The FTC / DOJ should strip Google of Chrome.
Honestly, they should split Google into four or five "baby Bell"-type companies. They're ensnaring the public and web commerce in so many ways:
- Chrome URL bar is a "search bar"
- You have to pay to maintain your trademark even if you own the .com, because other parties can place ads in front of you with Google Search. (Same on Google Play Store.)
- Google search is the default search
- Paid third parties for Google search to be the default search
- Paid third parties for Google Chrome to be the default browser
- Required handset / Android manufacturers to bundle Google Play services
- Own Adsense and a large percentage of web advertising
- Made Google Payments the default for pay with Android
- Made Google accounts the default
- Via Google Accounts, removes or dampens the ability for companies to know their customer
- Steers web standards in a way advantageous to Google
- Pulls information from websites into Google's search interface, removing the need to use the websites providing the data (same as most AI tools now)
- Use Chrome to remove adblock and other extensions that harm their advertising revenues
- Use Adsense, Chrome performance, and other signals to rank Search results
- Owns YouTube, the world's leading media company - one company controls too much surface area of how you publish and advertise
- Pushes YouTube results via Google and Android
... and that's just scratching the surface.
Many big tech companies should face this same judgment, but none of the rest are as brazen or as vampiric as Google.
No it isn't. If you want your capitalism to be liberal, you need antitrust, true. If you only want capitalism, and don't really care about the 'liberty' part, you can check the mercantile capitalism of old. It worked quite well for people with power.
It’s actually kinda simple: they don’t, at least not continuously. It’s “what you use” because you decided that’s true at some point in the past. All you have to do now is decide that some other browser is “what you use”. You can even take it a step further and decide that Chrome is “not what you use”.
(And actually, if you go through with it, you might discover reasons for why you don’t want to switch like “bookmarks” and “saved passwords”. In my opinion, if it is not easy to transfer those things, that is further reason to switch because vendor lock-in is user-hostile.)
For a normal user they would just switch back to chrome because that is what works, they don’t care about our complaints, they care that what they want to use works.
One failure mode of unchecked and unregulated capitalism is the establishment of monopolies that can starve oxygen from the rest of the ecosystem.
In order to have maximally efficient and broadly beneficial capitalism, you need strong anti-trust mechanisms to reoxygenate the environment for new competition. Regular enforcement also means that labor and investment capital reap the most rewards instead of calcified, legacy incumbents.
Companies need to be constantly fighting to survive. If they're sitting comfortable and growing without controls, something went wrong and the rest of the fitness landscape is being distorted by an invasive species.
Antitrust Regulation is incredibly pro-market and pro-competition.