back to article How US Dept of Justice's cure for Google could inflict collateral damage

The US Justice Department's proposed remedies to address Google's monopoly control of the search services and search text advertising markets should be reconsidered in light of the broader problems with technology platforms. The floated fixes should also be evaluated for how they will affect other aspects of Google's business …

  1. LVPC

    Mozilla can die in a fire for all I care at this point. Under Mitchel Baker they sent from 20% market share to 2% - while she paid herself an 8-figure salary.

    If Mozilla going broke is a consequence of breaking up google, it's worth the price.

    1. isdnip

      Firefox is still a good browser, with better privacy than Chrome. Yes, they've lost market share and they have probably wasted a lot on silly side projects, but a Chrome monopoly (Edge is based on it) would be harmful.

  2. Dinanziame Silver badge
    Devil

    Also think of poor Apple, which will lose 20% of its net income...

    1. This post has been deleted by its author

  3. seldom

    Did Google pay for this article?

    Just wondering. Equiring minds want to know. If they did, how much?

  4. DoctorNine

    Collateral damage?

    I'm still waiting for that promised comeuppance to MS for it's monopolitical nastiness with IE. Never happened.

    Monolithic transnationals in the business world are very slippery critters.

    1. find users who cut cat tail

      Re: Collateral damage?

      Exactly. If the main problem is ‘But but but… the Apples and Microsofts will continue with business as usual!’, the solution is not letting Google get away with it. It is not letting the Apples and Microsofts get away with it either.

      1. Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge

        Re: Collateral damage?

        No. The main problem is that a solution which looks odd in 2024 will be all-but-irrelevant by 2032, or whenever the case is finally settled and all appeals exhausted.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Well thought-out

    > Every setting should be opt-in rather than opt-out.

    Why, here's a list of ALL of our 350 settings! We keep adding more!! And _every single one of them_ is opt-in. Because they are _required_ for the browser to actually function, *you have to make a choice*!! *click, click, click, an hour and a half later click, ...click...*

    The simple fact is that there is no perfect solution. Every solution will create pain somewhere else. The least perfect solution is to allow goog to continue as-is. Wresting Chrome from them may be very much worthwhile, but as said before it'll make it into a data-gathering engine for personal-data aggregators. Let that happen *prior* to putting in personal-data protection laws, so that there may actually be a buyer at the moment, and then screw the buyer later (because fuck you, data aggregators!). There will *always* be a drawback, to every possible action.

    Simply asking someone what their default search engine should be is a joke. Isn't that requirement already there? goggle has an iron grip on web standards at this point (AMP, ssl certificate expirations, public visibility of all certs (even private dev environments), quik, webp/webm vs av1 and jpegxl/avf, javascript extensions, plugin manifest, ...) and allowing them to keep controlling it harms the web. Allowing them to be the primary stake-holder, voter, or contributor to the project harms the web. Chrome has to be separated. (In their words, they only ever created it because they wanted a faster javascript engine for their web-apps! They didn't want/need it! Then they bastardized it into a tracking system, just like they did Android.)

    Alternatively, Chrome isn't allowed to implement anything not defined by the IETF. Anything the company wants to do *must* be standardized by them first. Unfortunately, this doesn't prevent things like sending every single URL that you visit to the mother-ship-co, as they do now, so it wouldn't stop the data-monopoly problem -- so chrome simply has to be separated.

    Android next, because of all the tracking, even when you opt out, *always* if you enable GPS, and the search-insider's personal, private abuse of that data.

    Data sharing, "at a nominal cost". Gcloud has data exfiltration rate of 10c/GB last I looked. That seems like a perfectly good definition of "nominal". Imagine asking data-users to pay 10c/GB PLUS the compute cost required to collect + process, to each customer individually (but hey they'd have only one) for each gigabyte of (inflated, uncompressed, parsed, hashed, tokenized, bundled, ...) search index data, when instead they could scrape from the source for free. Probably they'd just send you a BigQuery bill for it. (Huh, I wonder what it looks like.. SELECT *; --... huh, this thing is slow. $450000 later.) Not a single entity, aside from the US spy-agencies, would ever pay for this. This is not a solution, it's not even a slap on the wrist - it's a business prospect, and an additional source of revenue (from the US gov, and unsuspecting, accidental, experimenting orgs). You'd in fact be subsidizing their operations.

  6. oreosRnice

    The US and the EU can barely manage themselves or avoid corruption.

    Yet somehow we let them think they know what’s best? Somehow they know how to properly breakup a company?

