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A comment on Judge Rules US v. Google Trial Documents Can Be Posted Online. Parent comment

Re:Judge Rules US v. Google Trial Documents Can Be Posted On... by throwaway2037 on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @08:51PM (#37683754)
I'm confused by the sentiment of the discussion here. There is so much talk about monopoly. Yes, Chrome has a commanding market lead, but it is not a monopoly in the eyes of US competition law (EU may be different; I am less familiar). It is more like an oligopoly. Mozilla Firefox is a very good alternative; so is Opera; so is Microsoft Edge; so is Apple Safari; so is Brave. Does anyone know if "Jerry's" change to the Omnibox also applied to Chromium? If yes, then this monopoly argument is even weaker. If Google decides to rollback the change, then derivatives of Chromium (Opera, Edge, etc.) can simply re-apply the change into their own fork. I think all this monopoly talk is almost impossible to win any court case because there is real competition and the core is open source.

Does anyone know if there have been any substantial legal victories against any software oligopolies where the software is substantially open source and the closed source version is free? I cannot think of any.

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Re:Judge Rules US v. Google Trial Documents Can Be Posted On... by ttt3ts on Thursday September 28, 2023 @12:56AM (#37685393)
It isn't about the browser. It is about search and ads which are not free or open source. There are alternatives but Google's market share is ~92% which is similar level to ie when Microsoft faced it's anti trust case. They pay off mozzila & apple to be default search. Bing has 7% market share and they are the only "real" competition.

The browser is just one more way google maintains it's core search business. E.g. their recently released topics api

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Re:Judge Rules US v. Google Trial Documents Can Be Posted On... by yunwal on Tuesday October 03, 2023 @01:43AM (#37748333)
The claim is that Google is using their dominance in browsers to unfairly drive business to their search/ads product. Yes, google has more market dominance in search but that’s not the reason for the lawsuit.
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