Google Being Forced to Sell Chrome Is Not Good for the Web
chriscoyier.net
chriscoyier.net
Google is a web business, that’s their whole thing. They made a browser to invest in the web itself because what is good for the web is good for Google, and happens to be good for all of us.
Google is less a 'web business' than it is an 'advertising business', a 'surveillance business', and a 'finance business'.
Consequently, it is false that 'what is good for the web is good for Google'. AMP, and the Ad-blocking prohibition are evidence of this.
The stated goal was for sites to be able to restrict access to human users instead of automated programs and "allow web servers to evaluate the authenticity of the device and honest representation of the software stack and the traffic from the device".
Which on the surface seems like a legitimate use case I have to be honest.
The most likely outcome of WEI would have been - and might still be - that users of any operating system or browser that does not comply with the Trusted Computing agenda (secure boot, verified OS, full encrypted path from company servers to the user's screen & input devices) find themselves locked out of large portions of the internet.
That's not in the purview of a web server to do that, and quickly falls into the territory of violating 'neutrality' and 'anti-compete' territory. (i.e. it should not be possible for Apple or Microsoft servers to show content only to Microsoft or Apple devices, because that violates the law, it prevents competing software vendors from being compatible with them).
It is strictly not appropriate for every single web server that my browser contacts to audit my software stack, just like if a bank phones me up randomly it's not appropriate for them to verify who I am — the burden is on the web server to validate and confirm that it's identity and software stack is correct, instead.
The job of a web server is to truthfully serve it's content and not to butcher or malform that content, just like a librarian. Imagine if you had to take your birth certificate and pictures of your flat's security system to a library every time you wanted to borrow a book!
Regardless of why Google made Chrome originally, today, the main reason why it exists is to enable Google to track users more efficiently. And that is a bad thing.
Do you support the abstract argument that
________ allows better monetization of _________ which is good for everyone.
??
If so, we can agree to disagree. If however, “it depends”, I think you need to clarify why your proposition is true where other variants (e.g. “Indentured servitude allows better monetization of the lower classes which is good for everyone”) are very clearly not so.
It allows better monetization of the web which is good for everyone.
In the real world, targeted ads initially promised to be related to user’s interests but never kept that. You don’t see what’s interesting for you, only what was paid a lot of money for, by people who find your parameters most suitable for their bait, blanket style. Users get heavily underserved their ads and mostly see generic money grab bs instead, cause money ranks better than interests and google is no socialist despite so much pretending.
It’s not true but let me explain :
« Free » (like in free beer) web is :
- Good when it’s really free (like, people sharing things because they are nice, free software…)
- Not good when there is a business behind.
I have nothing against businesses. I love throwing my money at a lot of them. But I hate when I’m their product.
The master stroke of Google, Facebook and others have been to let the entire world think we are entitled to free things. It’s not true, you always somehow pay, if not with your money, then it means you are the money.
See pretty much every lesson in history ever, from the Schutzstaffel of the Nazis, to worker unions being doxxed, to lobbyism.
Our democracy relies on private information being secret, and any one sided party having that information is able to rule over the other.
There's a reason why Putin is so successful when utilizing his FSB and SVR apparatus.
The "i don't have anything to hide" reasoning is bullshit, because you didn't post your email addresses password publicly for everyone to see. Therefore, your reasoning is based on the assumption that you misinterpret what everyone vs some party you inherently trust means.
Look at US politics, where 50% of the population now regrets having shared their medical data with doctors, because the current administration decided to prosecute past visits to the gynecologist if a woman decided to not be pregnant. Something that was not illegal in the past is now illegal, therefore data in itself is incriminating by default.
Assume there's no ad network that tells you that user is into high-end bikes. You cannot produce cheap rage bait and then market bikes, because you'll likely miss your target audience. You have to produce good biking content and then advertise bikes to be effective.
This is basically "break for our sponsor" you see on YouTube - for me personally youtube sponsorships are way more bearable than typical ad infested "news" site
Tbh cookies are lesser evil than Google's make believe cookie replacement technology. And remember Google is not Netscape, Google is on whole another level of power and domination.
A few of us are using Firefox. The few who remember the terror that web development was when Microsoft had the monopoly. At least they were mostly ignorant, not outright hostile towards the open web.
Obviously the most visited websites would maintain the web better than OS vendors, their buisness depended on it being open.
We have a similar situation now, but with google locking down the most common browser (Manifest v3) and using extensions of web standards to maintain a dominant position.
Disclaimer: I am a zoomer and not a web developer so my history may be off here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Environment_Integrity#Rece...
AJAX of jQuery fame, is extremely similar to ActiveX XmlHttpRequest.
The problem isn't XmlHttpRequest, but everything else they added/removed. Same with Google. The problem isn't they made request more secure, they made ad blocking impossible.
I'm not sure what your message is referring to.
I think you have two names mixed up: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1600419/xmlhttprequest-v...
