Google reacts angrily to report it will have to sell Chrome | Hacker News Reader

Google reacts angrily to report it will have to sell Chrome

bbc.com

43 pointsrmason54 comments

This is great news: the government can force Google to sell Chrome to Microsoft, and then we can go back to 20 years ago when everyone was basically forced to use IE6. Or they can force them to sell to Apple, and everyone will be forced to use Macs and iPhones. And, of course, the government won't have a problem with those companies having a browser monopoly and tying it to their other HW/SW.

Are those the only options?

Elon likes to buy things.

I suppose this is also a possibility, but I think it's highly unlikely. He already has his hands full with Xitter and DoGE, and he had trouble getting enough money together for his Twitter acquisition, so I'm not sure how he'd have enough money to also buy Chrome. And unlike Twitter, there's no clear way to make any money from Chrome unless it's tied to an advertising empire, which Xitter is not; after all, it's a company so unpopular with advertisers (he told them to go fuck themselves remember) that the CEO wants to the government to prosecute companies for not advertising with them.

Well, there is also Facebook or Amazon.

But pretty much yes. Chrome is a very large, very expensive product to develop with very unclear profit perspective once disassociated from Google.

Maybe ByteDance can buy it!

Oracle

While Oracle is indeed a big IT company and could probably afford to buy Chrome, I don't see how it would make any business sense for them whatsoever. How would this improve profits for their other products or services?

I don't understand why they bought sun. As everyone I know use mariadb or percona.

Anyone but them. They're even worse than Microsoft when it comes to customer hostility

One possibility is that Chrome could be acquired and run by a consortium of companies, similar to how the C++ programming language is governed. In the C++ model, a committee with representatives from various organizations works collaboratively on proposals, agreeing on features and then implementing them. A similar approach for Chrome could involve major tech companies forming a consortium to collectively manage and develop the browser while adhering to agreed-upon principles and priorities.

The C++ you speak of is a programming language specification, not a consumer-ready piece of software developed by software engineers. I don't see how these are remotely comparable: the C++ consortium doesn't require an army of paid engineers, managers, IT personnel, etc. to operate. A browser does: just look at Mozilla Corp.

"My made-up strawman scenario is horrible!"

Not to mention ahistorical. Frequently, monopoly breakups just resulted in new companies formed.

Microsoft already shoves Edge on its users via OS dominance. Seems way more anti-competitive than what Google does with Chrome.

Edge is based on Chromium. Google won the internet.

V8 and jQuery won the web, really.

Edge was able to fork Chromium without paying Google for it. It's so different from the old IE dominance.

The best would be a nonprofit company like Mozilla funded by the eu. (With most of the old developers)

(Yes I'm a dreamer)

Tell your friends to use Firefox much more aggressively, and the dream will at least partly come true.

Mozilla is better than Google, but still a bad choice nowadays:/

E.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42191110

mozilla is just a monster in waiting, horribly invasive software,promises controll and just feeds ads faster than the rest as an alternative console tool,ok it has its place, but for a daily driver I only use it for niche uses where my other browsers dont render certain big tech web sites and no google anything here

I think you should review Mozilla's privacy issues and compare them objectively to Chrome's. In comparison to the two, Chrome is more invasive, offers less control, and feeds you more ads. Mozilla is no saint, but I don't think any browser companies are (Brave, Vivaldi have had controversies too).

"bad" is still better than "even worse".

My version of the dream is the EU funding a non-profit organization whose _only_ goal, and mandate is to develop and maintain the open web browser like Firefox in a “user. Privacy first” focus.

I is also dream about EU suspending all their “green sustainability” efforts and focus on one thing and do it well. The one thing? Lay new high speed tracks and create a “European Rail” entity that is not merely a composition of national rail organizations. There should be _one_ organization, funded by the EU responsible for high speed tracks between all major cities. Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris, Barcelona, Madrid, Lisbon, Frankfurt, Vienna, Zurich, Rome, Prague, Berlin, Warsaw, Hamburg, Copenhagen, Stockholm,Helsinki, Oslo - imagine all reachable by high speed train who tickets you could buy from one entity, and runs like clockwork.

The US has tried that in several metro areas, and it just doesn't work very well, and that's in a federal country where the bickering owners of these state-run companies are all just "states" and not actual (semi-)sovereign nations.

The EU needs to stop trying to make confederation work and just become a single country if it wants to be a real world-class economic power with things like a working continental rail system. To do this, they'll probably need to take some harsh measures, such as kicking out some of the members.

