Google Archive

Next up in my backlog of news to cover: the US Department of Justice’s proposed remedies for Google’s monopolistic abuse. Now that Judge Amit Mehta has found Google is a monopolist, lawyers for the Department of Justice have begun proposing solutions to correct the company’s illegal behavior and restore competition to the market for search engines. In a new 32-page filing (included below), they said they are considering both “behavioral and structural remedies.“ That covers everything from applying a consent decree to keep an eye on the company’s behavior to forcing it to sell off parts of its business, such as Chrome, Android, or Google Play. ↫ Richard Lawler at The Verge While I think it would be a great idea to break Google up, such an action taken in a vacuum seems to be rather pointless. Say Google is forced to spin off Android into a separate company – how is that relatively small Android, Inc. going to compete with the behemoth that is Apple and its iOS to which such restrictions do not apply? How is Chrome Ltd. going to survive Microsoft’s continued attempts at forcing Edge down our collective throats? Being a dedicated browser maker is working out great for Firefox, right? This is the problem with piecemeal, retroactive measures to try and “correct” a market position that you have known for years is being abused – sure, this would knock Google down a peg, but other, even larger megacorporations like Apple or Microsoft will be the ones to benefit most, not any possible new companies or startups. This is exactly why a market-wide, equally-applied set of rules and regulations, like the European Union’s Digital Markets Act, is a far better and more sustainable approach. Unless similar remedies are applied to Google’s massive competitors, these Google-specific remedies will most likely only make things worse, not better, for the American consumer.

Google now displays convenient artificial intelligence-based answers at the top of its search pages — meaning users may never click through to the websites whose data is being used to power those results. But many site owners say they can’t afford to block Google’s AI from summarizing their content. That’s because the Google tool that sifts through web content to come up with its AI answers is the same one that keeps track of web pages for search results, according to publishers. Blocking Alphabet Inc.’s Google the way sites have blocked some of its AI competitors would also hamper a site’s ability to be discovered online. ↫ Julia Love and Davey Alba OSNews still relies partially on advertising right now, and thus Google continues to play a role in our survival. You can help by reducing our dependency on Google by supporting us through Patreon, making donations using Ko-Fi, or buying our merch. The more of you support us, the closer to reality the dream of an ad-free OSNews not dependent on Google becomes. OSNews is my sole source of income, and if that does not work out, OSNews will cease to exist if I’m forced to find another job. Due to Google’s utter dominance on the internet, websites and publishers have no choice but to accept whatever Google decides to do. Not being indexed by the most popular search engine on the web with like 90% market share is a death sentence, but feeding Google’s machine learning algorithms will be a slow death by a thousands cuts, too, for many publishers. The more content is fed to Google’s AI tools, the better they’ll get at simply copying your style to a T, and the better they’ll get at showing just the little paragraph or line that matters as a Google result, meaning you won’t have to visit the site in question. It’s also not great for Google in the long-term, either. Google Search relies on humans making content for people to find; if there’s no more quality content for people to find, people aren’t going to be using Google as much anymore. In what is typical of the search giant, it seems they’re not really looking ahead very far into the future, chasing short-term profits riding the AI hype train, while long-term profits take a back seat. Maybe I’m just too stupid to understand the Silicon Valley galaxy brain business boys, but to a simple man like me it seems rather stupid to starve the very websites, publishers, authors, and so on that your main product relies on to be useful in the first place. I honestly don’t even know how much of OSNews’ traffic comes from Google, so I don’t know how much it would even affect us were we to tell Google’s crawlers to get bent. My guess is that search traffic is still a sizable portion of our traffic, so I’m definitely not going to gamble the future of OSNews. Luckily we’re quite small and I doubt many people are interested in AI generating my writing style and the topics I cover anyway, so I don’t think I have to worry as much as some of the larger tech websites do.

