DOJ asks for judgement requiring Google to divest Chrome [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

DOJ asks for judgement requiring Google to divest Chrome [pdf]

storage.courtlistener.com

32 pointsstefan_34 comments

“Divesting” Chrome does not even make much sense. Divestment means owner must sell the assets to an unrelated party so $$$ must trade hands in exchange for something of value.

Here is me “thinking aloud”, I don’t have that kind of money to buy Chrome.

Assuming someone has the funds to buy Chrome, they will end up buying the IP and brand. The IP is copyright on the code which is mostly open source, proprietary Google services integration bits, and then the brand.

I can see value in buying the patents & copyright to the codebase and taking it private to build a proprietary State of the art browser to sell or bundle for free with Ads.

Nobody is going to pay for a browser in 2025 so Mritun’s Chrome (my brand - I can’t call it Google Chrome anymore) is going to be ad supported. I might have to think of paid V8 runtimes like Mritun’s Electron and Mritun’s NodeJS to extract maximum value from my investment.

All in, in these high interest-rate environment, I do not see someone buying Chrome to fund it for free - however a lot of ecosystems depend on Chrome, so the best bet would be to use copyright and patents to go after the users. If I have money, I can totally see buying Chrome for approx $100M and then going after monetization.

A lot of the value of Chrome is in the expertise of it's developers - so whoever buys it better get those devs or they're not going to get far.

Might not be necessary, though. A quick transfusion of cash to our sitting President will bring that action to a screeching halt.

There is soooo much scummy surveillance and data stealing that a nefarious owner of Chrome could achieve. People say Google is "evil" but that isn't a fraction of the total tracking and wholesale private content harvesting a different owner would monetize.

Frankly there isn’t much money in surveillance - with the “Google” and the four colors gone I doubt the “Chrome” brand is going to be worth much. “Blackrock Private Equity LLC Chrome” just does not have the ring.

The money is in Chrome patents and copyright. One can go to town and blitzkrieg the NodeJS ecosystem which has super deep pockets. SCO will look baby-talk.

Full docket: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/18552824/united-states-...

Also,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42177767 ("DOJ will push Google to sell off Chrome (bloomberg.com)", 3 months ago, 1450 comments)

Google should sell Chrome to Microsoft,

and Microsoft should sell Edge to Google.

Sounds like a plan only the DOJ would love.

Anyone can go build a web browser if they want to. Google just happens to be the company with the best overlap between competence and motivation to make it comfortable for users to use the internet. Since the world has a pretty good read on which company has the best competence/motivation overlap, it is silly to try and ban them from maintaining a web browser. The next best alternative isn't going to be as good.

Also, would it kill the lawyers to include an abstract that doesn't use the words "whereas" and MENTALLY unsound STYLE capitalisation?

The problem is that it also has massive conflicts of interest, which probably shouldn’t be ignored.

Almost literally everyone that tried to build a web browser gave up and just reskins Chrome now. Of the two outliers, one exists only because its very successful hardware vendor preloads it and disallows competitors, and the other is mostly funded by Chrome's owner anyway.

Basically: without Chrome, Firefox dies (Mozilla is mostly a zombie now already) and Apple closes up shop on Safari a-la IE6. The end result of an order like this will be the death of the world wide web as a platform for new applications.

Didn't Mozilla make it's money on search? If so, how would Chrome disappearing kill Firefox which is independently developed and funded differently?

On responding Chrome, I'll add that's partly because Google controlled Search and Chrome which helped Chrome get dominant. Then, web site owners made pages good for Chrome by default. Then, it was harder to compete with Chrome since everyone had to imitate it. If it's independent (or even weakened), that might reverse a bit. Might not.

Saying Mozilla made its money on search is misleading. It made money because Google paid to be the default search engine. Without that deal Mozilla would be in a much worse state. It's why Mozilla is scrambling to become an ad company.

Perhaps Mozilla could build an ad-supported search engine, seeing that google appears to be giving up search

I meant that it made it's money off Google Search. A search engine company paid it. I apologize if it was confusing to anyone.

So, the fact that they're paid to support Google Search means Chrome being divested shouldn't hurt them. The only exception I could see is if they had to pay the new owner of Chrome like that, didn't add anything to the budget, and split it between the two. That's pure speculation, though.

It depends on how this is all handled. If Chromium/Blink were handed over to a Blender-style non-profit that were sponsored by the enormous number of companies that depend on it (including several cash-flush multinationals), things would continue more or less as-is, minus inappropriate changes requested by non-Chrome branches of Google.

