The reality is, Google needs to be broken up. Every fine they get makes that clear.
The most generous thing I could say is that it feels different. However, Apple has a stronger hold on iOS than Google has on the web. On the web, at least you could switch to another browser to view the same content. Switching off iPhone requires a whole new ecosystem and hardware.
I hope people who argue for a certain treatment of Google in this case are at least consistent in the Apple case.
2. Apple's new privacy changes require that apps solicit user permission before doing any tracking. However, once the user has granted that, app developers are allowed to either use Apple's solution or their own.
Apple's AppTrackingTransparency Framework harms a market that Apple is not a part of. That specific action doesn't have any monopoly connotations in my mind because it solely benefited the product that was changed. There are no knock on effects where now Apple Maps is worth more.
Also, in this case, the consumers that are harmed by Google's alleged monopoly are people who are buying ads, not people using Chrome. I don't do anything with ads, but the impression I got from other people is that it's much easier for a consumer to switch phones than it is for an advertiser to just not advertise with Google.
I do think Apple has monopoly issues, I just don't think ATT is part of it. That was a legitimate response to consumer demand for privacy.
Not really the best examples.
On one end by almost literally being an extension of Google. On the other end by constantly laying off engineers. A big problem people are just handwaving away is that browsers are incredibly complex nowadays and how do you fund development of a browser engine? If you think the "Linux" model would work, well browsers already have that - it's called Mozilla and there is never any good news about them.
Brave is also funded by Google - Brave doesn't develop a browser, they develop a skin around a browser engine that Google pays millions to develop and has decided to open source.
There is also another aspect to it - one can imagine that the time of an OS which would run web apps as first class citizens (in the correctly engineered sandboxes/etc.) just hasn't come yet. In the meantime the browsers are just ugly stop-gap 0.x version of such an OS (there is a reason they are "browsers" as their roots (incl. deep architectural roots) are in browsing of static content, and everything else is bolt-ons - the integration of JavaScript engine for example back then could be best described exactly as a "bolt-on").
It's certainly possible for a browser to survive that way, but Konqueror doesn't seem to be terribly successful.
Both Linux kernel and web browsers are arguably too huge now to be even maintained entirely by a single organization, let alone to be developed from scratch by one.
Linux being under GPL kinda forces cooperation between businesses for their business needs, if they are going to tweak Linux. With browsers are you under impression that you can just fork Chromium maintained by someone else and then just add your business value for you alone to reap.
Plus, there's no rule that says a browser has to get most of its revenue from selling Google Search placement. That just happens to be the case for the single independent browser that exists right now, one which isn't exactly renowned for great business leadership. I think if the Chrome team had a reason to explore self sustaining revenue models there's a good chance they would come up with some solid innovations.
The only solution that would actually work is better regulation of the advertising space, but all advertisers (Google included) actively fight this. For example, ban governments from purchasing personal information without a warrant. Ban the sale of any/all personal information between companies - any personal information transferred should be gratis with at most nominal costs for the cost of the transfer itself. But then you might have to actually start paying for some services rather than everything being totally ad supported. Not to mention that governments, despite all their outcries about “privacy” and “evil corporations” love the status quo because of how easy it makes to invade your privacy without a warrant.
Not necessarily, its engine is now what powers Edge. Microsoft might support it.
It may be nearly impossible to prove to you, but what makes it impossible, or even particularly difficult, to achieve if the company is interested in doing it?
They do?
Apple gives away a pretty decent browser with their OS.
Microsoft gives away a version of Chrome with their OS (and for MacOS).
Most Linux versions ship with variants of Chromium.
The Chrome source which is a fork of WebKit which is in turn a fork of KHTML... is Open Source.
Chrome can't really be sold.
What exactly could "Chrome" the company do to make money?
Chrome can not be sold for many reasons, being open source is not one of them, nothing prevents the selling of open source software, one just has to include the source or make the source available
Finding someone willing to buy chrome would be a harder problem
Right. Now try to use that top right "user" icon on your chrome window to log in as a user that is not from a google account.
Nobody is going to pay. But if google serve an ad for a logged out (or firefox) user, they get paid 0.05c if they serve the same ad to someone logged in (via that button or otherwise) they get paid 1.7usd.
the button is just to make you be always logged in.
You are paying all the time and don't even realize.
Otherwise lots of existing employees may not want to be part of this split company. If that is a large loss of talent (think veterans with lots of experience) that could hurt the quality (security, stability) and velocity of the project resulting in much less interest from those companies to pay the Chrome company for their services. What I'd suspect at that point is that Google might just fork it and develop it internally for internal use only (it's going to be hard to trust a third party browser to access internal confidential/critical resources when said third party has trouble maintaining high quality engineering talent). We're talking about state actors here that could have much easier time attacking a smaller Chrome company to introduce data exfiltration code.
How to get from here to there, I don't know.
> How to get from here to there, I don't know.
You literally are there!
Sure, it's easy to criticize Mozilla for having "wrong priorities", being "pragmatic about EME", Firefox OS, losing market share, etc.
But simply saying a new board would fix things seems a bit naive.
by doing *exactly* what Google sued microsoft for trying to do with IE in the 90s. Isn't it funny?