U.S. Plans to Propose Breakup of Google to Fix Search Monopoly

[Celerity]

In a landmark antitrust case, the government will ask a judge to force the company to sell its popular Chrome browser, people with knowledge of the matter said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/20/technology/google-search-remedies-doj.html

https://archive.ph/LlamN

The Justice Department and a group of states plan to ask a federal court late Wednesday to force Google to sell Chrome, its popular web browser, two people with knowledge of the decision said, a move that could fundamentally alter the $2 trillion company’s business and reshape competition on the internet. The request would follow a landmark ruling in August by Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia that found Google had illegally maintained a monopoly in online search. Judge Mehta asked the Justice Department and the states that brought the antitrust case to submit solutions by the end of Wednesday to correct the search monopoly.

Beyond the sale of Chrome, the government is set to ask Judge Mehta to bar Google from entering into paid agreements with Apple and others to be the automatic search engine on smartphones and in browsers, the people said. Google should also be required to share data with rivals, they said. The proposals would likely be the most significant remedies to be requested in a tech antitrust case since the Justice Department asked to break up Microsoft in 2000. If Judge Mehta adopts the proposals, they will set the tone for a string of other antitrust cases that challenge the dominance of tech behemoths including Apple, Amazon and Meta.

Being forced to sell Chrome would be among the worst possible outcomes for Google. Chrome, which is free to use, is the most popular web browser in the world and part of an elaborate Google ecosystem that keeps people using the company’s products. Google’s search engine is bundled into Chrome. Google is set to file its own suggestions for fixing the search monopoly by Dec. 20. Both sides can modify their requests before Judge Mehta is expected to hear arguments on the remedies this spring. He is expected to rule by the end of the summer.

“The D.O.J. continues to push a radical agenda that goes far beyond the legal issues in this case,” Lee-Anne Mulholland, vice president for regulatory affairs at Google, said in a statement this week after details of the government’s discussions were reported publicly. “The government putting its thumb on the scale in these ways would harm consumers, developers and American technological leadership at precisely the moment it is most needed.” A spokesman for the Justice Department declined to comment. Bloomberg earlier reported some details of the department’s planned request.

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[Ndp5]

1. Good

That is the least the judge should do.

Google’s possible monopoly over ad tech, which is beyond the purview of this case, but is being decided in another case, is destroying democracy.

Google gets the majority of online ad revenue in the U.S. It manages that through anticompetitive practices — it controls the plumbing of online advertising technology — that are starving news outlets of the revenue they need to survive.

Big tech companies have lobbied Congress fiercely to prevent the U.S. from following other Western democracies in passing legislation to protect the press from predatory tech interests.

We saw the rotten fruits of Google’s work in this election, when swarms of uninformed voters elected an autocrat whose only “achievement” was a tax cut for economic elites.

As newspapers in this country have declined, Fox News and big tech (i.e. social media misinformation) have risen. That is like trading a forest for a nuclear waste dump.

[UpInArms]

2. I agree ...

And, welcome to DU, Ndp5

[radius777]

3. Big tech is a monarchy

led by modern day kings who rule with impunity. They all need to be broken up, with standards made open, to allow for more competition, especially with AI on the horizon. The top 7 companies (the so-called Magnificent 7) are all big tech monopolies that account for a third of the market cap of the S&P 500 and half of the Nasdaq.

[soandso]

4. Great news

and I hope it happens. These behemoths should have never been allowed to develop nor should the degree of control they have nor the massive private wealth they've accumulated.

“The government putting its thumb on the scale in these ways would harm consumers, developers and American technological leadership at precisely the moment it is most needed.”

Well isn't that rich because it was US taxpayer that funded them. Now it's all proprietary which also should not be allowed. It should be a public asset.

By the mid 1990s, the intelligence community was seeding funding to the most promising supercomputing efforts across academia, guiding the creation of efforts to make massive amounts of information useful for both the private sector as well as the intelligence community.

They funded these computer scientists through an unclassified, highly compartmentalized program that was managed for the CIA and the NSA by large military and intelligence contractors. It was called the Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS) project.

In 1995, one of the first and most promising MDDS grants went to a computer-science research team at Stanford University with a decade-long history of working with NSF and DARPA grants. The primary objective of this grant was “query optimization of very complex queries that are described using the ‘query flocks’ approach.” A second grant—the DARPA-NSF grant most closely associated with Google’s origin—was part of a coordinated effort to build a massive digital library using the internet as its backbone. Both grants funded research by two graduate students who were making rapid advances in web-page ranking, as well as tracking (and making sense of) user queries: future Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

The research by Brin and Page under these grants became the heart of Google: people using search functions to find precisely what they wanted inside a very large data set. The intelligence community, however, saw a slightly different benefit in their research: Could the network be organized so efficiently that individual users could be uniquely identified and tracked?

https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-cia-and-nsa-research-grants-for-mass-surveillance