This stuck out because I remember jQuery's ajax being a wrapper around XMLHttpRequest (and maybe still is?).
Microsoft is known for treating developers pretty good. Much unlike Apple.
It doesn’t matter what the standard is. It has to work in chrome because of its market saturation.
That makes chrome the standard regardless of what any standards body says
...But even then, it did not follow that "what is good for Google is good for the web".
Just because 2005!Google does something that improves its situation doesn't mean that's automatically good for all of us, even if stuff that improves the web for all of us makes 2005!Google's situation better as a side effect.
And 2025!Google is definitely not in that position. At this point, what's good for the web is only good for Google if it fits with Google's own plans and enhances their control.
Chrome is similar to other apps like X, Instagram, or YouTube. You click on the app. You are given a way to discover content and ads are shown along side that content. When you click on a site / post there can also be ads. Maximizing engagement on the web, means people will discover more content, which means more ads can be displayed.
>AMP
Unlike the other platforms I mentioned the web hosts content using 3rd party tech stacks and server which means that the user experience can be variable. AMP allows Google to provide a more consistent experience. It was optional and served to provide a better user experience for the users of the web.
>Ad-blocking prohibition
Google Search and Chrome have not prohibited ad blockers.
Re: AMP. AMP is like Cloudflare. Whatever is good about it is, by definition, bad for the Web, because its model replaces the Web as-we-know-it with something closer to Compuserve.
Re: Ad-blockers. It may not be a complete prohibition, but it is a hobbling of ad-blockers. It is clearly intentional, too, as evidenced by AlphaGoogle's recent anti-adblocker initiatives at Youtube.
Companies providing web hosting is already an established part of the web for a long time. People want to dedicate their time to the problems the site has and not to the problems the infra has. Not every site is going to want to setup their own servers at hundreds of points of presence around the world. Being able to use someone else's for free allows site operators to improve the user experience of their site for users for free. Even if such a deal ends people can still connect and use the original site directly.
You are being sarcastic here, but ironically you are not far from the truth. The core financial model of a businesses is not always obvious.
McDonald’s is a real-estate business. Costco is a subscription business.
I don’t think that’s accurate. The membership fee is a trivially small percentage for most members, and can’t be a significant margin driver. Especially for those members who have a pack of kids and shop Costco regularly, spending hundreds of dollars per visit.
I personally think the membership fee exists as a gating function to keep less-prolific customers out of overcrowded stores on weekends.
Their margin comes from subscriptions.
Ads aren't the mechanism through which Google receives payment, they're what Google is paid for. The actual claim your analogy matches is that Google is just an online credit card processing business. But nobody makes that claim.
Given that, I actually don't see much resistance from Google leadership to abc.xyz divesting itself of Chrome. In fact, it's probably on some level been "worked out" - with the DOJ pushing for a meaningful, and symbolically meaningful, concession that was already negotiated as something Google could agree to, and maybe even wanted.
Getting rid of Chrome could help them refocus their efforts, and unburden themselves from something that probably comes with a lot of issues. Cue the eventual press release, letter from the leadership, looking back on the decades of Chrome, and how they ultimate believe that a Browser should be owned by the web and the people itself, not by a company.
It could be a significant, meaningful and positive pivot for the company as it faces changing situations.
Google deprecated PageRank in large part because interlinking was a proxy for user interest, and now with Chrome they can measure user interest directly in real time.
That's the crux of the argument. I don't need any further evidence.
But, the problem is the opposite is not true. What is good for Google is often bad for the web as a whole. The only reason it "Works" is because of their dominance.
Google removed don’t be evil. They created a web browser which originally was good back in the day d.g. Internet explorer was crap, Firefox was okay but very different world 2007 vs today.
I had to look it up, but what a fantastic word which applies perfectly to this context:
"Panglossian" describes something or someone characterized by extreme and often naive optimism, especially in the face of adversity
Panglossian • \pan-GLAH-see-un\ • adjective. : marked by the view that all is for the best in this best of possible worlds : excessively optimistic.
Example: Even the most Panglossian temperament would have had trouble finding the good in this situation.
Thank you!
Certainly this would be unpopular here but I would be all for aggressive trust-busting beyond what the DOJ has done historically, including vertical integrations.
Right now tech is a strange feudal state with hundreds of thousands of small teams anchored to a few hydra-like super-corporations on a consuming destructive rampage. Somehow, with the most advanced computer and technological systems to ever be known by man, we're looking to increase working hours and cut benefits, for "profits" that are not quite realized by the labor class or the end users.
Gonna be interesting to see what happens. I know Wall Street will place their bets for what they want to happen right along side what's obviously going to shake out once the market becomes 'rational.'
Also they have the have the formula because they've already done it. And it works, why wouldn't they want to keep doing it, but more?
Biden’s DOJ was slooooooowly pursuing anti-trust more seriously. That’s not a Trump priority. So what’s the reason?
