So as I understand it, Google’s using it’s monopoly market position to force web “standards” unilaterally (without an independent/conglomerate web specification standards where Google is only one of many voices) that will disadvantage its competitors and force people to leave its competitors.
I’m not a lawyer, and I’m a fledgling tech guy, but this sounds like abuse of a monopoly. Google which serves 75% of the world’s ads and has 75% of the browser market share seems to want to use its market power to annihilate people’s privacy and control over their web experience.
So we can file a complaint with FTC led by Lina Khan who has been the biggest warrior against abuse by big tech in the US.
https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/report-antitrust-violation
We can also file a complaint with the DOJ:
https://www.justice.gov/atr/citizen-complaint-center
And there have to be EU, UK, Indian, Chinese, and Japanese organizations that we can file antitrust complaints to.
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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.
While that probably is “legally” what should happen:
- Chrome will likely die within the decade. And it will take Chromium, which is the basis for basically every browser except Safari and Firefox, with it. The best we can hope for is massive stagnation as people hope CVEs aren’t found.
- Youtube will die within a year, if not quarter. People VASTLY underestimate just how much it costs to maintain and serve that much video content and how favorable the terms are for creators.
- And search will be fine and still have almost all the same power as Alphabet. Because that (and the associated ads) are largely what is keeping google afloat.
- Cloud/data center should be fine.
I hate to say it, but google is very much “too big to fail” at this point. People lost their minds over how many helpful posts were hidden during the reddit protests. Imagine how they’ll feel when pretty much 99% of the videos on the internet go away (I pulled that number out of my ass but… it is probably not that far off).
While Google failing would definitely cause a disruption, I don’t think they are too big to fail. I’ve done some experimenting with other search engines and Kagi & Duckduckgo are both sufficient.
Gmail is very popular, but everyone could find another email provider. Losing YouTube would hurt but we have other large sites with infrastructure that could cover. Facebook, Twitter, reddit, Instagram, tiktok, etc. Together I think they could take on the bandwidth
As for the browser, I’d be glad if Chrome died. We need more browsers. Chrome dying would force all of the derivatives to do something else. Vivaldi, edge, brave, etc would all need to either switch to Firefox or a project for a new browser would begin
I think while disruptive Google failing would ultimately be good. We have anti-trust laws for a reason and we need to actually use them. If we don’t enforce them, why did we pass the laws in the first place? The market stagnated and the consumers lose. Plus we fall behind pragmatic countries like China who are blazing forward full speed. Their government is more than willing to turn the $$$ hose to innovate in technology. Here in the US we rely on the market. But if we hamstring the market with a monopoly… just a recipe for disaster in my opinion
Losing gmail (which I didn’t even think of…) would be MASSIVELY disruptive. People would literally lose touch with family and friends, companies would go under, etc.
And no, social media sites can’t handle what youtube does. Even ignoring how laughable twitter currently is: at its prime, it STILL couldn’t serve videos reliably. Tiktok and Instagram have very strict limits on video uploads and the rest largely rely on youtube anyway. Yes, some people upload videos to facebook or choose to mirror them, but it is often still youtube links. Same with reddit.
That also ignores the creator side of things. To my understanding, instagram is mostly about getting enough views to get sponsors. Tiktok? I have no freaking idea how you monetize that. Facebook briefly had the idea of paying content creators but, to my understanding, has worse ad revenue than twitch. Youtube is pretty unique in that, because it is Google, they can give significant amounts of ad revenue to creators who can more or less make their entire life releasing a few videos a month. MAYBE twitch could de-shit a bit (because losing your competition is when you give more money to creators?) but they aren’t a VOD site. So even if these social media sites could “handle the load”, they wouldn’t provide the environment that generates that kind of load.
Antitrust laws should have prevented us from getting this far in the first place. But taking out google will have massive repercussions that go beyond “it would be great if we ate the rich” levels of thought.
Anyone who hasn’t planed for this with an account on another service, at the very least like proton, kinda deserves whats coming due to the signs.
