we have so many freaking monopolies now a days. we really need to keep companies from owning so much. bring back the media limits and no company should be able to own multiple areas of healthcare and such.
Ooooooooooh shit. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.
Will go to SCOTUS, a few bribes will happen, then it will die.
Please let an outcome from this enable users to change the default Android search from Google search 🙏
this is why it’s silly that people are mad at mozilla for buying a privacy friendly ad company to try and break the monopoly.
Not silly at all. It’s a ship of Theseus situation, and the ship has helmsmen with bad attitudes. Bad attitudes engender bad decisionmaking.
In a healthy market new browsers need to be able to enter… but browsers are so complex from the reckless, endless feature creep that creating a new browser securely (or at all) is unreasonable. (Luckily they are open source and can be forked but the changes are minor compared to the base. A Chromium fork is still Chromium at the end of the day).
Supporting the ad-driven internet is contrary to what is wanted by many users of Firefox/flavors and there is no alternative. It was said that they would destroy the Sith, not join them.
Supporting the ad-driven internet
The thing is that there’s not really a good alternative. There’s real costs in running a service - servers, bandwidth, staff, etc. Either you pay for content directly (subscription services), someone else pays for you (which is the case with many Lemmy servers where admins are paying out of their own pockets), or ads cover the cost for you. People want to use the web for free, so ad-supported content is going to be around for a long time.
I disliked adverts so much as a time waster of limited human life. There may not be a good alternative to dumping toxic waste into a river, for example, but I still think we shouldn’t do it.
Can’t speak for others but I do donate (not as much as I’d like) to Wikipedia and buy merch from some creators (if I like it for what it is).
I would rather pay for works directly, so I prefer a browser with no ads ever.
Sure, that makes sense. A lot of people can’t afford that though, especially in poorer countries.
But then advertising to them is less lucrative too.
Its seriously absurd. I hate ads, but there’s realistically not a better option to profit when providing free software and services like Mozilla is doing. Investing into ads that don’t violate your privacy is a great decision. I don’t know what the hell people want from them.
People don’t seem to realise that developing a browser (a real one, not Chrome with a different paint job), web rendering engine, having the top-notch security expertise that building a modern web engine requires, plus being on the board that decides web standards is expensive.
It’s honestly at a similar scale and complexity to OS development now.
We’re talking hundreds of millions a year to do the work that Mozilla needs to do. People who say “oh I’d chip in a dollar or two, but only if they get rid of all other funding” as if it’s feasible kind of get on my nerves because they clearly don’t see the big picture.
Any time Mozilla tries to diversify their income while still being broadly privacy-respecting they’re branded as evil or too corporate. Any time they ask for donations they’re being greedy beggars. When they take Google’s money they’re shills for big tech. They can’t win. People want Mozilla to work for free.
Exactly. Browser’s are insanely fucking complex, the codebases of Firefox and Chromium are MASSIVE. There is zero chance Mozilla could ever make enough money simply off of donations.
I don’t know what the hell people want from them.
these people are probably already using forks anyway
They want them to meet all of their impossibly high and contradictory standards at the same time. For free. What’s so hard about that?? /s
They should do it like Signal: accept donations. Signal is doing just fine. But Mozilla cannot legally do that as they are a for-profit company. And Mozilla Foundation won’t do that either because they are funded by Mozilla and under their command.
You can accept donations if you’re a for-profit company, there’s no rule against that.
You can do crowdfunding. But general donations is illegal in the US if I understand that correctly. https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/charitable-organizations/charitable-solicitation-state-requirements
You underestimate the complexity of a web browser if you compare it to instant messaging app
They’re comparing the business models, not the software itself.
The problem is the business models revolve around the software. You cannot directly compare them without also comparing the complexity and manpower required to achieve it. Just take a look at W3C spec and you’ll see just how many cases there are to handle when making a browser. Not to mention making it secure and performant. Also, if you want to support web push technology on your browser you also need to have infrastructure to maintain. A donation may work but you’ll have to be content with slow development since the resources can be uncertain.
Signal is a teeny tiny little pet project compared to an entire browser and rendering engine.
Google pays them 400 million. You really think they’re going to get anywhere close to that from donations?
This is a big deal, but just a reminder that this is the District (trial) court, so the next step would be the Circuit Court of Appeals, followed by an appeal to the Supreme Court. There may be some intriguing injunctions that come out of this, but we’re years away from a final disposition.
For the curious, this one came out of the DC Circuit, informally known to be the most technically and administratively savvy circuit, as it deals with a LOT of nitty gritty stuff coming out of Federal agencies.
