The BBC is reporting the exact opposite of this headline.
"It's also free to keep making payments to partners such as Apple, to secure placement of its browser - another closely watched and contentious part of the case."
Firefox can still get money, and maybe Apple too. The ruling says they can pay for preload, but not for exclusivity.
Google also must share search data with competitors, but it's not totally clear what this is. The ruling mentions helping other engines with "long tail" queries.
All in all this seems like a pretty mild ruling, and an appeal can generally only help Google from a not to bad ruling at this point.
The problem for the judge seems to be that there is no alternative at this point. No other company can bid for or credibly pay Apple/Mozilla as much as Google did. Apple testified they would spend less on innovation if the payment goes away, Mozilla said they wont survive. So the alternative for the judge is to create a market in the next five years where people invest in search, there are more credible products that come up, and are competitive enough to justify the placement bids (ending dependency on google).
The nuclear option was DDG's hope. Google should share their entire data, so DDG can offer the same product without having to build out the thing themselves. The judge correctly identified (imo) where this sharing of index and search results would have meant a bunch of white labeled wrappers selling Google search and would have no incentive to innovate themselves in the short term. Somehow, DDG did not see that happening. At that goal, it's a great ruling, well considered.
Entirely their fault, tbh. Mozilla's C suite has knowingly enriched themselves off this money for over 15 years now. If they were serious about surviving, they would have found alternative funding sources a long time ago.
Firefox isn't a true project. It's Google paying off someone to make Chrome appear not to be a monopoly at first glance.
The search deals were already not exclusive. The real impact will be the other businesses (especially GenAI) where Google will be barred from having exclusivity clauses in its contracts.
This is an astonishing victory for Google, they must be very happy about it.
They get basically everything they want (keeping it all in the tent), plus a negotiating position on search deals where they can refuse something because they can't do it now.
Quite why the judge is so concerned about the rise of AI factoring in here is beyond me. It's fundamentally an anticompetitive decision.
Much like microsoft, it's really the best possible outcome.
Winning a case is one thing, as they can find other reasons to come back.
Losing, and saying "but we were already punished, you got what you want" is such a barrier to EVER putting any sort of realistic reigns on them. They might as well just bury antitrust now and stop pretending.
This is an absolute and disgraceful failure by Amit Mehta, a win for corporate power, and a loss for user freedom and the tech industry at large. Unbelievable the degree to which this judge sold out.
The judge ruled against Google for ideological reasons and then realized what the consequences of his decision were after the fact. Google's monopoly is in the ads space where they control the buy side, sell side, and exchange. The idea that chrome or android were ever a monopoly and should be sold off was ridiculous.
It's largely a win for Google, but it does put them in a slightly weaker position with regard to negotiations for their Apple deal. By striking down Google's ability to form exclusive partnerships, their non-exclusive partnership deals (such as the one with Apple) are now more important.
One would assume the appeal is over the data-sharing requirements, which does feel a little bit like sharing the secret sauce with competitors.
This seems like a very sensible and logical conclusion by the judge to me.
An exclusive contract with Apple/Samsung isn't great, but even Apple testified that they would not have accepted any other searcch engine because everyone else was worse. You can't make restrictions on what Apple is allowed to do because Google violated some law--if Apple wants to make Google the default, they should be allowed to do so! The ban on exclusive contracts makes sense though; they should not be allowed to use contracts to furthur their monopoly position.
And similarly with Chrome; it made no sense to bring Chrome into this equation. Google started, developed, and built Chrome into the best browser available today NOT through exclusive contracts, but because Chrome is just a better product. Users can switch to Firefox/Safari (Mac default)/Edge (Windows default); they don't because Chrome is better. Forcing Google to give up one of its best products is effectively eminent domain by the government to a private company.
With the rise of ChatGPT (I barely use Google anymore) and AI search engines potentially shifting the search landscape, who knows if Google will still be a monopoly 5 years from now. Software moves fast and the best solution to software monopoly is more software competition.
>built Chrome into the best browser available today
haha what? Not even close to true. Chrome is a locked down money maker for Google. It is primarily a data-collection tool for Google. No way is that possibly the best browser available today.
