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Comment by m463 | Hacker News Reader

What if this browser killed lots of other viable browsers because it was "free" (yet supported by and supporting a monopoly)?

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.

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It sounds like you want to artificially make the dominant product worse (i.e. non-free) just to make the life of competitors easier.

And noting that Chrome doesn't have anything close to a monopoly - people can use any browser they like. Having >90% of the market doesn't make it a monopoly, it just makes it good. It is the last sort of product people should be attacking, Chrome is a free market success story and Google's strategy is an exemplar of good corporate citizenship.

Didn’t Google change YouTube to hinder Edge?

At first it was a free market success story, now it’s not

Why are you saying that like it's a bad thing? That's what antitrust means. Chrome is free because it's unfairly subsidized by Google Search. Standard Oil was also cheaper because it was a monopoly.

Because for that to make sense you need to have some strong evidence that the resulting status quo will be better for consumers than the present situation. You don't break monopolies just for the sake of breaking monopolies. You do that to avoid locking into some suboptimal outcomes for consumers.

Same as Microsoft keeping Apple alive back in their own antichrist days.

> Same as Microsoft keeping Apple alive back in their own antichrist days.

Antichrist seems like a typo here. Perhaps you meant antitrust?

Maybe it isn't ? MS was the antichrist in Open source circles before Satya Nadella

No past tense or qualifier necessary.

Still is, even if some have let themselves be tempted by the devil.

so, we will all pay for browsers for google don't be a monopoly anymore, that is the plan?

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