Technology

59652 readers

2788 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

757

DOJ indicates it’s considering Google breakup following monopoly ruling (www.cnbc.com)

submitted 1 month ago by Xatolos@reddthat.com to c/technology@lemmy.world

87 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] ripcord@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I don't see why a breakup would mean a Firefox deal can't be done anymore. Unless the search engine business shut down, they would still be motivated to have a default search engine deal with browsers.

What might change, I think, could be:

Search engine may be way less motivated to have a deal with Firefox. FF has pretty low market share. One popular theory is that Google continues to subsidize FF partly to make it look like there is other viable browser competition and that they are helping foster it (for antitrust reasons). If search and browser were different companies - not being proposed I don't believe, but could happen in a breakup - this might lessen. Although apparently even 2-5% of the market is worth billions so I could see it easily continuing. Especially if signs are that other browsers start losing some share.
Less money to FF: If the ads biz does become less lucrative, that'd flow downstream to deals like the one with Mozilla.

But I don't see any reason why they "wouldn't be able" to have a deal anymore.

[–] Dasnap@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

But I don’t see any reason why they “wouldn’t be able” to have a deal anymore.

It's this part of the article that stuck out to me:

the DOJ suggested limiting or prohibiting default agreements and “other revenue-sharing arrangements related to search and search-related products.” That would include Google’s search position agreements with Apple’s iPhone and Samsung devices — deals that cost the company billions of dollars a year in payouts. The agency suggested one way to do this is requiring a “choice screen,” which could allow users to pick from other search engines.

[–] ripcord@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

Wow, I totally missed that part. That would be a potentially different story.