U.S. DoJ may force Android to be divested from Google

starkle

As reported by the New York Times:

Google’s competitors and other critics have proposed — either publicly or in discussions with the government — several options for how Judge Mehta should rein in the company.

The most extreme is for Google to split off a substantial part of its business. That could mean the company would have to spin off Chrome, its web browser, or Android, its software for smartphones. Both of those products use Google as the automatic search engine, which helps fuel the company’s dominance, Judge Mehta said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/13/technology/google-monopoly-antitrust-justice-department.html

While described as an extreme option, it seems well within the realm of possibility. Google's monopolistic and anti-competitive actions with Android are more substantial than what they do with Chrome or Google Search itself in my opinion.

I post this because it seems relevant to the future of GrapheneOS. It could be a great step towards de-integrating Google Play and allowing hardware vendors to ship GrapheneOS. On the other hand Google's upstream involvement seems like a big part of why Pixels are viable targets for GrapheneOS, and divesting Android to a separate company might get in the way of that.

secrec

starkle This is definitely a tricky idea. What might happen if the power influencing Android changes? Very unfortunately, Android is licensed, for the most part, under excessively permissive licenses, mostly APL. These licenses make it so that any future custodian of the Android source code will NOT be required to continue publishing updates as open source.

Yes, the current code can be forked and the fork maintained by more freedom-conscious institutions, however the fact that the major stumbling point for a mobile operating system is having up to date hardware, it makes it really challenging to move forward without the cooperation of at least one hardware vendor.

Google has thus far ALWAYS offered fully supported unlocked or unlockable hardware. So what happens if Google is forced to divest of Android? Android might die, and that puts everybody into a much worse off position. Or, maybe it creates the necessity to move towards a copy-left licensed mobile OS when a bunch of different competing hardware vendors suddenly realize that they're screwed.

23Sha-ger

So Google will do another trick and rebrand "Alphabet" to a bunch of subsidiaries.
I don't believe that governments or laws can stop those companies, the users should.
And the way I see it, 99.9% of users just want the "Bring me the new AI stuff" so I doubt it's feasible.

starkle

Not sure if it's worth responding to such nonsense but:

A divestiture wouldn't result in a subsidiary by definition.
The government can regulate companies, actually.
User's can't do anything about an illegal monopoly... that's kinda the point.

starkle

secrec I doubt Android will turn closed source. Several big companies have incentive to maintain Android's open and collaborative development model. It would be awesome if it got split into a non-profit, like an "Android Foundation" or something.

I do worry that if Google loses ownership of Android, they won't be as inclined to make their hardware a "reference implementation" in terms of custom OS support etc. which has so far made Pixels the ideal targets for GrapheneOS.

On the other hand, major hardware vendors may suddenly be interested in shipping GrapheneOS outright because the GMS exclusivity agreements would likely be gone.

And to be clear, AOSP is licensed with the Apache License 2.0, not the APL.