Force them to sell off Windows. Force them to not have special pricing for specific OEMs under any special agreements or terms. Force them to unbundle Edge from windows. Force them to continually support and fully implement competing standards into their products. Edit: Force them to sell off Visual Studio, Direct X and .Net
Does Microsoft hold much cryptocurrency?
I agree forcing Google to see Chromium makes about as much sense as force Microsoft to sell the open source part of .NET. I didn't understand it, still can't fathom the reasoning behind it, and I suspect I never will.
I'm missing something. The tool they are taking away in this case is the web browser. They are a dime a dozen. To wit: I am (somewhat) plugged into Google's ecosystem, and I don't use Chrome. Removing Chrome will do nothing to loosen Google's grip on me.
Yes, I'm sure Google used Chrome to shepherd a whole pile of features into the standard. Perhaps we would not have things like video, webrtc and drm if Google had not Microsoft owned the desktop. Microsoft tried valiantly to prevent it happening for years with IE6. But, it's more or less over now - modern browsers let web sites do most things once reserved for the desktop, and besides Microsoft has discovered it quite likes it's customers renting it's software running in their cloud instead of purchasing it outright. The horse has bolted, closing the gate now would be mostly a symbolic gesture.
Lets say Google is forced to divest Chrome anyway. I'm sure they would like to maintain the few proprietary hooks they do need for password management and the like. One way would be to continue to fund Firefox, and add make their own proprietary extension available for it. If they do that, what's the point?
Now this is just a simplification and not all of how Google uses Chrome for their business interests. However for Google which is the number one search engine being able put their search engine as the default on the number one browser everyone uses as well as pay to be the default on all the others is a huge moat. Not the only moat they have by any means but it would be silly to ignore it just because dealing with it alone wouldn't solve the problem.
But I'm not working for the DOJ and if I were I'd suggest splitting Google Search up into multiple branded search sites ( Atlantic Google, GoogleSouth Southwestern Google etc.) and also multiple whole sale search engines (engines that power the search sites) each would only be owned by separate companies and would be forbidden from acquiring or merging with each other.
Your right - I hadn't considered that aspect. However, on everything bar Android users have to manually install Chrome and set it to the default. You can do that without owning the browser - just publish an extension. To say it again, even if the ban was implemented it looks like it would be ineffective. It's possibly good to remember at this point Apple does not allow Chrome on iOS.
As for splitting the other bits of Google up, I suspect it's going to be so hard it will happen in name only. At the retail end, people don't choose Google products because of things like network effects, they choose it because it's the best or close to it. That's true for Search, Youtube, GMail/Contacts/Calendar, Maps and their ad platform off the top of my head. Android is the exception - it's firmly entrenched because of network effects. But for the rest, if you build a better one the people would come, eventually.
The insurmountable barrier for building a competitor isn't the deep pockets needed until people discover you. People can and do build other mail clients (which is possibly the easiest to do). It's Google's engineering talent. The odds of it being substantially better for the length of time require for those people to arrive must be close to 0. As one example, Bing hasn't been able to pull it off after decades, and Outlook remains a mess. As a current example Gemini consistently ranks at the top of lmarena.ai
At the infrastructure end the situation is worse. Google has built the world's best, most secure infrastructure. Their modus operandi seems to be buy stuff, transplant it their infrastructure and engineering processes, and hope the weed grows into a monster. It normally doesn't (and famously gets killed), but when it does the advantages of transplantation and googles infrastructure tend to lead to world domination. Your watching it happen again right now, as Google develops and deploys the only large scale competitor to NVidia's platform for AI.
To me, a software engineer, breaking youtube, search, gmail or whatever away from Google's infrastructure (and that monorepo) would be decade long and hugely expensive project - if it's possible at all. And if you don't Google gets to charge what they want for using it, keeping most of the profits, and god help us build replacements.
Yes, I agree.
But we are talking about the impact of Google no longer distributing Chrome on people (or organisations) who go to the trouble of manually installing Chrome themselves. If they are willing to manually install something there are no end of ways for Google to ensure a browser, or the new Chrome will use Google's preferred defaults.
To put it another way, I disliked how Google drove Firefox down to it's current level or usage. It was with numerous subtle nags and breakages. They've always insisted it wasn't deliberate, and that remains plausible. If they are forced to sell Chrome, they could push their preferred extension the same way. (It would be ironic this causes them some regret in introducing Manifest V3.)
rbanffy•8mo ago
PaulHoule•8mo ago
I decided that I never wanted to work at Intel in the early 00's when it became clear that they had a periodic ritual of laying off 10% of their engineers. I left academica because I didn't think I was good at musical chairs and no way would I want to work somewhere where I might get laid off just because they want to lay off 10% of the workers.