US Antitrust Regulators Could Target Google's Chrome Browser For Breakup (politico.com) 45
Slashdot reader alternative_right shares a report from Politico:
Justice Department and state prosecutors investigating Google for alleged antitrust violations are considering whether to force the company to sell its dominant Chrome browser and parts of its lucrative advertising business, three people with knowledge of the discussions said...
The conversations — amid preparations for an antitrust legal battle that the Department of Justice is expected to begin in the coming weeks — could pave the way for the first court-ordered break-up of a U.S. company in decades. The forced sales would also represent major setbacks for Google, which uses its control of the world's most popular web browser to aid the search engine that is the key to its fortunes.
Discussions about how to resolve Google's control over the $162.3 billion global market for digital advertising remain ongoing, and no final decisions have been made, the people cautioned, speaking anonymously to discuss confidential discussions. But prosecutors have asked advertising technology experts, industry rivals and media publishers for potential steps to weaken Google's grip... A major antitrust report that the House Judiciary Committee released this week found that Chrome's market share allows Google to "effectively set standards for the industry," an issue of particular relevance as Chrome phases out cookies. "Google's ad-based business model can prompt questions about whether the standards Google chooses to introduce are ultimately designed primarily to serve Google's interests," the House report said. "Market participants are concerned that while Google phases out third-party cookies needed by other digital advertising companies, Google can still rely on data collected throughout its ecosystem."
Friday Politico reported the antitrust suit against Google is likely to be filed "early next week, but without the sign-on of any Democratic attorneys general, four people familiar with the case said Friday — upending the Trump administration's hopes to enlist bipartisan support for its fight against the internet giant..."
Instead a bipartisan group of states "expects to file an antitrust complaint challenging Google's search practices at a later date, the people said. That group, led by Democratic attorneys general in Colorado and Iowa along with Nebraska's Republican attorney general, has expressed concern about what they view as the Justice Department's narrow approach to the case, the people said. Filing a separate suit would allow more leverage if the Department of Justice negotiates a settlement with Google they don't like, they said."
The conversations — amid preparations for an antitrust legal battle that the Department of Justice is expected to begin in the coming weeks — could pave the way for the first court-ordered break-up of a U.S. company in decades. The forced sales would also represent major setbacks for Google, which uses its control of the world's most popular web browser to aid the search engine that is the key to its fortunes.
Discussions about how to resolve Google's control over the $162.3 billion global market for digital advertising remain ongoing, and no final decisions have been made, the people cautioned, speaking anonymously to discuss confidential discussions. But prosecutors have asked advertising technology experts, industry rivals and media publishers for potential steps to weaken Google's grip... A major antitrust report that the House Judiciary Committee released this week found that Chrome's market share allows Google to "effectively set standards for the industry," an issue of particular relevance as Chrome phases out cookies. "Google's ad-based business model can prompt questions about whether the standards Google chooses to introduce are ultimately designed primarily to serve Google's interests," the House report said. "Market participants are concerned that while Google phases out third-party cookies needed by other digital advertising companies, Google can still rely on data collected throughout its ecosystem."
Friday Politico reported the antitrust suit against Google is likely to be filed "early next week, but without the sign-on of any Democratic attorneys general, four people familiar with the case said Friday — upending the Trump administration's hopes to enlist bipartisan support for its fight against the internet giant..."
Instead a bipartisan group of states "expects to file an antitrust complaint challenging Google's search practices at a later date, the people said. That group, led by Democratic attorneys general in Colorado and Iowa along with Nebraska's Republican attorney general, has expressed concern about what they view as the Justice Department's narrow approach to the case, the people said. Filing a separate suit would allow more leverage if the Department of Justice negotiates a settlement with Google they don't like, they said."
Let's be clear (Score:2, Insightful)
The regulators want the same amount of black money they got from Microsoft from not splitting their Windows+Internet Explorer pair.
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How do you sell something that is open source and free to copy? Have they not seen Chromium?
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OK now look up "what is a contract" and then, "can a contract have value?"
The Russian stupid ray satellite is going to turned on full power until well after the election, I fear.
Re: Let's be clear (Score:2)
The other major company backing chrome development is Microsoft. So chrome becomes a Microsoft product? And what happens to chrome OS, which has been shaping up to be a major competitor to windows (at least, in the education sector, chrome OS has been mopping the floor with all of its competitors.)
And also, the government would have to outright forbid Google from making any web browser at all or else they could simply fork chromium and then they'd be back where they started.
