So as I understand it, Google’s using it’s monopoly market position to force web “standards” unilaterally (without an independent/conglomerate web specification standards where Google is only one of many voices) that will disadvantage its competitors and force people to leave its competitors.
I’m not a lawyer, and I’m a fledgling tech guy, but this sounds like abuse of a monopoly. Google which serves 75% of the world’s ads and has 75% of the browser market share seems to want to use its market power to annihilate people’s privacy and control over their web experience.
So we can file a complaint with FTC led by Lina Khan who has been the biggest warrior against abuse by big tech in the US.
https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/report-antitrust-violation
We can also file a complaint with the DOJ:
https://www.justice.gov/atr/citizen-complaint-center
And there have to be EU, UK, Indian, Chinese, and Japanese organizations that we can file antitrust complaints to.
Everyone should go over to Firefox as well as advocate against this.
This is what I did when this story came out. In used different browsers in different places, but I switched to Firefox anywhere that’s windows or Linux.
Break up Google.
Browser is one company. YouTube is another. The search a third company. The ad one has to be the richest and should be it’s own.
Then once you cut down Google into manageable companies, go after Facebook.
Antitrust regulations have been neutered in the US since the Reagan administration, which is how we have not only unfettered tech monopolies, but telecommunications regional monopolies and a national oligopoly (that is, an organized cartel, but legal)
Since most federal regulatory departments are captured, and serve their industries rather than the public. Mileage may vary re: state regulations.
Every problem in my life somehow seems to find its way back to him
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While Google failing would definitely cause a disruption, I don’t think they are too big to fail. I’ve done some experimenting with other search engines and Kagi & Duckduckgo are both sufficient.
Gmail is very popular, but everyone could find another email provider. Losing YouTube would hurt but we have other large sites with infrastructure that could cover. Facebook, Twitter, reddit, Instagram, tiktok, etc. Together I think they could take on the bandwidth
As for the browser, I’d be glad if Chrome died. We need more browsers. Chrome dying would force all of the derivatives to do something else. Vivaldi, edge, brave, etc would all need to either switch to Firefox or a project for a new browser would begin
I think while disruptive Google failing would ultimately be good. We have anti-trust laws for a reason and we need to actually use them. If we don’t enforce them, why did we pass the laws in the first place? The market stagnated and the consumers lose. Plus we fall behind pragmatic countries like China who are blazing forward full speed. Their government is more than willing to turn the $$$ hose to innovate in technology. Here in the US we rely on the market. But if we hamstring the market with a monopoly… just a recipe for disaster in my opinion
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There are many other email providers besides gmail out there…
Yeah, and none of them let you keep your existing @gmail.com address. Which means you’ll have to update it everywhere. That’s the massive problem.
That’s just a bit of work. Keeping an evil monopoly because of inconvenience that isn’t really a great argument in by book
You’re right, but the argument was that it wouldn’t be that disruptive, and that’s not true.
Losing gmail (which I didn’t even think of…) would be MASSIVELY disruptive. People would literally lose touch with family and friends, companies would go under, etc.
I am old enough to remember the times the same thing was said about Hotmail and other sites… people will adapt.
And no, social media sites can’t handle what youtube does. Even ignoring how laughable twitter currently is: at its prime, it STILL couldn’t serve videos reliably. Tiktok and Instagram have very strict limits on video uploads and the rest largely rely on youtube anyway. Yes, some people upload videos to facebook or choose to mirror them, but it is often still youtube links. Same with reddit.
Not one alone. But work will probably be split between more sites. And actual limitation are just decision that were made and can change.
Anyone who hasn’t planed for this with an account on another service, at the very least like proton, kinda deserves whats coming due to the signs.
I’m no soothsayer and even I can see that Google is making enemies with governments, China, US, and Europe. You can survive one or two but not all three.
The world is much larger than just the wealthy nations. Where I’m from, the internet is synonymous with Google, emails with gmail and online video sharing with YouTube.
