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- cross-posted to:
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A federal judge has ruled that Google has an illegal monopoly in the US. “The market reality is that Google is the only real choice” as the default search engine, Judge Amit Mehta said in his decision, and he determined it had gotten that way unfairly. It’s a ruling that could portend big changes for the company, but we yet don’t know how big, and we might not for years.
Mehta declared on Monday that Google was liable for violating antitrust laws, vindicating the Department of Justice and a coalition of states that sued the tech giant in 2020. The next step — deciding on remedies for its illegal conduct — begins next month. Both parties must submit a proposed schedule for remedy proceedings by September 4th and then appear at a status conference on September 6th.
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I have used Google, DDG, Bing and Ecosia (which is basically Bing) at this point and ingl, none of them really stands out for its results. If anything, I think DDG and Bing beat Google.
Google might be the first company to create a monopoly out money and apathy. The apathy of users who don’t care about their search engine enough to even change the default.
Honeslty all search engines have gone to shit since the internet got polluted with AI-generated nonsense. Its a very hard problem to solve.
I think we should be precise. The badness began before generative AI. Generative AI makes things worse because now you are less sure when you’re looking at total junk, but the junk ratio itself doesn’t depend on that.
Well, its worse because its a firehose that can spit out nonsense at a rate nearly infinitely greater than a finite set of content marketing employees
You’re not wrong. The mass proliferation of listacles with the same 5 advertised products stamped behind a novella of filler to appease SEO algorithms has been increasingly problematic for at least 10 years now. The issue has only been compounded with the flood of “AI” generated content and deceptive ads. I almost prefer when every website had sidebars full of blatant advertisements. Sure they were ever present, but they weren’t trying to literally trick you into buying something.
What you talking about as apathy, that’s not what’s happening. Google has 90% or more of the search market because it’s the default, because it pays to be the default, even when it’s worse than alternatives. The only people who are actually apathetic are the ones who know that alternative exist, are relatively easy to switch to, are superior, and still don’t. That’s not the majority of users.
Have you tried Kagi?
this could be bad for mozilla / firefox.
if Google can’t continue to try to increase / sustain their market share, they may stop paying mozilla to be thw default.
If they do and Firefox dies, they’re getting ANOTHER Antitrust trial (hopefully).
On what grounds would that trial exist?
They’re the only rendering engine? Oh because they stopped paying Mozilla? Due to a court order?
It’s a complicated situation.
Because with the Chromium engine becoming the only engine, they can decide which features they want to support and which they don’t, thus, combined with their ad business, they will have no opposition to Manifest v3 and can even do Manifest v3.1 or Manifest v4 which leaves adblockers completely powerless against Google Ads.
And can essentially deprecate all browser addons forever.
Right but you said “hopefully” and “can”.
They haven’t actually done that yet.
I do think the Manifest v2 situation is interesting, but keep in mind the Chromium/Blink engine is fully open source.
It’s a trickier sell to say they have complete control when anyone is free to fork it.
Ain’t nobody forking Chromium, and realistically speaking, everyone will just follow whatever standards Google pushes via the Blink engine. It’s the truth, no matter the copium. Maybe Vivaldi and Brave will try to oppose any bad changes, but they will kneel eventually.
default what?
Google pays Firefox a lot of cash to be the default search engine on their browser.
So now we need to make sure we keep supporting Firefox. I have a feeling that most people who can choose, do in fact coose firefox, and the majority of chrome users do so because it’s on their business or student computers.
How does one support Firefox in a post Google paying them world?
I know the Mozilla foundation takes donations but it doesn’t seem like those go to Firefox development. Maybe I’m wrong though.
Some of it does. But currently a lot of it doesn’t because they can rely on the google funding. You can also donate volunteering time to Mozilla projects you want to support like Firefox or Thunderbird
A lot goes on the CEO’s $7,000,000 salary.
Yeah. The CEO class needs to be eliminated from the upper stratus of society. If you think monetary donations to Mozilla aren’t worth it as a result, I get it, and I’m right there with you. I don’t donate money. But also… In the browser space if money is what you want to donate, it might be the best route.
I’m not sure, but non profits have made millions in the past, and they were supposed to pass the money on to someone else, such as the corrupt Susan G. Komen, but did not. So yeah, Mozilla could be supported by donations alone.
I thought the money was to protect their monopoly status.
That’s saying the quiet part loud
It’s important though because if that’s the real reason Google pays them, they could come up with some other excuse to give them the money.
Do you really think Google will give up on their pole position because of this verdict?
Default search engine on their browser?
You can easily change the default.
That’s not the point. The point is Google is paying Mozilla to be the default. Google pays them 500M per year to be the default. If at some point Google legally isn’t allowed to do so, Mozilla can say bye bye to 500M/year.
Mozilla already started sending your data to advertisers by default in firefox 128. If Google’s money dries up, I can’t even begin to imagine what fucked up shit they’ll do.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attribution
Hardly qualifies as “sending your data to advertisers”.