Vertical integration was a huge part of what they went after historically, until a bunch of people "convinced" the US that the standard should be "consumer harm." The cool thing about consumer harm is that you can come up with any bullshit argument about how prices will go down and access and quality up in the future from some merger, and nobody can disprove it because it's a counterfactual (he said, she said.) And when prices go up, it's just <shrug>, who could have known?
I know what vertical integration is today, though. It's not a hypothetical, it's a selling point to investors. I can just tell you no. Any clear metrics or standards for antitrust action can't be tolerated. The goal is to force us to go on vibes. Then they say we have bad vibes.
Competition brings down prices. Laissez-faire leads to pseudo-Communism with royal families, courtiers, and technicians making up the top 10%, and everybody else gets to be a (debt) slave i.e. feudalism.
We should err towards breaking more things up than would be ideal, not less. If I make you divest from something, you sell it and get whatever future value out of it today. It's not a punishment according to SCOTUS when they're looking at TikTok (which is why they said the TikTok ban wasn't a bill of attainder.) We charter these companies, and they operate for our benefit, which is why we grant them limited liability and a whole bunch of other treats. What you divest is going to go to somebody just like you, but someone who is not financially entangled with you. The only reason you want to keep it all is to do things that I don't want you to do with it, I don't want you doing unproductive market manipulation, I want you to put that energy into competing.
Surely, the reason you want to keep it is because owning and controlling thing A and thing B allows you to make more profit personally than being a controlling owner of thing A or thing B.
That said, I agree with your post and also think nations should err more on the side of breaking things up.
Concentrations of power distort markets and resist democratic control.
Somehow?? This is capitalism 101. Not a "strange feudal state" nor anything else.
Because then Chrome would slowly rot since there's no one to fund development, leading us to WebKit being the only engine, as Firefox is also defunded. I don't see how that's better.
The antitrust remedy isn’t set until the September hearings and won’t take effect until after years of appeals hearings.
They can even make it closed source or enforce a not for commerce license. That would make manufacturers choose between paying those royalties, installing Firefox, investing in their own browser (a fork of Chrome or their very own tech.) Some of them will pay royalties.
They track you. There IS a business model for Chrome: monetizing user data.
And some people wonder how Chrome could ever make money if it were divested from Google...
I’m no fan of Google, but—unless people really want browser subscriptions—I don’t see how you can have a browser company today. They exist better as a byproduct of some other business model.
If any product was given away by massively rich companies there would be "no market" for it, because it was destroyed.
As the saying goes, if the product is free, YOU are the product.
The majority of Netflix users over the next few years will be advertising based users. That just doesn't bring in enough profit because people are not willing to pay enough subscription to cover what those things actually cost.
Your hypothesis has a bit of a gaping hole where "real world user behaviour" sits.
You do know most of those companies do both charge you and sell your data? Almost the only companies that don't sell your data are big tech advertising companies.
"When you don't pay you are the product" doesn't mean "If you pay you aren't the product", you still are the product the company is just double dipping.
This means that you as a consumer have to spend at least $1 (likely more - profit not revenue) for every $0.70 of value you receive in "free" services. Being supportive of ad-supported services is therefore financially irrational.
Judging by how much hyper-consumerist behavior I see in myself and my coworkers, we’re not. Everyone is constantly buying shit they don’t need and then justifying it.
No, people are not going to pay much for browsers and websites, that's why ad supported products and services exist. Otherwise someone would make better software and charge for it. The only way this works is government intervention, which is what's happening here.
If you want to prevent such alternatives from existing, you'd need fairly authoritarian measures.
It’s all flowers and sunshine when you agree with what they are doing but it’s incredibly easy to abuse the power. And suddenly, like compounding interest, you have dictatorship.
It very much is not.
Ads are private sector propaganda. They’re manipulative material attempting to exploit the weakness of the human mind to get YOU to spend money you don’t actually want to spend. Yes, YOU.
We know things that exploit the weaknesses of the human mind, like nicotine, have the potential for extraordinary evil when left to the hands of the private sector. We haven’t all come to this consensus on advertisement, but we will.
A browser is an operating system feature.
I mean, you can get alternative file manager programs. Pay for them, even. But most people will never bother.
Microsoft fought and (largely speaking) lost an entire case about that assertion [1].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
IE had the opposite problem. Microsoft was moving too slow and was genuinely holding the web back. And obviously, that was intentional because Microsoft's business model at that time was entirely tied to locking users into Windows.
Its never been easier to write cross browser web apps. Some companies choose not to because they don't care enough to test in other browsers. And even then, there are a lot of apps that just happen to work in all the major browsers by chance. It wasn't nearly as easy to build a cross browser app for the IE6 dominated web.
Could be. But this decision is why we even have other browsers.
The decision came too late to save Netscape. Microsoft then stopped competing, and were slow to react when Firefox emerged.
Meanwhile, Apple were always going to create their own browser — as part of their own OS — eventually. Opera kept on keeping on. Konquerer was never going to live or die depending on what happened on Windows.