Digital literacy is hard to worry about when you are struggling to improve your life. Even outside of harsh situations it’s not okay to expect everyone to literate themselves.
People like that need to be educated more than any other and liberating them of that responsibility only harms them, it does not help them.
Nobody is claiming it wouldn’t be disruptive, but the question is if the long term it would be better for society. Monopolies are not good and the longer we allow them to survive, the more ingrained they become.
Free market capitalism only works well when there is competition. When big companies are so powerful they can just buy up any potential competitors, we’re not in free market capitalism anymore. We’re entering a merger of corporate and state power - teetering slowly towards a “tolerant” fascism. It’s something that desperately needs to be addressed.
Digital illiteracy is easy to combat. You just put the person on a different service. As long as it “just works” they’ll be fine.
As for the browser, I’d be glad if Chrome died. We need more browsers. Chrome dying would force all of the derivatives to do something else. Vivaldi, edge, brave, etc would all need to either switch to Firefox or a project for a new browser would begin
Firefox is currently kept alive by Google, which pays $500M/year to Mozilla in order to have Google Search as the default in Firefox and to not let Google Chrome become a monopoly on paper too. Break Google and it would probably die.
Creating “more browsers” (browser engines I would add, we already have enough browsers) is not an easy task. The specification that needs to be implemented is massive, and doing so efficiently is even more complex. It would be a waste of resources to have many browser engines, not to mention the confusion in the webdev community when you suddently have to work around many more bugs in the implementations.
Web browsers are a critical infrastructure. Linux too, is very complex and requires lots of development and standards. But we have companies that spend the resources because it’s necessary for their bottom line. Servers all run on Linux.
Similar thing I think would happen with web browsers. Many companies would have incentive to develop web browsers - Facebook for example would want people on their site and that requires a web browser.
My question is if this would simply result in another company taking Google spot in the market or there would be a new open source collaborative effort by many companies like Linux? I’m not really sure. Like you said, the specifications are massive and basically shape and mold the internet as a whole. So it’s not a simple task.
Also just because Google funds Mozilla through search does not mean Firefox would immediately die should Google go under. Consider that Firefox would be only 1 of 2 browsers left alive. They could presumably make a deal with Bing or Duckduckgo or something and would be able to make up the lost income in spades because of sheer volume of users.
There was a time Firefox was actually the most popular browser.
It seems to me that they sponsor Mozilla Foundation just to thwart accusations of monopoly and make it look like they got competition.
I agree with you, but it’s still a fact that that sponsorship make up most of Mozilla’s income. And if Google gets broken up then will they still care about that?
Chrome became popular for 2 reasons:
- Nerds recommended it after installing windows.
- It’s the default browser for Android.
Number 1 isn’t always true anymore but has momentum while 2 is fixed. Until something changes, Chrome is cemented into web browsing.
how favorable the terms are for creators
If I’m not mistaken Youtube creators get something like 1/10 of a penny per view of a video. Is that really favorable for creators?
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Well, NireRed also has NileBlue and a bunch of patreon supporters (over 2k, apparently getting 250k/creation, which is insane). He’s not living off NileRed videos alone
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Would that really be that bad? Another browser will take its place, or Chromium will be forked. The worst thing would be YouTube going down, but even that is not that bad. Even so, I don’t think YouTube would necessarily disappear; it would probably be bought by some other company for pennies on the dollar. If that happened, I think it would be a mild inconvenience but nothing too crazy. In all, I say break it up!
Microsoft might take over Chromium.
Nobody’s taking over YouTube, at least not for long (or without massive changes).
Hold up… You’re not actually saying that Chrome and Chromium will die out within a decade, and not only that, but YouTube only has a year or less left? I do not believe that at all lol
I think they meant YouTube would die in a year or less if it was seperated from google. But I am not quite sure.
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I know it’s probably just me, but YouTube could disappear tomorrow and it would probably take me weeks to notice.
If there’s one thing I actively avoid for it’s abysmal information density, it’s videos.
