back to article Uncle Sam may force Google to sell Chrome browser, or Android OS

The US government has confirmed it is considering asking a judge to force Google to divest parts of its business as part of potential remedies in the antitrust case over its control of online searches. In a proposed remedy framework [PDF] it filed yesterday, the Department of Justice's antitrust division laid out the various …

  1. Lee D Silver badge

    Cool. Now do iOS, Safari and Apple.

    1. Lee D Silver badge

      Or even Edge, Windows and Microsoft (again!) for that matter.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        I don't that will much difference to either user of Edge.

        1. R Soul Silver badge

          There's two of them?

          1. Lee D Silver badge

            One who develops it, one who uses it.

          2. katrinab Silver badge
            Trollface

            Lots of people use it to download Chrome and Firefox.

            I personally use WinGet.

        2. Altrux

          Reminds me of when I told my Yahoo-using wife that Yahoo Mail was down. "Both users affected!"

    2. Nik 2

      I think that Apple has a get-out in that it doesn't have the market share that Android does. Also the position of Search as a window into consumer preferences and the means of control of results and hence user behaviour isn't there.

      But yes, I do think that the abuse of power is there.

      1. mark l 2 Silver badge

        In the US Apple has a larger share of the mobile market compared to Android, around 55% to 60% depending on where you look. Its only when you take in the ROW that Android becomes the bigger install base over iOS. But is the DOJ looking at Google operations on a worldwide scale or just how their dominance effects US based users?

        Now if the DOJ does force Google to sell off Android and Chrome who is going to buy them is the interesting question? As we might end up just going from the frying pan to the fire if Meta, Microsoft or Musk end up in control of any of them.

        1. Lazlo Woodbine

          Musk buying Android is probably the only thing that would prompt me to buy an iPhone

    3. Zippy´s Sausage Factory
      Meh

      I'd argue they should make Google, Microsoft and Amazon sell off their cloud divisions. You want to make search engines, Office software and sell tat? Great, but you can't sell cloud services at the same time. Not gonna happen. And that includes Google Drive and OneDrive.

      1. MacGuffin

        and Apple/iCloud

        1. Zippy´s Sausage Factory

          iCloud I forgot about. They should open the APIs so you can replace iCloud with any cloud storage provider. Not that there are any I actually like any more, since Barracuda shut down "Copy", but there you go.

      2. doublelayer Silver badge

        What would be the logic of that? I can see a case for Microsoft: if they own both the cloud service and an operating system you might run in it, then they could do what they have to make it more expensive to run Windows in someone else's cloud. But that doesn't apply to either of the other two. Having an online store has no direct conflicts with running servers, and unless they did something like forbidding people to sell stuff in the Amazon store if they used a competitor's cloud (they haven't), there's no reason to break along that line. They do plenty of similar things, but related to things like whose shipping network you use, not whose cloud servers. Likewise with Google Cloud and Google Search.

        When you make a case for breaking up a company, you usually have to describe how having positions in those two lines causes a conflict. Each company has plenty of complementary businesses for which you can easily make that argument, but that doesn't mean that every pair of services works that way. Browser and a search engine: yes. OS and app distribution: yes. OS and browser: yes. Search engine and app distribution: probably not unless they were intentionally keeping F-Droid out of search results, but you could try. Cloud servers and a mobile OS: I don't see it. These are important because you need to prove that an abuse exists to split them at all, and the lines where these conflicts exist are where the breaking needs to occur to stop the negative results.

  2. collinsl Silver badge

    It won't happen, just like it didn't happen with Microsoft in the 90s. Google will pay some fine which will be less than 10% of it's global profit and that'll be the end of it.

  3. Helcat Silver badge

    If this did happen, all that Google would do is spawn a few shell companies that'd own shares in a new company that 'owns' Android et al, all of which would ultimately be owned by the people who own Google.

    Old tale: Old trick: Nothing the US can do about that. Especially as the shell companies will be external to the US so outside their jurisdiction - or whatever legal trickery is needed to do to meet requirements without losing anything.

  4. Altrux

    Do it, do right now!

    Long overdue, although we know it will take years to actually make it happen.

  5. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

    Apple probably breathing a sigh of relief

    for the moment.

    By NOT having a huge commercial cloud service[1] AND a search engine AND not selling user data to ad slingers, they may have escaped this round.

    Next time APPL and AMZN and even ORCL will be on the chopping block.

    [1] AFAIK, Apple use AWS (or could be AZURE) to host large parts of iCloud.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Apple probably breathing a sigh of relief

      You missed an 'e' in Apple, 'a' and 'o' in Amazon and 'a' and 'e' in Oracle. Is your keyboard broken?

      1. Jedit Silver badge
        Boffin

        "Is your keyboard broken?"

        I'm guessing those are the stock market ticker codes for the companies.

  6. devin3782

    How about they're have to spin off both, while they're at lets see Apple finally taken to task on their (same) anticompetitive behaviours.