Last week wasn’t the first time Google was declared a monopoly – eight months ago, in the Epic vs. Google case, Google’s control over the Play Store was also declared monopolistic. The judge, Google, and Epic have been arguing ever since over possible remedies, and in two weeks’ time, we’ll know what the judge is going to demand of Google. Eight months after a federal jury unanimously decided that Google’s Android app store is an illegal monopoly in Epic v. Google, Donato held his final hearing on remedies today. While we don’t yet know what will happen, he repeatedly shut down any suggestion that Google shouldn’t have to open up its store to rival stores, that it’d be too much work or cost too much, or that the proposed remedies go too far. “We’re going to tear the barriers down, it’s just the way it’s going to happen,” said Donato. “The world that exists today is the product of monopolistic conduct. That world is changing.” Donato will issue his final ruling in a little over two weeks. ↫ Sean Hollister at The Verge I was a bit confused by what “opening up” the Play Store really meant, since Android is already quite friendly to installing whatever other applications and application stores you want, but what they’re talking about here is allowing rival application stores inside the Play Store. This way, instead of downloading, say, the F-Droid APK from the web and installing it, you could just install the F-Droid application store straight from within the Play Store. Epic wants the judge to take it a step further and force Google to also give rival application stores access to every Play Store application, allowing them to take ownership of said applications, I guess? I’m not entirely sure how that would work, considering I doubt there’d be much overlap between the offerings of the various stores. The prospect of micromanaging where every application gets its updates from seems like a lot of busywork, but at the same time, it’s the kind of fine-grained control power users would really enjoy. A point of contention is whether or not Google would have to perform human review on every application store and their applications inside the Play Store, and even if Google should have any form of control at all. What’s interesting about all these court cases in the United States is how closely the arguments and proposed remedies align with the European Digital Markets Act. Where the EU made a set of pretty clear and straightforward rules for megacorporations to follow, thereby creating a level playing field for all of them, the US seems to want to endlessly take each offending company to court, which feels quite messy, time-consuming, and arbitrary, especially when medieval nonsense like jury trials are involved. This is probably a result of the US using common law, whereas the EU uses civil (Napoleonic) law, but it’s interesting nonetheless.

While a US judge ruled last week that Google is a monopoly, and hat it has abused its monopoly position, potential remedies were not part of the case up until this point. Now, though, the US Department of Justice is mulling over potential remedies, and it seems everything is on the table – down to breaking Google up. Justice Department officials are considering what remedies to ask a federal judge to order against the search giant, said three people with knowledge of the deliberations involving the agency and state attorneys general who helped to bring the case. They are discussing various proposals, including breaking off parts of Google, such as its Chrome browser or Android smartphone operating system, two of the people said. Other scenarios under consideration include forcing Google to make its data available to rivals, or mandating that it abandon deals that made its search engine the default option on devices like the iPhone, said the people, who declined to be identified because the process is confidential. The government is meeting with other companies and experts to discuss their proposals for limiting Google’s power, the people said. ↫ David McCabe and Nico Grant The United States has a long history of breaking companies up, but the real question here is how, exactly, you would break Google up. Google makes virtually all of its money using its advertising business, and products like Chrome or Android in an of themselves make little to no money – they probably only cost Google money. Their real purpose is to direct people to using Google Search, which is where the various ads are Google’s real money maker. In other words, what would happen if you were to split off Chrome or Android? How are these products supposed to make money and survive, financially? I don’t understand entirely how Google’s advertising business spaghetti is organised, but it seems like to me that’s where any talk of splitting Google up to create breathing room in the market should be focusing on. Breaking that core business up into several independent online advertising companies, which would suddenly have to compete with each other as well as with others on a more equal footing, would be much better for consumer than turning Chrome or Android into unsustainable businesses. In an advertising market not dominated by one giant player, there’s far more room and opportunity for smaller, perhaps more ethical companies to spring up and survive. Perhaps I’m wrong, and maybe there is life in a business that contains everything Google does except for online advertising, but I feel like said new company would not survive in a market where it has to contend with other abusive heavyweights like Facebook and Apple.

