zlacker

>>transp+(OP)
This is entirely unsurprising. It's been clear that Google has been into their Android duopoly-abusive stage for a while now, with more and more of their Android changes moving into GMS or non-AOSP Google apps (like camera, messages, location services, etc) over the last decade. Graphene has been doomed to this fate for a long time, and anyone who thought otherwise was naively optimistic.

The same is clearly coming for Chromium forks, which is why I've always thought the privacy and ad-blocking forks are a joke - if they ever gain enough marketshare, or if google just tires of the public open source charade, they have no chance of maintaining a modern browser on their own.

This is all the more likely now that Google has been emboldened by not having to sell off Chrome for anticompetitive reasons.

>>scottb+ll
Just a year prior, I would have been against a decision to force Google to part with either Android or Chrome.

Now, I'm of the opinion that they should have been forced to sell off both, and maybe Chromebooks too, for the good measure.

No company with a direction as vile and openly user-hostile as what Google currently demonstrates should have anywhere near this level of control over the ecosystem.

>>ACCoun+9m
The sad thing is I think Google keeping Chrome is actually likely the better of two possible bad outcomes... Anyone else interested and willing to pay the true value of owning the entire Internet ecosystem is almost certainly going to look to extract value from that, and that's almost certainly worse than what Google does today. E.g. using everyone's browser to extract training data for AI without getting IP blocked.

>>scottb+io
A year or so ago, I would have agreed. Not anymore.

Sure, a company can buy Chrome and proceed to sell user browsing habits data to the highest bidder, or use it as a backbone for decentralized scraping - backed by real user data and real residential IPs to fool most anti-scraping checks. But if they fuck with users enough, Chrome would just die off over time, and Firefox or various Chromium forks like Brave would take its place. This already happened to the browsing titan that was IE, and without the entire power of Google to push Chrome? It can happen again.

The alternative is Google owning Chrome for eternity - and proceeding with the most damaging initiatives possible. Right now, Google is seeking to destroy adblocking, tighten the control over the ad data ecosystem to undermine their competitors, and who knows what else they'll come up with next week.

>>ACCoun+Ct
Why do suppose Chrome would die off for user-hostile actions under a non-Google entity (2nd paragraph), but not while being controlled by Google (3rd paragraph)?

>>overfe+jS
Not the OP, but Google spent years advertising Chrome front and center on the Internet's most visited pages. Money doesn't buy that kind of real estate, ownership does.

>>AlotOf+KU
> Money doesn't buy that kind of real estate, ownership does.

If this is the reason, the remedy doesn't attack the root of the matter. If Chrome were unbundled from Google, what's to stop Google from creating a new Chromium fork - and naming it Cobalt and marketing the hell out of it to achieve the same market share?

>>overfe+F41
Antitrust orders are more complicated than just declaring a business unit spontaneously independent. They usually include provisions to ensure the the situation is actually fixed, like prohibitions on the parent competing in that entire market and financial/infrastructure support for the new companies on their transition to independence.

>>AlotOf+gI4
Are you able to share a case when an American court issued such a broad order on a F100 company? There was a stronger case for breaking up Microsoft, but the DoJ shied from that remedy, there was never a chance that Google could have been broken up in this case, IMO.