I’m no soothsayer and even I can see that Google is making enemies with governments, China, US, and Europe. You can survive one or two but not all three.
The world is much larger than just the wealthy nations. Where I’m from, the internet is synonymous with Google, emails with gmail and online video sharing with YouTube.
Digital literacy is hard to worry about when you are struggling to improve your life. Even outside of harsh situations it’s not okay to expect everyone to literate themselves.
Nobody is claiming it wouldn’t be disruptive, but the question is if the long term it would be better for society. Monopolies are not good and the longer we allow them to survive, the more ingrained they become.
Free market capitalism only works well when there is competition. When big companies are so powerful they can just buy up any potential competitors, we’re not in free market capitalism anymore. We’re entering a merger of corporate and state power - teetering slowly towards a “tolerant” fascism. It’s something that desperately needs to be addressed.
As for the browser, I’d be glad if Chrome died. We need more browsers. Chrome dying would force all of the derivatives to do something else. Vivaldi, edge, brave, etc would all need to either switch to Firefox or a project for a new browser would begin
Firefox is currently kept alive by Google, which pays $500M/year to Mozilla in order to have Google Search as the default in Firefox and to not let Google Chrome become a monopoly on paper too. Break Google and it would probably die.
Creating “more browsers” (browser engines I would add, we already have enough browsers) is not an easy task. The specification that needs to be implemented is massive, and doing so efficiently is even more complex. It would be a waste of resources to have many browser engines, not to mention the confusion in the webdev community when you suddently have to work around many more bugs in the implementations.
Web browsers are a critical infrastructure. Linux too, is very complex and requires lots of development and standards. But we have companies that spend the resources because it’s necessary for their bottom line. Servers all run on Linux.
Similar thing I think would happen with web browsers. Many companies would have incentive to develop web browsers - Facebook for example would want people on their site and that requires a web browser.
My question is if this would simply result in another company taking Google spot in the market or there would be a new open source collaborative effort by many companies like Linux? I’m not really sure. Like you said, the specifications are massive and basically shape and mold the internet as a whole. So it’s not a simple task.
Also just because Google funds Mozilla through search does not mean Firefox would immediately die should Google go under. Consider that Firefox would be only 1 of 2 browsers left alive. They could presumably make a deal with Bing or Duckduckgo or something and would be able to make up the lost income in spades because of sheer volume of users.
There was a time Firefox was actually the most popular browser.
Chrome became popular for 2 reasons:
- Nerds recommended it after installing windows.
- It’s the default browser for Android.
Number 1 isn’t always true anymore but has momentum while 2 is fixed. Until something changes, Chrome is cemented into web browsing.
I know it’s probably just me, but YouTube could disappear tomorrow and it would probably take me weeks to notice.
If there’s one thing I actively avoid for it’s abysmal information density, it’s videos.
how favorable the terms are for creators
If I’m not mistaken Youtube creators get something like 1/10 of a penny per view of a video. Is that really favorable for creators?
I don’t know any of the youtubers that were cited in this, but this lines up with what other youtubers have said on podcasts and the like
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-much-do-youtubers-make
1.61 to 29.30 USD per 1000 views. That is going to vary based on how many ads they run but that does indeed come out to ~0.002 USD per ad play.
Which… is still really good compared to stuff like twitch. And that doesn’t include the youtube premium numbers which are a LOT more privately held but are universally acknowledged as a lot better… even by twitch streamers.
The twitch math gets harder due to a mix of twitch being a lot stricter about streamers sharing their revenue and it changing every five minutes. But going by the current 50/50 split on subscriptions: If you have 1000 subscribers in a given month (which is already amazing since having a couple hundred concurrents put you in the top 1% of streamers) AND it averages out to all at the 5 dollar tier (they aren’t, most are going to be using bezos bucks), you are getting 2500 USD. Per month. Considering that most streamers at this range are looking at 3-5 8 hour days per week (and many go MUCH farther), and let’s say 4 weeks per month:
2500 bucks/ (4 days per week * 8 hours per day * 4 weeks) = 19.5 bucks an hour.