That sure is a big news drop for a random Tuesday. A federal judge ruled that Google violated US antitrust law by maintaining a monopoly in the search and advertising markets. “After having carefully considered and weighed the witness testimony and evidence, the court reaches the following conclusion: Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” according to the court’s ruling, which you can read in full at the bottom of this story. “It has violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act.” ↫ Lauren Feiner at The Verge Among many other things, the judge mentions Google’s own admissions that the company can do pretty much whatever it wants with Google Search and its advertisement business, without having to worry about users opting to go elsewhere or ad buyers leaving the Google platform. Studies from inside Google itself made it very clear that Google could systematically make Search worse without it affecting user and/or usage numbers in any way, shape, or form – because users have nowhere else to realistically go. While the ability to raise prices at will without fear of losing customers is a sure sign of being a monopoly, so is being able to make a product worse without fear of losing customers, the judge argues. Google plans to appeal, obviously, and this ruling has nothing yet to say about potential remedies, so what, exactly, is going to change is as of yet unknown. Potential remedies will be handled during the next phase of the proceedings, with the wildest and most aggressive remedy being a potential break-up of Google, Alphabet, or whatever it’s called today. My sights are definitely set on a break-up – hopefully followed by Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft – to create some much-needed breathing room into the technology market, and pave the way for a massive number of newcomers to compete on much fairer terms. Of note is that the judge also put yet another nail in the coffin of Google’s various exclusivity deals, most notable with Apple and, for our interests, with Mozilla. Google pays Apple well over 20 billion dollars a year to be the default search engine on iOS, and it pays about 80% of Mozilla’s revenue to be the default search engine in Firefox. According to the judge, such deals are anticompetitive. Mehta rejected Google’s arguments that its contracts with phone and browser makers like Apple were not exclusionary and therefore shouldn’t qualify it for liability under the Sherman Act. “The prospect of losing tens of billions in guaranteed revenue from Google — which presently come at little to no cost to Apple — disincentivizes Apple from launching its own search engine when it otherwise has built the capacity to do so,” he wrote. ↫ Lauren Feiner at The Verge If the end of these deals become part of the package of remedies, it will be a massive financial blow to Apple – 20 billion dollars a year is about 15% of Apple’s total annual operating profits, and I’m also pretty sure those Google billions are counted as part of Tim Cook’s much-vaunted services revenue, so losing it would definitely impact Apple directly where it hurts. Sure, it’s not like it’ll make Apple any less of a dangerous behemoth, but it will definitely have some explaining to do to investors. Much more worrisome, however, is the similar deal Google has with Mozilla. About 80% of Mozilla’s total revenue comes from a search deal with Google, and if that deal were to be dissolved, the consequences for Mozilla, and thus for Firefox, would be absolutely immense. This is something I’ve been warning about for years now, and the end of this deal would be yet another worry that I’ve voiced repeatedly becoming reality, right after Mozilla becoming an advertising company and making Firefox worse in the name of quick profits. One by one, every single concern I’ve voiced about the future of Firefox is becoming reality. Canonical, Fedora, KDE, GNOME, and many other stakeholders – ignore these developments at your own peril.

As uBlock Origin lead developer and maintainer Raymond Hill explained on Friday, this is the result of Google deprecating support for the Manifest v2 (MV2) extensions platform in favor of Manifest v3 (MV3). “uBO is a Manifest v2 extension, hence the warning in your Google Chrome browser. There is no Manifest v3 version of uBO, hence the browser will suggest alternative extensions as a replacement for uBO,” Hill explained. ↫ Sergiu Gatlan at Bleeping Computer If you’re still using Chrome, or any possible Chrome skins who have not committed to keeping Manifest v2 extensions enabled, it’s really high time to start thinking about jumping ship if ad blocking matters to you. Of course, we don’t know for how long Firefox will remain able to properly block ads either, but for now, it’s obviously the better choice for those of us who care about a better browsing experience. And just to reiterate: I fully support anyone’s right to block ads, even on OSNews. Your computer, your rules. There are a variety of other, better means to support OSNews – our Patreon, individual donations through Ko-Fi, or buying our merch – that are far better for us than ads will ever be.

In 2018, we announced the deprecation and transition of Google URL Shortener because of the changes we’ve seen in how people find content on the internet, and the number of new popular URL shortening services that emerged in that time. This meant that we no longer accepted new URLs to shorten but that we would continue serving existing URLs. Today, the time has come to turn off the serving portion of Google URL Shortener. Please read on below to understand more about how this will impact you if you’re using Google URL Shortener. ↫ Sumit Chandel and Eldhose Mathokkil Babu It should cost Google nothing to keep this running for as long as Google exists, and yet, this, too, has to be killed off and buried in the Google Graveyard. We’ll be running into non-resolving Google URL Shortener links for decades to come, both on large, popular websites a well as on obscure forums and small websites. You’ll find a solution to some obscure problem a decade from now, but the links you need will be useless, and you’ll rightfully curse Google for being so utterly petty. Relying on anything Google that isn’t directly serving its main business – ads – is a recipe for disaster, and will cause headaches down the line. Things like Gmail, YouTube, and Android are most likely fine, but anything consumer-focused is really a lottery.

