An aside on proposed anti-trust remedies against Google
As an aside, that one of the Biden administration’s proposed remedies for Google’s market dominance – a big issue there being Chrome’s ongoing dominance – was for Google to sell Chrome off to an equally big and equally problematic competitor is a clear example of how the US Democrats operate within the frameworks and infrastructure of authoritarianism without being outright fascists themselves.
The Democrats keep legitimising tactics, like off-shore concentration camps, extra-legal assassination or, such as they did here, preferring to foster controllable oligopolies over diverse markets, companies that then become centralised nodes controlling the overall economy and media and are the building blocks of an authoritarian system.
This a small thing compared to Guantanamo or drone assassination programs, but it’s part and parcel of a worldview where what matters the most is who has authority over the public, media, and the markets. The idea that the media or the markets should be diversified and free doesn’t seem to enter their minds at all.
The Democrats love to build or reinforce the mechanisms of authoritarianism, which they mistakenly think they can apply for good and moral purposes, but then become major building blocks for an authoritarian state.
If the dominance of Chrome is a problem, then that won’t be solved by shifting it over to an equally large competitor. That solution only makes sense if your goal is to maintain the current oligopoly dynamic and that the biggest threat from Google isn’t their threat to the free market – none of these people seem to care about the actual economy – but Google’s size making them harder to control. They want to make Google more controllable, which is already problematic for a democracy, but a controllable Google is an outright gift to the rising fascists.
(An uncontrollable Google is the path towards corporate feudalism, which is yet another reason why either breaking these companies up or exiling them entirely should be the number one priority of the remaining free democracies of the west.)
If the Democrats actually cared about the market – about ensuring the health of a diversity of companies and potential employers that rely on the web – they’d have proposed spinning off Chrome as a not-for-profit funded by fines on Google and with a roadmap for bringing in state funding and participation from around the world, because having independent and safe web browsers is also a major national security issue.
Better yet, they would have spun it off as two not-for-profits, creating two equally well-funded forks, one on either side of the Atlantic, with a funding commitment from the EU for one, and NATO for both.
But they don’t care, so they didn’t.