That looks interesting. How are you liking it so far? The idea of no telemetry is neat. I think I went through everything in Firefox to turn that stuff off.
Google already knows everything about you. Now they get to limit how much others know about you, under the rallying cry of "preserving user privacy". They get to decide how much of your profile they disclose to advertisers.
It seems like having the dominant browser by market share (where they gather browsing history), and the dominant ad platform by revenue and market share (where they sell that information), would draw regulator scrutiny?
I don't know anything about anti-trust law and I don't like the idea of a company with that much power but what would be the basis of a regulatory action here?
Google will tell you that there is no monopoly. Anyone can install firefox (with efficient ad-blockers) and use duckduckgo.
Does anti-trust law goes beyond just breaking monopolies? We just saw the EU regulator get rebuffed in a case involving intel strong-arming OEM so they don't use their competitor's chip. Seems like a straightforward case, and yet...
The argument for Google not being an advertising monopoly can't be "Just don't look at ads." That's like saying hypothetical oil company has no monopoly because people can just walk.
There is a hypothetical world where the advertising market is not so ruined that it's apparently a good option to completely avoid it. Maybe if there was better competition, people would not want to avoid ads.
> Does anti-trust law goes beyond just breaking monopolies? We just saw the EU regulator get rebuffed in a case involving intel strong-arming OEM so they don't use their competitor's chip.
It does, but requires the legally significant hurdle of demonstrating precisely how much harm was created. You need to be able to show the kinds and amount of harm that the subject foisted upon the public, and that harm must be "significant" to the entire populace. It's a huge barrier to climb over.
