Why stop at chrome. Break off Android too. They are shitting all over that now.
this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2025
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Separate Apple software and silicon as well. Break them all up! But honestly to I'd rather them start with our food system. Break up the conglomerates, break up the grocery stores, etc.... I can live if I don't buy a new phone or use Google search or Chrome.
Separate the media portions of these companies as well; apple and amazon music, tv, streaming into separate entities.
Don’t simply allow them to be purchased by another huge conglomerate or corporation like perplexity or openai, split them into their own entities. Stop companies purchasing each other to avoid this mess from repeating and avoid monopolies
Or just nationalize these companies. Trump already started the process with intel
A 10% stake with no board representation or even the option to influence the makeup of the board is hardly a step towards nationalization. The US is just along for the ride even if they drive it off a cliff.
Break up the big farms! One company shouldn't be allowed to own more than one,t if even one!
because perplexity or anthropic buying android would be even worse.
Once. Just once I want to have a happy thought to creep into my mind instead of this hell of probability. As example. Valve buys Android and runs their steamOS through it.
Valve could do that today already for free. Why would they pay for it instead?
would a new owner make it better? they would need to be profitable somehow, especially if they are not using it to sell pixel phones
outdated news from may 2nd, in fact today a judge ruled that google won’t have to sell chrome or android, and they can keep paying mozilla/apple for being the default search engine
BUT, they will have to share search data publicly, and the default search engine deals can’t be exclusive anymore
and android.. right? RIGHT??
Please. PLEEEEEEEEASE!
The problem is that I feel android being sold would give it to a closed source entity. Ideally, a judge would make it so AOSP goes to a nonprofit governing body independent of any corporation, but I have a strong feeling that is not what will happen (in the US).
Yeah, MS would probably buy Android to get back into the mobile market.
I agree. Ideally, Android would be something like Debian or a mobile project of the Linux Foundation. It would really be better off if it wasn’t beholden to a company.
The mobile OS wars have already settled on Android and iOS. Closing off Android would destroy the market, and I don’t want to go back to the days when Windows Mobile was the leading mobile OS.
Odds are low of anything good happening because of this administration.
Android would be unprofitable and unsustainable in isolation. So that would leave each OEM to build their own thing, but to make a long story short, everybody would just get an iPhone. So then I wonder, if making such a ruling would create the void for a monopoly, what's the sense?
It could be profitable the way RHEL or the Mozilla Foundation is profitable.
Companies will pay for OS support, and companies will pay for access. Android as a foundation with a company selling OS support and services which could be rebranded would be profitable.
I’m thinking about the wider IoT space here beyond only mobile.
The primary ways in which the Mozilla Foundation earns money is through search partnerships, donations and grants. Guess who is the major contributor.
As for Red Hat, this comes down to subscriptions or enterprise offerings, neither which really apply to a consumer OS unless you're willing to pay a subscription fee out of pocket. I doubt there will be much to be earned from offering consulting or training, either, unless they make Android exceedingly confusing to use.
The only companies that would pay for Android are OEMs who are already making thin margins, and effectively it'd drive the price of non-iPhones up. The alternative is that OEMs take the Huawei option and fork AAOS and develop it at their own expense.
The primary ways in which the Mozilla Foundation earns money is through search partnerships, donations and grants.
Yes. It’s the same thing with the Linux kernel and other large FOSS projects. There isn’t a perfect fit for Android, but it would be better than the way ASOP is run now.
As for Red Hat, this comes down to subscriptions or enterprise offerings, neither which really apply to a consumer OS unless you're willing to pay a subscription fee out of pocket.
Consumer devices ship with proprietary software which is licensed all the time. It could be a library or an entire OS. Consumers are not the target market, like consumers aren’t the target market for RHEL.
The prime example is Windows. It’s licensed to Dell or whomever and ships with the hardware. The license is baked in.
Some people might be willing to pay if the price is reasonable enough. Android has support for major vendors, so using it as a base would be a boon to people doing things like media boxes and signage.
I doubt there will be much to be earned from offering consulting or training, either, unless they make Android exceedingly confusing to use.
It’s the opposite. Make it easy to use. Companies pay for tools which reduces developer time.
The only companies that would pay for Android are OEMs who are already making thin margins, and effectively it'd drive the price of non-iPhones up.
