Feds may target Google’s Chrome browser for breakup
October 11, 2020 3:02 PM   Subscribe

 
Being forced to separate Chrome from the advertising business might be the one thing that gets me to use Chrome!

Probably not, I like Firefox, but as long as Google owns Chrome I definitely won't use it.
posted by oddman at 3:08 PM on October 11, 2020 [10 favorites]


Gave up on Chrome when I migrated to Ubuntu Linux. Chrome's even more bloated than Firefox here, and that's saying a lot.
posted by ZenMasterThis at 3:11 PM on October 11, 2020 [4 favorites]


Knowing the Trump administration, their sanctions against Apple will involve forcing them to stop blocking ad-targeting cookies/cross-app tracking.
posted by acb at 3:12 PM on October 11, 2020


Of all the ways they could target Google, that seems like pretty small potatoes. Breaking up search and ads would be a far bigger deal.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 3:16 PM on October 11, 2020 [4 favorites]


What they really need to do is force them to sell off YouTube. Of course Republicans are happy with the way YouTube algorithms currently work.
posted by happyroach at 3:21 PM on October 11, 2020 [6 favorites]


So we'll get:

Pacific Chromesis
US Chrome
AmeriChrome
Southwestern Chrome Corporation
ChromeSouth
Chome Atlantic
CHROMEX
Southern New England Chrome
Cincinnati Chrome
Mountain States Chrome
posted by nickggully at 3:22 PM on October 11, 2020 [50 favorites]


It's widely believed Barr is ramming things through in order to get charges laid before the election, while the investigators themselves strongly desire extra time to pull everything together.

...draw your own conclusions regarding the probable quality and organization of the resulting cases. Political showmanship rarely produces solid cases.
posted by aramaic at 3:24 PM on October 11, 2020 [11 favorites]


So we'll get:

Pacific Chromesis
US Chrome
AmeriChrome
Southwestern Chrome Corporation
ChromeSouth
Chome Atlantic
CHROMEX
Southern New England Chrome
Cincinnati Chrome
Mountain States Chrome


The Baby Chromes!

Which, through mergers and acquisitions, will reform into Chrome Ads and Browsers or CA&B
posted by Zedcaster at 3:43 PM on October 11, 2020 [11 favorites]


Chrome is essentially an open-source project; Chromium *is* an open source project from which it's derived. Google devotes engineering time to it and therefore exercises considerable control over where the project goes. How would the state or federal government exercise legal power over anyone paying engineers to do what they want done on an open source project?

Don't get me wrong, I have tried to minimize my use of Chrome and have been measuring every form of engagement with Google that I can for all the usual reasons for limiting trust. I just suspect there'd be some pretty... novel theories necessary to keep Google from building the browser. Hell, it'd probably take some novel and selectively applied theories to separate search from advertising.

(Side note: staying away from Chrome is hard. Firefox is my spirit animal and what I recommend and may it live forever, but it's still more of resource hog than either Safari or Chrome and I stop using it in the summer because it literally makes my laptop hotter. Safari is the most battery efficient but the process of doing nothing more taxing than typing a comment in the most recent iteration of Facebook can bring performance to the point where it behaves like an 80s modem trying to keep up with my typing. Chrome is still the clear overall performance winner.)


It's widely believed Barr is ramming things through in order to get charges laid before the election

It's also 100% what conservative authoritarians are doing here. It's the same thing as their contemptible charges of "bias": they want to work the refs, and it'd be a coup for them if they could somehow pressure Google into playing ball with their propaganda efforts, or even cow them into ways in which they already somewhat effectively manipulate the system.
posted by wildblueyonder at 3:57 PM on October 11, 2020 [2 favorites]


How will this look in reality? I'm assuming if there was a split, there'd still be fairly cozy relationships between Chrome and Google, it isn't like the companies management structure will suddenly change. Chrome has pushes standards and invites other dominant players in the industry to participate. We can argue whether internet standards are influenced by the fact that Chrome is the elephant in the room but I think that's going to happen whenever you have a dominant player in the room. It is like we can talk about how all NBA teams are equal but if the Lakers and the Heat talk people listen. In any case I don't see how they have anti-competitive behavior in the way Microsoft and others behaved and a large part of that was probably from learning how the DOJ prosecuted those cases.

