra security.

anyway, sorry for the tangent, but I kinda like to discuss these topics if that's ok, and you bringing up divesting YouTube kind of made me think of it, if that's ok.
 
your typing about YouTube sparked a bit of a tangential brainstorm in my brain, if that's ok. (related to google's single sign on [SSO] login system)

while its "nice" that we can login once and then be automatically signed in to all the other Google services on iPhone/android/chromeos etc, I also strongly believe that there should most definitely be the *option* for it to *not* behave this way. basically, I believe that users should have the choice.

I think that it would be nice to have the option to login to certain Google properties (Nest, Gemini, Fit, Google chat, etc to name a few) alternative means whether it’s a separate SSO like "login/continue with Microsoft/Apple" or the ability to add an alternative email and password login that triggers a login to *only* the one app, without auto-logging into dozens of other google apps, people should have that choice when using an omnipresent service like google. I do like google services, but we need options for logging into apps in a singular manner instead of always logging us into everything else. In terms of an SSO, Microsoft would be *my* top choice because it seems the most "platform/device agnostic" to me, but others may have their own choices. and then of course, the ability to add an alternative email+password login would negate the issues with Google having to add another SSO.

Another idea i had would be a checkbox *on the login page* - something to the effect “do not login to other google apps (only login to [google service name]).

*yet another* thought related to this is the google apps account switcher security. idea - the account switcher for android / iPhone Google apps works well, but for added privacy/security, maybe there could be an option to require authentication (password, fingerprint etc..) when switching accounts. again, it could just be an *option* for users who want extra security.

anyway, sorry for the tangent, but I kinda like to discuss these topics if that's ok, and you bringing up divesting YouTube kind of made me think of it, if that's ok.
I'm not sure shared accounts are going away regardless. It's just too easy for people. Though I do like options like you're presenting. To be honest though, for most services I trust Google or even FB to keep account details secure over almost anyone else.

What splitting YouTube off would do IMO, is begin to provide search competition. YouTube is the largest video provider on the internet. Many users start their search at YouTube, not Google proper. So day 1, Google would have a significant search competitor wrt to video.
 
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Maybe the DoJ would not go after Google chrome if Google was able to control itself in the data collection of people's information because Google is well known for harvesting the personal data off users and selling that data to advertisers and universities and other institutions that carry out data studies. Also, how much personal data is Google collecting from companies and businesses when they use Google chrome in the work place.

The huge majority of computer users knew that in days gone by free web browsers were funded by ad's. The problem is as the years went by, the makers of free web browsers started to increase how many ad's were in the browser. Then came along Google with it's Chrome browser, not only putting ad's in the browser but also using the browser to collect data from it's users and selling that collected data to others.

People are finally getting fed up of all this personal data collection and they want it to stop because it causes untold problems when 3rd parties hack into unprotected data servers to steal the data of millions of people with these people finding themselves the victims of identify theft.
 
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