Who would possibly buy Chrome? Letting any of the large tech companies purchase it (the only possible buyers) would just give someone else monopolistic power.
Chrome can’t exist as a standalone business without being even more consumer hostile.
Chrome can’t exist as a standalone business without being even more consumer hostile.
I happen to be poking around the Chromium codebase the last few days. The size of the codebase itself is at the same level as all of our company's code. Something as important and critical as GPU rendering is only a small part of the entire project. You also have v8, ChromeOS, ANGLE etc to worry about, all requiring experts in those areas. Not to mention things like Widevine and other proprietary technology surrounding Chrome.
I have a few hundred bucks that I'm willing to put into the pie, but based on the financials, it's probably going to go bankrupt pretty quick.
Stage 1: Buy Chrome from Google, with its 65% browser market share.
Stage 2: Tell Google you'll keep them as default search provider for $5 billion per year.
Stage 3: Profit
The DOJ is working to ban search deals too, you wouldn't receive a single penny. The DOJ is incomprehensibly incompetent compared to the EU DMA/DSA.
This is illustrates the extent and magnitude of the problem to fix the internet. That regulators failed to give enough oversight of the internet and to regulate its monopolistic players several decades ago when these problems first became obvious has meant that they are now almost insurmountable.
Ideally, Google would be forced to divest itself of Chrome and that Chrome would become an open source project a la Linux. Clearly, that's very unlikely to happen.
For those who'd argue that Chrome would have no funding to further develop I'd respond by saying that it already works well as a browser and from observation that Google is channeling most of Chrome's development funds into anti-features that are hostile to users.
As an open source project that level of funding would be no longer necessary and its future development could progress at a slower pace.
Chrome's upstream (Chromium) is already open source. If Google is forbidden from sponsoring Chromium's development, and that of its proprietary downstream distribution (Chrome) who's going to fund Chromium's development? Even if forced to divest, Google will always have an outsized sway on any open source browser due to the engineer-hours they can spend on contributions. If they are blocked from even that, then the whole exercise would be anti-consumer IMO.
Incidentally, I don't use Chrome, only Chromium-based and Firefox-based browsers.
I think there’s a very very substantial underlying infrastructure maintained and funded by google that would disappear. This isn’t a GitHub project where you can clone and make install.
Google's entire existence is predicated on the ad-model internet existing, and internet users have overwhelmingly voted for this model of internet over the last 30 years.
People hate ads, but they hate opening their wallet even more.
The obvious test for whether the browser is actually independent: what is the response to "let's add an ad-blocker by default".
OpenAI joined the chat...
I meant incompetence at the company governance level, not technical.
There's massive technical competence in non-profits.
This brilliance is just wasted by leaders who sacrifice business acumen over the mission.
[1] https://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/2008/09/google-chrome.html...
The user base
2. make your website the default
3. make it easier to access your suite of web services
Eg. imagine instead of defaulting to google everything you typed in the search bar defaulted to chatgpt. Imagine open AI could buy that at a discount
Anti trust activities are not about any one act (such as routing browsers to your site), it's more about whether the fates choose your company to end up in the DOJs roulette wheel.
The issue is that Google's dominance of the search/ad business is distorting the browser market.
This is my take, anyways (I'm not a lawyer or American).
>2. make your website the default
>3. make it easier to access your suite of web services
Chrome is not a search engine. Chrome doesn't have a "suite of web services."
That's Alphabet/Google.
Chrome is just the browser.
Third-party sign in with Google [1].
[1] https://www.google.com/account/about/sign-in-with-google/
Do they? I would rather not have a "browser account" and just back up my own bookmarks like I was doing 20 years ago.
Presumably yes. I haven't seen any evidence to the contrary.
> and just back up my own bookmarks
Nothing wrong about that. But again.. most people don't find that to be very convenient (I'd actually bet money that that there are is magnitude or a few times more people using Safari/Chrome/etc. to sync their data automatically instead of doing it manually).
I think presuming people want this is like presuming they want 3rd party tracking cookies or that they want their online footprint profiled by the likes of data brokers and palantir and so on. Uninformed consent is not the same as support. Adult humans are mostly smart enough to change their preferences away from convenience when they understand it has bad consequences.
This is how it should work anyway.
widevine and all the other DRMy bits.
Or, better yet, deprecate and disable all the DRMy bits. (One can wish)
Seems like the DOJ is angling that Chrome should be spun off as an advertising platform of some kind.
Seems so, so much worse.
But say it was forced to sell for peanuts because any large company proposal was denied by antitrust review itself, a forced sale of a US company's business to a non-US company under ownership by Chinese investors would likely not be allowed go through in the current environment either. Maybe some other "or something" at this point but it feels a bit like asking for a wildcard play from a very methodical and slow process.
There are a few American companies that could pull it off though; Oracle comes to mind? I know that they don't really work in the browser space, but they have plenty of money, and they work in pretty much every other part of tech.
MS owns an ad network that brings in ~$10Bn a year. Much smaller than Google, but certainly nothing to ignore.
MS owns outlook/hotmail which is wildly popular.