Which… is still a lot better than minimum wage but that speaks to the US being a complete shitshow.
But let’s just do rough numbers on some youtubers. I watched a HowNOT2 on big walling last night. 74k views for a one hour video that was uploaded eight months ago. I have youtube premium so I have no idea how many ads that video had, but a quick google suggests people do 4 ads for a 12 minute video. Ryan is actively pushing away from ad based monetization, so let’s say that was 4 ads for a one hour video.
4 ads per video * 74 thousand views * 2 bucks per 1000 views = 592 dollars for a video.
Which is shit… except he has 457 videos uploaded. And they all (okay, a lot probably got demonetized, but roll with me) generate revenue. That adds up and is why people like NileRed can talk about NOT making videos for a year because people will keep watching his older ones and keep him going while he figures out what kind of experiments are worth filming.
Whereas, if you take a week off Twitch you take a week off getting paid (sort of. subscription models get weird).
This is the way. The more I think about it, the more I realize it needs to happen. Market positions in each of them give Google an unfair, anti-competitive advantage in all the rest of them.
Same with Facebook. It’s used its market power to copy features from its competitors and get a leg up on them from their existing userbase. It should have never been allowed to buy its competitors like instagram, whatsapp and what not. It’s time to break them all apart again.
The most recent egregious example of this is the Threads app. But what it did to Snapchat with Instagram stories is another example, IMO.
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.
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
You have to realise that to most people, Google is not seen as a bad company - quite the opposite in fact.
You are right, maybe I tend to forget that is not obvious to everybody. But it’s not like I believe Google is inherently bad or evil, they just have an enormous amount of power that I think very few people realize. Google search alone or YouTube alone can make or break companies, can shift elections, can shift popular opinion in general. That’s to much power IMO.
Power corrupts as we know, and although Google is not worse than most, they aren’t better either, and they are using their power in subtle ways, to promote their own interests.
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.
Yes because a bit faster short term, is worth sacrificing you freedom long term?
I will never get people like you.
Most people have no idea or don’t care at all about privacy on the internet. Google has a solid set of “free” services that work well and a good enough reputation to convince them.
Wow you got 2 downvotes for stating an absolutely true statement, that describes a HUGE problem.
For us to lose all our rights and freedoms, it only takes enough people not to care. And that’s the problem.
Google apps are a huge surveillance machine that absolutely threaten our freedom. Most people just don’t give a shit, because it’s convenient.
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So a bit of speed short term, is enough to sacrifice your freedom long term?
Obviously I know it was faster, what I don’t get is that people had no principles, and was ready to give everything up to a company clearly trying to control the Internet.
And that was even so shortly after we had similar problems with Microsoft, that we have now with Google.
I could understand your argument if we’re talking about the choice today but don’t act like Google 15 years ago was the same as it is today. They are vastly different companies.
And people conveniently forget: The Mozilla Foundation is a warm and fuzzy non-profit. The Mozilla Corporation, where significant portions of the foundation’s money comes from, is a company that acquires other services (like Pocket) and mostly monetizes through search engine royalties and the like.
Yes, MzF has great foundational principles and MzC has yet to be demonstrably evil. But remember when one of Google’s core principles was “Don’t be evil”?
At the end of the day: We as people want there to be variety in browsers (unless you are a web developer at which point you want to shove a fork in my eye for even saying that). If everyone had just leapt to Firefox then, odds are, we would be in a similar mess right now with people smugly accusing everyone of “sacrific(ing) your freedom long term” for not siding with Google.
i’m not sure you quite remember the leap in performance that chrome was… it was night and day, and literally ushered in the era of performance being an actual concern for browsers
as much as i hate google, you’ve gotta credit them with starting that
and at the start, many (myself included) believed that googles motivation was to make the web fast to compete with native apps (they wanted the web platform to be what everyone used on their phones), because google can serve web ads across all platforms on the web, but native they mostly only control android
that still might have been the entirety of their original intent too! but now they have that dominance, they’re being evil with it
Firefox used to be very slow, very buggy and full of memory leaks.