Clarence Thomas is hiding behind a tree in a yellow suit rubbing his hands together for all the shit Google is gonna give to him to get this immediately overturned…
I was about to comment that this is going to be appealed, and unless something changes with SCOTUS, my money is in it being reversed to some degree.
depends on when it hits the supreme court, for sure.
didn’t someone just say google was ‘very bad’ and should be ‘shut down’? …someone that helped stack the court to its current composition?
Stop making me sad, sir!!!
Clone Teddy Roosevelt.
‘Biggest Antitrust Case of the 21st Century’ so far…
We can only hope
Biggest “so far” they’re far from the only.
Mark my words! the outcome of this will be like a mountain giving birth to a mouse.
Microsoft came out of such antitrust lawsuit unscathed and a decade later went back to pushing its browser down everyone’s throat.
A mountain giving birth to a mouse? Is that a translation from another language? I’m not being critical, it’s just oddly specific and bizarre.
Yeah it is a french expression, the english equivalent is " a long harvest for a little corn "
Here is a link to read about it, its meaning and use and its equivalent in other languages : link
I’ve heard long climb for a short slide.
tbh i care more about meta because of EEE
I thought Microsoft was the company that first embraced the whole “embrace, extend, extinguish” philosophy?
Yeah but they ended up investing in apple to avoid more serious antitrust litigation from becoming a complete monopoly, and Linux ruined their chances of dominating the server maketshare.
Google just took it and did it more discretly over a longer period of time.
Eee?
you need to get checked out, every fediverse user knows that means Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
I thought it meant “Elegant Electric Elephant”
Eccentric Electric Erotica. Took till the third page of images for an elephant to be involved. /S (I think)
My point is people still used that VHSs. They just also bought DVDs. For most people, you didn’t only use one. I think most people went through a period where they used both.
But there is an alternative, search engines that say that are independent but then come crashing down when Bing goes down, which belongs to another convicted yet still existing monopoly.
Will this mean that no one will be able to pay to be the default search, or just that Google will no longer be allowed?
Honestly, Google is still the best free search even though it isn’t as good as it used to be… and if this ruling means that no one can pay to be the default then Google will still win based on name recognition and performance. Plus they will save money by not needing to give it to Apple.
The real loser here is Apple who is going to lose a fairly large revenue stream.
I imagine that, if regulators go hard enough, it’ll make sweeping changes company-wide. Google does a lot of anti-competitive behaviors that don’t involve money and are very sneaky, and as a result, we might see a lot of features be changed in the long term.
I think this may also end up killing their deal with reddit.
The biggest loser is Mozilla, who will lose about 80% of their revenue. If they enforce this, Firefox will pretty much be dead.
Cool, now actually enforce that judgment
Hey now, let’s not be unreasonable!!
America needs to pick up the old ways and start going after monopolies with a sledge hammer to break them into tiny pieces again.
and pass laws that don’t let them pull an ATT and buy back all their fragments and recongeal into an even bigger, more dangerous monopoly than it was before like some kinda fucked up liquid metal terminator of capitalism.
You don’t need to bring your library. Having your library split between multiple platforms isn’t a big deal and most people do it. You just don’t give them any more money.
People didn’t not buy DVDs because they had a library of VHSs.
Uh yes many of us did not buy dvds because we had vhs and couldn’t afford to switch to a new medium.
Just like if we had a dvd collection we didn’t go to HDDVD / Blueray. Many people never got into Blu-ray at all
But eventually we had to and now we have issues with drm and losing purchased digital media on streaming services
I’m not talking about replacing your VHS collection but buying DVDs in addition. You would still watch both. Maybe buying a DVD player was a barrier. But it wasn’t that you owned VHS.
Yes it was for many many people. You seem to find this hard to believe.
Blueray/HDDvd was out before the majority of people stopped using their vhs collections.
As tvs went digital and high def it took a long time for people to care enough to upgrade/replace
Blueray/HDDvd was out before the majority of people stopped using their vhs collections.
Do you have a citation on this? Personally I was DVD only until I got an Xbox One, which could play Blurays.
And we got DVDs because my brother marketed getting a PS2 to my family as a DVD player and a Video Game system, as one of those alone cost the same as a PS2 at the time.
And we gave up VHS tapes long before, as space is at a premium for us. Worse quality, worse features, more work to rewatch something, bigger format, etc.
Ok then switch to streaming. My point was just that just because you have a VHS collection doesn’t mean you can’t get media in another way and still use your VHS collection. And most people would use both while they transitioned. Throwing out all your VHSs for the hot new thing isn’t something a lot of people did. Or throwing out all your DVDs because streaming is a thing. People aren’t restricted to one thing.
