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.
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.
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Well, its worse because its a firehose that can spit out nonsense at a rate nearly infinitely greater than a finite set if content marketing employees
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Have you tried Kagi?
What happens now is that Google appeals and then the case will bounce around different courts for years to come, and maybe one day the supreme court will hear it assuming that US lasts that long as a country.
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).
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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?
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)
???
Maybe like a one million dollar fine? That’s a lot of money, you know.
Kill Chrome/Chromium and Firefox by proxy. Revert back to pure html websites, live a free life.
As consumers… we should try our best to avoid Google products. Money is their god and so long as they have their money flowing in, they will continue to conquer.
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.
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.
Google pays a lot to stay the default browser.
The other search engines mostly use overlapping indexes.
Said search engines are also not anywhere near competition to Google.
Quite frankly, I can only think of 4. DDG, Ecosia, Bing, and Kagi.
Most people don’t know about Ecosia or Kagi. Most people hardly even know about DDG.
I wouldn’t consider YouTube as much of a monopoly because despite it being mostly the only one, from what I understand they haven’t paid out to stay the only one, and don’t really leverage market dominance against others (they probably do but I just don’t hear about it often.) The main reason alternatives don’t exist is simply because of the mass amount of data the YT needs
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.