I'm not defending Google but unless there's something really surprising coming out of the DOJ this week I would hazard to guess their ad business or search is is far more guilty in engaging in anti-competitive practices. Even Amazon with AWS (along with Microsoft Azure and Google GCP) arguably engage in anti-competitive practices as they can innovate for basically free on a giant infrastructure. Even getting out of a legal mode when companies don't want to innovate because they think they'll not have the resource on hand that's a huge issue, to the point where some of those resources might be better served as a public utility.

At least with Chrome we have transparency in what features they adopt and I haven't heard about browser innovation stifled due to Chrome's dominance. I have been in meeting where major retailers decide not to innovate or compete against Amazon because there's a perception that Amazon has a competitive advantage in their infrastructure and size, plus that they can take a loss to drive out competitors -- much more of a trait of an anti-competitive industry.

Both companies and all companies can be bad, but if you're after tech firms, Chrome is like a slap on a wrist that'll just spin off to an existing open source project releasing the same product with just a slightly different name and most likely funded by Google.
posted by geoff. at 4:13 PM on October 11, 2020 [1 favorite]


Are we in Brazil or V for Vendetta?
posted by glaucon at 4:14 PM on October 11, 2020 [3 favorites]


How will this turn out any differently than the DOJ’s case against Microsoft?
posted by interogative mood at 4:29 PM on October 11, 2020 [1 favorite]


The DOJ’s case against Microsoft caused the company to reevaluate its behaviors and set the stage for Google and Apple’s ascent at the moment that smart phones were becoming a thing. They weren’t broken up, but they developed a completely different corporate personality afterwards. I would be interested to see the same happen with today’s FAANG companies.
posted by migurski at 4:46 PM on October 11, 2020 [11 favorites]


I think it’d be really healthy for the internet if they were forced to stop using YouTube, Gmail, etc. to promote Chrome and especially to fix bugs and performance issues which mysteriously only affect the competition. They famously had things like a YouTube performance de-optimization on all other browsers for ages but also things like a year where they disabled FIDO support on iOS while still doing puffery about how Chrome is the most secure browser.

It’s arguably too late to save Firefox and they’ve had no meaningful consequences. Keeping Safari and the Chrome derivatives viable might avoid Google locking
that in permanently.

Of course, given the current leadership of the DOJ I’m kind of expecting this to end with the announcement that Oracle is launching a browser and Ellison was complaining to Trump over golf about the unfairness of those SJWs at Mozilla having greater market share.
posted by adamsc at 4:50 PM on October 11, 2020 [3 favorites]


Sell it to whom?! Chrome has very little revenue on its own. Who's jumping up and down to buy an expensive product and engineering org that makes a thing that's given away for free? Am I missing something?
posted by potrzebie at 5:33 PM on October 11, 2020 [3 favorites]


Sell it to whom?!

Chrome collects a large amount of analytics data. Knowing what 70% of the Internet browse for, who they are and their history is an enormous value. I bet if Chrome were to spin off into its own analytics firm selling that information on the open market it'd be one of the larger if not the largest IPOs ever on Wall Street.
posted by geoff. at 6:01 PM on October 11, 2020 [3 favorites]


I'm not defending Google but unless there's something really surprising coming out of the DOJ this week I would hazard to guess their ad business or search is is far more guilty in engaging in anti-competitive practices.

Really? I don’t claim to know much about the legal perspective but Chrome as a vehicle to drive traffic to search and to feed usage data into their system feels like an idea Microsoft would have loved back in the day. And Chrome is arguably well beyond being respectful of standards. Of course they still don’t measure up to the actual degree of dominance MS had.

