On other hand splitting "free" product is somewhat questionable. When the competitor don't have exactly viable business model. Pushing for something that will clearly in not too distant future kill the split product is not helpful.
You never get to compare the products that never got to exist.
related, I think google supported firefox to have a "viable" competitor to chrome and prevent monopoly scrutiny.
Antichrist seems like a typo here. Perhaps you meant antitrust?
At first it was a free market success story, now it’s not
We all like to have a high minded ideal of some kind of wonderful fully independent for-the-good-of-society entity stewarding Chrome, but history has shown us that’s not what will happen.
The new Chrome company could stop contributing back to Chromium if they wanted, but it would mean they'd diverge from the other browsers backed by the OSS project which is one of their big advantages.
I'm not saying they wouldn't do that or it wouldn't work out, but it's not an obvious win.
[edit] the same way zero rating certain data traffic is still a net neutrality violation.
Look at the new entrant browsers out there: all of them are based on Chromium. The existence of Chrome as an OSS project enabled competition in practice - the cost of entry is orders of magnitude lower when you have a mature browser engine at your disposal.
They’re not considering this because of Chrome’s market share, but because of Google’s power in the search engine market. Indirectly killing Chrome may be acceptable if it makes the market for search engines more competitive.
Having said that, I don’t think it will matter much as long as Apple and, in particular (because they also have a search engine) Microsoft can ship browsers with preconfigured search engines with their OSes, but we will see.
Google could do this if they wanted very very easily but they wouldn’t make any money because as you know they sell advertising, for things they don’t provide.
The problem isn't the Browser it is the other services it has that makes it a monopoly.
Don't let, "Oh we sell off our loss leader so we are not a monopoly." fool you. It has YouTube, office solutions and even every other software under the sun.
Without Chrome being managed or maintain it becomes vulnerable exposing customers to viruses or attacks. It is a service because it stores passwords and manages bookmarks in a secure location for Google products. It is ingrained.
To me this sound like Edge wants to be king, but oh wait Edge is also part of a monopoly. So should not Microsoft experience this too?
Monopolistic practices are not necessarily monopolies, but rather require regulation to encourage fairness.
But to come back to the original point I was making, is that it’s really not akin to a bakery window. If I wanted to allow the metaphor to be further tortured I’d allow “Sears” or something.
But it’s more than that, as Google’s business model is largely parasitic to what users would be doing anyway.
We are talking about the most advertised, most installed most used program. Asking users to pay will do more good than harm
Seems like a good reason for a product to die.