DOJ filed paperwork to US District Court to force Google to spin off Chrome [pdf]

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.223205/gov.uscourts.dcd.223205.1062.0.pdf

by donsupreme • 2 years ago

131 123 2 years ago

storage.courtlistener.com

gnabgib• 2 years ago

Discussion (1171 points, 2 days ago, 1387 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42177767

voidfunc• 2 years ago

This will quietly die off after Jan 20. Nothing to see here.

Onavo• 2 years ago

They need to pay their tithe/donation to the administration first.

JumpCrisscross3• 2 years ago

Trump is a lame duck. Donating to his campaign is useless.

They have one path for political redemption, and it’s to acquire Trump annd his allies’ companies and/or invest in their funds.

Hilift• 2 years ago

Yep. Even if there were a case, it would be litigated in the courts for years.

asadotzler• 2 years ago

The case is over. Are you even paying attention? They were found guilty. This is "sentencing" basically, the penalty phase.

2OEH8eoCRo03• 2 years ago

Not necessarily. The state of Colorado is one of the plaintiffs.

comex• 2 years ago

To ask the judge to force Google to spin off Chrome.

The judge still has to agree to it.

iam-role-admin• 2 years ago

I wonder what’s going to happen to ChromeOS

wmf6• 2 years ago

If ChromeOS and Android end up in different companies it might prevent them from merging and thus lead to greater OS diversity.

knuckleheads• 2 years ago

Page 12 is also very interesting to me personally, as it contains orders mandating the opening of Google’s search index to their competitors. I had been wondering if that would make it in there and am happy to see it land.

arresin• 2 years ago

That is the only thing that makes sense then. The chrome thing doesn’t. It’s like the worst possible way of dealing with this very serious problem.

kranke155• 2 years ago

I don’t fully understand how the DOJ believes selling Chrome will help. Like others said, browsers lose money.

anon2912• 2 years ago

As usual DOJ is late to the party. Google is already facing competition and as it falters, the doj will use this as 'evidence' it was effective.

Teever• 2 years ago

The way you write this implies that it is somehow an intrinsic fault of the DoJ and not the fault of monopolists like Google with the massive resources to slow walk these kinds of things, or the effective lobbying of the Obama administration followed by four chaotic years of Trump.

Never forget that corruption is always to blame for these failures, not the noble people who try and fix these things with flawed institutions.

anon2912• 2 years ago

Never forget that corruption is always to blame for these failures, not the noble people who try and fix these things with flawed institutions.

This is dogmatism. You're implying that those working for the government are inherently more noble than the rest, and that only private enterprise is flawed. To the contrary, I am implying nothing, just pointing out that the DOJ is late to the game. This would have meant something a decade ago when Google absolutely dominated. But they're being nipped at by a thousand different companies right now.

JSteph223• 2 years ago

It's fair to criticize the DoJ if they're enforcing anti-trust laws in a poor manner.

439202• 2 years ago

This has already been discussed extensively in prior threads, but the biggest question is, how does a spun-off Chrome get funded?

Chrome/Firefox/Safari all cost hundreds of millions of dollars a year to maintain. Currently, Safari and Firefox both make essentially all their revenue through default search agreements. Chrome, Edge, and now Brave are produced by companies that also own the search engines, so they're essentially a loss-generating product, that exist because they cancel out distribution costs that Google and Microsoft would otherwise have to pay other browsers.

But the DOJ order is also asking to ban payments between search engines and browser makers: > As detailed in Section IV, the PFJ prohibits Google from providing third parties something of value (including financial payments) in order to make Google the default general search engine or otherwise discouraging those third parties from offering competing search products

With that revenue gone, the only real options to fund a browser are:

* Directly charge users for it. This is effectively a non-starter, because the vast majority of people aren't willing to pay for it.

* Insert ads or sell user data - users also hate this, it's probably not legal in the EU, and it may not be legal in most of the US in the future either.

* Use the browser as a platform to push some product that does make money - a non-Google search engine? A social network? An LLM interface?