It’s time for Google being Google, this time by using an undocumented APIs to track resource usage when using Chrome. When visiting a *.google.com domain, the Google site can use the API to query the real-time CPU, GPU, and memory usage of your browser, as well as info about the processor you’re using, so that whatever service is being provided – such as video-conferencing with Google Meet – could, for instance, be optimized and tweaked so that it doesn’t overly tax your computer. The functionality is implemented as an API provided by an extension baked into Chromium – the browser brains primarily developed by Google and used in Chrome, Edge, Opera, Brave, and others. ↫ Brandon Vigliarolo at The Register The original goal of the API was to give Google’s various video chat services – I’ve lost count – the ability to optimise themselves based on the available system resources. Crucially, though, this API is only available to Google’s domains, and other, competing services cannot make use of it. This is in clear violation of the European Union’s Digital Markets Act, and with Chrome being by far the most popular browser in the world, and thus a clear gatekeeper, the European Commission really should have something to say about this. For its part, Google told The Register it claims to comply with the DMA, so we might see a change to this API soon. Aside from optimising video chat performance, the API, which is baked into a non-removable extension, also tracks performance issues and crashes and reports these back to Google. This second use, too, is at its core not a bad thing – especially if users are given the option to opt out of such crash analytics. Still, it seems odd to use an undocumented API for something like this, but I’m not a developer so what do I know. Mind you, other Chromium-based browsers also report this data back to Google, which is wild when you think about it. Normally I would suggest people switch to Firefox, but I’ve got some choice words for Firefox and Mozilla, too, later today.

Surprisingly quietly, in the middle of Apple’s WWDC, Google’s ChromeOS team has made a rather massive announcement that seems to be staying a bit under the radar. Google is announcing today that it is replacing many of ChromeOS’ current relatively standard Linux-based subsystems with the comparable subsystems from Android. To continue rolling out new Google AI features to users at a faster and even larger scale, we’ll be embracing portions of the Android stack, like the Android Linux kernel and Android frameworks, as part of the foundation of ChromeOS. We already have a strong history of collaboration, with Android apps available on ChromeOS and the start of unifying our Bluetooth stacks as of ChromeOS 122. ↫ Prajakta Gudadhe and Alexander Kuscher on the Chromium blog The benefits to Google here are obvious: instead of developing and maintaining two variants of the Linux kernel and various related subsystems, they now only have to focus on one, saving money and time. It will also make it easier for both platforms to benefit from new features and bugfixes, which should benefit users of both platforms quite a bit. As mentioned in the snippet, the first major subsystem in ChromeOS to be replaced by its Android counterpart is Bluetooth. ChromeOS was using the BlueZ Bluetooth stack, the same one used by most (all?) Linux distributions today, which was initially developed by Qualcomm, but has now switched over to using Fluoride, the one from Android. According to Google, Fluoride has a number of benefits over BlueZ. It runs almost entirely in userspace, as opposed to BlueZ, where more than 50% of the code resides in the kernel. In addition, Fluoride is written in Rust, and Google claims it has a simpler architecture, making it easier to perform testing. Google also highlights that Fluoride has a far larger userbase – i.e., all Android users – which also presents a number of benefits. Google performed internal tests to measure the improvements as a result from switching ChromeOS from BlueZ to Fluoride, and the test results speak for themselves – pairing is faster, pairing fails less often, and reconnecting an already paired device fails less often. With Bluetooth being a rather problematic technology to use, any improvements to the user experience are welcome. At the end of Google’s detailed blog post about the switch to Fluoride, the company notes that it intends for the project as whole – which is called Project Floss – to be a standalone open source project, capable of running on any Linux distribution. ↫ Russ Lindsay, Abhishek Pandit-Subedi, Alain Michaud, and Loic Wei Yu Neng on the chromeOS dev website We aspire to position Project Floss as a standalone open source project that can reach beyond the walls of Google’s own operating system in a way where we can maximize the overall value and agility of the larger Bluetooth ecosystem. We also intend to support the Linux community as a whole with the goal that Floss can easily run on most Linux distributions. If Fluoride can indeed deliver tangible, measurable benefits in Bluetooth performance on Linux desktops, I have no doubt quite a few distributions will be more than willing to switch over. Bluetooth is used a lot, and if Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch, and so on, can improve the Bluetooth experience by switching over, I’m pretty sure they will, or at least consider doing so.