Read the Pocket and Mozilla FakeSpot privacy policies. They collect a lot if data, including browsing history, and do so via Google Analytics. They then share that data with advertisers.
Okay? What does that have to do with the new advertising API the added support for in 128?
I wish I could be that naive.
You certainly seem to lack reading comprehension.
You’re seriously going to believe that an “aggregation service” isn’t going to be misused? No wonder there’s no privacy when people are this naive.
Very persuasive argument, definitely shows a strong grasp of the technical matters.
Because naiveté is technical. Sure buddy.
If Mozilla needs Google to survive, they can go down with the ship for all I care. Mozilla are bad actors anyways.
If not Mozilla or Google, what will you use for a browser?
There’s a decent selection at the moment:
If you need javascript+css: qtwebkit, gtkwebkit, qtwebengine ( blink based :( ), Ladybird (I really don’t care if the dev sucks; goolag/mozilla’s browser monopoly is too important for me to care about some stupid idpol takes)
If you don’t need javascript but want css: netsurf (there is technically javascript support, but it’s worked absolutely nowhere in my experience)
If you’re an epic hackor that doesn’t need either: w3m, links2, links, lynx
I mostly use w3m, but I use qutebrowser (qtwebkit and qtwebengine) when I need js. I’ll probably replace qutebrowser with Ladybird once there’s a port for OpenBSD (trying to write my own at the moment).
If you just want to abandon www all together, check out gemini and gopher clients.
Least quixotic lemmy user
Also
Mozilla are bad actors anyway
Ladybird (I really don’t care if the dev sucks)
???
Least quixotic lemmy user
Thank you for teaching me a new word. I would hardly call using webkit instead of gecko idealistic, but normies gonna normie, I guess.
???
If you don’t know how to differentiate between a dev having stupid idpol takes and an ad-company feigning to be a privacy organization mass-distributing spyware and adware inside privacy conscious communities then I can’t help you.
These are not alternatives to modern browsers.
I’m going to conclude you’re lying and haven’t actually used a webkit browser, because in terms of feature parity with blink and gecko, webkit is pretty good. Maybe some stuff breaks with RTC WASM and other questionable browser capabilities, but for 99% of the web they’re fine. All of the browsers I’ve recommended are regularly updated (except links, superceded by links2), all of them are “modern”. If I wanted to recommend old dead browsers, I would recommend retawq, dillo, elinks or xombrero. Even textmode only browsers are very usable for documentation and reading news and blogs.
For what I want to do on the Internet, Lynx works just fine. If I need something fancy I’ll just us Safari on my phone.
Removed by mod
The most effective thing to do as consumers is to encourage other people not to use google products. The best way to do that is to foment outrage at Google.
It’s hard to avoid google products when like 85% of sites have google’s tracjers embedded in them and advertising being their main business.
Maybe like a one million dollar fine? That’s a lot of money, you know.
Google search opens up to more corps so everyone can get in on the enshittification
Does anyone have a (link to a) good summary of the ruling and rationale?
I find the idea that “Google is the only real choice” kind of odd. There are other perfectly functional and user-friendly search engines. It’s not like other monopolies, say, Youtube, where there’s no realistic alternative. (I’m not denying that search is a monopoly too.)
Practices like getting Reddit to only work with Google instead of Bing are probably a big part of it.
Kill Chrome/Chromium and Firefox by proxy. Revert back to pure html websites, live a free life.
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Great, so now we get a Microsoft/Google duopoly. Rejoice… /sigh
You’d complain about a ton of gold being too heavy wouldn’t you?
I’m complaining about the lack of something real ever happening to these companies. Just because you’re too ignorant to understand what is(n’t) going on here, doesn’t mean that I’m complaining just for the sake of it.
Duopolys aren’t any better than Monopolies, except for the illusion of choice. They’ll move lock-step in line with one another, just like duopolys do, they’ll still use the same anticompetitive practices, but instead of getting fucked by one dick, now you’re getting fucked by two.
I’m glad you like being fucked so much that you’re rejoicing over this news, but I’d rather there be real competition.
As soon as a company puts forth a superior search engine. We’re all waiting…
How many companies does it take to not become an -opoly anymore?
It’s not really the number of companies that determines this, but rather the lack of any real competition. A small enough number of companies makes this more likely, so there’s not likely a hard number of say…over 5 companies isn’t an oligopoly, they can still be - so long as they’re all focused on each other. If you see 1 company raise it’s prices and all 4 others do too, then it’s still an oligopoly. Because even though they aren’t actively getting together, and saying “hey let’s all raise our prices!”, (collusion) - the effect is the same.
It ceases to be that when barriers to entry don’t stop new competition from entering, and competition is active. (at least, that’s the simplified answer; there’s some more nuance to it, but that should at least give an overall understanding)