    Yea… okay.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Too late she cried

    That’s all she wrote

  8. abend0c4 Silver badge

    Negatively impact independent browsers like Firefox

    The thing is, it's not "independent" if it's, well, dependent on the cash from a supposed rival. And competition-as-a-service is not competition.

    If you have entire industry sectors that depend mostly on stuff that has significant development costs being (apparently) given away, it is inevitably going to lead to the dominance of megacorporations and billionaires - and a complete lack of genuine privacy for the end users whose data is the only currency that changes hands.

    The only effective solutions would ultimately lead to Google et al having to charge for their services in cash and I suspect that the general public would, unfortunately, prefer the status quo - and the regulators know it.

  9. Zolko Silver badge

    break them really up !

    Google – or rather Alphabet – it's :

    * search (including Maps, Mail ...)

    * Youtube

    * Chrome

    * Android

    * Cloud

    So it's much more than only Chrome that should be separated. If you ask me, it's rather Android and Youtube that should be split apart from the rest, then the Chrome monopoly won't matter anymore.

    1. naive

      Re: break them really up !

      This is politically motivated justice, one of the last spasms of a politicized justice system, that made a big show of president Trump hiding "secret documents" raid at Mar el Lago, that was nothing but smoke.

      Maybe google didn't pay enough campaign contributions to Biden or they were refusing to suppress president Trump from their search results like they did in 2020.

      It will be over after January 20.

      1. Someone Else Silver badge

        Re: break them really up !

        Your handle is well chosen!

    2. Mark 124

      Re: break them really up !

      I've been playing with this idea in my mind for a while, it'd be perhaps hard to enforce and probably some downsides, but humour me if you will...

      There should be a minimum price for on-selling user data, that must be paid to the user, plus a minimum price for holding user data for that purpose. Something like 10c per fact held and maybe 0.1c per fact sold. So if Google, or importantly Facebook, know my age, postcode, gender, and which football team I support, they owe me 40c per year. They might then infer other facts like my martial status and a political viewpoint. When they make those facts available via an ad auction they owe me 0.6c (for these six example facts). This wouldn't apply to order fulfillment e.g. when I buy something online and the vendor gives my address to a courier.

      Given the number of facts actually held and inferred, and their number of users and ad auctions as they search and scroll, this should have meaningful impact on their bottom line. Likely they'd charge advertisers per fact, which would make the advertisers also think twice about how much they need to know all this stuff about their target consumers.

      Another nice side effect is that having to pay Russian troll accounts for their (presumably fake) facts would violate laws about financing terror and/or sanctions, so the number of such accounts might finally drop.

      I'm not super comfortable about giving payment details to a big tech platform, especially from a privacy perspective, but on the other hand they already know who I am. Requiring a credit card would also make age verification trivial.

      1. munnoch Silver badge

        Re: break them really up !

        Interesting take. Of course if you turn the personal data side of it into micropayments then the flip side is that you should be making micropayments when you consume the end services. Every search conducted, every email sent, every video watched.

        In a way that creates an even higher barrier to entry as end users are unlikely to care about subscribing to niche providers just for the occasional tidbit and will probably be happy enough with the Google/MS/Apple's monthly 9.95 omnibus subscription. And of course as we have seen with streaming services, giving them a monthly fee still doesn't stop them forcing ads down your throat (Now are terrible offenders, Prime have started doing it as well).

        I still think that's the solution however, we need to pay for the services so that all the atrocious behaviour on the back-end can become less necessary and can then be legislated away without the incumbents digging their heels in. Unfortunately a whole generation of internet users have become conditioned to everything being free (as well as automatically clicking on the "accept defaults" button to get to the juice as fast as possible,,,). Hell, even I fall into that category, my local "free" newspaper wants 2 quid a month for unlimited online articles, which in the great scheme of things is next to nothing, but I still baulk at it despite it being something genuinely useful and relevant to my life.

      2. collinsl Silver badge

        Re: break them really up !

        It's an interesting idea - immediate issue in my head with this though is that 10c USD is worth more to some people than others. In the US or other western/developed nations it's practically nothing, but if you look at a rural poor family in Africa or a North Korean labourer that may be a day's pay, so they'd be trading their personal information for payment just to get the money, which defeats the object of your idea IMO.

  10. xanadu42
    Mushroom

    Outside the box thinking...