I was a Firefox user until they started releasing major versions every few days which broke addons. Not sure how it is today but it was a hassle for a few weeks at least. I switched to chrome because it was the next best option back then.
Yes that was stupid, I don’t deny Chrome could easily be seen as the better browser in some respects.
But it was still pretty obvious that we were on our way to the exact same problems we had with Internet Explorer, and Microsofts attempt to control the Internet, through extensions only available on IE, that were necessary to use several Microsoft technologies, when Microsoft had a monopoly.
So would you say Firefox has settled down in the last years? I don’t like where chrome is going (not only privacy, the “dumbing down” sucks too) and tempted to switch back again. But it requires a bit of work
I’d say yes, there are still frequent upgrades, but IMO add-on breakage is not common anymore in my experience.
I have to admit though, that I’m not using nearly as many add-ons as I used to. uBlock Origin is my most important add-on, and Dark reader, and bypass paywall are also always on add-ons, and they have all worked flawlessly for years.
I’m on Manjaro Linux, so I get updates very frequently and early, although most are probably security updates. So I’m probably near max exposed to breakage, and haven’t had problems with it since years ago, when an add-on for splitting windows into panels broke after being unmaintained for quite a while.
Alternatively, you might want to try Chromium, which allegedly should be like Chrome but without the Google shenanigans.
Personally I prefer to not use that either, because it’s still heavily influenced by the development of Chrome, but I guess it’s better than Chrome from a freedom perspective.
It’s easy to forget now, but IE was such absolute dogshit for years that literally anything else was better
Back in the day Firefox delivered the same look and feel with a better experience than IE did.
hah, this person thinks antitrust legislation is actually enforced
hah, yeah, let’s roll over and die already!
Yes, the two options: rely on the committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie to stop the capitalist exploitation, or roll over and die.
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
They also where the first to approve the Microsoft/Activision merge tho so it’s better than in America but often very hit or miss too! :/
Microsoft/Activision merger doesn’t pose any threat. Sony is the market leader in console gaming and Steam is the leading platform in PC gaming. Activision is also on its last breath and if it wasn’t for Microsoft, someone else would buy it a couple of years later. There are literally no reasons to block this merger.
The only reason US is against is because sweet Sony money.
True, that was a bad example but it really is more hit or miss than proper enforcment a lot of the time.
Not exactly the same situation, Sony is the market leader here and the FTC was only able to show that the merger may harm Sony, not customers. The EU got many remedies for the Activision and Microsoft merger that doesn’t exist today like Activision games on more platforms which will be beneficial to consumers.
True, that was a bad example but it really is more hit or miss than proper enforcment a lot of the time.
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 !organize@lemmy.world. 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?
Ribbit
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.
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.
This generation of the internet is doomed if we let it keep going in the direction it’s headed.
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.
They hate the idea of a free and open web.
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: !movement@lemmy.world !organize@lemmy.world
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.
There is another one that is called !protest@lemmy.world
Yep, I only saw it like a couple of hours ago. I joined it too. But I’m hoping we can do more than just protest. Like organize to clean up a wetland or something. Or organize to petition the government.
I am all for it. Actually I have started working on a mobile app just for that purpose specifically. I have written a little bit about in one of my first posts if you wanna look at it.
I took a look at it. Do you want to be a mod at both communities or at least c/organize with me (I figure the app shows me that you have passion about all of this)? Even if we don’t necessarily get folks to download and install the app, I think we can potentially try out the algorithm and get community feedback on how they feel about it.
Let me think about it and I’ll get back to you.
Organize a regional election or five would be more useful.
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.
Sure, but you still need judges who will actually do something and a DOJ who actually goes after these people
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.