The smaller OEMs would pay for licenses, PS hours, and backend services. They don’t have the expertise or budget.
Samsung? They’re going to keep doing what they’re doing because they have the expertise and budget to fork from upstream. It’s possible they would rally around Android, like companies have rallied around the Linux kernel.
OEMs do this with Linux already, so it would bring Android more inline with the norms.
It’s the same thing with the Linux kernel
It's funny you should mention this, because Google has needed to adapt this for mobile and are already open source. If the opportunity existed for a "free" and open source version of Android to be embraced by consumers, there are many such options today, like GrapheneOS (or even forking AOSP, for that matter).
My concern is that if the major contributor to that steps out, the volunteer community will need to substantially step up.
Consumer devices ship with proprietary software which is licensed all the time
The reason I called out your example of Red Hat is to illustrate how enterprise is financing a free consumer experience.
With a very limited enterprise market, it's not realistic to expect this to apply to an almost exclusively consumer product.
So there are two options. Either we don't have an open source Android and in addition to the license cost of GMS, OEMs would have to license the OS itself. The alternative is that OEMs shoulder the development cost of their own fork of AOSP, which would simply be passed on to consumers. Either way, this would drive up the price of devices.
I'm not sure why you're speaking in hypotheticals about what Android could be if it had license fees, as it's readily available in open source under the Apache license today and, despite that, steadily losing market share.
Deal.
Lets get a whole bunch of different OS. That compete with each other.
What do you mean by "get"? Who will be funding the creation of all these OSes? The phone margins are already razor thin.
Preferably something open source that fuckin corpos can't gatekeep and control.
Android is already largely open source. Yet it takes a massive investment from Google to continue developing it and curate the app store with it.
I'm genuinely struggling to envision how we move from the current situation to a somehow better but more fragmented ecosystem that doesn't negatively affect consumer experiences. Whichever way I've approached it, it plays in the favor of one company in particular who already has a leading market share in the US, and I truly don't see how that would be better.
Sadly the failure is a governmental one. Not on any of us.
We have monopoly laws. Mechanisms to break them up. But they generally aren't enforced. It happens occasionally but almost never on the size of company that it was made to be used on.
Because Tim Cook gave Trump a trophy.
Android could be profitable if Google Play Services went with it. However, that doesn't exactly fix the monopoly problems associated with Android.
My interpretation of what the proponents of separating Android from Google are arguing is that it's exactly Google Play, Gmail, Google Maps and the other parts of GMS that must be uncoupled.
Google bribes trump, agrees to place pro-trump search results higher. Nothing happens to Google.
I hate to say it, but unless Chrome becomes an open source project, I'd rather that it be owned by Google. No other company that could make money on a browser should own Chrome.
I don't trust the US government to do literally anything right with this, and I'm kinda surprised Google didn't already gift an underage child to Trump so he'd make the problem go away.
However a perfectly viable option that I'm sure the previous government looked into would be to entrust Chromium (which is Open-Source though not copyleft) to a new, independent nonprofit made of Google's former chromium team led and paid for by a consortium of the major commercial chromium users (Google, Microsoft, etc.). It would be in everyone's best interest to share the relatively small financial burden so that Chromium can remain decent and competitive.
This wouldn't be anything revolutionary. This approach of financing an independent open-source project as a "common good" is basically how the Linux kernel has been developed for many years now, most Linux code is written by corporate sponsors.
Chromium :3
News from The Government!
Going forward you can now only search and browse the web by mail!
Isn't that great?
Some guy in the government.... I got another request for titties. Have we organized the titties files yet? The request is pretty clear... Larger than C cup but smaller than triple D.
"Sorry, we've all looked through those files a lot but no one has had time to alphabetize them yet!"
Are you feeling lucky? Here is a bunch of random stuff regarding the term tits:
Google has said it didn't maintain a monopoly through such agreements and that consumers could change their device defaults to use other search engines.
It's not complete truth. I use librewolf because you can set search engine to custom. In chrome you can only pick from predefined. With this fact Google controls it's competition. You can't compete with monopoly by being invisible because they always watch you.
What would happen if you disabled all connections on a Tesla? Or put it in some kind of Faraday cage? Would it just shut itself down, or would it keep running in its current state?