Everyone should go over to Firefox as well as advocate against this.
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This is what I did when this story came out. In used different browsers in different places, but I switched to Firefox anywhere that’s windows or Linux.
Break up Google.
Browser is one company. YouTube is another. The search a third company. The ad one has to be the richest and should be it's own.
Then once you cut down Google into manageable companies, go after Facebook.
Antitrust regulations have been neutered in the US since the Reagan administration, which is how we have not only unfettered tech monopolies, but telecommunications regional monopolies and a national oligopoly (that is, an organized cartel, but legal)
Since most federal regulatory departments are captured, and serve their industries rather than the public. Mileage may vary re: state regulations.
Every problem in my life somehow seems to find its way back to him
You're right - this is very reminiscent of the Microsoft Antitrust suit of 1998. Technically, per that ruling, Google could be subject to an AT&T style breakup. However, it's pertinent to note that on appeal, the Justice Department chose to settle with Microsoft on the issue of splitting the company rather than go back to trial.
Clearly, in the real world, the ruling didn't stick, as today Microsoft, Apple, and Google all package their browsers on their operating systems. As such, I don't think it likely that enforcing an API standard would exceed the current antitrust abuses that we've come to accept as a fact of daily life, and highly unlikely to attract a serious case from the Justice Department.
That being said, I fully support your effort - we've needed stronger antitrust enforcement for a long time, and AT&T shouldn't have been the high watermark of the Justice Department's efforts in this arena.
Anti-trust lawsuits only happen when companies forget to pay their politicians.
According to the supreme court. Bribes are legal now. Ethics are not to be considered.
Ok, guys I'm going to try to organize some community action about all of this over on the community I made on [email protected]. Specifically in this thread, I'd like to work on actions like crafting the letter we'd to send to the FTC as well as the letters we're going to send to the EFF and Louis Rossmann. If you're interested in collaborating on all this or just following the action, please join the community and keep up with the thread. I'm considering creating a sister Discord or Matrix. And it would anathema to the cause to use Google Docs to collaborate on writing this e-mail, but I figure we can use OnlyOffice (https://www.onlyoffice.com/) or Etherpad (https://etherpad.org/) instead.
Are you guys in?
hah, this person thinks antitrust legislation is actually enforced
the EU actually does quite often, not that Americans would notice much of it. EU courts are the reason why Microsoft need to offer multiple browsers on install and why the N category of windows existed
I never left Firefox, and I will never understand, why people were so quick to adopt Chrome which was Google controlled from the start. Google was already an obvious problem at the time (2008).
Google never had an interest in building the best browser for users. They are not a browser company, they are an advertiser. What they wanted is the best browser for Google, meaning the best browser for delivering advertising. They only made the best browser to attract users with no political foresight. That is becoming more and more obvious. Google has been trying to kill Firefox for a while, by making parts of their services not work quite as intended. While if you changed your user agent, it would work fine!
Another place here today, we can read how Google is trying to kill Jpeg XL or JXL, which is a superior graphics format to JPG PNG and GIF wrapped into 1. https://lemmy.world/post/2059816
Firefox really helped protect the Internet and Internet users from the shenanigans of Microsoft. It should come as no surprise, that Google wants to control the Internet, just as much as Microsoft did, from a pure business perspective, that's an obvious move, and our best defense is still Mozilla and Firefox and lawmakers that aren't corrupt. So don't elect trump to get another Ajit Pai who has no bigger wish than to kill net neutrality.
You have to realise that to most people, Google is not seen as a bad company - quite the opposite in fact. They have all these "free" products that do everything you need them to, so they've built-up a huge amount of trust with the general population.
Google is obviously trying to take over the web, but the regular person doesn't see this as they don't follow any of this news, nor do they actually care. Google has good, fast, free products, that's all people care about.
As someone deeply immersed in libre software and the Free Software Foundation, it pains me that my conversations are likely always going to be the first time people have actually seriously thought about their software freedom. It's really difficult unwinding decades and billions of dollars of corpocratic propaganda without resorting to shock and scare tactics.
I'm still going to do it because there's nothing else better to say. :D
why people were so quick to adopt Chrome which was Google controlled from the start.
Because for a long time Chrome was just much faster. It wasn't until a couple of months ago that Firefox started becoming performant enough for me to use as a daily driver. Even then, there's still issues with how slow it takes Mozilla to implement new web technologies like WebGPU, etc.
This Manifest V3 business with Chrome is going to be the trigger for me to jump ship.
If we spin up the way back machine, Chrome became popular as a competitor to Internet Explorer. Even though IE had the vast majority of market share it was a truly awful product. It was slow, unreliable, and insecure. Chrome resolved those issues and it was the reason I went with it at the time. Basically I was just looking to dump IE.
