US Court Rules Google a Monopoly in 'Biggest Antitrust Case of the 21st Century'.
US Court Rules Google a Monopoly in 'Biggest Antitrust Case of the 21st Century' | Common Dreams
This is a big deal, but just a reminder that this is the District (trial) court, so the next step would be the Circuit Court of Appeals, followed by an appeal to the Supreme Court. There may be some intriguing injunctions that come out of this, but we're years away from a final disposition.
For the curious, this one came out of the DC Circuit, informally known to be the most technically and administratively savvy circuit, as it deals with a LOT of nitty gritty stuff coming out of Federal agencies.
I was about to comment that this is going to be appealed, and unless something changes with SCOTUS, my money is in it being reversed to some degree.
depends on when it hits the supreme court, for sure.
didn't someone just say google was 'very bad' and should be 'shut down'? ...someone that helped stack the court to its current composition?
Stop making me sad, sir!!!
Clarence Thomas is hiding behind a tree in a yellow suit rubbing his hands together for all the shit Google is gonna give to him to get this immediately overturned...
this is why it's silly that people are mad at mozilla for buying a privacy friendly ad company to try and break the monopoly.
Its seriously absurd. I hate ads, but there's realistically not a better option to profit when providing free software and services like Mozilla is doing. Investing into ads that don't violate your privacy is a great decision. I don't know what the hell people want from them.
They want them to meet all of their impossibly high and contradictory standards at the same time. For free. What's so hard about that?? /s
People don't seem to realise that developing a browser (a real one, not Chrome with a different paint job), web rendering engine, having the top-notch security expertise that building a modern web engine requires, plus being on the board that decides web standards is expensive.
It's honestly at a similar scale and complexity to OS development.
We're talking hundreds of millions a year to do the work that Mozilla needs to do. People who say "oh I'd chip in a dollar or two, but only if they get rid of all other funding" as if it's feasible kind of get on my nerves because they clearly don't see the big picture.
Any time Mozilla tries to diversify their income while still being broadly privacy-respecting they're branded as evil or too corporate. Any time they ask for donations they're being greedy beggars. When they take Google's money they're shills for big tech. They can't win. People want Mozilla to work for free.
They should do it like Signal: accept donations. Signal is doing just fine. But Mozilla cannot legally do that as they are a for-profit company. And Mozilla Foundation won't do that either because they are funded by Mozilla and under their command.
I don’t know what the hell people want from them.
these people are probably already using forks anyway
In a healthy market new browsers need to be able to enter.. but browsers are so complex from the reckless, endless feature creep that creating a new browser securely (or at all) is unreasonable. (Luckily they are open source and can be forked but the changes are minor compared to the base. A Chromium fork is still Chromium at the end of the day).
Supporting the ad-driven internet is contrary to what is wanted by many users of Firefox/flavors and there is no alternative. It was said that they would destroy the Sith, not join them.
Supporting the ad-driven internet
The thing is that there's not really a good alternative. There's real costs in running a service - servers, bandwidth, staff, etc. Either you pay for content directly (subscription services), someone else pays for you (which is the case with many Lemmy servers where admins are paying out of their own pockets), or ads cover the cost for you. People want to use the web for free, so ad-supported content is going to be around for a long time.
Not silly at all. It's a ship of Theseus situation, and the ship has helmsmen with bad attitudes. Bad attitudes engender bad decisionmaking.
FUCK YEAH!!! NOW BREAK THOSE BASTARDS UP!!!!
Fine: About $3.50
Punitive damages: lol
The fine isnt important, its if any breaking up of the company comes of it
Oh boy, can't wait for this one to be thrown out by our totally not rigged, definitly for the people supreme Court.
The supremes will rule fairly! ....and in the case of people vs the Google, how do you find these 3 million dollars in a quad motor Tesla?
Innocent your supremacist! Innocent!
What with Trump recently declaring (in his usual completely coherent and not at all deranged manner) that Google Are Bad, the Supreme Court might not necessarily be feeling so keen to help out on this one.
Trump is mad at Google so the Republicans want it. So Supreme Court will likely rule 6/3 in favor.
one can hope lol
Cool, now actually enforce that judgment
America needs to pick up the old ways and start going after monopolies with a sledge hammer to break them into tiny pieces again.
and pass laws that don't let them pull an ATT and buy back all their fragments and recongeal into an even bigger, more dangerous monopoly than it was before like some kinda fucked up liquid metal terminator of capitalism.
Hey now, let's not be unreasonable!!
Not sure why ARM is on your angry list. They are more than happy to sell rights to other manufacturers. As far as I can tell, they have not done anything wrong, yet.
The example is Amazon who have their own ARM CPUs for their datacenters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AWS_Graviton
Okay, now loop in reddit's bullshit exclusivity agreement to search results and make it so no one can favor any one search engine crawler or demand payment to be shown in search. If your content is publicly accessible it should be fair game to all.
Most companies will want their site to show up on other search engines but they knew what they were doing, you only search for it on google to find results because google's own are an SEO ad riddled mess.
All your thoughts R belong to US!
Yep, this contract is now suspect.
Mark my words! the outcome of this will be like a mountain giving birth to a mouse.
Microsoft came out of such antitrust lawsuit unscathed and a decade later went back to pushing its browser down everyone's throat.
A mountain giving birth to a mouse? Is that a translation from another language? I'm not being critical, it's just oddly specific and bizarre.
Yeah it is a french expression, the english equivalent is " a long harvest for a little corn "
Here is a link to read about it, its meaning and use and its equivalent in other languages : link
What did we expect? There's no "monopolistic competition" in an industry where everything depends on everything. We granted them a monopoly and now play whack-a-mole when that monopoly gets "too" big.
