Infosec News

With Chrome's sale, ad blockers will reign.

What happens if there are no bidders?

We will have to see if this happens. Google will certainly be appealing so this will still drag on for years.

And let's not forget the last big anti trust case in the US - Microsoft. That was supposed to break up Microsoft but in the end the government and Microsoft came to a settlement. And it was a very weak settlement in Microsoft favour.

Microsoft opened up some of its APIs to developers but that only applied to Windows, not allowing those APIs on other systems. And the Web browser part of the case was dropped.

And look what happened - Microsoft maintained it's monopolies with Windows and Office, and they have only strengthened. On Web browsers it's monopoly wa overturned but that was in part due to the EU case (forcing a choice window in Europe) and largely because another monopolist Googlr came along leveraging search instead of an OS.

Microsoft has oblitered competition again with office. The latest example is bundling Teams in, which has destroyed Slack. And it's now aggressively pushing Edge, integrating it in unnecessary ways into the OS and making it unremovable.

The US anti trust actions against tech are weak. I don't see Google being broken up or receiving harsh sanctions. It's lost the case, but like Microsoft it will negotiate a settlement that costs it little but gives the politicians something to point at to say they did something.

I suspect the big loser will be Firefox. Part of the case against Google was that it makes exclusivity deals to funnel search customers to it. Mozilla has such a deal and is very reliant on that revenue to keep going.

And if it were forced to sell Chrome, who would buy it? It's entire business model is around funneling people to search, and snooping on customers to strengthen Googles ad data. Likely one of the other big tech companies, and they'd just try to redirect everyone and built a new monopoly.