It’s amazing to watch the old, rusted machine of antitrust slowly grinding back to life, bit by bit.
Rip 'em apart! Make them into 6 different companies with single letter names and force two sets of two to share their letter to fuck with their marketing!
…I’ll be in my bunk
Government prosecutors had argued during the trial that Google illegally monopolized control over the internet search market, spending tens of billions of dollars each year on contracts to providers such as Apple and Samsung in order to become the default search engine on their devices. Justice department lawyers accused Google of using its dominant market position – they alleged the company controls about 90% of the US search market – to crowd out rivals and boost its own advertising revenues.
Does this mean that their deal with Mozilla was ruled to be an antitrust violation?
I’ve seen at least one journalist say that they think so.
Then that’s very concerning, because IIRC that is actually Mozilla’s largest funding source and losing that could easily threaten Firefox.
It’ll be interesting, because Google have spent a lot of money to maintain dominance and no doubt Bing will try and fill the vacuum. Now is a good time for search engine investment. I suspect that Google will try and make some concessions to appease the law. Expect to hear rumours of Chromium and even Android becoming non profits.
How high can they appeal? This is just a district court. I bet it’ll take another decade until a decision is reached.
