this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2025
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Justice Department asks judge to order Google the "immediate" sale of Chrome (www.techspot.com)
submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by cm0002@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world
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The U.S. Department of Justice is ramping up its case against Google's alleged monopoly, suggesting the government could eventually force the company to sell its widely-used Chrome browser. The move is part of the DoJ's push to challenge Google's hold over the digital advertising and search engine markets.

The Justice Department's latest legal action accuses Google of engaging in anticompetitive behavior by unfairly using its dominance in search and advertising to prop up its other services, most notably Chrome. The government argues that Google's browser and vast data ecosystem have given the company an outsized advantage over competitors, stifling innovation and harming consumers. By bundling Chrome with its Android operating system, Google has built an extensive network that could limit consumer choice and make it difficult for smaller firms to compete.

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[–] ShittyBeatlesFCPres@lemmy.world 9 points 1 day ago (4 children)

I don’t really get what selling Chrome and Android would accomplish. I’m all for breaking up tech monopolies but both of those projects are mostly open source that get proprietary Google crap and (for Android, at least, some monopolistic behavior like requiring what’s preinstalled, which is fine to ban).

I don’t work on ad-supported projects so I may be out of my element but it seems like what would actually help end the monopolistic behavior is requiring Google (and Facebook) to spin off their ad network businesses. The monopoly problem isn’t Chromium or AOSP or that Google runs ad-supported search. It’s that if [insert random site] wants ads, they typically use AdSense. If Facebook and Google want to run ad-supported services, fine. But they shouldn’t also also be the middlemen for advertisers who want to run ads on third party sites. That’s a recipe for monopolistic behavior.

In my ideal world, there would be no targeted ads at all and advertisers had to sponsor — and were so partly responsible for — the specific content they want to be associated with. But that probably isn’t going to happen since every politician is an advertiser that wants to launder their sponsorships through a middleman.

[–] sbv@sh.itjust.works 10 points 17 hours ago

I don’t really get what selling Chrome and Android would accomplish.

There was a leak of Google's old page ranking algorithm (not PageRank, but how they change the order of results on search) - it looked like they used a bunch of signals from Chrome about the amount of time users spend on a page, how quickly they go back, etc. Chrome gives the search side of the business an advantage.

Conversely, Android feeds a bunch of extra data to the ad business about what people do in real life.

Both products give the rest of Alphabet a significant advantage over their competitors, and make it harder for new entrants to get a foothold.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 10 points 23 hours ago

requiring Google (and Facebook) to spin off their ad network businesses

That is their business. Everything else exists to bring more value to that business:

  • AOSP - ads in the browser (search engine) and app store
  • Chrome - ads in the search engine, and nudge people toward other Google products to hoover up data to serve more ads

And so on. Google and Meta are ad companies that drive traffic to their ads through software services.

The point in forcing them out of certain businesses is to open them up to more competition. They can keep ad margins high due to sheer volume of eyeballs coming from their other services. Gutting those services means they need to provide better value to stay competitive.

Idk if it'll work, but stripping out the browser is likely good overall for the open web.

[–] bdonvr@thelemmy.club 6 points 22 hours ago

Google gets to control the source code, what additions are added, and what features don't get into it.

Yes technically some organization could fork it and then maintain a fork themselves. But it's a huge undertaking that almost nobody has the money to fund. Browsers are free so there's really not a lot of monetization schemes for browsers.

So nobody as far as I know has really been able to maintain a hard fork of chromium for very long. Remember, every change you make then has to be maintained by you and then you have to keep it up to date with the chromium master tree while also keeping all of your changes compatible. It is a big undertaking almost as big as modern operating systems. Browsers are just too complicated so Google in this position does still have a monopoly that's very hard to fight.

Almost all browsers other than Safari and Firefox are based on Chromium, which gives Google a ton of control.

[–] reddig33@lemmy.world 8 points 1 day ago

Spinning them off into their own independent companies would make more sense than a sale to another party.