I guess Google didn’t bribe hard enough
this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2025
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There are still Trump critics on YouTube.
You know, I always assumed they were conservative biased because for me personally they always pushed the most disgusting far right garbage in reccomended and adverts for over a decade, but I looked it up and I guess Google does have an anti-conservative bias in their news listings.
TIL.
It's not done yet. I highly doubt it ever will be either.
Justice Department is 100% lobbing this over to JD Vance's buddy Peter Thiel who's going to enshittify it even further and turn it with its massive install base into a tool for techno-fascism.
I must say that, as a European using a Firefox fork for my daily browsing while waiting for Ladybird, I don't see that outcome as completely negative: Google, somehow, in America has kept a completely unjustified good vibes feeling surrounding itself, while Thiel is much more evil in the public eye.
If Chrome is associated with him in anyway it can become a more lucid image of itself.
I really don't think this is true. It might push some politically engaged users to Firefox, but unlike Musk, most people don't know who Thiel is, and as long as he keeps it that way, nobody will care.
That's when we come onto the scene.
I am continuously "translating" news and opinions from here on LinkedIn. Already got banned from a professional Slack that contains most people in my industry for saying in a private conversation that I like watermelon.
Not gonna stop. People are not politically inclined because we kept our knowledge to ourselves for too long.
For a second, I read your fruit predilection literally and was like, "Is…watermelon controversial, now? Are they [the people who banned you] cartoonishly racist?"
I follow you, now; sucks but expected…
I still don't get it, can you clue me in?
Yeah; of course. Ze's referencing supporting Palestine (as the watermelon became more widely recognized as a symbol for them due to recent events).
FF depends on google ad money, thats why FF is currently enshittifying right now.
Acceleration-ism does not work.
If the USA has not taught you this, after this reckless takeover, nothing will save you.
The more likely outcome is for Chrome to become a North Korea RedStar equivalent, where you cannot freely access the internet without Chrome. And if you visit a resource with wrongspeak, the resource will have all its finances taken away (see the legislation surrounding section 230); with you being sent to El Salvador.
Ladybird can't come fast enough.
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Please, do it! That's going to eviscerate Chrome's userbase and push these Chromium browsers to fork so fast it'll make his head spin.
You're putting way too much faith in the typical consumer. Enshittifying Chrome even more would piss its users off, but inertia and its market dominance would keep most of them continuing to use it while complaining about how bad it is.
Remember: It took 8 years for Chrome to drag Internet Explorer to the point where less than 10% of people actually used it. And that's with Firefox already being a competitor to it for years.
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Why, what, is there something different about the Google guy?
Look at all their lips. See how they look like they are ready to kiss or suck something? Now look at Pichai. Just smiling instead of getting ready to receive a load. He bent the knee, but not far enough.
I'll go and risk "shade of skin". He is also smiling an looks a little less as a Bond villain, but I go with the shading.
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Which tech company would buy Chrome from Google? I just can't think of a single tech company that could be an improvement over Google owning Chrome.
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Amazon
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Apple
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Meta
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Microsoft
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Oracle
What about media companies? I don't see consumers benefiting from this.
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Comcast
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Disney
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Netflix
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Viacom
What about telecom? I still don't see consumers benefiting from this.
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AT&T
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T-Mobile
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Verizon
What about foreign companies? Will they be even allowed to buy Chrome? I'm not sure.
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LG
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Philips
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Samsung
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Sony
The more I think about it, this won't end well.
Chromium is already there and companies like Microsoft have their own forks so... Yeah I think there's no point of buying Chrome.
It's the most popular web browser in the world. Direct access to the browser windows and browsing data of the majority of Internet users would be the point.
Sell it to IBM so they can end all support lol
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the doj doesn't care about monopolies; the doj just wants to punish people who don't push fascist agendas.
Google’s ad network and YouTube are pushing the agenda more than pretty much everyone.
I thought so too because I only get horrific conservative nonsense from their platforms but turns out they've been vearing left lately, delisting conservative news and banning far right advertisers.
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Solution: Create an open source foundation, cram the board with Google employees
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A direct “donation” to Trump would instantly fix this.
I think this is good news which seems hard to believe right now. I'm sure someone will find a way to make this terrible but on it's face we are watching an important anti-trust ruling take place. Google's monopoly on the browser is dangerous and unhealthy. Taking it away from them is absolutely the right thing to do. Who inherits the power over the single browser used by most of the world remains to be seen though.
Who inherits the power over the single browser used by most of the world remains to be seen though.
Probably Musk or Thiel.
The year is 2032
The Hogan Browser new update reads you an AI Sermon when you attempt to access medical graphs because it autodetected pornographic content.
You have 20 minutes to repent before the ICE justiciars show up and sentence you, but you forgot to clean and polish the Trump Crucifix Statuette this morning.
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I'd cheer if I thought this was anything except a blackmail play when a Trump administration is now involved. They'll buy him off and it'll all be back to status quo by fall.
Thus the price of collaboration. You are not rewarded, you simply draw attention to yourself as someone with wealth they can pillage.
or pay a generous fee of %0.00001 of your yearly earnings to make it go away
I don’t really get what selling Chrome and Android would accomplish. I’m all for breaking up tech monopolies but both of those projects are mostly open source that get proprietary Google crap and (for Android, at least, some monopolistic behavior like requiring what’s preinstalled, which is fine to ban).
I don’t work on ad-supported projects so I may be out of my element but it seems like what would actually help end the monopolistic behavior is requiring Google (and Facebook) to spin off their ad network businesses. The monopoly problem isn’t Chromium or AOSP or that Google runs ad-supported search. It’s that if [insert random site] wants ads, they typically use AdSense. If Facebook and Google want to run ad-supported services, fine. But they shouldn’t also also be the middlemen for advertisers who want to run ads on third party sites. That’s a recipe for monopolistic behavior.
In my ideal world, there would be no targeted ads at all and advertisers had to sponsor — and were so partly responsible for — the specific content they want to be associated with. But that probably isn’t going to happen since every politician is an advertiser that wants to launder their sponsorships through a middleman.
requiring Google (and Facebook) to spin off their ad network businesses
That is their business. Everything else exists to bring more value to that business:
- AOSP - ads in the browser (search engine) and app store
- Chrome - ads in the search engine, and nudge people toward other Google products to hoover up data to serve more ads
And so on. Google and Meta are ad companies that drive traffic to their ads through software services.
The point in forcing them out of certain businesses is to open them up to more competition. They can keep ad margins high due to sheer volume of eyeballs coming from their other services. Gutting those services means they need to provide better value to stay competitive.
Idk if it'll work, but stripping out the browser is likely good overall for the open web.
I don’t really get what selling Chrome and Android would accomplish.
There was a leak of Google's old page ranking algorithm (not PageRank, but how they change the order of results on search) - it looked like they used a bunch of signals from Chrome about the amount of time users spend on a page, how quickly they go back, etc. Chrome gives the search side of the business an advantage.
Conversely, Android feeds a bunch of extra data to the ad business about what people do in real life.
Both products give the rest of Alphabet a significant advantage over their competitors, and make it harder for new entrants to get a foothold.
Spinning them off into their own independent companies would make more sense than a sale to another party.
It would be better to not allow Google to have a major stake in the control of the Chromium project itself. Same for Android, force them to spin AOSP off into a nonprofit or sell it to EFF or something and forbid them from having a huge stake in it.
Let them use it for their own products, but remove their financial influence over the underlying software.
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