Re:Let's be clear (Score:5, Insightful)
I doubt that's the goal.
It's more likely that regulators want Google to divest itself of involvement with Chrome. Given how many things are using the Chrome Embedded Framework, NW.JS, Cordova, Electron, Edge and Opera, that puts Chrome and it's underlying source code as a dependency in far more things than "MSIE" was in. Nevermind things like SmartTV's and Android phones that ship a version of it.
So Google might still be able to build Chrome, but Google must spin off the group that develops Chrome, Chromium to an independent company in the same way Mozilla is.
As for advertising, Google certainly has too much power here, and is actively destroying the internet by being the "default" place people go to advertise, and favoring itself for ad space. Like no company that I'm aware of likes Google in this space because what goes for $2.00CPM on any other ad network, barely gets pennies for the same traffic. Google ends up being at advertiser of last resort because you need large amounts of traffic to get better advertisement networks, but better networks won't even care about your traffic unless you're a top-100 site. So you have to deal with resellers, which tend to slip in garbage traffic to benefit themselves as well.
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They don't necessarily have to break up Chrome/Chromium from Google, but they do need to FORCE them to take upstream patches, to support other operating systems and platforms. If you're not on a platform google cares about, they ignore you. This is why the *BSD patchset is so huge now. This also goes for things like video support (make video work on linux, bsd, etc), forcing the use of google services with chrome, etc.
Chromecast protocol should be forced completely open too. Firefox should be able to c
Re:Let's be clear (Score:4, Insightful)
And who is going to take this large, non-revenue generating group of engineers? If you make the Chrome group independent, who pays their salaries? That is the same problem Mozilla is having, who pays the salaries?
That's not what's going on here (Score:5, Insightful)
Ask yourself this: Where were all these anti-trust actions when AT&T was buying back all the bells?
If the powers that be understood what the Internet was they never would have let us have it. They understand now. They're moving to take it away from us. Net Neutrality, Section 230, and disingenuous anti-trust enforcement.
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The powers that be underestimated just how much it was being abused. When you saying, "take it away from us" you must be a shareholder or senior level at Big Tech. No one else would talk that way, no one else would have the power to talk that way. That would explain why your so upset about someone addressing big techs monopoly abuse. Either that or you work in the media or the Democrat party.
As for the rest of the country, I'm inclined to say that they deserve to have their elections free of big tech manipu
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Not in US, but in EU Windows asks you about browser and search engine of preference.
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Exactly. When I see the word “could” in the headline, I read “time to pay your protection money”.
Good. (Score:3, Insightful)
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A diverse web is a web that more strictly adheres to open standards instead of giving into the "standards" defined by the industry leader. Firefox is the last non-Chromium based browser and we need more options other than just Firefox.
Don't hold your breath. Chances are Google will be "forced" to "sell" their browser to Thesaurus, Inc., a subsidiary of Alphabet, Inc. (which few people really know about that company....see how easy it is to "meet" compliance?)
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No, moron, if the lawyer proposes that they get fined just for saying it.
Why the fuck do you think lawyers are so good with words? Their words are regulated.
They can lie until the cows come home, but only immaterial lies, and lies that were within a mistake's distance from the Truth.
If you're ordered to sell a subsidiary, and your lawyer tells you can play a shell game and sell it to yourself, not only will the sale be ruled invalid later, but the lawyer could lose their license or even go to prison, and th
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It's practically fucking cute that you assume an entity like Google, would be subject to that delusional state of a justice system you describe.
Chevrolet, was "Too Big To Fail." The FUCK do you think Google clout carries? Government going anti-monopoly against their precious Donor Class?
Yeah, the American people are dumb enough to fall for this.
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The context is an anti-trust action. Google is a lot smaller than the US Government. They do not enter the courtroom throwing their weight around. You don't know what the "donations" you refer to are, where they come from, where they go to, or even who runs an anti-trust investigation.
What people would theoretically be "dumb enough to fall for" is not relevant to understanding what system those dummies actually managed to put into place. For that you'd have to put pants on, climb the stairs, and venture out
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The context is an anti-trust action. Google is a lot smaller than the US Government. They do not enter the courtroom throwing their weight around. You don't know what the "donations" you refer to are, where they come from, where they go to, or even who runs an anti-trust investigation.
