Genuinely fascinating to see. Despite being a backwoods Southerner building a cabin in the woods, I pay my bills with the sort of job that you'd expect out of some snooty Bay Area transplant that kleinbl00 would fantasize about ramming his car into in traffic, and believe me, this kind of discussion comes up internally at the big tech companies... and nobody's afraid.

Technology moves so much faster than legislation that just about all major tech companies, particularly the "big five", are more or less immune to antitrust laws the way they're written in the US. This isn't even new, it's been talked about for years. (On a side note--isn't that second article from 2017 super hopeful and innocent sounding? The tone of journalism has changed so much in such a short time, even on the Editorial side.)

This one in particular is such an easy win for Google. Absolute worst-case scenario, you end up with future smartphones that work like PCs sold in Europe--you turn it on, and when you create your user account it asks which search provider you want to use, and which browser you want to install. Woooooooo scary. That didn't reduce Microsoft's footprint in Europe any, and it's not even remotely scary to any modern tech company. I'd bet you a new car that Google already has that code written, and it's just commented out with a comment that says something like "emergency middle finger to legislators; enable this section whenever the government gets too big for their britches."

Cynically, this is actually good for the tech industry. Everybody knows that the big tech firms have grown entirely too large and now wield levels of influence traditionally reserved for governments and religions, but several years from now when the US government loses a long and expensive antitrust case against Google, or wins a purely symbolic victory that doesn't accomplish anything, it will only serve to empower the tech companies to push even further. The 2020 brain in me sees this as being just like when asshole "Republicans" pass anti-abortion laws that are wildly illegal purely in the hopes of pushing the issue and getting a decision that hurts everybody. Considering that Barr hasn't demonstrated a willingness or interest in doing anything that doesn't explicitly cause harm to the American people, I can't help but see this in the same light as some dickhole governor intentionally passing an abortion law that can't stand up in court.