• 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.

    • They’ll bend eventually. Money does that.

      Remember when DeSantis went to war with Disney? And Disney destroyed him and any chance he had to being a presidential candidate and we all cheered? Then Disney went around to make allegiance with all the non-DeSantis Republicans?

      It’s all money for stockholders at the end of the day. Not people, not who sits at the throne.

  • 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.

      • I only mentioned MS Edge to highlight that it’s a chrome(-ium) browser and therefore Edge 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

    •  mke   ( @mke@programming.dev ) 
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      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?

    •  amelore   ( @amelore@slrpnk.net ) 
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      It’d be good for Android to be mostly its base, the Android Open Source Project. Over the years Google put more and more things in the proprietary part of Android (Google Play Services) instead of AOSP.

      Depends on who takes over whether that gets better of course. If they also put too much in Play Services, or ask the manufacturers for a high fee, yes it’s possible we go back to more oem flavours.

  • Interesting. Why focus on selling chrome? I’m not sure I understand the DOJ here. Google could end Chrome and continue updating chromium instead of selling if not for this directive. Given they are approved to continue working on chromium I don’t see why the sale is being forced.

    • The monopoly is the problem, someone using a pixel, using android, browsing using chrome, using Google search to find your website, visit an article website where you sign in via Google, see Google ads throughout, click on an affiliate link to buy a featured product of the blog and post using Google pay.

      This is classic monopoly and Google chrome is small dab middle of it, if you want to break a chain you start from breaking it in the middle instead of the end like Google pay. Hopefully other things will follow soon.

  • 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.