WASHINGTON, Nov 18 (Reuters) - The U.S. Department of Justice will ask a judge to force Alphabet’s Google (GOOGL.O), opens new tab to sell off its Chrome internet browser, Bloomberg News reported on Monday, citing people familiar with the plans.
The DOJ will also ask the judge, who ruled in August that Google illegally monopolized the search market, to require measures related to artificial intelligence and its Android smartphone operating system, the report said.
Google controls how people view the internet and what ads they see in part through its Chrome browser, which typically uses Google search, gathers information important to Google’s ad business, and is estimated to have about two-thirds of the global browser market.
The DOJ declined to comment. Google, in a statement from Lee-Anne Mulholland, vice president, Google Regulatory Affairs, said the DOJ is pushing a “radical agenda that goes far beyond the legal issues in this case,” and would harm consumers.
The move would be one of the most aggressive attempts by the Biden administration to curb what it alleges are Big Tech monopolies.
Ultimately, however, the re-election of Donald Trump to the presidency could have the greatest impact over the case.
Two months before the election, Trump claimed he would prosecute Google for what he perceives as bias against him. But a month later, Trump questioned whether breaking up the company was a good idea.
The company plans to appeal once U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta makes a final ruling, which he is likely to do by August 2025. Mehta has scheduled a trial on the remedy proposals for April.
Prosecutors had floated a range of potential remedies in the case, from ending exclusive agreements where Google pays billions of dollars annually to Apple Inc (AAPL.O) and other companies to remain the default search engine on tablets and smart phones, all the way to divesting parts of its business, such as Chrome and Android operating system.
Because Chrome’s market share is so high, it is an important revenue driver for Google. At the same time, when users sign into Chrome with a Google account, Google can offer more targeted search ads.
Google maintains its search engine has won users with its quality, adding that it faces robust competition from Amazon (AMZN.O) and other sites and users can choose other search engines as their default.
The government has the option to decide whether a Chrome sale is necessary at a later date if some of the other aspects of the remedy create a more competitive market, the Bloomberg report said.
The reason those problems are centralized is BECAUSE they are so complex. And because they are so high risk. Bad actors will GLADLY spend a year or two sneaking in various MRs to compromise a browser because it can potentially pay enough to never have to hack again.
I love it. We take away their de facto standards. We increase their day job workload exponentially. And then we expect them to put in the after hours efforts to optimize page loading.
There were, you know, Torvalds-Tannenbaum and “cathedral vs bazaar” disputes either of which combined with this would show the way in the direction opposite of what Linux people consider the winning one.
Exactly about complexity and centralization and independence, even though it may not seem so.
Linux is more complex than it has to be. Its main advantage over a few other operating systems, which is hardware support, has nothing to do with its unjustified complexity in everything else.
I dunno, this seems to work against the point you seem to be making.
There’s a clear concept of what the Web is. A secure browser for that is not so complex. Also look at Gemini.
However, there’s also commercial demand for functionality which has been pushed to browsers instead of, well, anything, a Java applets alternative or Flash alternative with good sandbox, for example.
And now we can many times see that the reason this has been done had nothing to do with it being a better solution.
Just a certain company making one of the browsers had a long-term strategy of making their own competitor of Flash and Java applets (and what not, there were many other such plugins for embedded content) the standard.
Do people have to spend hours to optimize loading of an e-book? Again, there’s a clear concept of what Web is. It’d be just good tone to treat it as that and “platform for applications” as something secondary that shouldn’t impede the primary goal. Something like street traders squatting on a church square.
My position is that anything else should be embedded content handled by various plugins.
One can refactor the existing “HTML5, modern CSS with complex DOM and all that crap”, maybe even JS. functionality into a plugin based on Chrome released by Google, why not, of course removing those things from the Web itself. I know this reads as if I were smoking weed right now. But suppose that happens, you know as well as I do that people would mostly prefer websites not using that.