TechScape: Why the US wants to force Google to sell Chrome | Technology
Google is in trouble. As my colleague Dan Milmo reported, the US Department of Justice “has proposed a far-reaching overhaul of Google’s structure and business practices, including the sale of its Chrome browser, in a bid to end its monopoly on internet search”. The move follows a major court ruling last August in which a federal judge determined that Google had violated antitrust laws and held an illegal monopoly over search services. The justice department’s suggestion is blunt: “Google must divest Chrome.” As for Android, the DoJ proposes two potential remedies: divest or submit to government oversight.
Both demands present seismic challenges to Google’s multiform, money-printing advertising business and would be a worst-case scenario for the company.
In an aggressively defensive blog post, Google’s chief legal officer, Kent Walker, called the justice department’s proposals “staggering”, “extreme”, and “unprecedented government overreach”. Walker can’t have an easy job right now. The company plans to file its own proposals next month and appeal its original loss in court. Still, Walker’s tone was, at times, almost comically histrionic: “As just one example, DoJ’s proposal would literally require us to install not one but two separate choice screens before you could access Google search on a Pixel phone you bought.” Not one, but two separate choice screens??!!
The justice department’s says its goal is to increase competition. Its attorneys wrote in a court filing: “A remedy for Google’s unlawful monopolization must simultaneously (1) unfetter these markets from Google’s exclusionary conduct; (2) pry them open to competition; (3) deny Google the fruits of its statutory violations; and (4) prevent Google from monopolizing these and related markets in the future.”
Google search is the cornerstone of the company’s lucrative ad business; Chrome is the second stone. It is the most popular browser in the world, boasting a market share of almost two-thirds of people using the internet. It is an absolute vacuum of browsing data and a key gateway to Google search and therefore ads shown via Google search. Its ads business precedes everything else the company does in profit and importance, ergo Chrome is the second-most vital part of Google. The ads business suffers a dire blow without Chrome, and Google shrinks. That is the justice department’s goal. Google argues that divestiture would hurt US leadership in the tech industry; the justice department argues Google’s monopolistic conduct hurts US leadership in the tech industry.
Google may also be forced to sell off Android, the most popular smartphone operating system. Android is likewise a conduit for data used to sell ads. The sale of Android would also be an enormous hit to Google’s business. The more interesting outcome in regard to Android would be the submission of the operating system to government oversight. What design decisions would a government committee make? It’d be fascinating to see the aesthetic qualities of a government-administered smartphone operating system. Two separate choice screens? Sweet suffering Jesus!
Without Chrome, Google would also lose the extremely valuable youth market. The tech giant’s Chromebooks are a low-cost item for schools that distribute laptops to students. Those laptops use Chrome OS, an operating system designed for web browsing and web-based tasks. Children introduced to one company’s products become accustomed to using them, and may seek out that company’s products as an adult. Apple has stated that training school-age users on its products can nurture a major pipeline of new customers.
Defaults are powerful, whether they appear as devices in schools or the search engine that appears in your browser’s address bar. Even if Google succeeds in appealing the forced divestment of Chrome, it seems likely that the company will be compelled to end its at-least-$20bn deal with Apple to maintain its search engine as the default in the Safari browser. Google’s only concession, it seems from Walker’s blog post, is to say it would be fine with changes, perhaps even complete cancellations, to those agreements. Walker writes that the justice department could have proposed remedies related to “search distribution agreements” – Google’s contracts with Firefox and the like. If even Google’s chief legal officer is saying that he would have preferred changes to those agreements, it is reasonable to infer that he would have accepted those changes. The browser agreements are not long for this world. You, the product’s user, may find yourself tasked with choosing a default search engine for your iPhone’s browser. I would recommend trying something other than Google, perhaps the privacy-focused DuckDuckGo, just for fun. You can always switch back. Google will still be there, waiting for you.