What people would theoretically be "dumb enough to fall for" is not relevant to understanding what system those dummies actually managed to put into place. For that you'd have to put pants on, climb the stairs, and venture out into the Real World.(TM)
Speaking of the Real World, do me a favor, O Confident One. Hold your breath until Google isn't a monopoly fueling government coffers with taxpayer money as trillions flow offshore through tax havens for that taxable "non-profit". I'm sure it'll happen quickly enough to not cause you any harm.
You're right. They don't enter the courtroom throwing their weight around. Don't need to when you've already bought a ruling in your Congresscritters favor. Let's just see how any anti-action against a government-ce
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It's not like standards are a bad thing. We need to make sure that 'more options' =! 'fewer standards'
and is google complying with the standards or creating the standards? Or a combination of both. It could be that everyone flocks to Google's standards exactly because they're not monopolistic. They don't go and sue everyone. Like Oracle did after they bought Java. So Google got big because they did the right thing (and I'm not saying an industry leader should set the standards but because they are the ones
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is google complying with the standards or creating the standards?
They're distorting the standards and imposing an element of control over them.
To an extent that's inevitable. If the primary tool in use deviates from the standard then you have a de facto standard and others will conform to that.
Google are however abusing their monopoly position to consumer detriment. An example here are AMP links, where instead of linking to a website they give you a Google URL and who knows what's happening on Google's servers before it sends your request through to the actual site.
That'
Re:Good. (Score:5, Interesting)
Chrome and Firefox have been breaking standards since 2016 by not supporting HTTP/2's entire spec on purpose. Chrome supports a "http/3" which they wrote themselves.
Like the browsers should not be dictating what a web site is required to run on. SSL-everywhere is a fine, but it comes at costs that have largely made "free hosting" impossible, and consolidated power into SSL-termination services like Cloudflare, as people just want to build websites, not web servers.
So by making SSL a requirement to not make the browser not show scare messages, even on sites that have no content that needs to be secure (like free content that you don't sign into), the costs to do the free hosting are substantially increased, and consolidation occurs because 100 people producing the same category of content don't want to pay 100 times for a service that they can share. SSL makes that incredibly hard to share since every site needs cert, and that's an additional cost to each site, and "free certs" are super difficult to deploy as the scripts that support it aren't stand-alone and rely on libraries and scripting languages that make it a pain in the ass.
People just want to go to their host and upload their content, they don't want to be forced to use Chrome, they don't want to be forced to use the hosting providers SSL cert provider (and if they didn't get it from the host, they have to do even more manual efforts) and since certs expire the website will explode at some point if the owner of the site doesn't understand how to update it. So if that cert is also used to login to the site's administrative controls, now they can't access the site to fix it either.
Like I can't illustrate how big of a quagmire Chrome and Firefox created for businesses to create their own websites, it's a mess, and it's not getting better.
Another feature that Chrome and Firefox pushed on users that should have not been a default is WASM, which is mostly used for malware.
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I don't understand the free hosting is impossible thing. Let's encrypt exists. TLS certs are free.
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Under the guise of being oh so concerned about everyones security google is trying to force everyone to use SSL for EVERYTHING, what that does in reality is dilute security awareness, how many people actually pay attention to WHO signed their certificate now or to whom it
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Most people don't even check for certs at all. That's why google is trying to force it to begin with. It's still a net win for security on the web.
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Yeah, it's always a win when corporate interests try to force people to do things, especially when "safety" is on the line.
I got my first taste of why certs are bullshit when Java adopted them, and I suddenly found out I couldn't run my own software on my own computer unless I jumped through hoops to make my own certificates, and the directions to do so were nowhere to be found in the SDK instructions. It only went downhill from there.
Security on the web is a myth. Certs, whether they are used for encrypt
Re:Good. (Score:4, Insightful)
what that does in reality is dilute security awareness, how many people actually pay attention to WHO signed their certificate now or to whom it's assigned?
Approximately no one does -- and approximately no one ever did. Making TLS the norm didn't change that.
Do I really need SSL encryption to read the morning news, or to check the weather report, or watch youtube, or to browse slashdot?
Yes, you do. Not because you need to hide what you're reading/seeing, but because you'd like to be sure that the code downloaded to your web browser is what was sent by the site you're connecting to -- and that you're actually connecting to the site you think you are. TLS does encryption, but that's almost irrelevant for most usage. The really important thing that it provides is authentication and integrity.
And, yes, you do need that to read the morning news, etc., because you don't want anyone sitting between you and the news site to inject malware that will exploit vulnerabilities in your browser.
