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Comment by bogwog | Hacker News Reader

> What is there to sell exactly?

The user base

Logged-in Chrome users are tied to Google logins. The mind boggles at the complexity of trying to somehow separate Chrome identities from Google identities, much less explain that to the general populace for whom "Google", "Chrome" and "browse the Internet" are largely interchangeable.

No boggling required. If you want to sync your browser state or settings across computers, make a Chrome account. If you don’t, don’t. If you want to use Google, make a Google account.

This is how it should work anyway.

100%. And that’s exactly how the DoJ sees it I believe.

> Logged-in Chrome users are tied to Google logins

Third-party sign in with Google [1].

[1] https://www.google.com/account/about/sign-in-with-google/

We had this for ~20 years. It wasn't mind-boggling complex. On the contrary, it was much simpler: you didn't have to "log in" to a piece of software that ran on a computer you owned under a user account you already logged into.

You don't HAVE to login unless you want to share your passwords, history, bookmarks etc. between your devices. Simpler = not having those features (which most users seemingly find useful).

Except if you logon to gmail it automatically logs you in the browser.

> those features (which most users seemingly find useful)

Do they? I would rather not have a "browser account" and just back up my own bookmarks like I was doing 20 years ago.

> Do they?

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).

> Presumably yes.

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.

There is no value to logging into chrome with a Google account that couldn't be replicated easily with some standalone service. The fact they added google logins to Chrome still bugs me.

And what do I, the new owner of this user base, do with it?

1. make your search engine the default

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

So basically invite the DOJ to immediately take it away again?

probably not going to be a popular take on this forum, but to me it looks like anti trust and securities laws are enforced almost randomly. Is Google a monopoly using its control to limit competition - yes but so is pretty much all of FANG and many successful businesses for that matter.

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.

This is a bad/uninformed take. The OP is about one particular anti-trust trial that ended already (with Google losing), and is in the remedies phase. The DOJ and FTC have been suing a lot of other companies over anti-trust, including the other big tech companies. Some of those are still ongoing, some haven't started yet, some have already ended.

I think the distinction is that the new Chrome company wouldn't be a "monopolist". If Chrome was a separate company and did exactly the same as Google is doing currently, there might be no problem. It's when a company "abuses" its market position to enter/capture/distort another market (or maintain the original market) is when in theory regulators have an issue. For example, free software is allowed, but when Microsoft used its dominance in the OS market to push a free browser on the world at the detriment to Netscape, regulators took issue.

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).

But the DOJ wouldn't take it away. The parent comment describes exactly what the DOJ's desired outcome looks like. That's what will happen if the DOJ gets their way. It's the only possible outcome. The people praising the DOJ's decision don't understand just how stupid it is.

Fool me once shame on you. Fool me twice shame on me. Google can no longer be trusted with Chrome; time to give it to another caretaker.

>1. make your search engine the default

>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.

Or the triumphant return of Yahoo!? (hypothetical, not interrobang)

Be careful. Asking these kind of obvious questions might make you ineligible to be hired as a government bureaucrat.

FYI the name for this type of comment is 'thought terminating cliche'.

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