Alternatively, a narrow reading of the proposed order is that this only applies to Google. In that case, perhaps Bing or OpenAI takes over all the distribution agreements and becomes the top search engine. Whether that's better for consumers seems fairly questionable.

wbl2• 2 years ago

Display ad insertion would be legal and there are definitely ways to do it all client side.

wmf6• 2 years ago

Just like scraping the entire Web for AI training is totally fair use? Enjoy ten years of lawsuits to prove it. Web sites would never tolerate ads being inserted that don't pay them.

reissbaker• 2 years ago

Unfortunately the real answer is:

* Only operating system vendors can ship web browsers. (But not Google.)

The USG in general seems to love giving Apple more monopoly power. This will effectively constrain browser development to just Apple and Microsoft, since as you note, the DOJ is also trying to regulate Firefox out of existence; and Apple has huge incentives to simply pause browser feature development (and has been dragging its feet on Safari for years).

Incredibly, this will also hamstring Android even further, since its parent company can't even make a web browser for it anymore! Only Apple, the Biden administration's favorite company, can do that kind of thing.

modeless2• 2 years ago

Seriously, first Apple's App Store is declared not a monopoly while the Play Store is, despite Android allowing alternative stores while iOS doesn't. Now Google is forbidden from developing web browsers while Apple is free to continue monopolizing browser engines on iOS and holding back the web from competing with native apps?

tsimionescu3• 2 years ago

The most likely answer is that it will take the Linux model, with a foundation put together to fund Chrome's development. Then all of the parties interested in people having access to the Web, including Google, will have an incentive to fund this without requiring it to push their specific products.

timschmidt2• 2 years ago

One minor nit, it will be all parties interested in influence over future web standards and their eventual implementation.

josephg2• 2 years ago

Chrome currently has far more paid full time engineers than the linux kernel does. I struggle to see how they get paid - except again, by charging search engines to be the default browser or something.

inopinatus• 2 years ago

There's always the Opera model: attempt to sell inserted ads, fail, sell it to a Chinese holding company, and have future development funded by the Russians. What could possibly go wrong?

ZuBB• 2 years ago

Can you please share a details about the part related to Russians? I used to be big fan of Opera browser, but don't follow theirs recent news

friendzis• 2 years ago

Chrome/Firefox/Safari all cost hundreds of millions of dollars a year to maintain.

The reason? Infinite[1] complexity. To Google that is a feature: as long as they can outspend competitors, they can control the complexity in their favor.

The question should not be "how do we fund development of operating system in a trench coat?", but rather "how much do we actually need to fetch and render HTML?" and the answer is in the ballpark of single digit FTEs.

In theory, we should expect browser complexity to converge on available funding, with the upside that webpages created two hours ago would continue working. In reality, some foundation, funded by majority chromium supporters, will be set up and distribute compensation for Google employees working on open-source Chromium "totally on their free time, mr. prosecutor".

[1] https://xkcd.com/285/

wbl2• 2 years ago

Parity with other application platforms demands more than just showing static HTML. Imagine the world with no XMLHTTPRequest because Microsoft wasn't allowed to innovate on the web.

montag• 2 years ago

"how much do we actually need to fetch and render HTML?" and the answer is in the ballpark of single digit FTEs

Sorry, but we're not going back to Lynx...

j16sdiz• 2 years ago

This has already been discussed extensively in prior threads, but the biggest question is, how does a spun-off Chrome get funded?

How about... just don't fund them and let it "die"?

Everybody is using Chromium -- Microsoft, Google, Opera, Electron, etc.. Some of them will step up and fork chromium.

ajvs2• 2 years ago

Or just don't fork Chromium at all and Google can make the upstream their recommended browser.

jsnell• 2 years ago

Alternatively, a narrow reading of the proposed order is that this only applies to Google.

That doesn't seem like a narrow reading, but the only possible one. How could the order be applying to deals strictly between companies neither of which was the party of the lawsuit? That doesn't seem like anything that could possibly be within the court's powers.

johndough• 2 years ago

Directly charge users for it. This is effectively a non-starter, because the vast majority of people aren't willing to pay for it.