This isn’t relevant, from the perspective of the ruling.
It might be relevant from the perspective of Chrome-the-business and from Chrome-users’ perspectives.
And what is the point of the breakup if everyone (including consumers/users) is worse off? Is the point of government to make people better off, or just to maximize the number of paperclips produced?
In this case this is pushed by other tech companies that want to buy data from Chrome, or they want to move users from the web to their apps where they can be more user hostile.
This is what happens when the government is controlled by corporations.
What a browser is in 2025 is vastly different from what anyone thought they would ever be. There are major, major issues with the way web engines/web browsers function today and much of those issues stem from Google's near monopoly on browsers.
There was a lot of very interesting and good discussion around this in some of the Mozilla/Firefox threads recently. Mostly about how browsers turned into something they were never meant to be, which has changed the way the internet works and how we interact with it.
The only thing that comes to mind is password management. But I would also argue that’s a boon for normal users and trust in the web.
For example, asking you straight on first launch to log into your Google account, for your "benefit".
Speed up the web with AMP that gives one company control over everything.
And AMP is not a browser feature.
If a hypothetical Chrome Corp. couldn't figure out how to use the exact same data Google is harvesting with the browser to at least move in the direction of profitability, then they're hypothetically idiots.
Selling that data to the government and other corporations is user hostile though, and that is exactly what is going to happen when Google is forced to sell.
I can see why the government would love this though so it makes sense they pursue this hard now,
(It's probably a bit better, assuming the hypothetical sale is to all comers, but still...)
Yes there is, it is the same business model Chrome has now, but with overt pricing. In other words if you can understand why Chrome is valuable to Google now, then you can understand what Chrome-the-standalone-business would put a price tag on.
Google benefits from the data that Chrome collects. So Chrome-the-business would collect the same data and charge Google for it.
But it could also sell that data to other companies too. This would create competition which would lead to better pricing and more innovation. That is why it is a remedy for a monopoly.
The history of antitrust is full of stuff like this. Standard Oil used to own all the gas stations in the country. AT&T used to be the only company that sold telephones.
Paid browsers used to be common in the past, and ones like Netcaptor gave us tabbed browsing, pop-up blocking, etc. Opera was great too. Netscape itself used to be paid at first. It was big companies like Microsoft and Google tyring to EEE the web by giving away free browsers that killed the thriving browser marketplace and led to monopolies like the ones we have now.
There very much can be a browser market and business model IF antitrust were actually enforced.
Divest that shit yesterday.
Chrome consistently pushes to make it easier for websites to track you -- by being the slowest browser to incorporate privacy protections like third-party cookie isolation, by eliminating extension APIs used by ad/tracker blockers, and by adding new features which expose more fingerprinting surface to websites. This disproportionately benefits Google because Google runs some of the largest web tracking networks (reCaptcha, Google Analytics, AdSense, etc). Even if Chrome was separate from Google, Google (along with other ad companies) could probably keep paying them to sabotage users' privacy.
Chrome also directly uploads a lot of data to Google. It's technically possible to use Chrome without syncing your browser history to your Google account, but a surprising number of people I know mysteriously managed to turn on sync without knowing it. Other Chrome data-collection initiatives, like Core Web Vitals, also provide a lot of value to Google's other businesses. Those are other products that Google could pay directly for.
Chrome’s defaults are the main reason anybody is tracked by cross-site cookies any more, and that tracking massively and directly benefits Google’s business.
[1] https://techstartups.com/2021/03/18/google-finally-revealed-...
They’re subtly, in millions of ways, most predating the Internet, manipulated into making that choice. And, more importantly, believing they willingly made that choice.
Consumer behavior is complex and is the result of hundreds of years of technology and economic growth. If I plop some hypothetical human who is on his first day on Earth, he probably wouldn’t make that choice.
This requires a reframing of how responsibility is thought about in the US, but we do think this way sometimes. We kneecapped many industries we’ve felt have influenced poor choices in individuals.
Besides which, we probably differ a great deal about "voluntarily giving." To me, it sounds like the defense of the mob. "These people gave us their money voluntarily. Ask them!"
> Chrome "collects" your physical address because
Because it reads your IP address and Wifi access point, and can compare that to a list of known ip addresses and access points, which they collect with their Maps cars.
- Google is banned from paying Firefox to be the default search engine -> Firefox has way less money -> Firefox development massively slows
- Someone buys Chrome and needs to turn a profit from Chrome, rather than using it to indirectly profit from the web in general like Google does -> Chrome probably goes to shit and development massively slows
So what now? Safari is going to be the leading force moving the web forward? The Chromium forks that are doing basically no browser engine work are going to suddenly find billions of dollars to invest in hiring developers? Someone will buy a time machine and go 10 years into the future to get a version of Ladybird that is comparable to what we have today in Chrome/Firefox? Just because you guys hate Google doesn't make any of those scenarios remotely plausible. And if you hate Google, there are much better ways to punish it than this.
