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Comment by concinds | Hacker News Reader

Judge Mehta's reasoning is obviously correct.

> US federal and state competition authorities recently asked the court of appeals to overturn the part of Mehta’s ruling that permits these payments.

You get the "competition authorities" you pay for. Decades of government-bashing, bureaucrat-bashing, sidelining and shit pay give you this level of institutional competence.

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Strong disagree. These payments are clearly massive tent pole of maintaining the monopoly and I think it was right for competition authorities to appeal them. In fact, IMO, Metha ruling was way to favorable for Google. Basically like, well, they did the crime but it's too much to disrupt so I guess we will nibble at the edges accomplishing little.

It sounds like you two agree.

Yeah, they should be forced to split Chrome into a separate business and stay out of the browser business permanently. Anything short of that either won't help or will further strengthen their monopoly.

Chrome isnt viable as a separate business. Its entire function is to be a loss leader / feeder for search.

Google should still be split, but along lines which are cohesive, financially viable and would level the playing field for competition, e.g.

- google workspaces / gmail / maps / search / chrome / youtube

- search index / cloud / datacenters

- youtube

- android

Browsers would work as a separate business if we stopped the anti-competitive practice of giving them away for free as a way to prevent competition in your other lines of business.

> split Chrome into a separate business

Bought by whom? Another monopolist bigcorp that surely won't care to monetize it? That is not how you reason about antitrust issues.

Not sell it. Split it into a separate business. Every share of Google turns into one share of Google and one share of Chrome.

The Firefox-Bing experiment proved that the amount of search engines the "free market" can sustain is one (1). You won't get more without proactive government interference and proper legislation. Meanwhile Firefox loses funding.

"Nibbling at the edges" is what the competition authorities are proposing.

"Nibbling at the edges" is all they can do since that was original proposed method. So they are appealing this particular nibbling at the edges but whole scale, break up Google was not in original remedy so authorities are kind of stuck.

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