I just wish that also included Google Play Services. Google has a chokehold on all Android manufacturers preventing them of even thinking of using AOSP without Googleware
Regarding Chrome - don’t forget Google used it’s market leading position of their products to block other platforms/browsers (from the top of my head - Windows Phone). Or develop their web apps (or browser APIs) deliberately in such a way that they work best only on Chrome.
This is perhaps a tad ahistorical. Google forked Blink off from WebKit around 2013 - it owes a lot of it's early success to the same technical foundations as Safari (which in turns owes the same debt to Konqueror...)
> You can't make restrictions on what Apple is allowed to do because Google violated some law
I think you can, under the assumption that Apple's decision wasn't independent/voluntary. At least, that seems how it works for people in cases of coercion, conspiracy or impairment.
They should be barred from shipping experimental or non-standardized features in Chrome to prevent them from abusing their monopoly and forcing others hands by creating de-facto standards without a fair discourse.
Experimental features should be allowed in special Chrome builds targeted at developers only, and not be allowed to come preinstalled on any consumer device.
By the way, a pet peeve of mine right now is that reporters covering court cases (and we have so many of public interest lately) never seem to simply paste the link to the online PDF decision/ruling for us all to read, right in the story. (and another user here kindly did that for us below: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.223... )
It seems such a simple step (they must have been using the ruling PDF to write the story) yet why is it always such a hassle for them to feel that they should link the original content? I would rather be able to see the probably dozens of pages ruling with the full details rather than hear it secondhand from a reporter at this point. It feels like they want to be the gatekeepers of information, and poor ones at that.
I think it should be adopted as standard journalistic practice in fact -- reporting on court rulings must come with the PDF.
Aside from that, it will be interesting to see on what grounds the judge decided that this particular data sharing remedy was the solution. Can anyone now simply claim they're a competitor and get access to Google's tons of data?
I am not too familiar with antitrust precedent, but to what extent does the judge rule on how specific the data sharing need to be (what types of data, for what time span, how anonymized, etc. etc.) or appoint a special master? Why is that up to the judge versus the FTC or whoever to propose?
I've noticed this too and I agree it's unacceptable practice. Journalism in general has become wildly resistant to properly citing their sources (or they simply make their citation as difficult to find as possible through various obfuscation techniques) and this is making independent validation of any information online that much more difficult while further entrenching a culture of "just trust me, bro" on the internet in general. It's a deeply infuriating and destructive practice that needs to die out. At least when I was in school & university, properly citing your sources was everything when it came to writing any sort of report or essay. How the adtech industry managed to quietly undo that standard expectation so thoroughly for the sake of engagement metrics is rather nuts to me.
There is a link right there in 3rd paragraph: "U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta", though strangely under the name...
> I would rather be able to see the probably dozens of pages ruling with the full details rather than hear it secondhand from a reporter at this point.
There is no way you'd have time for that (and more importantly, your average reader), but if you do, the extra time it'd take you to find the link is ~0.0% of the total extra time needed to read the decision directly, so that's fine?
> with the full details
You don't have them in those dozens of pages, for example, the very basics of judge's ideological biases are not included.
> I think it should be adopted as standard journalistic practice in fact -- reporting on court rulings must come with the PDF.
Bafflingly, I’ve found this practice to continue even in places like University PR articles describing new papers. Linking to the paper itself is an obvious thing to do, yet many of them won’t even do that.
In addition to playing games to avoid outbound links, I think this practice comes from old journalistic ideals that the journalist is the communicator of the information and therefore including the source directly is not necessary. They want to be the center of the communication and want you to get the information through them.
I would go so far as to inherently mistrust any legal reporting that does not link to the ruling or trial footage at this point. I've watched multiple public trials and seen reporting that simply did not reflect what actually went on.
As a reporter, I can tell you that your comment stems from a common fallacy: y’all think you know better than reporters what our jobs are and what the dynamics of our publishing platform entail.
For some reason, everyone feels like they would know how to be a journalist better than the actual professionals.
That said, reporters have most probably nothing to do with what you’re decrying. Linking policies are not the reporter’s business.
There are probably multiple layers of SEO “experts” and upper management deciding what goes on page and what not.
Funnily enough, they might be super anal about what the story links, and then let Taboola link the worst shit on the Internet under each piece…
So please, when you start your sentence with “reporters” please know that you’re criticizing something they have no power to change.