I would gladly pay for Firefox, but I only found a way to donate to Mozilla, which also finances many other things that I am not interested in.

Insert ads or sell user data - users also hate this, it's probably not legal in the EU, and it may not be legal in most of the US in the future either.

Adds are legal, but "selling user data" is more tricky. Many news websites are currently paywalling access to their website unless a monthly fee is paid. As far as I know, there has been no ruling yet whether that is legal.

Use the browser as a platform to push some product that does make money - a non-Google search engine? A social network? An LLM interface?

Firefox tried to sell a VPN product that way, but it was not priced competitively.

dehrmann• 2 years ago

Currently, Safari and Firefox both make essentially all their revenue through default search agreements.

Safari is funded by Apple's hardware sales. It can afford to develop its own browser because it's table stakes for devices and gives Apple the ability to do deeper integrations and targeted performance optimizations. The search revenue is the cherry on top.

EE84M3i• 2 years ago

Directly charge users for it. This is effectively a non-starter, because the vast majority of people aren't willing to pay for it.

Chrome already has paid offerings - chrome enterprise and educational products. It's quite common for enterprise customers to subsidize free tiers.

nprateem• 2 years ago

The same way ff does. Google will pay to be the main search engine and to ensure all their Web apps continue to work performantly.

colimbarna• 2 years ago

Google will be prohibited from doing that under the DOJ's proposal.

Malidir• 2 years ago

Advertising deal with google/others to pay for full time staff along with volunteers?

And the underlying chromium will be maintained by all the browser companies that are using it

BrendanEich4• 2 years ago

the DOJ order is also asking to ban payments between search engines and browser makers

The remedy document does not ask this.

What you cite after "> As detailed in..." does not ban any and all payments from a search engine (or only from Google) to a browser. The remedy doc is based on the antitrust case's finding that Google violated U.S. Law by abusing its monopoly through "tying", and in particular by forcing partners to lock out competitors through exclusive (default search only) deals.

This does not mean Google cannot pay for search traffic, and indeed Google has a relatively open, albeit lower-monetizing, system called Adsense for Search, which allows a toolbar to monetize -- but not a browser via queries entered into its address bar (aka Omnibus). Bing does many API deals, or did (it hiked prices last year). Brave has an API business (not yet an ads feed, just search).

BrendanEich4• 2 years ago

Spellcorrekt got me: "Omnibox".

439202• 2 years ago

I'm having a bit of a hard time imagining what kind of payment Google could make under this structure. Do you have something in mind?

I agree that if Google was paying a browser for something other than default search placement, that would likely fall outside the scope of the proposal. But historically, default placement = traffic, and is also the only leverage the browsers have - ie if Google wasn't the default, Google would only get users who explicitly selected it, and if Google knows all of their users are actively selecting them already, they have no reason to pay extra for that traffic.

API access seems like a good alternative way for Google to monetize, but it doesn't solve the problem of providing funding for browsers (except in your case, since you're combining a search engine and browser in one company). Or am I missing something?

xnx• 2 years ago

Google's response: "DOJ’s staggering proposal would hurt consumers and America’s global technological leadership" https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/public-policy/doj-s...

dyauspitr2• 2 years ago

I wholeheartedly agree. What the hell is the DOJ thinking?

k4rli• 2 years ago

Would've been believable before the MV3 adblock ban fiasco. Now it's clear this browser doesn't care about the users.

JSteph223• 2 years ago

I agree. The DOJ should stick to imposing fines or enforcing rules on things like bundling or pricing. Not arbitrarily breaking companies up where there's no clear business model.

viraptor4• 2 years ago

Of course these are things they'll say publicly. And they'll point out all the bad results and none of the good ones. None of what they wrote should be surprising, but also it's not particularly novel/interesting. (Also they're framing a few good things as if they're bad for the users...)

m4r1k• 2 years ago

Chrome is not the problem. Chrome is not even a symptom.