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Yeah, because www.paypaI.com definitely was from Paypal and not some scam site. I mean, it says it c
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Yeah, because www.paypaI.com definitely was from Paypal and not some scam site. I mean, it says it came from PaypaI by LetsEncrypt, after all.
All you know is it's a website that claimed to be Paypal but was actually from PaypaI. Yep, definitely more secure.
Web content authentication comprises three problems:
1. Ensuring the content that you download is what was sent by the site you're visiting.
2. Ensuring that the site you're receiving content from is the one you told your browser to visit.
3. Ensuring that the site you're visiting is the one you think you're visiting.
TLS effectively solves the first two problems. Your complaint is that it does not solve the third problem, and your claim is that this is due to LetsEncrypt. You're right that TLS does not s
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What LE doesn't confirm is that www.paypal.com is owned by Pay Pal Corporation. You need a different level of certificate for that.
In practice, a different sort of certificate (EV rather than DV) doesn't solve it either, because approximately no one checks the certs. We need to just accept that that is not solved, nor solvable, by TLS and look for different solutions.
But TLS does a great job of ensuring that the data my browser receives is exactly what the site I told my browser to visit sent.
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Certs were never really about who. Yes there were "enhanced" certs where the provider claimed to have verified that the company really was who they said they were, but they were trivially easy to circumvent, e.g. just register a dormant company with that name somewhere.
That's why all major browsers stopped displaying the enhanced information years ago.
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You are totally missing why SSL is being used. It is there to stop your ISP from snooping your traffic and selling off what they find in it. FCC made that legal a few years back and the response has been to encrypt everything.
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Chrome and Firefox have been breaking standards since 2016 by not supporting HTTP/2's entire spec on purpose. Chrome supports a "http/3" which they wrote themselves.
Actually, Google wrote both HTTP/2 and HTTP/3. HTTP/2 was originally called "SPDY", and HTTP/3 was originally called "QUIC". Neither of them had an unauthenticated mode as-designed. When SPDY went through standardization, the committee insisted on adding an unauthenticated mode, but AFAIK no one has ever deployed it in any significant way. None of the major web browsers support non-TLS HTTP/2, and all have announced that they have no plans ever to support it. This isn't just Google & Mozilla -- Apple,
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Does "breakup" mean smaller size in bytes? (Score:2)
I mean, really, Google? 500 MB? Firefox is half that size. Or perhaps the amount of free disk space needed to compile the damn thing?
Look at who is pushing this..... (Score:3)
It's for the most part a bunch a republicans .. They are pissed at Google for pushing off Alt-right, conspiracy and Russian troll sites from youtube.... Facebook has tried to look the other way and their reward is to avoid scrutiny for now. This is purely political. Republicans can't rule without violent racist groups, conspiracy theories and Russian help any more. I think Google exerts way too much influence and they shouldn't be the defacto force driving web standards and advertising, but this is not about that. If the GOP gave a crap about Monopolies, which they have shown time and time again they do not, they would've acted way different over the last 20+ years. Twitter will probably also be investigated for God knows what, and the that will be political too. Given the reasons behind this we should expect the worst possible outcome. If you think Kicking Trump out of office is the end of this nonsense , it isn't, it's just the beginning. Going forward they plan to use the same play book so they want to make sure no one can or will challenge them. MS broke up a big Russian Bot Net a little while back, I surprised they are not in the cross hairs, however that would mean the Republicans would have to realize what that meant, and they don't have a clue.
Third-party cookies have been on the way out (Score:2)
Third-party cookies have been on the way out for years now, with more and more browsers restricting or blocking them by default. The primary reason has been massive abuse by the ad networks that're complaining now. Those restrictions affect Google third-party cookies equally, it's just that Google saw the writing on the wall and began moving to non-cookie-based tracking that's integrated into the domain carrying the advertising or analytics while the other ad networks were lazy and never updated their techn
That headline (Score:3)
Break up a browser?
Google: You're going to have to download our custom TCP/IP stack and JavaScript engine separately to make this work.
Customer: Engine? TCP/IP stack? Do I need to start my car? Should I pour syrup on my computer?
Google: Yes.
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It would probably make Chrome deteriorate rapidly. Without Google's resources it will end up like Firefox, stagnating apart from the addition of anti-features that try to monetize the user.
There's a reason why almost every other browser is just a Chrome skin. Developing a browser costs a lot of money and there isn't much revenue. If Google is no longer motivated to throw resources at Chrome then the new owner will just end up like Mozilla, taking money from service providers to have their services added to
That won't help. (Score:1)