I don't really care if you think people don't understand details of the job you do, or the system in which you operate. Your name is on the article and it's my expectation at this point that someone telling a story give me the original source when it's easily available. I don't need to know the complications or reasons why it isn't done, I want the right outcome.
If anything, you should be helping to cut through the BS layers and insisting that the original source link (or, even just the full name of the court case) be included with your reporting.
Actual answer is that majority journalists are summarizing other journalists who are summarizing someone they asked about the original content. They have never seen it themselves so can't link it.
> they must have been using the ruling PDF to write the story
Oh you sweet Summer child :-)
The worst is with criminal cases where they can't even be burdened to write what the actual charges are. It's just some vague 'crime' and the charges aren't even summarized - they're just ignored.
> I would rather be able to see the probably dozens of pages ruling with the full details rather than hear it secondhand from a reporter at this point
And the reporter would rather you hear it second hand from them :)
I agree, online "journalists" are absolutely terrible at linking to sources. You'll have articles which literally just cover a video (a filmed press conference, a YouTube video, whatever) that's freely available online and then fail to link to said video.
I don't know what they're teaching at journalistic ethics courses these days. "Provide sources where possible" sounds like it should be like rule 1, yet it never happens.
I feel like way too many journalists or editors still see hyperlinks as a way of "sending traffic to competitors", and as such to be avoided at all cost.
It's simple - the reason there's no PDF is that most people don't want one. If they did, the reporter would be incentivized to include it. You're complaining about them not serving a tiny, tiny minority of readers.
Journalists actively hinder readers from finding the primary source because their coverage outranks it. If readers regularly saw the primary source they would realize how dishonest the Journalists are.
This is my pet peeve about most news articles. Give. me. raw. sources. Not edited clips, RAW CLIPS AND LINKS. I'm so tired of sensationalized news, I always look for raw sources or I assume there's a spin on the story. If someone made a news site that actually gave you raw sources, I would subscribe to them for life.
> Google will have to make available to Qualified Competitors certain search
index and user-interaction data, though not ads data, as such sharing will
...
The court, however, has narrowed the datasets Google will be required to
share to tailor the remedy to its anticompetitive conduct.
I don't like the sound of that.
> Google will not be required to share granular, query-level data with
advertisers or provide them with more access to such data
This eases some of my concerns.
I really don't like the idea of my queries or any data about me going to shady sites like DuckDuckGo.
> The remedy also extends beyond the conduct Plaintiffs seek to redress. It was Google’s control of the Chrome default, not its ownership of Chrome as a whole, that the court highlighted in its liability finding. See Google, 747 F. Supp. 3d at 120–21. Ordering Google to sell one of its most popular products, one that it has built “from the ground up” and in which it has invested (and continues to invest) billions of dollars, in the hope of opening a single channel of distribution to competition—and not even one that was unlawfully foreclosed by the challenged contracts—cannot reasonably be described as a remedy “tailored to fit the wrong creating the occasion for the remedy.” Microsoft III, 253 F.3d at 107; Rem. Tr. at 2466:23–2468:3 (Pichai); id. at 1634:23–1636:2 (Tabriz) (discussing PXR0215 at -257). Further, as a legal matter, the divestiture of Chrome exceeds the proper scope of relief. “All parties agree that the relevant geographic marketis the United States.” Google, 747 F. Supp. 3d at 107. Chrome, however, is not so geographically confined. The vast majority—over 80%—of its monthly active users are located outside the United States. Rem. Tr. at 1619:23–1620:6 (Tabriz). Plaintiffs do not try to make the case that a divestiture of Chrome to just U.S.-based users is feasible.
It’s remarkable that in certain instances, it’s wrong or even potentially dangerous to democracy to question institutions, and in other instances it’s okay to say a judge or a judicial system is corrupt and favoring big tech.
If I am reading this correctly, Google is now required to syndicate their search text ads to "Qualified Competitors." This is important as it will allow companies to monetize AI answers and other search replacements without needing to completely build a corresponding search ad marketplace. The search ad marketplace is a somewhat natural monopoly where the revenue per auction actually grows with the number of auctions so a second search ad marketplace could never develop on its own.
116 comments
[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 87.1 ms ] threadWhere would Mozilla get their 80% of revenue from if Google now has to probably sever and end their search deal for Firefox? [0].
[0] https://www.theverge.com/news/660548/firefox-google-search-r...