I for one really tire of this spiritual vandalism masquerading as a hopeful pineing ask for a new beginning. The web rocks, is amazing. Sure there's some incidental complexity that's accrued, but the versatility & wide capability from a simple core are a glorious & powerful thing that I think only a fool wouldn't celebrate.
I don't think 98% of readers here have any possible candidates in mind. We don't have any idea what might be better, or why.
Gemini and gopher both seem semi competitive with the web in that they target users. (Ipfs is just a transport; there's value there of course but it leaves more questions than suggestions.) But I really doubt the web is going to be disrupted or even budged by efforts that are so explicitly ultra-minimal, so bare bones text.
Folks complain about the document model of the web being used for apps, which I personally feel is incredibly silly, that hypermedia being able to sing & dance like it does & having so many different framework styles validated the Extensible Web Manifesto https://github.com/extensibleweb/manifesto idea of HTML + platform APIs as a low level platform, putty we can forever reshape & mold to different architecture & use. If folks really want to get beyond the web though, the answer is definitely not just chopping off the capabilities, doing drastically less. We'd need a more bold encompassing media form, that's obviously better. I'm curious as hell to find out what that might look like but I see very few such bold ideas.
Its crazy to me that the only vision, the only rabble rousing of note seems to be to do vastly less. Maybe we could ask Flutter why they think they deserve to be the future, why the apps their are better than web, but I expect more revolting disgusting "it's better for devs" "pixel perfect" answers without any actual progress for the user, with a status quo of what software is, and no principles & or fundamental enablement or interconnection wins. Its not gonna weave something better than the www. Too many visions are inwards, retreating, and so few imagine better connecting, richer media forms, looking outward beyond the singular developer distilled down app experience that made the web the force that rewrote computing that it is, that makes the web so utterly unique & special (& something great wealth should be funding & cherishing).
People can also pay for browsers. The only reason why this isn't feasible today is because it's hard to compete with the top-of-the-line stuff that megacorps offer for free - which they do precisely so they can maintain de facto control over web standards (or force the lack thereof in areas where this is advantageous). Lest we forget, many early web browsers were paid products (not just NN, but also Opera, for example), and Microsoft's original sin as a monopoly was offering IE for free, against which NN couldn't compete. But if Google is forced to ditch Chrome, and Microsoft is forced to ditch Edge...
Browsers will not stop existing because google cannot make one. At worse google would donate to a non profit that keeps the engine and do the influencing under the rug.
Almost the same argument applies to Edge and Chrome.
This is a better answer than Waterfox or Edge. Like you said, at least Apple cares about privacy enough to defend it in court.
Waterfox is dependent on Mozilla, which admitted to selling its users’ data.
Edge is an answer just for Windows, and the primary benefit to MS is getting people to use Bing, to sell ads.
Even Safari is massively subsidized by Google paying to be the default browser. If those billions go away, engineering investment will be cut.
Courtroom testimony implied that part of the reason Apple value(s/d) the deal with Google was a "peace deal" to prevent Google from doing what Google does and forcing Safari users on Google properties, to switch to Chrome.
Of all the browsers that would be affected by the loss of Google funding, Safari is least likely to be affected.
Apple only has a browser team because they need to keep up with parity for their OS.
What constitutes "forward" to you
Who would this be and how would they turn a profit from it?
I kinda believe Chromium is already complete enough, and government can take over it, and keep in running in maintenance mode (security fixes through possible bounties) with minimum expenses, and it will be great product: reliable, performant, secure and without corp-crap-tech.
Unfortunetelly we are in the times when any split of any of those multi-bilion dollar corp would be greatly benefiting humanity as a whole. How many people are taking their profits really? Hundreds? Thousands maybe?
And that is it. What humanity have from existence of those? Like one thing?
Some may say that we will have an AI, self driving cars or androids pretty soon. But ask your friends, or neighbours, ordinary people that work in non-tech jobs what they need. I am 100% sure that any those things above will be not their first need.
Better heath care. Less work. More money. Less stress. Vacation to recuperate and relax. More time for hobbies. Just possibility to have relaxing walk in the woods without worry.
Does any of those companies work on any projects that will help suffice any of those needs? Author of an article mentions 'good of the web' because probably his livelihood is the web.
But regular person does not care if their banking application or Netflix app on TV dongle is written with latest CSS standards or with Jquery.
Till that point in our history all big empires fell because of buearacracy and stagnation caused by millions of people trying to retain status quo. Momentum of conquest was not enough suply enoug resources to feed the empire. With the tech giants this may be first time in history when one entity will rule the entire human population caused by sheer momentum of technical progression it is making.
Will this be a good thing? I am entirely sure it will not be.
Better health care is a tough one, I'll give you that.
As a disclaimer I work on AI research.
Oh yeah. Definitely when we have discussions with companies to get funding we totally talk about how we're going to save the poor worker from all of these horrible jobs.
There's one end goal. Get rid of people to increase profits for management and shareholders.