This is the way. The more I think about it, the more I realize it needs to happen. Market positions in each of them give Google an unfair, anti-competitive advantage in all the rest of them.
Same with Facebook. It’s used its market power to copy features from its competitors and get a leg up on them from their existing userbase. It should have never been allowed to buy its competitors like instagram, whatsapp and what not. It’s time to break them all apart again.
The most recent egregious example of this is the Threads app. But what it did to Snapchat with Instagram stories is another example, IMO.
You’re right - this is very reminiscent of the Microsoft Antitrust suit of 1998. Technically, per that ruling, Google could be subject to an AT&T style breakup. However, it’s pertinent to note that on appeal, the Justice Department chose to settle with Microsoft on the issue of splitting the company rather than go back to trial.
Clearly, in the real world, the ruling didn’t stick, as today Microsoft, Apple, and Google all package their browsers on their operating systems. As such, I don’t think it likely that enforcing an API standard would exceed the current antitrust abuses that we’ve come to accept as a fact of daily life, and highly unlikely to attract a serious case from the Justice Department.
That being said, I fully support your effort - we’ve needed stronger antitrust enforcement for a long time, and AT&T shouldn’t have been the high watermark of the Justice Department’s efforts in this arena.
Anti-trust lawsuits only happen when companies forget to pay their politicians.
According to the supreme court. Bribes are legal now. Ethics are not to be considered.
Ok, guys I’m going to try to organize some community action about all of this over on the community I made on [email protected]. Specifically in this thread, I’d like to work on actions like crafting the letter we’d to send to the FTC as well as the letters we’re going to send to the EFF and Louis Rossmann. If you’re interested in collaborating on all this or just following the action, please join the community and keep up with the thread. I’m considering creating a sister Discord or Matrix. And it would anathema to the cause to use Google Docs to collaborate on writing this e-mail, but I figure we can use OnlyOffice (https://www.onlyoffice.com/) or Etherpad (https://etherpad.org/) instead.
Are you guys in?
Ribbit
Post a lemm.ee version
Why? It’s all federated
hah, this person thinks antitrust legislation is actually enforced
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Yes, the two options: rely on the committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie to stop the capitalist exploitation, or roll over and die.
the EU actually does quite often, not that Americans would notice much of it. EU courts are the reason why Microsoft need to offer multiple browsers on install and why the N category of windows existed
They also where the first to approve the Microsoft/Activision merge tho so it’s better than in America but often very hit or miss too! :/
Not exactly the same situation, Sony is the market leader here and the FTC was only able to show that the merger may harm Sony, not customers. The EU got many remedies for the Activision and Microsoft merger that doesn’t exist today like Activision games on more platforms which will be beneficial to consumers.
True, that was a bad example but it really is more hit or miss than proper enforcment a lot of the time.
Microsoft/Activision merger doesn’t pose any threat. Sony is the market leader in console gaming and Steam is the leading platform in PC gaming. Activision is also on its last breath and if it wasn’t for Microsoft, someone else would buy it a couple of years later. There are literally no reasons to block this merger.
The only reason US is against is because sweet Sony money.
True, that was a bad example but it really is more hit or miss than proper enforcment a lot of the time.
antitrust legislation is actually enforced
One could look at DoJ v Microsoft and how little was done despite it being SO bad that the DoJ actually sued the first technical company since AT&T for antitrust.
But that’s more a factor of inspections and investigations, and in a small-government setup there’s just no people for that. Sorry.
I never left Firefox, and I will never understand, why people were so quick to adopt Chrome which was Google controlled from the start. Google was already an obvious problem at the time (2008).
Google never had an interest in building the best browser for users. They are not a browser company, they are an advertiser. What they wanted is the best browser for Google, meaning the best browser for delivering advertising. They only made the best browser to attract users with no political foresight. That is becoming more and more obvious. Google has been trying to kill Firefox for a while, by making parts of their services not work quite as intended. While if you changed your user agent, it would work fine!
