What's Google Without Chrome?
What Next | Daily News and Analysis
Slate Podcasts
4.3 • 2.4K Ratings
🗓️ 22 November 2024
⏱️ 20 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The Department of Justice has released its recommendations for how Google’s monopoly on web search should be broken up. Top of their wishlist? Spinning off their web browser Chrome.
But with a new administration coming to the White House, will Google have to comply?
Guest: Leah Nylen, antitrust reporter for Bloomberg News
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, Leah. I feel like we were just talking about this Google lawsuit. |
| 0:10.4 | Yeah. Not too terribly long ago. And we're back. We are back. I called up Leah Nyland, an antitrust reporter for Bloomberg News early Thursday morning. How late were you up last night? |
| 0:22.9 | You know, probably like 1 o'clock in the morning. |
| 0:27.1 | Well, you know, when it's like crunch time for nerds, you just got to do it. |
| 0:33.1 | I last spoke to Leah in August when a federal judge determined that Google was a monopoly. |
| 0:38.9 | Since then, the Department of Justice has been crafting a list of recommendations for what should happen to break Google's stronghold on the search engine industry. |
| 0:48.6 | And then, around midnight, the DOJ released its recommendations. |
| 0:54.0 | There's a few things in the DOJ's wish list, |
| 0:56.6 | but the big one is for the judge overseeing the case, Judge Amit Mehta, to make Google sell |
| 1:02.4 | its web browser Chrome. How bad is this for Google? I mean, the federal judge is going to have a |
| 1:09.3 | final say in all of this, but if Judge |
| 1:11.4 | Meta accepts these recommendations, is this the worst case scenario for Google? |
| 1:16.8 | It's not the worst case scenario. That would probably be like dismantling the company entirely, |
| 1:21.8 | but this is certainly bad. Chrome is a very important part of the Google Empire. It's the way a lot of people get to their website, and it gives them a lot of information. |
| 1:33.3 | When you are using Chrome and you're a logged in user specifically, it gives them a lot of data about where you go on the web, what you're looking at. And the company uses that to help target ads. |
| 1:45.4 | And advertising is, of course, its main business. |
| 1:48.5 | So this could break a lot of the tools that Google has internally for how it sells ads. |
| 1:59.8 | It's looking like dark skies ahead for Google, but there's one big unknown, the incoming Trump |
| 2:06.4 | administration. |
| 2:08.1 | Trump can throw a wrench into anything, but the states have joined onto this. |
| 2:12.0 | A lot of those are Democratic AGs, and then they could keep pushing for the proposal that the Biden administration has made. |
| 2:20.3 | It could get messy if the Trump administration decides to propose something else. |
... |
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