I think it’s also possible that in a world where Chrome/Blink is no longer guaranteed to dominate there’d be increased interest in contributions to WebKit, which is still quite open and flexible, helping bring it up to par for non-Apple platforms.

> If Chromium/Blink were handed over to a Blender-style non-profit that were sponsored by the enormous number of companies that depend on it (including several cash-flush multinationals),

The "that depend on it" is a past tense analysis. When those "cash-flush multinationals" need to roll out the next version of their product, are they going to continue to bet on a "Blender-style non-profit"?

Or are they just going to ship an iOS app like everyone else since "everyone knows web sucks on Apple now" and "everyone has an iPhone anyway"?

Presumably these companies will continue to want the business of the majority non-iOS-user planet, plus there’s all the companies that have integrated Chromium into their desktop tech stacks by way of Electron and CEF. Most of these companies probably already ship an iOS app anyway.

I disagree. I think Google Chrome has a unique anti-compeitive advantage similar to 1990s Microsoft in bundling their web browser (chrome) on the world’s most popular operating system (android). The biggest difference is now that barrier to entry for generating a web engine is significantly higher than it ever has been, and over the years many of the competitors have given up on the pursuit. At the same time, there are more web users than ever before, and the web is a bigger part of daily life than ever before.

I might not be so worried if there weren’t clear privacy considerations with surfing the web and Chrome has no incentive to minimize it because of the ad-tech revenue Google generates.

And how will selling Chrome and then Google forking Chromium and Google employees continuing to submit patches and/or developing the fork fix anything?

Is the DOJ going to forbid Chromium from accepting Google employee patches and forbid Google from using or forking Chromium? What if someone else forks Chromium, will Google also be forbidden from contributing to or using that fork? Is the DOJ going to forbid Google from using any web browsers?

P.S. the Chromium organization is controlled by Google, which is separate from the Chrome brand/product. Is the DOJ also going to force Google to "sell" or divest that?

I don’t have the legal chops to know, but as part of the judgment couldn’t Google be forbidden from developing a browser or influencing the development of other organizations’ browsers so long as it holds products/services that constitute a conflict of interest?

That is the DOJ’s proposal, yes.

> Anyone can go build a web browser if they want to.

Anyone can build a web browser that can navigate the web as it existed in the 90s, but that's not true of the modern web. To a cynical observer it would certainly appear that Google has made a concerted effort to make the web standards nearly impossible to fully implement from scratch. I look forward to seeing if Ladybird can actually become production ready and fully usable, but that effort is notable precisely because the conventional wisdom is that it's essentially impossible to compete with Google anymore with a new browser.

Only Safari really exists in a form that can check Google's power—which is ironically only possible because of Apple's walled garden that prevents all other engines from competing on their platform.

only Safari?

You don't feel like Firefox (and it's derivatives) can do that?

No. I used to, but I've changed my mind recently.

Firefox is driven by Mozilla, which has long since lost the plot and shows no sign of regaining it. If Firefox were forkable we'd have seen one by now, but even Brendan Eich himself chose Chrome as the base for his browser.

I would love to be proven wrong, but my prediction for ten years out is that Mozilla will finally have gone under and Firefox won't be maintainable any more.

(Writing this from Firefox. I'll hold out as long as it's possible to hold out.)

Zen Browser is shaping up to be a nice fork, but if development on Firefox/Gecko stagnates or stops entirely due to Mozilla folding or something, it’s gonna be in a tough position.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Su...

I wonder if Google will be able to get out of this by making a concession to Trump like boosting or dampening search results for some topics.

Much like Tiktok getting a reprieve for suppressing negative videos about Trump or Elon.

Hadn't heard about that what happened?

A couple publications posted stories that anti Trump searches were hidden after Tiktok came back online but anti Biden ones were not.

https://www.ibtimes.com/anti-trump-searches-appear-hidden-ti...

I assumed that Sundar budding up to Trump was to get this killed in the water among other benefits so I wonder if this will pan out or if Trump will step in.

It's been a transition, but, one of the parts I've learned to be thankful for, as a newly experienced citizen under fascism, is the link between paternal fascism and bread and circus. I missed in my 2008 era Poli Sci that there was a link between the two

Trump is going to demand a lot more than the few million Google donated for that. I doubt Trump would settle for anything less than a public grovelling to every Google/YouTube user (like TikTok), serious and significant pro-Trump tinkering with the ranking algorithms, or maybe a few billion purchase of $TRUMP.

I'm sure he'd settle for downranking every journalist he doesn't like and increasing the rank of every news source that fellates him.

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