A lot can happy from now and then. And this may take many years to grind through the court system.
I wonder if there exists AI models of all the super senior and important judges so we can venture how this will play out through the court system.
"It's also free to keep making payments to partners such as Apple, to secure placement of its browser - another closely watched and contentious part of the case."
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cg50dlj9gm4t
Edit: Even the CNBC body text contradicts its own headline. The confusion seems to be what "exclusive" means.
"The company can make payments to preload products, but they cannot have exclusive contracts, the decision showed."
Google also must share search data with competitors, but it's not totally clear what this is. The ruling mentions helping other engines with "long tail" queries.
All in all this seems like a pretty mild ruling, and an appeal can generally only help Google from a not to bad ruling at this point.
The nuclear option was DDG's hope. Google should share their entire data, so DDG can offer the same product without having to build out the thing themselves. The judge correctly identified (imo) where this sharing of index and search results would have meant a bunch of white labeled wrappers selling Google search and would have no incentive to innovate themselves in the short term. Somehow, DDG did not see that happening. At that goal, it's a great ruling, well considered.
Entirely their fault, tbh. Mozilla's C suite has knowingly enriched themselves off this money for over 15 years now. If they were serious about surviving, they would have found alternative funding sources a long time ago.
Firefox isn't a true project. It's Google paying off someone to make Chrome appear not to be a monopoly at first glance.
-update- CNBC has fixed their headline.
They get basically everything they want (keeping it all in the tent), plus a negotiating position on search deals where they can refuse something because they can't do it now.
Quite why the judge is so concerned about the rise of AI factoring in here is beyond me. It's fundamentally an anticompetitive decision.
Winning a case is one thing, as they can find other reasons to come back.
Losing, and saying "but we were already punished, you got what you want" is such a barrier to EVER putting any sort of realistic reigns on them. They might as well just bury antitrust now and stop pretending.
One would assume the appeal is over the data-sharing requirements, which does feel a little bit like sharing the secret sauce with competitors.
An exclusive contract with Apple/Samsung isn't great, but even Apple testified that they would not have accepted any other searcch engine because everyone else was worse. You can't make restrictions on what Apple is allowed to do because Google violated some law--if Apple wants to make Google the default, they should be allowed to do so! The ban on exclusive contracts makes sense though; they should not be allowed to use contracts to furthur their monopoly position.
And similarly with Chrome; it made no sense to bring Chrome into this equation. Google started, developed, and built Chrome into the best browser available today NOT through exclusive contracts, but because Chrome is just a better product. Users can switch to Firefox/Safari (Mac default)/Edge (Windows default); they don't because Chrome is better. Forcing Google to give up one of its best products is effectively eminent domain by the government to a private company.
With the rise of ChatGPT (I barely use Google anymore) and AI search engines potentially shifting the search landscape, who knows if Google will still be a monopoly 5 years from now. Software moves fast and the best solution to software monopoly is more software competition.
haha what? Not even close to true. Chrome is a locked down money maker for Google. It is primarily a data-collection tool for Google. No way is that possibly the best browser available today.
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=windows+phone+google
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
This is perhaps a tad ahistorical. Google forked Blink off from WebKit around 2013 - it owes a lot of it's early success to the same technical foundations as Safari (which in turns owes the same debt to Konqueror...)
I think you can, under the assumption that Apple's decision wasn't independent/voluntary. At least, that seems how it works for people in cases of coercion, conspiracy or impairment.
What's wrong with that?
This is interesting to me in that I find Google's Gemini and Anthropic's Claude much better for coding / planning work than ChatGPT
Edit: I just checked the stock, I had no idea people priced in a split with that much certainty.
It seems such a simple step (they must have been using the ruling PDF to write the story) yet why is it always such a hassle for them to feel that they should link the original content? I would rather be able to see the probably dozens of pages ruling with the full details rather than hear it secondhand from a reporter at this point. It feels like they want to be the gatekeepers of information, and poor ones at that.
I think it should be adopted as standard journalistic practice in fact -- reporting on court rulings must come with the PDF.
Aside from that, it will be interesting to see on what grounds the judge decided that this particular data sharing remedy was the solution. Can anyone now simply claim they're a competitor and get access to Google's tons of data?
