Comment by echelon
6 months ago
The answer is antitrust.
The FTC / DOJ should strip Google of Chrome.
Honestly, they should split Google into four or five "baby Bell"-type companies. They're ensnaring the public and web commerce in so many ways:
- Chrome URL bar is a "search bar"
- You have to pay to maintain your trademark even if you own the .com, because other parties can place ads in front of you with Google Search. (Same on Google Play Store.)
- Google search is the default search
- Paid third parties for Google search to be the default search
- Paid third parties for Google Chrome to be the default browser
- Required handset / Android manufacturers to bundle Google Play services
- Own Adsense and a large percentage of web advertising
- Made Google Payments the default for pay with Android
- Made Google accounts the default
- Via Google Accounts, removes or dampens the ability for companies to know their customer
- Steers web standards in a way advantageous to Google
- Pulls information from websites into Google's search interface, removing the need to use the websites providing the data (same as most AI tools now)
- Use Chrome to remove adblock and other extensions that harm their advertising revenues
- Use Adsense, Chrome performance, and other signals to rank Search results
- Owns YouTube, the world's leading media company - one company controls too much surface area of how you publish and advertise
- Pushes YouTube results via Google and Android
... and that's just scratching the surface.
Many big tech companies should face this same judgment, but none of the rest are as brazen or as vampiric as Google.
Yes to everything except the first statement:
> The answer is antitrust.
Anti-trust is crucial to make the capitalist economy work prperly, I agree
But another answer is "Firefox"
I would love to say another answer is "Firefox" (which is my default browser), but Mozilla have gotten fat of Googles money over the years and got distracted by other things.
I would love if some of these projects that fall backward into loads of money would stay lean, and invest that money in a way that allowed them to become truly independent. So when the money dries up, or the funding becomes dirty, they have the freedom to cut ties and continue their lean operations, self-funded by the interest from their investments.
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It isn't a coincidence that Google continue to fund Mozilla: Firefox is, arguably, a fig leaf. A few hundred million a year is a small price to pay to Google if they have even a semi-willing participant in allowing them to bulldoze through the standards bodies.
Controlled opposition to avoid anti-trust is a MegaCorp's standard operation procedure.
So why do people choose Chrome?
(I use chrome, but I am unable to articulate why. Surely some of you know why you use Chrome :-))
> So why do people choose Chrome?
It’s actually kinda simple: they don’t, at least not continuously. It’s “what you use” because you decided that’s true at some point in the past. All you have to do now is decide that some other browser is “what you use”. You can even take it a step further and decide that Chrome is “not what you use”.
(And actually, if you go through with it, you might discover reasons for why you don’t want to switch like “bookmarks” and “saved passwords”. In my opinion, if it is not easy to transfer those things, that is further reason to switch because vendor lock-in is user-hostile.)
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Because, last time I tried it, Firefox decided to force Pocket integration and I accidentally uploaded some of my bookmarks.
Also performance, but the behaviour of Mozilla is the main reason I keep away.
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> Anti-trust is crucial to make the capitalist economy work prperly
No it isn't. If you want your capitalism to be liberal, you need antitrust, true. If you only want capitalism, and don't really care about the 'liberty' part, you can check the mercantile capitalism of old. It worked quite well for people with power.
Capitalism is a great model that results in evolutionary pressures for the efficient development of goods and services.
One failure mode of unchecked and unregulated capitalism is the establishment of monopolies that can starve oxygen from the rest of the ecosystem.
In order to have maximally efficient and broadly beneficial capitalism, you need strong anti-trust mechanisms to reoxygenate the environment for new competition. Regular enforcement also means that labor and investment capital reap the most rewards instead of calcified, legacy incumbents.
Companies need to be constantly fighting to survive. If they're sitting comfortable and growing without controls, something went wrong and the rest of the fitness landscape is being distorted by an invasive species.
Antitrust Regulation is incredibly pro-market and pro-competition.
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Yes, that is correct
If you want capitalism to be the best it can be you need to brake up monopolies, continuously
You also need to manage externalities.
> If you only want capitalism
Yeah, I prefer not to die in a coal mine at ripe age of 14, so a coal baron can increase their wealth by 0.001%.
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