Google has gotten its first taste of remedies that Donald Trump’s Department of Justice plans to pursue to break up the tech giant’s monopoly in search. In the first filing since Trump allies took over the department, government lawyers backed off a key proposal submitted by the Biden DOJ. The government won’t ask the court to force Google to sell off its AI investments, and the way it intends to handle Android is changing. However, the most serious penalty is intact—Google’s popular Chrome browser is still on the chopping block.
“Google’s illegal conduct has created an economic goliath, one that wreaks havoc over the marketplace to ensure that—no matter what occurs—Google always wins,” the DOJ filing says. To that end, the government maintains that Chrome must go if the playing field is to be made level again.
The DOJ is asking the court to force Google to promptly and fully divest itself of Chrome, along with any data or other assets required for its continued operation. It is essentially aiming to take the Chrome user base—consisting of some 3.4 billion people—away from Google and hand it to a competitor. The government will vet any potential buyers to ensure the sale does not pose a national security threat. During the term of the judgment, Google would not be allowed to release any new browsers. However, it may continue to contribute to the open source Chromium project.
Are Lineage and Graphene still decent android alternatives?
They’re both android, but without the Google services tacked on. The question is, how will the Android Open Source project fare if Google is forced to divest from it? And where does that leave the ungoogled ROMs?
Can you explain to me, an Idiot™, what that would mean for me in practice if I switched? Would I be able to use the play store? What about my bank’s app, or something that uses location, like Grindr?
Yep! Most Android roms allow you to install a Google apps pack (“GApps”) on top of the system, so they’re installed as system apps like normal. There’s different packs, from the bare essentials (play store and play services) to basically everything made by google.
GrapheneOS is cool because it has a sandboxing layer, so you can install those same Google apps as normal user apps and avoid giving them the extra permissions they get as system apps.
This depends. Google’s Play Integrity API is used by a bunch of apps to easily enforce “security” and disallow using the app if the integrity check fails. Thing is, the things it checks for aren’t necessarily what’s secure, but more like what does Google approve of. For example, I would consider GrapheneOS at least as secure as official Google Android, but it can fail the Integrity API checks.
My bank apps work fine, but that doesn’t mean yours will. And I don’t use dating apps, so no clue there. Really, you’ld just have to try it and see how well it works. Just be sure you have good backups if you do, and also know how to restore the original system if using an alternate doesn’t work out.
Yes (with the caveat that it’s still tied to Google) and yes (de-googled)