Another place here today, we can read how Google is trying to kill Jpeg XL or JXL, which is a superior graphics format to JPG PNG and GIF wrapped into 1. https://lemmy.world/post/2059816
Firefox really helped protect the Internet and Internet users from the shenanigans of Microsoft. It should come as no surprise, that Google wants to control the Internet, just as much as Microsoft did, from a pure business perspective, that’s an obvious move, and our best defense is still Mozilla and Firefox and lawmakers that aren’t corrupt. So don’t elect trump to get another Ajit Pai who has no bigger wish than to kill net neutrality.
You have to realise that to most people, Google is not seen as a bad company - quite the opposite in fact. They have all these “free” products that do everything you need them to, so they’ve built-up a huge amount of trust with the general population.
Google is obviously trying to take over the web, but the regular person doesn’t see this as they don’t follow any of this news, nor do they actually care. Google has good, fast, free products, that’s all people care about.
As someone deeply immersed in libre software and the Free Software Foundation, it pains me that my conversations are likely always going to be the first time people have actually seriously thought about their software freedom. It’s really difficult unwinding decades and billions of dollars of corpocratic propaganda without resorting to shock and scare tactics.
I’m still going to do it because there’s nothing else better to say. :D
You have to realise that to most people, Google is not seen as a bad company - quite the opposite in fact.
You are right, maybe I tend to forget that is not obvious to everybody. But it’s not like I believe Google is inherently bad or evil, they just have an enormous amount of power that I think very few people realize. Google search alone or YouTube alone can make or break companies, can shift elections, can shift popular opinion in general. That’s to much power IMO.
Power corrupts as we know, and although Google is not worse than most, they aren’t better either, and they are using their power in subtle ways, to promote their own interests.
why people were so quick to adopt Chrome which was Google controlled from the start.
Because for a long time Chrome was just much faster. It wasn’t until a couple of months ago that Firefox started becoming performant enough for me to use as a daily driver. Even then, there’s still issues with how slow it takes Mozilla to implement new web technologies like WebGPU, etc.
Yes because a bit faster short term, is worth sacrificing you freedom long term?
I will never get people like you.
because a bit faster short term
Waaaaaaay more than “a bit”. Like “imperceptible render time” vs 2s for firefox. That adds up a lot.
is worth sacrificing you freedom long term?
What freedom did I lose? I used chromium mostly.
Firefox has performance now, where it did’t in the past. So I don’t use chrome now.
See, I use the best tool for the job I can find, and that changes over time. For a while the was Chrome.
What freedom did I lose?
It’s impossible to know which freedoms we have lost due to Chrome dominance. But from an ecosphere view point, you can see it very clearly on for instance iOS, where you can’t sideload apps, and Apple for years prevented subscriptions to papers if they had any kind of nakedness. We only register those limitations when compared to options that don’t have them.
On Gaming you have consoles, that are also somewhat closed ecospheres, where you cannot develop freely like on PC. Games that exist on both console and PC, often have way more options like downloadable mods often user generated. Those do not work on consoles, because the control from the owner of the platform has not allowed/facilitated it.
In the same way there are closed Google/Alphabet ecospheres like Android, Google search and YouTube, which together with Chrome browser dominance can be used to achieve competitive advantages that keep out competition.
The fact that they may not have succeeded, does not mean there was no danger. But there is evidence that they tried. For instance they tried to kill Firefox, by making services like Google maps not work 100% with Firefox. We now see Google has removed Jpeg XL support from Chrome. So your freedom to use that format has been taken away. They are preventing adblockers from working with a double sided strategy, on both Chrome AND Goggle services. So they are trying to take your freedom to use adblockers away too.
I bet there are 100s cases we don’t know about, because mostly such things are done stealthily, some times they may not even be on purpose, but more for practicality. But the end result remains the same. Creating a closed ecosphere with very dominant control by one player, is almost guaranteed to limit your options long term. And limiting options is equal to taking away a bit of freedom.