I am not too familiar with antitrust precedent, but to what extent does the judge rule on how specific the data sharing need to be (what types of data, for what time span, how anonymized, etc. etc.) or appoint a special master? Why is that up to the judge versus the FTC or whoever to propose?
There is a link right there in 3rd paragraph: "U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta", though strangely under the name...
> I would rather be able to see the probably dozens of pages ruling with the full details rather than hear it secondhand from a reporter at this point.
There is no way you'd have time for that (and more importantly, your average reader), but if you do, the extra time it'd take you to find the link is ~0.0% of the total extra time needed to read the decision directly, so that's fine?
> with the full details
You don't have them in those dozens of pages, for example, the very basics of judge's ideological biases are not included.
Bafflingly, I’ve found this practice to continue even in places like University PR articles describing new papers. Linking to the paper itself is an obvious thing to do, yet many of them won’t even do that.
In addition to playing games to avoid outbound links, I think this practice comes from old journalistic ideals that the journalist is the communicator of the information and therefore including the source directly is not necessary. They want to be the center of the communication and want you to get the information through them.
That said, reporters have most probably nothing to do with what you’re decrying. Linking policies are not the reporter’s business. There are probably multiple layers of SEO “experts” and upper management deciding what goes on page and what not. Funnily enough, they might be super anal about what the story links, and then let Taboola link the worst shit on the Internet under each piece… So please, when you start your sentence with “reporters” please know that you’re criticizing something they have no power to change.
If anything, you should be helping to cut through the BS layers and insisting that the original source link (or, even just the full name of the court case) be included with your reporting.
Oh you sweet Summer child :-)
The worst is with criminal cases where they can't even be burdened to write what the actual charges are. It's just some vague 'crime' and the charges aren't even summarized - they're just ignored.
And the reporter would rather you hear it second hand from them :)
I agree, online "journalists" are absolutely terrible at linking to sources. You'll have articles which literally just cover a video (a filmed press conference, a YouTube video, whatever) that's freely available online and then fail to link to said video.
I don't know what they're teaching at journalistic ethics courses these days. "Provide sources where possible" sounds like it should be like rule 1, yet it never happens.
How is this relevant? Apple is the one selling exclusive access to search on iPhone, not Google.
> Google will have to make available to Qualified Competitors certain search index and user-interaction data, though not ads data, as such sharing will ... The court, however, has narrowed the datasets Google will be required to share to tailor the remedy to its anticompetitive conduct.
I don't like the sound of that.
> Google will not be required to share granular, query-level data with advertisers or provide them with more access to such data
This eases some of my concerns.
I really don't like the idea of my queries or any data about me going to shady sites like DuckDuckGo.
The Bloomberg article is much better on what exactly is the remedy. IMHO: they got off easy.
Bloomberg article is better, has more details on the remedy.
IMHO: They got off easy. Looking forward to reading Matt Stoller’s take on this.
Chrome is the most sophisticated and awesome software ever built, next to Linux. It leads and drives web innovation.
Don’t get me wrong - my main drive is Firefox but googles investment in Chrome benefits every single player in the internet.
> The remedy also extends beyond the conduct Plaintiffs seek to redress. It was Google’s control of the Chrome default, not its ownership of Chrome as a whole, that the court highlighted in its liability finding. See Google, 747 F. Supp. 3d at 120–21. Ordering Google to sell one of its most popular products, one that it has built “from the ground up” and in which it has invested (and continues to invest) billions of dollars, in the hope of opening a single channel of distribution to competition—and not even one that was unlawfully foreclosed by the challenged contracts—cannot reasonably be described as a remedy “tailored to fit the wrong creating the occasion for the remedy.” Microsoft III, 253 F.3d at 107; Rem. Tr. at 2466:23–2468:3 (Pichai); id. at 1634:23–1636:2 (Tabriz) (discussing PXR0215 at -257). Further, as a legal matter, the divestiture of Chrome exceeds the proper scope of relief. “All parties agree that the relevant geographic marketis the United States.” Google, 747 F. Supp. 3d at 107. Chrome, however, is not so geographically confined. The vast majority—over 80%—of its monthly active users are located outside the United States. Rem. Tr. at 1619:23–1620:6 (Tabriz). Plaintiffs do not try to make the case that a divestiture of Chrome to just U.S.-based users is feasible.
Anyone have a rubric I can follow?