The one I’m still not sure I get, to be honest, is going after Apple on the App Store. Because, yeah, they exercise tremendous control... of their minority of the market? Does that count? Serious question.
posted by atoxyl at 6:16 PM on October 11, 2020


And yet Facebook isn't in trouble...
posted by coberh at 6:53 PM on October 11, 2020 [2 favorites]


Sell it to whom?!

Exactly. Every piece of Alphabet that gets chopped off from the Search mothership will likely just wither and die. Search is something like 94% of their revenue, it literally pays for everything else.
posted by sideshow at 6:55 PM on October 11, 2020


I would be interested to see the same happen with today’s FAANG companies.

Netflix is kind of an interesting case in the FAANG companies because it doesn't really hold a monopoly and it's hard to point to any harm done to consumers or the commons in the company's behaviour, unlike the other four.

Of course, you can easily get them on labour laws. Netflix operate under a dopey "sports team" model, where you trade higher wages for zero job security, and if they no longer need your skills, you get "traded" (fired immediately). Netflix staff don't seem to have realised that in a sports team, once you cut a player you don't benefit from them any more, while Netflix benefits enormously from the work done by people they've fired.
posted by Merus at 7:15 PM on October 11, 2020 [1 favorite]


where you trade higher wages for zero job security, and if they no longer need your skills, you get "traded" (fired immediately)

It’s more like you find yourself on the wrong side of the “In” crowd at the school cafeteria. It’s like Mean Girls, to be honest.

Also, everyone gets paid a lot in The Bay Area. If you actually wanted to separate out Netflix, you’d mention they don’t give out Restricted Stock Units. So, sucks to be them when most other people in town have seen their double or triple in the last few years.
posted by sideshow at 8:31 PM on October 11, 2020


The one I’m still not sure I get, to be honest, is going after Apple on the App Store. Because, yeah, they exercise tremendous control... of their minority of the market? Does that count? Serious question.

So the dirty thing about monopolies is that they're not illegal per se. Monopolies become illegal when they start to use their power in one market to crush another. In the case of the App Store there's two big arguments that Apple have.

1) There is competition in devices. You can buy an Android device and they're 80% of the market. Don't like the App Store? You got your competition right there. Same with the developers. You don't like the App Store's conditions? Google Play is right there.

2) The Apple Store/IAP is not tying. Normally you're not allowed to have your produce depend on buying a product in a different competitive market (see Microsoft vs Netscape when browsers were still a competitive market). Apple's argument would be that you don't actually go out and buy an in-app purchases provider, it's all integrated from within the store. Developers can't contract for Apple to provide IAP on their Google Play app and Apple isn't requiring developers to use Apple IAP on other platforms, therefore no tying.

Apple's position is quite strong because closed ecosystems aren't a bad thing per se and yes, they are a minority in the market, but when it comes to courts nobody knows how it's going to be ruled until it's been ruled on.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 8:48 PM on October 11, 2020 [1 favorite]


Of course, you can easily get them on labour laws. Netflix operate under a dopey "sports team" model, where you trade higher wages for zero job security, and if they no longer need your skills, you get "traded" (fired immediately).

There are illegal reasons to fire somebody, but if you avoid those isn’t that just at-will employment? Shitty culture, but seems unlikely to contravene U.S. labor law. And I’m pretty sure they usually give severance pay at least.

Also, everyone gets paid a lot in The Bay Area. If you actually wanted to separate out Netflix, you’d mention they don’t give out Restricted Stock Units. So, sucks to be them when most other people in town have seen their double or triple in the last few years.

