Do Elon now. He owns way too much shit and always tries for a monopoly. Start by nationalizing star link.
Why nationalize it? Surely treating Starlink like a utility and putting it under an independent org would be better, no? Keep politics out of it and let ISPs pay for access like how MVNOs like Mint Mobile work, except prevent the entity that owns it from providing service directly.
Nationalizing under that administration? Who would that help?
America, when they stab each other to death, each shouting Sic Semper
selling android or breaking it up would be terrible since you just go back to each manufacturer making their own flavor with no updates or compatability.
I used to believe this, before google turned evil. Right now I’d take 5 shitty flavours than the pure shit google is doing. They have turned into a vile corporation that needs to be cut down
Disagree, you might be right in the short term, but long term competition like that only benefits the customer.
Ok but is this like REAL yet or did they just say they intend to?
Reading the article helps to answer this question:
The DOJ is asking the court to force Google to promptly and fully divest itself of Chrome, along with any data or other assets required for its continued operation.
It also links the filing, see specifically “III. Plaintiffs’ Revised Proposed Final Judgment”
Who reads articles these days?
Thank you
I mean, I’d love to see Google broken up, but this isn’t news. DoJ has been asking specifically for Chrome to be sold for over a year now, and the lawsuit was started during the first Trump administration. Until the judge actually reaches a decision this is just recycled old news.
Monkey Paw:
Chrome is now owned by X
Its now known as Xrome
X for the swastica, and rome for the “roman” (aka: nazi) salute
Ykno what good. Maybe it’ll cause Mozilla to get off their asses and DO SOMETHING.
You know what, good. Maybe it’ll cause the people who keep using Chrome because they don’t give two shits about their privacy to get off their asses and use something else.
Just like whole tribes are refusing to move from WhatsApp to Signal, because they say they care about privacy, but actually they don’t.
The monkey giggles. Mozilla completely pivots to adtech & AI.
Little does the monkey know theyre already starting that and I’m not surprised
The index finger slowly curls, revealing the only finger left–the middle finger. The monkey giggles.
Sell it to who?
I would laugh if a European company stepped in to buy it. Most used browser in the whole entire world bought by a European company? Would absolutely be hilarious and I’d be so down for that to happen.
Hilarious AND good for humanity? Sign me up!
Take a guess who’s going to buy it.
Probably Microsoft.
Oh god can you imagine the fucking nightmare.
deleted by creator
So…. What are the odds on fElon ending up owning some of this shit?
Depends on how low we can sink his Tesla stock.
It’s a team effort, if everyone throws one Molotov we can be done by April.
Wouldn’t that just screw over insurance companies?
I think you’re underestimating the value of everyone throwing a molotov
Google says government proposals would “harm America’s consumers.”
Says the company that couldn’t stand by the core value “don’t be evil”.
as if america’s consumers aren’t quite willing to be harmed at this point
Musk will be champing at the bit to own a controlling share of both of these. It disgusts me to agree with them but they’re right. This is the single worst possible time to try and push this through.
This is the single worst possible time to try and push this through.
Which is why it’s happening now, I agree.
But we, the non-billionaires are still better off after any monopoly split. It’s hard to express how incredibly bad powerful monopolies are. The fact that another billionaire will be the buyer sucks, but it’s no reason to back away from forcing the legally required split.
Chrome is a monopoly by itself already. And forcing Google to sell, only to have Microsoft buying it is actually worse then the current situation.
The DOJ is asking the court to force Google to promptly and fully divest itself of Chrome, along with any data or other assets required for its continued operation. It is essentially aiming to take the Chrome user base—consisting of some 3.4 billion people—away from Google and hand it to a competitor
Fuck yes, shatter that shit.
Shatter it and probably have it bought out by Elon.
Seriously. The only people willing to pay what it’s “worth” will end up doing the same thing (or worse).
What we need are some actual privacy laws with teeth, so that the data isn’t worth as much to begin with.
Elon’s a dunce, so he’ll probably enshittify it so badly that people will leave. So google is weakened and chrome dies (at least, i hope in a good outcome)
The court still has to decide. Final verdict this august. There absolutely no way Google doesn’t call upon the current administration to help out. Let’s not celebrate before the final verdict. We don’t know whether it’s really final either or whether google can appeal, because if they can, it’ll probably take a few years before anything really happens. Maybe we’ll even see a new administration by then.
Yeah but is it Elon&friends who will get to buy it?
The optimist in me hopes not, but only time will tell.
If he does i hope he tanks it so badly that it loses a huge chunk of market share - ideally when ladybird is ready.
Is ladybird some FF replacement?
It’s a completely built from scratch browser https://ladybird.org/, very exciting.
There’s also https://servo.org/ (was mozilla but now linux foundation), but it seems to be going slower.