People generally do not want to be "alleviated" of work, a great euphemism for being unemployed.
There's far more funding in getting rid of people than increasing their productivity 2x.
Losing your job sucks. It could suck a lot less with stuff like UBI that distributes the right amount of the profits from increasingly concentrated automation. Maybe you think that's impossible in the US or wherever you're from. You might be right. The point is that whichever society figures out the right mix of policies to harness all the benefits of automation without turning 99% of their people into paupers is going to "win".
But that investment isn’t neutral. It’s oriented towards making the Web a better place for Google to make money—not a better place for users to avoid being tracked by Google. Chrome’s dominant position means Google can kill any new web feature that would help users, but hurt Google’s bottom line.
Blink-dev is an amazing mailing list of really good improvements being built intelligently, in well declared fashion, with lots of checks via standards bodies, fully open to discussion. There's very few places on the planet where such good work is so easy to see, and no where that it's so abundant. https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev
What features has Google killed, do you think? How often has this been a problem, do you think? What other browsers have gone ahead, with Google holding out?
Google wants a competent capable successful healthy web. They want there to be an open, standards & protocols system out there, a connected rich hypermedia internet, because everything else humanity has done with computing is proprietary and trying to rely on someone else's platform is existentially hazardous.
Unless you've been living under a rock, it's hard to miss manifest v2 vs v3.
I still think this is, like, the one example. Its a bloody awful one though.
JPEG-XL pops to mind.
> How often has this been a problem, do you think? very often
> What other browsers have gone ahead, with Google holding out? Google is holding out in a sense that no other people can implement a feature-complete browser. Google is killing the "open standard" web by make the standard impossible.
But there are also plenty of people at Google etc who are convinced that advertising is the only way to fund the web and so build features to support that e.g. maintaining 3rd-party cookies, FLEDGE / Flock / Topics (and the rest of the deceptively names Privacy Sandbox)
Advertising is a massive invasion into our personal lives and via ad networks actors (sometimes hostile) can get access to data they have no rights to
If a company acquires Chrome, they don't have many choices: re-establish Google integration deals (so the divestiture would be pointless), replace Google integrations with their own (becoming just another Chromium distro in a sea of Chromium distros), or just monetize the existing userbase.
A Chrome acquisition doesn't include unlimited control over Chromium. Chromium is open source, with contributions from many organizations (who retain the copyright to their contributed code). Google can only sell what it exclusively owns: the brand, infrastructure, signing keys, etc. The real force behind Chromium is having a critical mass of engineers all pushing in generally the same direction. You can't necessarily just buy that, especially when you wouldn't own exclusive rights. Any other company is free to poach engineers and fork the project.
Edited to add: if Microsoft sold VS Code to, say, Oracle... don't you think that another company would leap at the opportunity to fork the project? Would the userbase and the thin layer of closed-source Microsoft customizations really be worth that much?
I literally don’t see a way out of this mess. In fact if Chrome needs to be split off from google, google has no need to keep Firefox alive anymore. If they just stop paying for the search engine default, Mozilla loses 75% of their revenue.
The real question is to what level Google continue investment in Chrome after the sale. Remember both Mozilla and Apple will also loose out on the search engine deal.
To contribute anything to Chromium or V8 you need to sign a CLA, afterwards there are very little rights you retain.
The economics are identical to Chrome being within Google. The differences are three-fold:
- Bing, DDG, OpenAI, and others can compete to pay for placement
- There can be no central directives to shove things like Manifest V3, weird data sharing, or DRM down our throats
- Google has no incentive to favor Chrome over Firefox or Edge in its web offerings
In other words, if a business is split, the same economics work, but without all the shady, anti-trusty stuff. It's an independent company, without linked chains of corporate control.
I think it most serves Google's interests to set up a second nonprofit similar to Mozilla to manage this, perhaps with more of a consortium model. Whatever Google can sell Chrome for is less in its interests than maintaining that the new Chrome will not be used against Google the way Google used Chrome against competitors.... If DDG were to end up with ownership of Chrome and switch from Google Search to DDG, I think Google would be pretty unhappy, while DDG's market cap of 75M versus Google's of $2T -- 2000 times higher -- would even out a little bit.
One of the key points is that the EXACT SAME economics and business model can be evil and anti-trusty or good and fair depending on chains of control and collusion. If there is a colluding consortium (whether by backroom deals or by having related products in the same place), new competitors won't come in since they know they'll be crushed unfairly. Same economics without backroom deals, and you've got market competition.
How do you image that working? Google is already banned from paying Apple to be the default search engine, so why would they be allowed to pay Chrome?
You’ve got a monopoly on lemonade because you pay all the grocery stores to be the default lemonade.
So we’re going to force you sell your car.
To put it another way, the problem is not so much that Google shouldn't be paying to be the default search engine, but that it shouldn't own both the browser and the search engine.