If, for some reason, you’re still using Chrome or one of the browsers that put a little hat on Chrome and call it a different browser, the time you’re going to want to consider switching to the only real alternative – Firefox – is getting closer and closer. Yesterday, Google has announced that the end of Manifest V2 is now truly here. Starting on June 3 on the Chrome Beta, Dev and Canary channels, if users still have Manifest V2 extensions installed, some will start to see a warning banner when visiting their extension management page – chrome://extensions – informing them that some (Manifest V2) extensions they have installed will soon no longer be supported. At the same time, extensions with the Featured badge that are still using Manifest V2 will lose their badge. This will be followed gradually in the coming months by the disabling of those extensions. Users will be directed to the Chrome Web Store, where they will be recommended Manifest V3 alternatives for their disabled extension. For a short time after the extensions are disabled, users will still be able to turn their Manifest V2 extensions back on, but over time, this toggle will go away as well. ↫ David Li on the Chromium blog In case you’ve been asleep at the wheel – and if you’re still using Chrome, you most likely are – Manifest V3 will heavily limit what content blockers can do, making them less effective at things like blocking ads. In a move that surprises absolutely nobody, it’s not entirely coincidental that Manifest V3 is being pushed hard by Google, the world’s largest online advertising company. While Google claims all the major content blockers have Manifest V3 versions available, the company fails to mention that they carry monikers such as “uBlock Origin Lite”, to indicate they are, well, shittier at their job than their Manifest V2 counterparts. I can’t make this any more clear: switch to Firefox. Now. While Firefox and Mozilla sure aren’t perfect, they have absolutely zero plans to phase out Manifest V2, and the proper, full versions of content blockers will continue to work. As the recent leaks have made very clear, Chrome is even more of a vehicle for user tracking and ad targeting than we already knew, and with the deprecation of Manifest V2 from Chrome, Google is limiting yet another avenue for blocking ads. OSNews has ads, and they are beyond my control, since our ads are managed by OSNews’ owner, and not by me. My position has always been clear: your computer, your rules. Nobody has any right to display ads on your computer, using your bandwidth, using your processor cycles, using your pixels. Sure, it’d be great if we could earn some income through ads, but we’d greatly prefer you become a Patreon (which removes ads) or make an individual donation to support OSNews and keep us alive that way instead.

Last week, Google unveiled a new little feature in Google Search, called “Web”. Residing alongside the various other options like “All”, “Images”, “Video”, and so on, its goal is to effectively strip Google Search results from everything we generally don’t like, and just present a list of actual links to actual websites. It turns out it’s quite simple to set this as your default search “engine” in your browser, so somebody made a website to make that process a little easier. On May 15th Google released a new “Web” filter that removes “AI Overview” and other clutter, leaving only traditional web results. Here is how you can set “Google Web” as your default search engine. ↫ TenBlueLinks.org It’s important to note that this is not some separate search engine, and that no data is flowing any differently than when using regular Google. All this does is append the parameter UDM=14 to the URL, which loads the option “Web”.

This is not a joke: Google will now let you perform a “web” search. It’s rolling out “web” searches now, and in my early tests on desktop, it’s looking like it could be an incredibly popular change to Google’s search engine. The optional setting filters out almost all the other blocks of content that Google crams into a search results page, leaving you with links and text — and Google confirms to The Verge that it will block the company’s new AI Overviews as well. ↫ Sean Hollister at The Verge I hate what the web has become.

While Firefox and Safari phased out third party cookies years ago, it’s taking Chrome a bit longer because, well, daddy Google got ads to sell. As such, Google has been developing a complicated new alternative to third party cookies that it calls “Privacy sandbox”, a name in the vain of “Greenland”. This process has not exactly been going well, because Google has had to postpone phasing out third party cookies several times now, and today, they had to postpone it again. This time, however, it’s because the UK competition authority, the CMA, still has some questions. We recognize that there are ongoing challenges related to reconciling divergent feedback from the industry, regulators and developers, and will continue to engage closely with the entire ecosystem. It’s also critical that the CMA has sufficient time to review all evidence including results from industry tests, which the CMA has asked market participants to provide by the end of June. Given both of these significant considerations, we will not complete third-party cookie deprecation during the second half of Q4. We remain committed to engaging closely with the CMA and ICO and we hope to conclude that process this year. Assuming we can reach an agreement, we envision proceeding with third-party cookie deprecation starting early next year. ↫ Google’s Greenland blog Making a browser good enough to take over almost the entire browser market was an absolute master stroke by Google. Now can you all please switch over to Firefox or like Lynx or something?

These emails — which I encourage you to look up — tell a dramatic story about how Google’s finance and advertising teams, led by Raghavan with the blessing of CEO Sundar Pichai, actively worked to make Google worse to make the company more money. This is what I mean when I talk about the Rot Economy — the illogical, product-destroying mindset that turns the products you love into torturous, frustrating quasi-tools that require you to fight the company’s intentions to get the service you want. ↫ Edward Zitron Quite the read.