Finally, some good fucking news
Might not do much for the upcoming Manifest v3 doomsday but at least the current government recognises the ills of big tech as it currently stands.
But is this just tactics to win an election? Will they go the distance on any trust issue, or is it all vapour?
we have so many freaking monopolies now a days. we really need to keep companies from owning so much. bring back the media limits and no company should be able to own multiple areas of healthcare and such.
Nice.. Now do it.. Break them
But there is an alternative, search engines that say that are independent but then come crashing down when Bing goes down, which belongs to another convicted yet still existing monopoly.
'Biggest Antitrust Case of the 21st Century' so far...
We can only hope
Ooooooooooh shit. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out.
Will go to SCOTUS, a few bribes will happen, then it will die.
Will this mean that no one will be able to pay to be the default search, or just that Google will no longer be allowed?
Honestly, Google is still the best free search even though it isn't as good as it used to be... and if this ruling means that no one can pay to be the default then Google will still win based on name recognition and performance. Plus they will save money by not needing to give it to Apple.
The real loser here is Apple who is going to lose a fairly large revenue stream.
I imagine that, if regulators go hard enough, it'll make sweeping changes company-wide. Google does a lot of anti-competitive behaviors that don't involve money and are very sneaky, and as a result, we might see a lot of features be changed in the long term.
I think this may also end up killing their deal with reddit.
The biggest loser is Mozilla, who will lose about 80% of their revenue. If they enforce this, Firefox will pretty much be dead.
So now Mozilla can stop receiving their hush money, right?
Biggest "so far" they're far from the only.
Clone Teddy Roosevelt.
Please let an outcome from this enable users to change the default Android search from Google search 🙏
tbh i care more about meta because of EEE
I thought Microsoft was the company that first embraced the whole "embrace, extend, extinguish" philosophy?
Yeah but they ended up investing in apple to avoid more serious antitrust litigation from becoming a complete monopoly, and Linux ruined their chances of dominating the server maketshare.
Google just took it and did it more discretly over a longer period of time.
My point is people still used that VHSs. They just also bought DVDs. For most people, you didn't only use one. I think most people went through a period where they used both.
You don't need to bring your library. Having your library split between multiple platforms isn't a big deal and most people do it. You just don't give them any more money.
People didn't not buy DVDs because they had a library of VHSs.
Uh yes many of us did not buy dvds because we had vhs and couldn't afford to switch to a new medium.
Just like if we had a dvd collection we didn't go to HDDVD / Blueray. Many people never got into Blu-ray at all
But eventually we had to and now we have issues with drm and losing purchased digital media on streaming services
You don't pre-emptively punish people not causing harm. That's a bad way to go.
Google no longer has the motto of "dont be evil", I wonder why...
Because they're engaging in harmful behaviors and need to be broken up and regulated.
No shit. Now do Amazon, apple, meta, Microsoft, Disney and all the food conglomerates. Then it will have been a good start.
They've got Amazon in the works
Amazon
Would be nice if we didn't let them kill off so many other businesses first before doing something about it.
Walmart and telecom too.
Too big to fail financial industry should go first.
Do PG&E
I still don't understand how the Californian government bailed them out when they were bankrupt, yet they were allowed to remain an independent company? Why didn't the government take full control?
Electricity in cities in the Bay Area that have their own municipal power company (like Palo Alto and Santa Clara) is literally 1/3 the cost of PG&E.
Cable companies too please.
The food companies fly low under the radar. They definitely need a wake up call.
I don't think they'll ever do anything serious to apple. That shit is untouchable.
They are. The FTC have already brought antitrust suits against three of the companies you just listed, and you can bet your ass they're eyeing the rest.
Decades of neoliberalism doesn't get undone in a single day. This is good news, and if America keeps putting competent people in power we'll see more of it.
Steam...
Edit: Funny how I was replying to a comment with examples of companies that wish they had 70% of the market under their control yet people didn't disagree with OP but bringing up Valve? Oh man, Gaben can do no wrong! 70% of the market under the control of a company owned by a single man? No problemo!
You can't break up steam and improve the market in any particular way. Since they're not really big on exclusivity agreements, there's also very little a court order would do to make the market more competitive.
Their market dominance isn't because of anticompetitive practices, it's because of customer-friendly practices. People like it, so people use it.
Steam? Really out of all these, the the one that treats it's customers properly and gives them any and all tools needed to make a proper purchase decision with many big sales consistently. Great call
Steam isn't actually a monopoly in a meaningful way
Where companies with monopolies are found to gain that title by ousting competitors and brutal buyouts and tactics literally every time, Valve exists. Literally. They just exist. Big difference between a monopoly and the best.
Other companies also exist. In fact there are several launchers and two other digital distributors, and several websites, where one can purchase games. There are some things Steam is shit on. The still feels old interface as a broad example. Competitors could push in, like Epic. Instead, they manage to create the next step up from a gold-tainted dung pile, shit on their own launcher or store stability and performance, and create an experience so bad that Steam is able, through the fuckups of their rivals, maintain a market majority.
Huh.
Maybe it's just the games I play, but I mostly hear people in MMO's ranting about steam and swearing they'll never use it (or never use it again). At least some of these people have seemingly zero personal issues with Amazon gaming, arc, epic, gog, and a few other steam clones.
I realize that by the numbers, steam is probably still the biggest, but unlike that early half-life debacle, most games are on multiple platforms now. Steam being bigger isn't what I'd call monopolistic anymore, it's just good sales on games and inertia.
Given epic's often BETTER sales, despite the fact that I really dislike the layout and functionality of the epic client, most of what steam has going for it is the deck and inertia.
SHHHH!!!
Monopolies and authoritarians aren't bad as long as people like them! Hadn't you heard?