Sadly, Servo more or less halted when Mozilla laid off people in 2020. It only really started back up in 2023 when they secured new external funding. That said, I don’t think Servo intends to be a fully-fledged Browser like Ladybird. While LB intends to be a car, Servo plans to be a great engine, but only that.
…on the other hand, Ladybird’s lead dev seems like trouble. So maybe I’d rather wait for a Servo-based browser instead.
I think you’d like to keep an eye on Verso.
Google is awful, but any other company that could afford to buy and run Chrome would be worse.
Microsoft Chrome - now with Cortana!
Any alternative is better than letting monopolies stand.
Sounds a lot like, “Biden & Harris support genocide, so let’s vote for Trump.”
No thread is safe…
The spoiler effect doesn’t apply in this scenario. We aren’t stuck with 2 choices, either Chrome under Google or Chrome under another shitty corporate.
If Chrome enshittifies, we have Firefox, Librewolf, Brave, Ironfox, Waterfox, Ungoogle Chromium, etc…
There is really only three browsers webkit (safari/apple), blink (chrome/Google) , and gecko (firefox/Mozilla) . Pretty much everything is running on one of those three and if Google has to seel chrome, I’m not sure if that would help the landscape. Building/maintinaing browsers is really hard and expensive, most likely you’d just have another big tech company step in making things worse.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_browser_engines
I think what they were saying is: two powerful, competing corpos is better than one huge and practically omnipotent corporation, which is what google currently is.
Preferring that we enforce our laws regardless of which billionaire benefits is a vote for Trump? I didn’t realize that. I’ve seen the light now. Thank you.
We can’t continue selectively enforcing our laws against monopolies. (This is just dark humor. Citizens United is for the express purpose of ensuring that any anti-monopoly law enforcement we get is selective and political, for the rest of however long the US has left.)
That’s how blow back works dear…
Eh, maybe, maybe not. I’m guessing it’ll be Microsoft, and they’ll just run it into the ground like they do with pretty much everything.
Heaven forbid it becomes its own company/a non profit.
Good. Now do Amazon.
i really distrust Google and I’m glad about the verdict. I do agree that chrome and android should be
cut off models.edit: cut off from advertising business models
on the other hand, like with Firefox, I’m worried about the instability and changes that are coming, mainly in the effect on fork projects Like Graphene, Calyx, Lineage, any privacy-focused Chrome forks, and of course Chromium.
DOJ probably isn’t able to guarantee chrome & potentially android are taken over by totally ethical, stable companies/NPOs who will keep the projects open source, or allow an open source offshoot project to which the new organization would still contribute coding people-hours.
I’m sure there will be some sort of guarantees for stock chrome and android users, like paid services/subscriptions will be continued or refunded.
but what about users of community projects based on chrome and Android?
many other Lemmy users have commented how community projects don’t really have the resources to keep browser engines up to date, let alone innovate. without Google (which i think is a good thing), Microsoft Edge team could become the de facto direction-setter of Chronium (which i think is really really really bad).
TL;DR the foss mobile OS community, and especially the foss browser community (considering Firefox funding shortfall and AI/ad revenue pursuits) are possibly f*ed in the a for the near term.
Not sure why Google needs to sell chrome but Microsoft doesn’t need to sell edge. Noone controlling the device should also own the internet browser imo.
I think the biggest difference is the fact Google owns the majority of the web browser market share, but there’s more to the cases than “big company owns big browser,” it actually has to do with Google’s search engine deals (e.g. with Apple and Mozilla) and Google’s ad business stifling the industry.
I only mentioned MS Edge to highlight that it’s a chrome(-ium) browser and
thereforeEdge probably has a paid team of developers.That team probably has enough quantity of members (or coding work hours) to overwhelm the upstream chromium code contributions of volunteer developers of foss projects.
Because of Edge’s volume of contributions, they could accidentally/intentionally decide the direction of Chromium, even without owning it officially. That’s one of the ways I heard that Google controlled Chromium, accidentally or intentionally.
edit: wording mistake
DOJ probably isn’t able to guarantee chrome & potentially android are taken over by totally ethical, stable companies/NPOs who will keep the projects open source
This doesn’t seem like their job. This is antitrust, as long as the result isn’t monopolistic, that’s it, no?
You’re right, but the concern is still valid.
Oh, it absolutely is, sorry if it felt like I was challenging that. It’s just a reminder to temper our hopes.
No worries! Yeah I agree.
it’s not their job, i agree. not under the current constitution and laws.
i meant to highlight that no one is going to guarantee anything (other than Google losing ownership of Chrome/Android).
Hell yes! Fuck google!
You’re happy until you figure out who’s going to buy it when it splits.
☹️
If they really wanted to change the character of the company, spin off the ad and cloud businesses into two separate things and let them figure out the rest.
And this worked so well with Microsoft back in the day. (It didn’t)