    Outside the box thinking such as the following may level the field a bit:

    Make it a requirement that Alphabet/Google:

    1) Remove ALL Tracking features and Google Account Linking from Google Chrome;

    2) Make ALL their proprietary code open-source;

    3) Donate funds to the main developers of ALL current non-proprietary web browser engines. (and, for that matter, make all other mega-corps that make proprietary web browsers do the same)

    4) Advertise on ALL their varied products ALL of the current non-proprietary web browser engine producers

    So instead of everyone who doesn't use Google Chrome seeing adverts to use Google Chrome when visiting an Alphabet/Google -owned site they will see adverts (paid for by Alphabet/Google) for alternate web browsers along the lines of "This web browser may be more suitable for you..."

    Probably all too altruistic... and a one-in-a-trillion+ chance

    And waiting for the down-votes

  11. Someone Else Silver badge

    Oh, puh-LEEEZE!

    From the article:

    That's evident from the statement issued by Mozilla, which warned that a blanket prohibition on search agreements – like the one Mozilla has with Google to make Google Search the default in Firefox – "will negatively impact independent browsers like Firefox and have knock-on effects for an open and accessible internet."

    Oh, fuckin' puh-LEEZE, already! Cry me a frickin' river! You're gonna try and tell me that the necessity to pop up a radio-buttoned dialog at the start of a "fresh" install of Firefox (or one of its ilk), where the poor user has to select his/her default search engine is going to "negatively impact independent browsers like Firefox"?!? Boy, you guys must not have a very good opinion of your developers' coding prowess.

    Or...your code base is as fucked up as some of Firefox's detracting commentards here would want you to believe.

    1. Orv Silver badge

      Re: Oh, puh-LEEEZE!

      The negative impact is the majority of Firefox's development funding comes from Google paying them to be the default search option.

      1. OhForF' Silver badge

        Re: Oh, puh-LEEEZE!

        Yes, for Firefox that would be a negative impact but even if Firefox can't continue in its current way i see a chance for long term benefit from that.

        If Google is no longer allowed to build a browser and not allowed to fund Firefox with ad money others might be able to build a browser using a business model not tied to the ad industry, e.g. by aksing users to pay for the browser and restart competition in the browser market.

        As abend0c4 wrote it is quite possible the general public would rather keep paying for the browsers with their data and looking at advertisments so it might be hard to reach a consensus this is a positive thing.

    2. Benny Cemoli

      Re: Oh, puh-LEEEZE!

      No, what will be "negatively impacted" are the salaries of the over-paid Mozilla employees that infest both the Foundation and the Corporation. You know, the ones that take home $10, $20, $25 Million USD per year salaries that contribute very little, if anything, to the development of the Firefox browser. That's who would be negatively impacted if Google were forced to end their pay for play payments to be default search engine in Mozilla Firefox.

  12. Ace2 Silver badge

    I am willing to put up with a great deal of collateral damage, if it means Google is blasted into tiny pieces.

  13. This post has been deleted by its author

  14. Softsuits

    Fixer Upper

    To fix the Commons, you need flavors of AD Blockers that monetize perceptions of privacy. Think of it as a septic treatment plant. How clean do you need your data in and out to be ?

    Demonitizing the value of your data is not going to happen. Filtering however is market opportunity. What is the value of your perception?

    1. Ace2 Silver badge

      Re: Fixer Upper

      What I want is a blocker / filter that just makes all of the data subtly wrong.

  15. Grinning Bandicoot

    Justice Dept. dedicated to ??

    The anti-trust division operates a manner as to hurt the people they claim that they're protecting.. ATT was broken up but it is still here but without Bell Labs and infused with the moral (?) code of the Enron hotshots. Alcoa was broke up after substitutes/competitors arose. The Hollywood vertical monopoly was broke after the substitute for the cinema was rapidly growing into entertainment dominance. If the author's hypothesis holds true, then too Google is going just as Yahoo fell by the roadside. But one must ask what will replace such things nominally free as Android, Chrome, Drive, Earth, or the their derivitives. These will have to be financed directly or pass from the scene. I've grown accustomed to to using Earth for a quick reminder of the physical layout and having no longer to pay for this service gladdens my pocket.

    How much of the fees received from the ads can be guessed by by the charge that M$ asks for its OS vs Android. Can the Justice Department's action be done at the behest of Redmond? Probably not but protection of old money is a better fit. Technology is just as long as the RIGHT PEOPLE control it. With Justice's past effort against producers of new technology I can not help as to whose pockets are being replenished as a reward for keeping the peasants down.

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