You clearly haven’t depended on services funded by the EU before.

I mean, obviously you are just making this up and attacking a straw man - the court is not going to order Google to sell the browser to Microsoft.

Lots of companies would probably be interested. None of them will be companies that possess a monopoly on search, because Google is the only one who has that.

It will lead to more competition in search. Google will not be able to prop up their search monopoly by being the default engine in Chrome anymore. They'll have to compete with, at a minimum, whoever buys it and immediately changes the default.

A more likely remedy than selling off the browser (or maybe both will happen) is that Google won't be able to set all your defaults for everything to Google anymore. This will create breathing room for other companies to market competing services and make money.

This is all good stuff for everyone who doesn't work at Google, which is 99.999999% of us even on Hacker News

It's not a strawman, and you made your own strawman too by putting words in my mouth. I never said they'd force Google to sell to Microsoft specifically. You clearly haven't thought very clearly about how this would work. How exactly would a buyer make money from Chrome? Think about that for a few minutes and then maybe you'll understand why Microsoft is the most likely buyer, with Apple the next most likely.

They don’t have to sell. They have to spin off. There are many scenarios that you are ruling out because nobody can predict 2026.

Meanwhile, working towards a somewhat healthier and competitive landscape on browsers is more than welcome.

I buy it for a dollar. Then let people contribute to the open source code. Problem solved

The only regulation Adtech companies need is a cap on how many Ads they can show to a single person in a day. Right now its infinity.

All this other stuff won't make any diff cause its all about how much Attention they are allowed to capture, steal, buy, sell and waste.

How would they know who a single person is? You could use multiple computers without being signed into Google on multiple networks.

Instead of a single person, make it a single sign-in. A "single person" really is too much to expect. But a single sign-in is not.

I haven’t seen an ad in years through careful ad blocking

Extensions API needs more granular controls and to remain functional

Is it the number of ads that's really the problem? The limit right now is "how much users will put up with".

I think of the targeting as the key problem. Not even necessarily the results of the targeted ads, but the process that they have to go through to do the targeting. They gather up a lot of your personal habits, and there's a ton of real evil that can be done with that. The ads are merely a large nuisance, but the loss of privacy is potentially devastating.

If so, limiting the ad count won't help.

The raw number of ads is not the problem compared to:

1. Placement and deliberate confusion

2. No liability for viruses or scams

3. Creepy spying/tracking

I have opinion that cloudflare might be a good fit for chrome. If they want it, obviously.

Yeah, I'd hate to see that. I have a feeling it would start drifting towards "use Chrome with our kernel module, or we'll block you from half the internet".

Something needs to be done; Google's mission is at odds to good browser development, and having an effective monopoly with the world using a single browser is not good for users even without the advertising conflict of interest.

>effective monopoly with the world using a single browser

I've got at least five browsers on the laptop - chrome, firefox, safari, orion and edge. I alternate between firefox and chrome depending on which works best for that I'm doing. Not sure how that's a monopoly? I use chrome most because it works best. Choosing the best amongst competing options seems kind of the opposite to a monopoly.

The only place I feel monopolistic behaviour is on the phone where apple try to push me to use safari rather than chrome.

Who would be able to buy it in a way that did align with good browser development?

People really like getting their web browser for free. If they're not paying for it with money, the developers will have to recoup costs some other way. In general, that's not going to be something that benefits users.

I suppose they could set up a not-for-profit that takes donations. I think that's how Mozilla works, but I don't think it's working very well.

I'd love for there to be some other brilliant idea. But thus far, we've been stuck on "money, advertising, or your data" as the only ways to make revenue.

To whom? Oracle? Adobe? Ticketmaster?

Mozilla

But then they will remove tab groups.

But add Containers :)

The Onion

This is what the world needs

Both logos are already basically circles!

To someone less evil, like Lex Luthor for example.

I'm sure I'm not alone seeing parallels with Microsoft's monopolistic moves with Internet Explorer a quarter-century ago.

I wonder if there's an age-related split in public opinion that matches those events.

Kick them back into the stone age.

LMAO

Google formed to break the m$/apple monopoly over the ecosystem and now theyre jealous of google successes.

LMAO

Google formed to break the m$/apple monopoly over the ecosystem and now theyre jealous of google successes.

I find you respond the most negatively to accusations and critisims you deep-down know to be true...

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