I think this harkens back to the anti-trust court case, United States v. Paramount Pictures, where the court ruled that the film studios cannot hold monopolies over the movie theatres, and that theatres must remain independent.
Similarly, browsers and search engines being independent is good for competition because the internet is too important to let a single company dictate how it is used.
If this is the real crux of the case, then is divesting Chrome going to negatively affect DuckDuckGo and Kagi?
My hunch is “no”, and also that search+browser isn’t the crux of the case. I think the real crux is Google owning browser+ad/surveillance-network.
Yep. The rest of the article is equally disingenuous, desperately making up arguments and bad analogies.
Google at least gave you the option to do that.
Not sure if Google voluntarily gave users the option. Google was forced to give users the option since Blink is a derivative of the LGPL-licensed WebKit, which is itself a derivative of the LGPL-licensed KHTML.
An argument can be made for open-sourcing the frontend of the browser. However, even the WebKit codebase has a test browser that runs on Windows (despite Safari dropping Windows support over a decade ago). This would have been present in the Blink codebase even if Google decided to keep the Chrome frontend proprietary. So people would still be able to embed "Chromium" into applications.
It’s baffling that you’re unhappy with companies wanting you to pay for their product. Yes Netflix increases their prices and wants to prevent you from sharing your account, but they’re not scanning every single email you’ve ever received or making the web worse for everyone to collect more data about you.
I'm actually kind of curious about that as an option. Right now the distortion that makes Google any 800 pound gorilla is their leveraging of Chrome to channel users into their various monetized ecosystems.
But there could conceivably be an interesting form of parity that comes from the browsers all depending on the same form of revenue, search engine placement. I haven't fully thought this through, so I welcome corrections. I suppose Google could quite easily give favorable treatment toward ChromeCo and effectively continue to flex its monopoly muscle. Google will need them just as much as before. I'm honestly just not sure.
A billion or two dollars would fund development indefinitely. Don't sell it to anybody, make it a nonprofit with a fat trust. I'll say the same thing about Firefox: they got plenty of money from Google. They should have been able to save enough in ten or how ever many years to fund development for all eternity. Instead they paid it to themselves.
Its just going to get more user hostile, that is the point. Google has a reason not to sell that data, Chrome company does not.
A more appropriate ruling would be just force Google to stop distributing Chrome, not sell it but kill it. There's already a myriad of chromium reskins, so that wouldn't change, and that's all chrome will become if someone else buys it. Make the precedent that owners of a search engine can't also have a browser.
I think just killing chrome would do more good than selling it off to become yet another sketchy chromium reskin with questionable privacy and crypto miners.
Apple did good things for the web with WebKit before iOS because it was in their interest to break the Windows desktop monopoly (and I'd argue that macOS has been a huge benefactor of Chrome taking down IE). They've been less than stellar post iOS now that they have a rent seeking business predicated on native apps locked away behind their app store.
They can’t be forced to sell soon enough.
Microsoft welded Explorer into the guts of its OS so they could say, after forcing it to be true, that the browser was an essential part of the system. But Microsoft made business software, why should it have to change IE? That's crazy!
I wouldn't be surprised if this guy was some astroturfed paid lobbyist for Alphabet's PR firm. Would you?
"Not so with the web. The web is a set of protocols and languages and file formats[...] Google, by virtue of having Chrome, invests heavily in the web itself"
Without a company like Google which functions like a public steward for the web there's little reason for anyone else to drive web development. The competitive market logic doesn't incentivize an open ecosystem because by definition there's no profit to be captured in it, it exists if you will because a benevolent player maintains it and makes money elsewhere.
An analog to this would be if you'd judge Red Hat's dominance in the commercial Linux space the same way and forced them to divest from the operating system market. There would be nobody stepping in, because there's no money in linux itself. It exists by virtue of a entity making money on adjacent markets and all the linux development happens because it's beneficial for them to drive adoption.
The only real alternative you could propose is straight up public funding, but a balkanized market is by its very logic not going to maintain the web, but vertically integrated alternatives, i.e. apps. It's something you can btw see in China which due to timing happened to leap frog over the open web and search and went straight to the hyper-competitive and for that reason proprietary world of platforms.
But it's not at all how the linux ecosystem looks. Redhat doesn't dominate linux distributions and they can't corral everyone into using their money-making services by making them default into their distribution.
As for malware ; sure, but the alternative is not allowing people to run the software they want on the machine they own.
Everyone pushing for Chrome forks, and Electron garbage has effectively turned the Web into ChromeOS for all practical purposes.
Firefox is no longer relevant, and Safari only resists thanks to Apple stance on iDevices.
"if google doesn't pay for chrome, who will make it better? and who will make it secure"
This is a valid concern.
However, for those of us who remember the time before chrome, the web was dominated by IE, which kneecapped security and innovation.
Its the same with mobile safari, a lack of competitors is bad for health.
The issue is, google has embedded a shit ton of metrics gathering into chrome, which is hugely anti competitive.
