This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Fine the heck out of them then. If they don't pay the fine ban em. Plenty of alternatives out there. More competition in the search engine market would be better anyways.
Not too big of a fan of banning companies as the hurdles should be decently high... Especially if many people rely on their service but if they won't comply with our jurisdiction long term I see this as the only option as fees can not be order of business to pay
Didn't a year ago or so, Some European lawmaker made a vague hint in support of something that involved regulations on social media, and Elon replied "go fuck yourself" verbatem?
Play hardball, or surrender and give them what they want. there's no compromise or middle ground with these techbro fascists
This is definitely to avoid the ire of fuhrer trump. It's also coincidence that meta is abandoning fact checking right before the new administration
He will sic the dogs of regulation on them if they don't dance to his tune
I want to live in a world where the EU bans Google, but we all know the EU will just roll over and accept this.
Given that we are going full authoritarian fascist now, perhaps the EU should ban Google, given the US tik tok precedent.
What a twist. In the 90s, the internet forced countries to wake up to the new modern era. It was a combination of American companies wanting both to expand and provide goodwill.
And now, this new era is going to tell American companies to fuck off.
wish the eu would just actually ban american companies there is really no need for them anyway
Fascism is good for business.
Can't believe Google's doing this, they seemed to be the most dedicated to this of the big companies. Especially on Youtube.
The rich are trying to pivot the Trump vicory into world domination before we can organize and dethrone the oligarchy.
Google/Meta helping to spread misinformation is a big part of that.
I wish I was kidding.
Nothing will meaningfully improve until the rich fear for their lives
Or fortune... but you can't take it with you so your point still stands.
picking up the sarcasm
That's pretty bold for a really fucking useless search engine. The EU could just block it and redirect google.com to a gov run searxng instange and everyone in europe would be better off overniggt
It would have to be an EU run search engine, otherwise which government?
Nah I don't think the government should run a search engine
Who do you trust more, Google or the EU?
Agreed.
It would likely be impossible to redirect google.com without either sparking a cyberwar or building something like the great firewall of China, quite possibly both.
Blocking is somewhat possible, but to redirect, they would have to forge google certificates and possibly also fork Chrome and convince users to replace their browser, since last I checked, google hard-coded it's own public keys into Chrome.
Technical details
I say blocking in somewhat possible, because governments can usually just ask DNS providers to not resolve a domain or internet providers to block IPs.
The issue is, google runs one of the largest DNS services in the world, so what happens if google says no? The block would at best be partial, at worst it could cause instability in the DNS system itself.
What about blocking IPs? Well, google data centers run a good portion of the internet, likely including critical services. Companies use google services for important systems. Block google data centers and you will have outages that will make crowd-strike look like a tiny glitch and last for months.
Could we redirect the google DNS IPs to a different, EU controlled server? Yes, but such attempts has cause issues beyond the borders of the country attempting it in the past. It would at least require careful preparations.
As for forging certificates, EU does control multiple Certificate authorities. But forging a certificate breaks the cardinal rule for being a trusted CA. Such CA would likely be immediately distrusted by all browsers. And foreig governments couldn't ignore this either. After all, googles domains are not just used for search. Countless google services that need to remain secure could potentially be compromised by the forged certificate. In addition, as I mentioned, google added hard-coded checks into Chrome to prevent a forged certificate from working for it's domains.
Just block payments from advertisers by revoking their business licence.
Yes, I mentioned that in a comment deeper down. And even before that, just fine them. Chances are they will pay and if not, you can probably seize some bank accounts.
I am not trying to say Google can afford to completely defy the EU, just found it interesting how hard it is to block just google search specifically.
PS: Also mentioned in a burried comment, there actually is a way for ISPs to block google, since DNS over HTTPS is not enabled by default yet in browsers I think. I forgot this since I enabled encrypted DNS like 8+ years ago for myself and just assumed people also have it.
Nah. Demanding the ISPs to block traffic to Google domains would be quite effective.
This isn't like the great firewall of chine where you want to prevent absolutely all traffic. If you make it inconvenient to use, because CSS breaks or a js library doesn't load or images breaslk, its already a huge step into pushing it out of the market.
Enterprise market would be much harder, a loooot of EU companies rely on Google's services, platforms and apps, and migrating away would take a lot of time and money.
Demanding the ISPs to block traffic to Google domains would be quite effective.
Filter it based on what? Between ESNI and DNS over HTTPS, it shouldn't be possible to know, which domain the traffic belongs to. Am I missing something?
Edit: Ah, I guess DNS over HTTPS isn't enabled by default yet.
There's probably a way to redirect without validation. Only respond to port 80 if needed, then redirecr. Sure the browser might complain a little but it's not as bad as invalid cert.
Maybe for some rando site, Google and any half competent site has HSTS enabled, meaning a browser won't even try to connect with insecure HTTP, nor allow user to dismiss the security warning, as long as the HSTS header is remembered by the browser (the site was visited recently, set to 1 year for google).
In addition, google will also be on HSTS preload lists, so it won't work even if you never visited the site.