The problem is that the world's largest search engine is also the world's largest ad distributor.

Chopping off tentacles like Android or Chrome does nothing to slay the two-headed beast.

wmf6• 2 years ago

There's a bunch of other stuff in there about syndicating data (which admittedly I don't understand) that takes aim at the heart of search and ads.

forgotoldacc3• 2 years ago

It's all part of an ecosystem. Chrome is a vehicle in which users are roped into their search engine and ads. And their search engine and ads also push users into Chrome. It's all cyclical.

Breaking off any chunk weakens the link between them and locks users into their ecosystem less. Rome wasn't built in a day, and monopolies aren't destroyed in one either.

dismalaf5• 2 years ago

Apple's VP literally said that no amount of money would make them choose Bing over Google because Google is the best search engine...

Lets be real, no one needs to be "roped into" using Google search. People have Bing and Edge shoved down their throats and still use Chrome and Google...

dyauspitr2• 2 years ago

Why would I want to slay one of our greatest technological companies?

dismalaf5• 2 years ago

Because MS and Apple ran a bunch of ads painting Google as untrustworthy custodians of user data and that unsubstantiated claim stuck with certain segments of the population?

2OEH8eoCRo03• 2 years ago

Have you read the document? They explain why Chrome and Android are clean cut-points for remedy.

algobro• 2 years ago

Weird that a Biden DOJ would do this.

Here's a bet: they are offloading a legal liability. Within 12 months someone reverse engineers the binaries and show that they were siphoning out all keystroke data, or it has an official remote backdoor or something equally horrendous.

mupuff1234• 2 years ago

The solution should just be to force browsers to support profile migration from one browser to another.

And generally, they should just pass laws that enforce interoperability in the software world, from OS to social networks, users should always be allowed to easily migrate.

JSteph223• 2 years ago

Totally agree.

The government has so many tools for enforcement it's puzzling why they insist on arbitrarily breaking up and creating new companies as if they're capable of determining what business models will work or not.

rjchint• 2 years ago

A much better split would be:

Chrome + Display Ads Android + Playstore + App Ads

dismalaf5• 2 years ago

IMO the best split would be:

- All Google consumer devices and products (Pixel, Chrome, Android, Nest)

- Search

- Ads

- YouTube

Search, Ads and YouTube could all survive and prosper on their own and then the Google devices company can pursue a similar strategy to Apple, have devices pay for software.

infotainment• 2 years ago

How could search survive without ads? Charge users per search?

hambes• 2 years ago

I'm quite weirded out about the part about sharing google's data with other companies to allow competition. Yes, sharing my data allows other companies to advertise to me and to monetize my interests. No, I don't want that. I don't even want google to do that.

Trompair• 2 years ago

Personally I'd rather just see users given a choice. Ban the ability to pay to be the default search engine, and throw up a search engine selection screen when a user first launches the browser.

If people still choose to use Google then so be it.

1vuio0pswjnm72• 2 years ago

There appears to be a hyperfocus on only a single element of the requested remedy. Perhaps many HN commenters are "web developers" and this explains the fixation on popular web browsers.

Perhaps commenters should consider that this particular request regarding Chrome may be removed when the revised Proposed Final Judgment is filed in March or this particular request regarding Chrome may be denied by the Court.

More often than not, the unbounded speculation put forth by HN commenters is incorrect in predicting the future.

IMHO, it would be great if web browsers became simpler to write and more numerous as opposed to the status quo where people commenting online assert that writing a web browser takes enormous investment and accept that there are only a handful to choose from, and these must be all controlled by commercial entities seeking to sell advertising services or partner with such commercial entities.

Browsers do not need to be Trojan Horse software to enable surreptitious data collection, nor vectors through which unsolicited advertising may be served. I am typing this comment with one that satisfies neither of those "requirements".

1vuio0pswjnm72• 2 years ago

To be fair, it is only just HN comments that are fixating on the request regarding Chrome while ignoring all the other requests.

DOJ filed paperwork to US District Court to force Google to spin off Chrome [pdf]

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