Most people have no idea or don’t care at all about privacy on the internet. Google has a solid set of “free” services that work well and a good enough reputation to convince them.
Wow you got 2 downvotes for stating an absolutely true statement, that describes a HUGE problem.
For us to lose all our rights and freedoms, it only takes enough people not to care. And that’s the problem.
Google apps are a huge surveillance machine that absolutely threaten our freedom. Most people just don’t give a shit, because it’s convenient.
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So a bit of speed short term, is enough to sacrifice your freedom long term?
Obviously I know it was faster, what I don’t get is that people had no principles, and was ready to give everything up to a company clearly trying to control the Internet.
And that was even so shortly after we had similar problems with Microsoft, that we have now with Google.
I could understand your argument if we’re talking about the choice today but don’t act like Google 15 years ago was the same as it is today. They are vastly different companies.
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i’m not sure you quite remember the leap in performance that chrome was… it was night and day, and literally ushered in the era of performance being an actual concern for browsers
as much as i hate google, you’ve gotta credit them with starting that
and at the start, many (myself included) believed that googles motivation was to make the web fast to compete with native apps (they wanted the web platform to be what everyone used on their phones), because google can serve web ads across all platforms on the web, but native they mostly only control android
that still might have been the entirety of their original intent too! but now they have that dominance, they’re being evil with it
This Manifest V3 business with Chrome is going to be the trigger for me to jump ship.
If we spin up the way back machine, Chrome became popular as a competitor to Internet Explorer. Even though IE had the vast majority of market share it was a truly awful product. It was slow, unreliable, and insecure. Chrome resolved those issues and it was the reason I went with it at the time. Basically I was just looking to dump IE.
At the time Firefox was clunky, unpopular, and did not have good compatibility across all sites. Now that Chrome is less desirable we’re left with Firefox as the best alternative. It’s come a long way since IE and Chrome went head to head. It’s a much better product now with a bigger user base.
At the time Firefox was clunky, unpopular, and did not have good compatibility across all sites
Firefox was an excellent, fast, highly compatible, alternative to Internet Explorer. It was already winning when Chrome came on the scene. However, Firefox actually got more clunky and slower over time, so Chrome was a breath of fresh air in comparison. People like me who used Firefox back from version 0.6 jumped to Chrome because it was doing what Firefox used to do. Chrome was a genuinely better product for a long time, but then like Firefox, it too got slower and more clunky. Meanwhile, Firefox saw what they were up against and went back to their roots. Firefox has gotten a lot better in the last couple years.
Google also significantly pushed Chrome adoption by encouraging people to download it in Google search and Gmail.
That’s probably true, but when I bailed on IE I tried both and Chrome was the better. I must have missed that early Firefox beats Chrome era. Even so I do remember having compatibility problems with Firefox on some sites and I simply couldn’t stand the settings interface. In any case the current awfulness of Chrome removes any question. Chrome is only going downhill and it will probably pick up the pace.
Firefox compatibility got worse as Chrome became more popular. There was a time when Firefox was the standard that everyone developed to. I’m talking like 2003-2004 period. Case in point, to this day Chrome identifies itself as Firefox to websites to get the “Firefox” version of a webpage as opposed to the Internet Explorer version.
Firefox has never been slow and clunky. If anything, that was Chrome because it runs so much fucking bloat to scrape your data.
I disagree. I remember Firefox since the days it was called Phoenix (I even remember its grandad - Netscape Navigator) and it ALWAYS was very slow and buggy. Until very recent times when they did a big rewrite.
Firefox used to be very slow, very buggy and full of memory leaks.
I was a Firefox user until they started releasing major versions every few days which broke addons. Not sure how it is today but it was a hassle for a few weeks at least. I switched to chrome because it was the next best option back then.
Yes that was stupid, I don’t deny Chrome could easily be seen as the better browser in some respects.
But it was still pretty obvious that we were on our way to the exact same problems we had with Internet Explorer, and Microsofts attempt to control the Internet, through extensions only available on IE, that were necessary to use several Microsoft technologies, when Microsoft had a monopoly.