I don’t know what the real numbers are for all of these companies but the numbers I’ve seen thrown around for Netflix make it seem like they pay some people enough on top of “a lot” that it would be perfectly legitimate to take their cash offer over a peer’s stock cash + stock offer if it were more in line with one’s philosophy about such things.
posted by atoxyl at 11:39 PM on October 11, 2020


I mean I don’t think I’d have a good time working there but I like the model for compensation better than companies that go heavy on the golden handcuffs thing.
posted by atoxyl at 12:54 AM on October 12, 2020 [1 favorite]


where you trade higher wages for zero job security, and if they no longer need your skills, you get "traded" (fired immediately)

Were are these wondrous jobs with > zero job security?
posted by octothorpe at 4:19 AM on October 12, 2020 [5 favorites]


I would rather google and facebook were investigated for price fixing and ad fraud personally but maybe someday we can have all the investigations.
posted by srboisvert at 4:30 AM on October 12, 2020 [1 favorite]


At least with Chrome we have transparency in what features they adopt and I haven't heard about browser innovation stifled due to Chrome's dominance.

Maybe. Sorta. There's long been a slow stream of "only works in Chrome" tools and stuff coming from Google Labs (or whatever they call it now) that never fails to raise not-fond memories of the bad old days of I.E.-only sites and tools. It isn't hard to run across web-based business tools that are optimized for, or outright require, Chrome.
posted by Thorzdad at 4:57 AM on October 12, 2020 [6 favorites]


I do software testing and in the last decade, when I've had to do website testing, 95% of the testing has been on Chrome. We'd test Firefox and IE sporadically if we had free time in the cycle and Safari basically never. So we weren't explicitly writing Chrome-only code but if things didn't work on non-Chrome browsers, we didn't catch it.
posted by octothorpe at 5:24 AM on October 12, 2020 [3 favorites]


Firefox works fine??? It used to be slow but it isn't anymore. Or maybe I just have a better laptop. All the privacy extensions, which are the extensions I care about, are on firefox.
posted by subdee at 5:27 AM on October 12, 2020 [4 favorites]


Their mobile browser also works fine!!! The only time I ever need to use Chrome is for some very specific work things.
posted by subdee at 5:28 AM on October 12, 2020 [3 favorites]


Firefox works fine???

Fine-ish. I'm trying to move away from it because lately every single update breaks something I was using, or messes with the UI in a pointless way that disrupts my flow, or disables one of my addons, or....

I'm trying out Vivaldi, and so far I'm tentatively impressed. For one thing, it lets me (after a minor CSS twiddle) keep the tabs below the address bar where they belong.
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 6:25 AM on October 12, 2020 [1 favorite]


This is my reminder to replace my phone browser with Firefox or Opera.
posted by loquacious at 9:07 AM on October 12, 2020


"these wondrous jobs with > zero job security" = tenured academia
posted by PhineasGage at 1:26 PM on October 12, 2020


This is my reminder to replace my phone browser with Firefox or Opera.

Go with Opera. The latest tablet/phone update of Firefox was done by people who had the same level of practical knowledge of non - desktop environments as medieval monks did of African mammals. I mean it's awful.

Desktop Firefox is comparatively workable, except for the part where I have to shut it down every night, lest it consume all the operating capacity of my computer.

I seriously wonder if the Firefox developers talk to anybody outside their circle.
posted by happyroach at 1:47 PM on October 12, 2020


Desktop Firefox is comparatively workable, except for the part where I have to shut it down every night, lest it consume all the operating capacity of my computer.
Disable extensions and add them back until you find the buggy ones. A clean Firefox install will only need restarting for updates.
posted by adamsc at 3:20 PM on October 12, 2020


I don't know what other posters are talking about with their Firefox gripes, but it works just fine. It has a URL box you type things into and it does indeed bring up those web pages exactly the same as Chrome. It uses quite a bit less resources than Chrome on my machine, and I've never had an update break anything. I don't use any addons other than a password manager and the EFF privacy thing.