  7. IGotOut Silver badge

    Sure thing Google.

    "said would hurt developers and consumers, "

    Yes, those people love us spying on them, controlling standards and generally fucking up everything you do online.

  8. Dinanziame Silver badge
    Meh

    To be honest, I don't see any of these remedies truly hurting Google. Even if Apple stopped receiving money from Google, they would still put Google as default search engine. Even if there was a choice screen, users would still choose Google. I'm not sure why so many people use Chrome on the desktop, but they do (admittedly on mobile it is preinstalled on all android phones). Even if other companies had access to the indexing data of Google, I doubt they would be able to use it efficiently. The only way out I see is that complacency will make Google products become so bad that people will vote with their feet. The evidence is that hasn't happened yet.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      "Even if there was a choice screen, users would still choose Google"

      AFAIK in Europe there is a choice screen for Android phones, allowing you to chose the search engine for your search bar widget. And people do chose other search engines.

    2. doublelayer Silver badge

      I think that most people, if presented with the search engine screen, would choose Google from brand recognition and inertia. Google is willing to spend billions to prevent that from happening. Either they know better than I do about what people will do with a choice, although those people can still go into the settings and get a choice screen with common engines listed, or the team that does this stuff has a massive budget and no oversight.

  9. DS999 Silver badge

    Forcing them to divest Chrome would be a huge win for consumers

    The only thing preventing them from having an effective monopoly on browsers is Apple requiring third party browsers to use WebKit instead of their own engines. That means web developers can't target only Chrome like they did in the bad old days of "best viewed in IE", which would not only hurt Apple users but users of Firefox and other alternative browsers on all platforms. Google already has a huge presence in search, ads, maps, email and consumer cloud, giving them an effective monopoly of the browser would make it easy for them to leverage that to grow those already huge presences. "Ooops sorry that other mapping stuff keeps breaking with each Chrome update, just use Google Maps it works perfectly" would be taken straight out of the Microsoft WordPerfect playbook, except DOS was upgraded a few times a year and Chrome is updated a few times a month so end users would just become used to their alternative mapping site etc. being broken all the time and move to Google's stuff on their own.

    I'm not sure forcing them to divest Android would change things all that much. Whoever owned Google Play would still have an effective monopoly on non-China app stores, if this new spun off Android came without Google maps and search most OEMs would probably install them on the phones they sold (and Google would probably charge them for the privilege lol) because that's what Android users have been used to for 15 years. So it is hard to see how this would make things better for either Android OEMs or Android users.

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    If Trump gets in, all Google has to do is tell him what a wonderful stable genius he is, and the case will be dropped.

    1. DS999 Silver badge

      No they'd also have to be willing to change Google Search results so that when any search is made - especially searches related to him - that it links only to right wing viewpoints. He doesn't want to see anything negative about himself, or those currently in his favor, and wants to see only negative things about his ever lengthening list of enemies.

      I mean, this is the guy who wants to pull the "broadcast license" for MSNBC because they are critical of him, nevermind that like Fox News Channel as a cable channel it has no broadcast license. But in a second term knowing that he's immune from prosecution for "official acts" by handing out blanket pardons like candy he'll get his lackeys to go whole hog against all press that's critical of him and find a way to shut them down. That's the first move dictators make - control the press, silence dissent.

      I mean, he's even said he wants to PROSECUTE Jimmy Kimmel, a night time talk show host / comedian, because he's always making fun of Trump and Trump is such a thin skinned baby he's totally unable to handle anyone making him the butt of a joke!

      So no, Google is not getting out from under from their antitrust issues with a few words of praise for Trump.

  11. Gene Cash Silver badge

    Baby Bells

    And of course all he Baby Bells have conglomerated back into one giant AT&T company again.

    Fat lot of good that accomplished.

    1. katrinab Silver badge
      Meh

      Re: Baby Bells

      Except for Verizon, which is I think two of them.

  12. Edward Ashford

    Web crawlers

    " to allow websites crawled for Google search to opt out of training or appearing in any Google-owned AI product or feature"

    Surely that should apply to all AI training?

    And it should be opt in! Only crawl for AI if thus meta tag included type of thing.

    1. Twilight

      Re: Web crawlers

      Precedent was set here in the early days of the web. Crawling was allowed unless robots.txt had a line forbidding it.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Web crawlers

        for indexing, not for wholesale swallowing.

  13. O'Reg Inalsin

    Advertiser's Rights!

    As opposed to Personal Rights to Privacy. This is the wrong end of the stick. Not impressed.

  14. chip66

    Careful what you ask for

    Google today characterized the move as "government overreach," says the company that stands firmly behind the party of big government.

  15. O'Reg Inalsin

    Start from the bottom

    I'd like to see attempts to require a standard interface for cellphones so that alternative OS could be installed on and work on any phone. That has gotten harder, not easier. Samsung could do that fairly easily, just as easily as they now deliberately choose to make it difficult due to external pressure.

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