Does Microsoft own “half the internet”? No but neither did Google. Microsoft does own Windows which is a (already sued) monopoly touch point similar to Android. They own a browser. They own a cloud platform that profits from a growing internet. They own plenty of consumer facing properties and should not be written off in monopoly or antitrust discussions.
Personally, I don’t know if I agree with the idea of spinning off Chrome (but I know Googlers so I may be biased), but I understand the appeal on paper.
"Google Analytics is used by 82.5% of all the websites whose traffic analysis tool we know." https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/ta-googleanalytics
Google's adware is all over nearly every site on the internet.
I don't even know what the real-world equivalent would be: maybe if you had to drive to the NYSE in an NYSE-provided vehicle (that could track your behavior to judge how much money you were likely to spend) in order to buy shares from the NYSE who sat on the other side of every trade in addition to running the market.
ehm... jokes aside. I think a more reasonable way is to setup a foundation, composed of biggest players in tech, also companies like Google, Meta, Microsoft, Mozilla Foundation, Linux Foundation, Apple and EFF. The foundation should steer the further development of Chrome. In that way Chrome will be owned by community just like e.g. Linux Kernel or standards like C++ lang spec.
If Chrome would be bought by a private entity, that entity would probably start milking the current user base straight away. Expect adds in bookmarks bar, more address bar spyware (e.g. sending all phrases to the cloud) and paid extensions web store.
The most used and advanced browser that we have today must stay open source. It is more than a program, it is part of global internet infrastructure. We should not destroy it by a foolish political decision.
They were the first company I thought of.
Microsoft is already using the Chromium and changing the default search engine to Bing and shipping it as Edge. What else is needed?
This DOJ looks like they just want to pad their resumes with some grandiose case which might be bad for everyone else.
So the market/consumers decided (due to whatever reasons) that they don't want to use Mozilla's browser. Lets reward them for that failure by giving them control over someone else's browser?
There’s probably a number of talented people out there who would love to drive that truck.
How is that even a question. It's worth billions. User data, ability to inject ads, ability to drive the future of web and web-based apps.
Currently it’s probably worth bilingual because Google owns it. I expect it to rapidly lose value should that change.
There is no potential buyers for Chrome that are serious and trustworthy. Chrome is not a profit center. Mozilla can't make money on Firefox and seems to be losing interest in the project, probably for the same reason. There's no reason to think that anyone would buy Chrome, keep it freely available and make money on the product.
Worst case is that some one will buy it, slap ads on it or turn it into a subscription service. Still I don't see that being enough to fund the Chromium/Blink development. While I do think the adding of features to the web could do with a slowdown, we're talking Internet Explorer 6 levels of stagnation if Chrome is sold of to the wrong entity.
Just reducing the direct influence from one company would already be beneficial for the market. And maybe Mozilla and other browser will get something out of it too.
how it could exist without getting money for setting the default search engine is certainly a question though
Somehow I think that if they will decide to stay in their niche, Cloudflare might be a good fit for Chrome
Why not? Chrome's team isn't as prone to distracting itself as Mozilla. But there is still a lot of ancillary nonsense they get up to that wouldn't be necessary if it weren't in Google. Starting, for example, with not giving a fuck about how their product impacts ad sales.
This quickly adds up to billions of dollars. You have the option to massively downsize, likely sacrificing product quality; or to sell something very valuable to a business-mined buyer. And there's really nothing a browser vendor can sell that isn't bad news for the users.
About the best option would be for Chrome to be spun off and then for Google to keep paying them for being the default search engine.
Why? I'm arguing you can downsize the portfolio without sacrificing product quality for most users. That should let one get by with fewer engineers and/or ones in lower-cost areas.
Browsers are massive. I'm pretty sure the complexity is exceeding the complexity of the Linux kernel. You can pull off heroics with fewer people, but if you want to build a company that brings in revenue, has a security team and a privacy team... all of sudden, it's a pretty big enterprise.
Google is paying Apple $20 billion per year just for that so financing 1000 engineers (which is probably excessive, a few hundred + contributions from other companies using Chromium might be enough) shouldn't be too hard.
Could happen under Trump...
The important part is ending the egregious conflict of interest where an advertising behemoth controls access to the internet.
Ideal result is that Chrome ceases to exist and Chromium continues as an independent open source project controlled by a nonprofit. Even if Google is one of the contributors, so long as they don’t control the product they will exert a lot less control over the web and how people access it.
TLDR just be like Mozilla
Mozilla is rapidly deciding they want to be an advertising and AI company at the expense of their primary product.
So, tl;dr: be like Mozilla used to be, not like they are now.
You can give money to Mozilla Corporation by paying for Firefox Relay, Mozilla Monitor, Mozilla VPN, MDN Plus, or Pocket Premium.
Should Google be banned from forking an open source project and/or just developing any type of browser at all?
The only reason Google "controls" Chromium is that they are spending the most money/development time on it.
It seems like you have no familiarity with any of this. If so, happy to help educate you. If I'm wrong and you're just trolling, it was hard to tell.
Please don't.
Do we really want incompetent management going into ad business? Declining market share, while raising management salaries and firing developers?