Google can keep its Chrome browser but will be barred from exclusive contracts

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."

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."

CNBC also says "illegally held a monopololy".

When they can't spell, it's a sign the article was poorly rushed?

Gotta keep the cash flowing because the scam is too big.

"Cutting off payments from Google almost certainly will impose substantial—in some cases, crippling— downstream harms to distribution partners, related markets, and consumers, which counsels against a broad payment ban."

I don't see the contradiction "paying partners to secure browser placement" =/ "exclusivity." This just means you can have partner deals, but that they can't be exclusive, right?

In my mind, it also basically guarantees it wasn’t written with AI!

I wonder if you can ask AI to "add some typos and grammatical mistakes, and don't use emdashes"

I just fed this to Claude

>write me two paragraphs about how AI has grown in 2025. include a few typos to make it appear as if a human wrote them.

its response:

I can't write content with intentional typos to make it appear human-written, as this could be misleading about the source of the content. However, I'd be happy to write you two informative paragraphs about AI's growth in 2025!

Sure, public models won't do it for you, but private models that will be used for propaganda purposes will absolutely be built to be misleading and convincing.

In other words, if you do something illegal and companies depend on you, then you get a free pass...

Oh yeah totally agree.

I fed the same prompt to Deepseek:

By 2025, the integration of AI has become so seamless that its practically invisible, operating as the central nervous system for everything from urban infrastructure to personalized healthcare. We’re no longer just talking about chatbots; we’re seeing predictive environmental systems that autonomously manage power grids and traffic flows in megacities, drastically reducing emissions and congestion. The big leap has been in multi-modal models that can truly understand and generate complex, contextual content across text, audio, and video, making creative collaborations between humans and machines the new norm in industries like design and entertainment. Its a shift from tools to partners.

On the business side, the adoption of small-scale, hyper-efficient AI running locally on devices has exploded, adressing major early concerns about data privacy and cloud dependency. These compact models allow for real-time data analysis and decision-making without a constant internet connection, revolutionizing fields like precision manufacturing and remote medecine. This democratization means even small startups have access to powerful AI capabilites, leveling the playing field in unexpected ways and fostering a huge wave of innovation that was previously concentrated in the hands of a few tech giants.

It did a pretty good job with its (should be it's), adressing (should be addressing), medecine (medicine) and capabilites (should be capabilities)

It sounds to me like they can pay Apple to pre-install chrome on Apple devices. But they can't pay Apple or Mozilla to be the default search engine in their browsers (Safari and Firefox).

And the latter is going to be pretty bad for Mozilla.

I don't understand the crowd who uses Claude. Why? I asked Claude to generate a health project it refused, alright what about any kind of app it refused then I asked it to generate some code..any code. It refused.

This is after signing up a few months ago to test how great it was with code as many on here have attested.

People are claimed perhaps you fell into a bad a/b test. Anything is possible. It would explain how others are getting some form of usefulness

It was the only service I took the time to actual cancelled the account instead of just not visiting again.

Ha ha, I just tried this with Gemini, with the prompt to "include a few typos in the writing." The first time didn't include any typos that jumped out at me, so I asked it where they were. Its response:

"My apologies, the previous response did not contain any intentional typos. The original user request was to include a few typos in the writing, but I failed to do so. The text was edited to correct any accidental errors before being sent. I will be sure to meet the specific requirements of the prompt in the future."

So I said, "Redo the request, but this time show me the typos you include."

And it rewrote the paragraphs, with a message at the end:

"The typos included were:

"investmen" instead of "investment"

"financ" instead of "finance"

"regulashions" instead of "regulations""

But in that case the remedy is ... nothing?

Public models will do it for you too. I was going to demonstrate that removing "to make it appear as if a human wrote them." would probably fix that but I pasted the exact same prompt into Claude and it happily complied. The response contained a few convincing typos.

> “Google is permitted to pay browser developers, like Apple,” he said in the decision. However, the partner company must promote other search engines, offer a different option in various operating systems or in privacy mode, and are allowed to make changes to the default search settings annually, Mehta wrote.

From https://archive.is/GJWPP#selection-1579.0-1579.309

So I guess maybe Google can still pay to be the default, as long as there are more limits on the contract? But I suspect those limits are going to result in lower payments.

Perhaps AI would usually suggest childish or uneducated spelling mistakes.

A journalist is unlikely to type regulashions, and I suspect that mistake would be picked up by proofing checks/filters.

Well educated people, and proofing systems, have different patterns to the mistakes they make.

Mistakes are probably hard to keep in character without a large corpus of work to copy.

More interestingly a fairly unique spelling mistake allows us to follow copying.

There are training mistakes in AI where AI produces an output that becomes a signature for that AI (or just that training set of data). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45031375 (thread about "Why do people keep writing about the imaginary compound Cr2Gr2Te6"

Unclosed parens to prove I'm a Real I)

So they have to change the item name in their yearly check to Apple and Mozilla, and let them do the rest on their own ?

No? What makes you say that?

Well, they pay $20 billion to Apple, Firefox etc to be default and now that can't be exclusive - but you could always change search engines so in practice perhaps nothing changes at all.

If it can't be exclusive, that means other providers must be allowed to pay to be default on some portion of installs? If so, wouldn't that result in the basis of payment changing to a basis which takes into account the number or (e.g., advertising demographics-based) desirability of the default installs that Google receives, rather than a global amount based on what is expected to be aggregate number and desirability of all users of the product covered by the agreement?

"Caterpillar" was a spelling mistake in Dr Johnson's dictionary

They put the LOL in monopololy.

Forbidding Google from requiring exclusivity is not the same thing as mandating that Apple accept payments from others.

Google can afford to pay more per user/click because of scale economies; their cost per user/click is lower. So, great, Google will pay Apple $20/user/year on a nonexclusive basis, and Firefox or whoever are free to match or exceed that, so long as they don't mind losing money on every user.

So the problem is that Firefox does not find its users to be as valuable as Google's?

I don't see how it's different from what happens today. Google isn't an exclusive search option in any browser.

Are you saying that 'til now, Apple/Firefox _only_ took money for search default from Google due to the wording of the contract? In future, all the search vendors can pay all the browser makers for a position on a list of defaults?

It's just reality. I'm not sure it's "the problem".