[newscracker]

This is Google extending an invite to the EU and other regulators to bring their war hammers and forever ban browser makers from pushing targeted ads and enabling profiling of people. Maybe break Google up and make the Google Chrome team a separate company with restrictions on how much it can work hand-in-hand with Google? Anyone in the EU who can file complaints about these abuses of market power?

Tell the people you know to switch from Google Chrome to another browser as their primary one. Google will still pester them on Google’s online properties to install Chrome, and may resort to other tricks on Android. But we are at a time when this can gather momentum and result in some good for all in the future (not mainly for Google, as it seems to be now).

[hackerfromthefu]

This is the answer - forever ban targeted ads.

Ads should be a display only HTML tag that just allows limited read only display WITH NO JAVASCRIPT. This would remove tracking and malware and force ads to be targeted on the content page not on the user.

[petre]

How can the EU break up a US company?

[kittywav]

https://about.google/intl/ALL_us/locations/?region=europe

If you don't want to follow the rules (against anti-competitive practices) of a certain set of countries, perhaps you shouldn't have offices in that set of countries? Just an idea...

[petre]

Okay, so they spin off a bunch of shell companies holding all these offices and stop displaying them on the Google website in order to address the EU requests. But the mothership still gets to remain a single company.

[xg15]

Maybe a better way to think about it is that the EU can effectively demonitize them. At the worst, the EU regulators could (theoretically) block them from doing business with EU citizens. They can offer their browser for download here alright, but they can't sell any ads or any other products here.

[beebeepka]

Yes, this is how it works on the kindergarten floor.

In the real world, they have to bribe their way to the same effect.

[newscracker]

GP here. I didn’t mean that EU should break it up. I had said “EU and other regulators” to mean the ones in the U.S. too. Other replies here have provided more substantive options that the EU could exercise to force Google to break up. I’m not saying it will be easy or quick, but it’s possible to make Google’s business more painful.

[3836293648]

It's not a US company. Google is Irish.

Sure, it's a technicality, but Irish law still applies

[speedgoose]

Floc was not enabled in Europe, and was probably never going to be enabled because of its high incompatibility with GDPR.

[anticristi]

Ditto. EU already solved the problem -- legally, not technically. A few fines later, Google is actually really privacy-minded to EU citizen. I get a yearly reminder to do a privacy checkup and can disable Google tracking if I want to -- which I do.

California and Virginia also enacted similar laws. More lawmakers need to understand tech.

[wbl]

And third party cookies get further embedded. FLOC exists so that killing third party cookies doesn't destroy the ad market.