The U.S. Department of Justice will ask a judge to force Alphabet Inc.'s Google to sell off its Chrome browser, Bloomberg reported on Monday.

Note: Original report by Bloomberg, article by Reuters proxied by Neuters to bypass paywall.

  • @[email protected]English
    137•1 month ago

    Lit. It’s a good ask although it’s not clear what separation means here. Not going to hold my breath, the big corpos seem to usually win these kind of games.

    • @[email protected]English
      75•1 month ago

      Chrome is now owned by a company, owned by a company, owned by another company, that is owned by Google.

      • @WhatAmLemmyEnglish
        72•1 month ago

        And even in the case where there is actual separation, and competition, it will only be temporary!

        see history of telco consolidation after a monopoly breakup in 1984

            • @[email protected]English
              3•1 month ago

              Thanks to this thread TIL it was one of the few serious competitors to ATTs monopoly.

              Southern Pacific Communications and introduction of Sprint

              Sprint also traces its roots back to the Southern Pacific Railroad (SPR), which was founded in the 1860s as a subsidiary of the Southern Pacific Company (SPC). The company operated thousands of miles of track as well as telegraph wire that ran along those tracks. In the early 1970s, the company began looking for ways to use its existing communications lines for long-distance calling. This division of the business was named the Southern Pacific Communications Company. By the mid 1970s, SPC was beginning to take business away from AT&T, which held a monopoly at the time. A number of lawsuits between SPC and AT&T took place throughout the 1970s; the majority were decided in favor of increased competition.Prior attempts at offering long-distance voice services had not been approved by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC), although a fax service (called SpeedFAX) was permitted..

              In the mid-1970s, SPC held a contest to select a new name for the company. The winning entry was “SPRINT”, an acronym for “Southern Pacific Railroad Internal Networking Telephony”.

        • @rottingleafEnglish
          1•1 month ago

          If they split Google, MS, Apple, Meta and Amazon all simultaneously, with some condition for the splinters to not merge back, and that contaminating the results of their allowed mergers, there may be good outcomes.

          Or there may not. It’s about people, not laws, after all.

      • @EldritchEnglish
        41•1 month ago

        It’s like they’re a company pretending to be another company, disguised as another company. Tropic Thunder all the way down.