All of yall should definitely switch to Firefox.
posted by bradbane at 4:02 PM on October 12, 2020


I use firefox developer edition on my macbook and regular firefox on my iphone. It's mostly fine, though I have to say I am very worried about the future of mozilla generally. They continue to increase exec bonuses while laying off significant portions of their workforce - apparently the entire MDN team was a part of the bloodbath. I am pretty staunchly anti-Google in the ways that I can be, which includes swapping off of Chrome. Though before long, I will have to use it again for development at work.

between the antitrust suits going on, mozilla's apparent financial instability, and the news that IBM is breaking itself up into two companies (one high margin cloud computing company, one everything else company tentatively titled NewCo) it is definitely an interesting time for the market in general.
posted by lazaruslong at 4:16 PM on October 12, 2020 [1 favorite]


Disable extensions and add them back until you find the buggy ones. A clean Firefox install will only need restarting for updates.

I have the same resource problem -- it is *constantly* consuming at least a full CPU core and pushing at least 4GB. I have no other extensions other than the official Mozilla Firefox Multi-Account Container tabs one, which is the most practical reason I choose to use Firefox (there are values-based reasons too), so I hope that's not what I'd have to ditch to improve performance.

I do tend to keep a *lot* of tabs open, something I should probably fix with some workflow changes, and maybe Chrome is just better for that use profile.
posted by wildblueyonder at 8:40 PM on October 12, 2020


So weird seeing others experiences that don't jive with mine. I routinely have 2-300+ tabs open at a time and ya it's consuming a ton of RAM but Chrome with only 30 tabs open is consuming more (facebook open in Chrome though so maybe that is the difference). Chrome IME just chokes on anywhere near a 100 tabs open.

Neither are using much in the way of CPU unless I've actively reloading pages.
posted by Mitheral at 7:28 AM on October 14, 2020


wait

hold up

i know having lots of tabs is a thing with folks and that's cool but i really was under the impression we were talking like O(50).

2-300?????
posted by lazaruslong at 8:16 AM on October 14, 2020


Pardon the O/T: Manifest V3 changes are now available to test in Microsoft Edge

Once this hits Chrome (100% confirmed) and Firefox (probably, sooner or later), say good-bye to content blocking.
posted by Bangaioh at 3:03 PM on October 14, 2020 [1 favorite]


2-300?????

Well, 70-80 are metafilter or linked sites.

I like to come back to stuff that I want to remember a few times. So for example I currently have this imgur page in my open tabs because I want to attempt to take a similar picture.

And I've got some tabs that are always open like two different GMail windows; a Google Earth tab where I can stick pins of things I'd like to visit/see/photograph; a messages for web tab so I can text from my desktop.

And I've got tabs open for sites I visit every day like the Flickr and 2x Tumblr associated with my Daily 365 project; the page where my union posts jobs; a couple reddit subs; a free training site; etc.

And right now I've got 30-60 tabs of goodreads/wikipedia/amazon open as I'm loading new books into Calibre from metafilter recommendations and I'm still deciding which ones to get. Then once I get them I often need to fix assorted metadata in Calibre so I still need those info pages loaded.

Also recipes I want to try out. I leave them in a tab until I try them and only create a PDF in my recipe folder if I like the results.

Finally besides some tabs that don't fit in those catagories I've got a couple dozen Subnautica hint/video/wiki sites open as I'm trying to figure out how to do some stuff with that.

PS: Tree Style Tabs is a pretty good extension for managing this sort of high tab count experience.
posted by Mitheral at 5:11 PM on October 15, 2020 [1 favorite]


Thank you for explaining your process, that is fascinating to me. If I'm working on a coding homework or project, I definitely keep a firefox window with ~25 - 50 tabs in it.

For most of the use cases you describe here, I process all of that stuff through the PARA method into various places based on content / format, most of which ends up in Evernote. Then I randomly surface stuff using RandomNote and apply progressive summarization.

I have a folder labeled Daily Check in my bookmarks toolbar and I just 'open all in tabs' each morning to check 'em all.

I'd love to leave Evernote at some point (if it supported writing notes in .md, then I'd probably stay) but the combination of RandomNote and broad support for various rich media makes finding a suitable replacement hard. I liked Bear, but yeah -- structure, randomnote, and rich media.
posted by lazaruslong at 8:17 AM on October 16, 2020


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