I know. As you put it, “common”… people are stupid. Illogical peasant mentality. Wanting the crown to be super rich while they suffer for their whole lives.
We just traded in crowns for billionaires and pretend it’s different. Anyone could become a king back then too. It’s just that you had to gather support then rise up and kill the current monarch to become one.
And technically, that is still the case. Just not literally nowadays. 
Yeah, that’s the most realistic scenario in the case that ruling goes forth I think:
We just hand it over from 1 master to another, and call it a day.
Also even if we say that the product you suggest (pay for use) would be accepted by consumers, what happens with competitors?
One of the “monopolization” issues right now, is that so many others (Edge, Brave, Vivaldi, Opera) are built on it.
You can’t “force” them to hard-fork and maintain their own, and a pay-for-use would also suggest a pay-to-license scheme, which again be a monopolization and anti-trust issue.
People now seem to commonly love subscriptions for everything too so there must be a way to get people to want to donate in some way or pay, even a small number of the userbase is a lot.
Now days it’s even worse than this though, a lot of people seem to love to pay money (Especially through subscriptions), and pay with their data at the same time for some reason although this completely bewilders me. A lot of people don’t think about these things though.
That being said my preference has always been for a viable standalone European browser and search engine to be made, a fresh start from the ground up but likely won’t happen and is difficult and expensive. Nothing against the US as a country of course, I just want a viable option in a different location.
I should specify viable as in more than a tiny fraction of marketshare, something that is actually known by the population.
Nah. I’m talking about open sourcing it completely. In the best scenario, if people realised that paying for software could indeed stop or at least limit ad marketing, more big-time apps and services may either voluntarily or forcibly go open source based on a worldwide trend.
Of course, services like Netflix, Spotify, etc. would be huge exceptions because you gotta pay the artists: musicians, actors, etc.
And as for YouTube creators and other platforms, we’d need to get rid of this algorithm-focused BS we have. If people become willing to pay for software, I imagine, they’d pay YouTubers too.
Oh, then absolutely! That’s my best-case hope too (see my RedHat (they aren’t perfect, but they are pretty good when it comes to foss) idea above).
The realistic issue I see with that though, is who pays for it then?
They can force Google to sell it (maybe), but they can’t force it to “gift” it…
And it would have an exorbitant objective value to pay.
Who is going to pay for it to fall in the hands of a “FOSS-AT-CORE” entity?
The one percent of the one percent. The very rare ethically correct billionaire.
Who that is? I have no clue. 
Or governments. But with the caveat that they cannot control the code, only fund it.
Well, considering that the EU has a larger population than the US, if everyone there were to use it, I think that would be significant enough.
And, of course, it would spread into other areas, like South Africa, Australia, Guyana, etc.
As a European citizen (a shithole in Europe that is, but still…) I can tell you that while I am extremely appreciative of the regulations, when it comes to actual implementation and tangible tech, EU is decades behind US.
It’s all dreams and no work…
We want our own this and that, but noone does the work and/or investment to make it happen.
We want progress and innovation, but Tech is so f* hard-hit by tarrifs and taxes, its an absolute luxury to get benefit from good tech as a citizen.
Was gonna go, “YAY!!!”, then I looked at the website and the first image on his Twitter.
You can support someone without posting it on your page… 
That said, didn’t know Rumble existed until now. Looking forward to the first billionaire to just fund and improve ActivityPub rather than doing something from scratch. It’s really wasted duplication at this point, with Odysee doing the same foolishness.
It’s open source code, so they could literally just build on the damn thing.
Just the mention of Zuck the Muck gave me chills. Meta (and its children), the one company I actually want to die completely. HELL NO!
Lynch me, but I’m not that against google, no other company offers so many useful and quality services for basically free.
I’m not sure if I even understand what is the big problem with them. Yes, they supposedly know “everything” about us, but I don’t know what they do with it other than ads. Their ads not even that invasive and effective like Meta’s, at least for me. Meta somehow the only one that figured out how to push a few relevant ads for me, through their apps. Somehow I barely see any ads from google, not even in their apps where adblocking is not that simple. So for me google is just a tool that works well, for now.
Everyone complains about their search engine too, I still manage to find almost everything I need without using LLMs. On a few occasions when I was really stuck with some technical issue, I tried the alternative engines and none of them gave me better results, mostly worse. LLMs are not that much better in giving useful information for obscure things… At least they are so random, that they inspire you to think outside the box.
I can’t imagine any other corporation, that could handle chrome better. Chromium is open source, can they really take it away from Google? They can just fork it or something? Maybe they rebrand it and make some changes that make the regulators happier.
Windows is the software that needs some intervention asap…
Won’t “lynch” you, but everything you just said was spoken like a true, “I don’t care about nor want to know about what privacy actually means” kinda person.
So, rather than give you a lengthy response, I recommend you watch the videos linked in the following thread. Educate yourself. Privacy is not just about you.
Just to mention it, one of the biggest issues is “data brokers”. Look it up. “Google it.”
Thread: No Privacy Means No Democracy
The most recent video in particular should help you understand.
Its not FREE.
They make a lot of money from data brokers and your own Government. Everything you do on THEIR network brings them MONEY. Its all at YOUR EXPENSE. So no it is not FREE.
To my knowledge, while the engine is open source, Chrome adds some things that are proprietary.
Same experience here. I have tried quite a few and the only ones that seem decent are DDG and Google. Brave is fine for English, but it is kind of iffy at times and Romanian queries don’t work at all.
For some, that’s the big problem. They don’t want Google to know anything more other than they’re an user of their services. You might not care as much as others. Ads are the main reason why they collect this data, alongside provide more personalized services that fit you better, but again, some don’t want that, myself included.
On the topic of monopoly. A “brave” perspective:
Maybe you’d like Startpage – it uses Google as a result provider, but the connection between the user and Google is as anonymised as possible.
As for Chrome, everyone talks about the main browser itself, but I also wonder what’s up with Chromium engine – it can be considered a part of monopoly as well. There are so many browsers depending on it… the only ones that aren’t and come to mind are Firefox, Firefox forks and terminal-based software.
I have tried it. I don’t remember much about it, so I will probably try it out again and see how it goes.
About Chromium, since it is open source, I don’t see how it will be affected. In fact, I really want to know how exactly does the DoJ want Google to sell Chrome when Chrome is just Chromium with Google’s proprietary stuff. Sell the codebase? The codebase is open source.
I’d argue Chromium is actually the main / most important detail of the monopoly and antitrust issues…
It’s development dictates the mechanisms for like 70% of the “competition” (not accounting for safari).
I didn’t say it’s main or most important, but it can be considered one of the details.
Of course, Chromium is open-source, yet I still wonder what might happen, taken into account Google is said not to develop any other browser after selling Chrome and they’re the creator and major contributor to Chromium.