So would you say Firefox has settled down in the last years? I don’t like where chrome is going (not only privacy, the “dumbing down” sucks too) and tempted to switch back again. But it requires a bit of work
I’d say yes, there are still frequent upgrades, but IMO add-on breakage is not common anymore in my experience.
I have to admit though, that I’m not using nearly as many add-ons as I used to. uBlock Origin is my most important add-on, and Dark reader, and bypass paywall are also always on add-ons, and they have all worked flawlessly for years.
I’m on Manjaro Linux, so I get updates very frequently and early, although most are probably security updates. So I’m probably near max exposed to breakage, and haven’t had problems with it since years ago, when an add-on for splitting windows into panels broke after being unmaintained for quite a while.
Alternatively, you might want to try Chromium, which allegedly should be like Chrome but without the Google shenanigans.
Personally I prefer to not use that either, because it’s still heavily influenced by the development of Chrome, but I guess it’s better than Chrome from a freedom perspective.
It’s easy to forget now, but IE was such absolute dogshit for years that literally anything else was better
Back in the day Firefox delivered the same look and feel with a better experience than IE did.
Corporations are finding that the vocal minority is small enough that they can let them complain all they want, and nothing will change. There are now enough users out there that it just doesn’t matter what how much we complain online. They just have to wait it out since the silent majority just don’t care anymore.
Reddit, Netflix, Spotify, and now Google. It’s happening everywhere lately.
This generation of the internet is doomed if we let it keep going in the direction it’s headed.
P.S. If any lawyers and people really knowledgeable about web technologies and standards here on Lemmy can get together and help us draft something together that we can all send in, that would be amazing.
P.P.S. If we can’t find a Lemmy lawyer, I’m proposing we take this to the EFF and Louis Rossmann (who has experience lobbying for right to repair and trying to get legislation passed) for their help.
The thing is that in the eyes of the general populace (and regulators) it’s not “just a Google thing” since Chromium is open source and a majority of browsers use that. So the argument is that most browsers will implement anything Google does and make it a de-facto standard.
Big corporations have been battling for control of the internet through browser market share since day one. We can’t let any one corpo gain control because it will destroy it with proprietary standards, it’s already suffered untold damage. MS almost got control when IE reached a vast majority of market share. Google is in the same place now with Chrome.
As consumers we have some control over market share through product selection. Of course an anti-trust lawsuit will help the cause as it did when MS was in position to take control. Time for Firefox to take the stage now, it’s ready.
look, there has to be some other privacy respecting browser out there!
Firefox?
No, it needs to be Chromium based!
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Even if alternatives die though, we could force google to sell off portions of itself to up and coming orgs/options like they did with AT&T. Or put in privacy protections that will allow alternatives to begin again and grow.
I don’t understand the ins and outs of it all but we can’t let fear of it taking too long or alternatives dying stop us from fighting monopolies and privacy protections.
So we should probably get started sooner than later. Especially while we have folks like Lina Khan in office.
It’s only an anti-trust violation if an anti-trust case is made and a sentence passed. A new Chrome update and a couple Benjamins on the adequate courts should easily fix that,.
Yup, judges are humans too and susceptible to corruption.
Susceptible? It’s their default position.
🤔 So what do we do? I am de-googlefying as we speak, but collectively, we really need to organize and build workarounds.
Don’t trust the state to solve your problems. Organize and be ready to act
For eu users : https://competition-policy.ec.europa.eu/antitrust/procedures/complaints_en
However not sure how it works, if you need to be directly affected as a company of user, or if you need to be a citizen to file a complaint.
I don’t have the necessary detail and information to be able to file the complaint.
If you give the detail on how it works and why it affects competition I may be able to file a complaint.
Howerver from what I saw in news the EU and US are already collaborating in an investigation against Google. Not sure if it’s true, current and on what exactly.
Laws only apply to the little people.