At the time Firefox was clunky, unpopular, and did not have good compatibility across all sites. Now that Chrome is less desirable we're left with Firefox as the best alternative. It's come a long way since IE and Chrome went head to head. It's a much better product now with a bigger user base.
At the time Firefox was clunky, unpopular, and did not have good compatibility across all sites
Firefox was an excellent, fast, highly compatible, alternative to Internet Explorer. It was already winning when Chrome came on the scene. However, Firefox actually got more clunky and slower over time, so Chrome was a breath of fresh air in comparison. People like me who used Firefox back from version 0.6 jumped to Chrome because it was doing what Firefox used to do. Chrome was a genuinely better product for a long time, but then like Firefox, it too got slower and more clunky. Meanwhile, Firefox saw what they were up against and went back to their roots. Firefox has gotten a lot better in the last couple years.
Google also significantly pushed Chrome adoption by encouraging people to download it in Google search and Gmail.
Firefox used to be very slow, very buggy and full of memory leaks.
Corporations are finding that the vocal minority is small enough that they can let them complain all they want, and nothing will change. There are now enough users out there that it just doesn't matter what how much we complain online. They just have to wait it out since the silent majority just don't care anymore.
Reddit, Netflix, Spotify, and now Google. It's happening everywhere lately.
P.S. If any lawyers and people really knowledgeable about web technologies and standards here on Lemmy can get together and help us draft something together that we can all send in, that would be amazing.
P.P.S. If we can't find a Lemmy lawyer, I'm proposing we take this to the EFF and Louis Rossmann (who has experience lobbying for right to repair and trying to get legislation passed) for their help.
Big corporations have been battling for control of the internet through browser market share since day one. We can't let any one corpo gain control because it will destroy it with proprietary standards, it's already suffered untold damage. MS almost got control when IE reached a vast majority of market share. Google is in the same place now with Chrome.
As consumers we have some control over market share through product selection. Of course an anti-trust lawsuit will help the cause as it did when MS was in position to take control. Time for Firefox to take the stage now, it's ready.
The thing is that in the eyes of the general populace (and regulators) it's not "just a Google thing" since Chromium is open source and a majority of browsers use that. So the argument is that most browsers will implement anything Google does and make it a de-facto standard.
It's only an anti-trust violation if an anti-trust case is made and a sentence passed. A new Chrome update and a couple Benjamins on the adequate courts should easily fix that,.
For eu users : https://competition-policy.ec.europa.eu/antitrust/procedures/complaints_en
However not sure how it works, if you need to be directly affected as a company of user, or if you need to be a citizen to file a complaint.
I don't have the necessary detail and information to be able to file the complaint.
If you give the detail on how it works and why it affects competition I may be able to file a complaint.
Howerver from what I saw in news the EU and US are already collaborating in an investigation against Google. Not sure if it's true, current and on what exactly.
Laws only apply to the little people.
Louis Rossman did a video recently and I completely agree with him. He said that regulars/normies especially 9-5s won't use Firefox as long the changes dont affect them personally.
TLDR,: We're fucked
Probably. But most companies have adopted a "do it now and ask for forgiveness later" policy it seems. For proof, look no further than class-action lawsuits. Those aren't punishments, it's just the cost of doing business.
Whether this goes through or not do not forget to give every effort to remove google search from your organization if you can. Setting even default home pages to DuckDuckGo and using that as the default search in the settings can have massive impacts.
Hey all, so along with this post, today, I made a couple of communities geared towards starting and organizing a movement like the one in this post that has us working together to petition our government for redress on the anticompetitive behavior by the Google Chrome monopoly. I messaged Ruud and reached out to c/support because I have no idea what I'm doing and where or when it's appropriate to advertise the community and I'm looking for guidance. So if it's inappropriate here, mods of c/Technology, I apologize and please delete this comment.
But here are the two communities I made: [email protected] [email protected]
I want them to be a place where we can pull together like minded individuals of Lemmy and perhaps the Fediverse/ActivityPub together about a cause we care about and want to create a movement for. I figure c/movement will be were you can gather those folks c/organize is where you can have discussions and organize to take action. Perhaps there should be an associated matrix or discord channel for the second one.
I'd like both communities to be community owned and community-led. So on big decisions and deciding the guidelines, I'd like the community to call the shots while mods would do the heavy lifting of enforcing those guidelines and organizing things to where the community's voice can be heard (so for example, after having a discussion about guidelines, consolidating all of that into some sort of vote if there needed to be one on finally voting in the new guidelines). Anyways, rather than having a discussion about the communities here, let's have them over on the c/support thread (https://lemmy.world/post/2061735) or the communities themselves.
And the thing is we all have jobs, classes, family or something else entirely having claims to our attention and time, but we shouldn't give up or give in. Let's still figure out a way to persevere.
They hate the idea of a free and open web.