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Elon ‘First Buddy’ Musk and his sidekick debut, Doge
Several weeks ago, “First Buddy” Elon Musk and failed presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy were formally appointed as the heads of the new Department of Government Efficiency. Doge, as Musk insists the department be called, is not part of the US government, but he has given it a gray checkmark on Twitter/X, denoting that it is a “government or multilateral organization account”. Musk and Ramaswamy are, in effect, advisers to Trump. The House oversight committee is creating a subcommittee to work with them. It is mildly funny that a bureau dedicated to paring down bureaucracy requires two heads (and an assist of Marjorie Taylor Greene in the House).
In an essay in the Wall Street Journal, they lay out their vision for the nongovernmental government agency. They plan to work mostly by executive action, by Trump decree, forecasting that the conservative supreme court will agree with his moves. They talk vaguely of efficiencies at a high level – abstracted from specifics as much as possible. For instance: “A drastic reduction in federal regulations provides sound industrial logic for mass head-count reductions across the federal bureaucracy.” These are big words for: “We are going to roll back laws so we can conduct big layoffs. That will lower the government’s costs and increase how much each individual employee works.”
In the same style as Trump, they enumerate their enemies in the form of a cost-cutting list: the media, international cooperation (America first, after all), and liberals. They cite “$535 million a year to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting; $1.5billion for grants to international organizations to nearly $300 million to progressive groups like Planned Parenthood” as examples of what they would cut. In the same breath, they say firing huge swathes of federal employees will not be political retaliation but instead will constitute only apolitical “reductions in force”. They also promise to require all employees to be in the office five days per week.
Musk has tried his damnedest to make Doge seem cutting-edge, but nothing, absolutely nothing, is less punk or sexy than federal spending policy.
He’ll need his gift for galvanizing if he’s to pull of Doge’s multibillion-dollar goals. The previous week, the world’s richest man asked for applications from “high-IQ revolutionaries” to his new endeavor. The perks? Long hours, “tedious work” (Elon’s own words) and no pay.
Musk and his sidekick’s understanding of government appears limited in their public statements, which is perhaps the point of their appointments but is also an obvious hindrance. He and Ramaswamy would like to cut all government programs that no longer have active congressional authorization. This idea makes basic logical sense. Yet, as one observer on X pointed out, such an action would ax healthcare for all US military veterans. The authorization for the Veterans’ Health Care Eligibility Act expired in 1998. Doing so would undoubtedly be an enormous political mistake and highly unlikely to get approved, even if it did save taxpayers some $120bn.
Musk has been named Trump’s “secretary of cost-cutting”. If you’re wondering what his approach to cost-cutting has been in the past, the New York Times has compiled a list of expenses he’s slashed at his menagerie of companies. Short version: His tactics worked well at SpaceX, less so at Tesla. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket costs $550m, whereas Nasa has projected the same spacecraft would cost the agency $4bn to build. At Tesla, Musk refused to use more expensive radar sensors for his cars’ full self-driving mode, opting instead for cameras. The US is now investigating the autonomous driving software’s role in a slew of fatal crashes.
Opt out: how to stop tech companies spying on your phone
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Use encrypted messaging apps
Examples: Signal, Apple iMessage, WhatsApp, Google Messages.
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Apple iMessage: This is also end-to-end encrypted when you’re talking to other people with iPhones and if you have advanced data protection turned on. Do that by going into settings, tapping on your Apple ID profile at the top, tapping on iCloud and scrolling down to the “advanced data protection” option and turning it on.
Google Messages: End-to-end encrypted conversations have “a banner that says: ‘RCS chat with [contact name or phone number]’” and “a lock on the send button when you compose a message”, per Google.
Disappear your messages: Encrypted messaging apps such as Signal and WhatsApp allow users to set messages to automatically be deleted after a certain period of time.
Auto-delete your data
Minimize how much data other apps and services are collecting about you and ensure that the data you do allow them to collect is being auto-deleted.
Google is the biggest holder of data about you. You can minimize how much data the company stores from your activity page at myactivity.google.com.
Turn off your location settings
Law enforcement is actively asking tech companies for location information or buying it. All it takes for you to protect yourself is a 15-minute review:
On iPhones, you can start by going into your settings and search for “location services” at the top.
On Android, start by going to your settings, then “security and privacy”, then “privacy controls”, then “permission manager” and select location.
Read the full how-to guide here.
The wider Techscape
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