[cccc4all]

Google has become too big as company and has to be broken up by anti-trust rules, along with many other FAANG companies that ballooned up in recent years.

It's laughable that Microsoft was under anti-trust scrutiny when they were much smaller company. The Microsoft anti-trust situation created enough lanes for smaller companies at the time, like Google, Apple, etc. to gain traction.

The situation is the same now, anti-trust rules are in place to promote healthy competition at all levels. All these big companies has to be broken up under anti-trust rules to further competition in technology space.

[izacus]

Except that you're talking about a completely different situation - Microsoft was attacked for defaulting their browser in their operating system, which had majority market share.

This isn't really the case with Chrome though - on Windows, I keep having my browser reset back to Edge with fullscreen ads, on macOS the default browser is Safari (and it keeps spamming me with notification advertisements to use it), on Android the default browser on most US devices is Samsung Browser...

It's hard to argue that Google is really abusing people to use Chrome when there's an uphill battle on every single popular platform for users to actually install it.

If Google is really pushing an inferior product, how will you argue for antitrust when the users need to go out of their way to use Chrome on pretty much every platform except ChromeOS? What's the equivalent antitrust argument here?

"Google doesn't want to freely give their server capacity to anyone for server-driven features" doesn't really make for a strong argument. How do we structure the argument here? "This browser is very popular so it needs to be taken away from its developers"?

[preommr]

Because it's not about the operating system, but all the related services that are embedded in the browser.

I use chrome because it ties with my google account which ties in with... pretty much everything. It stores a lot of my passwords, it ties in with my gmail, my google workspace, my shared extensions that gets installed with any other chrome browsers through this google account, other google apps like google docs/calendar, and other google services like their speech-to-text, and it also ties in with my android phone that is linked to my google account.

[Person5478]

exactly.

The platform used to be the OS, but google effectively commoditized it and the new platform is the 'cloud'. If you're on MS your new platform is going to be OWS, Azure, etc. With google it's going to be google cloud, gmail, and so forth.

What's considered a platform has vastly changed.

[turminal]

Google was attacked for bundling chrome in android as well.