DRM, wanna know who spearheaded that? and who fought against that-- and who won. and who all were then forced to go along with it. This isn't rocket science.
How about Google making flutter? How is that not an awesome attempt to make mobile app development unified and easier for developers?
Also, selling your car? No a more apt metaphor would be selling the lemonade squeezing equipment business that you also hold a monopoly in.
I’m not arguing for the merits of forcing Google to sell chrome, but I think the articles points are off based either way.
I don't think Chrome is a very popular browser for desktop Linux users. Or, at the very least, it is definitely not as dominate as it is on Windows and macOS.
If nobody can pay to be the default, then it's an absolute win for Google. This would save Google billions of dollars and many of those users will use Google anyway. Google is really paying so nobody else can.
If other companeis can pay to be the default, then it's a much more mixed bag. It'll hurt Firefox and Apple because nobody can pay what Google can and with Google out of the picture, people won't have to pay as much anyway.
Divestment of Chrome is a separate issue. I don't see how this can work as an independent business. People won't pay for a browser. Selling user data doesn't seem like a sustainable business. I know I wouldn't use that. t It's really time for browsers to become a common good.
Did you see Google's Q4 earnings? "Google Services revenues increased 10% to $84.1 billion, reflecting the strong momentum across Google Search & other and YouTube ads." That's by using user data. If Chrome is split off into a new company, there will be buses full of wooers.
Google has to sell Chrome for reasons that don't even imply fault or wrongdoing. It lowers the level of competition to an unacceptable level for Google to own Chrome; and when Google owns Chrome, the temptation to do things like pay to be the default search engine in your competitors products in order to manipulate their behavior is too high.
The fact that they were actually doing something like that is a separate problem. And it will not be fixed by punishing them, it will be fixed by telling them to stop doing it. This is a long overdue intervention, not a criminal trial.
Is it any better if Meta, Alibaba, Microsoft or any other big company with money to buy Chrome owned Chrome?
> Other remedies the government is asking the court to impose include prohibiting Google from offering money or anything of value to third parties — including Apple and other phone-makers — to make Google’s search engine the default, or to discourage them from hosting search competitors. It also wants to ban Google from preferencing its search engine on any owned-and-operated platform (like YouTube or Gemini), mandate it let rivals access its search index at “marginal cost, and on an ongoing basis,” and require Google to syndicate its search results, ranking signals, and US-originated query data for 10 years.
I don’t think they’re going to get all of that, but it’s interesting, and it definitely doesn’t line up with the “sell your car” analogy in the post.
Some will say well the free market will do its thing and people will just switch. The problem is Chrome has a 60-70% market share. And like it or not anyone that is a professional developer will be at the mercy of this new buyer because like them or not they will own 60%+ browser market share overnight.
Anyone who was old enough to remember what web development was in the 2000s and early 2010s remembers that was not a smooth or enjoyable transition going from IE to Firefox to Chrome. I remember those years it was the Dark Ages of desktop internet browsing.
They will likely relax firefox live support afterwards to weaken its org structure, and new-chrome will seek contracts like search/etc and they will invent something like “feature requests with benefits” which aren’t exactly illegal.
The only true way is revolution against standards and grounding the cost of a browser to viable levels. It will be pain like 2->3 or ESM, and likely much worse, but we made it through before.
My only worry is that it will become even shittier to program for, because we lost sense of that 20 years ago.
You really need it. Food chain of your own paycheck likely rely on efficient ads at many points.
And I'm not sure that I would start with Google. I'm honestly not sure how I would rank the major players in terms of antitrust concerns, but I do think there probably should be an order of operations such that you don't go after the "wrong" one first, effectively consolidating the industry further rather than balancing it.
I would rank MS the worst with Google in second place. But the advertising company currently has a lock on our schools, which I find unacceptable.
Side question: If hypothetically Google is forced to sell off Chrome, who would buy it?
Counterpoint: funding via advertisement
> So we’re going to force you sell your car.
This is b*llocks. Google financed being monopolist in cars with profits from its monopoly on lemonade, which they then used to perpetuate the monopoly on lemonade. We can't solve lemonade problem for now, but we can easily fix the car monopoly problem and break the feedback loop between the two.
If it goes to a terrible company like Oracle or Meta, then yeah, it will be bad.
If it goes to say, the Apache Software Foundation, that could be fantastic.
"apple wins, its the only viable smartphone left".
What happens when this artificial friction causes chrome to lose network effect faster than natural, and we are ironically left with a different monopoly?
I do think the dynamics of browser market share it had in a previous time been subject to exactly the waves and frictions you mentioned, but it's too high stakes now. There's too much serious investment necessary, and so it's going to be responding to some business and economic dynamics Which will be different than the waves and frictions of yesteryear.
If instead web standards moved at a pace set by a standards body not incentivised to spy on users, how much more competition could exist in the browser space?
I wish they split search from Google. Either you are search business, or ad business.
We need healthy alternatives to Chrome.
Great source.
But I do agree: to edict the sale of chrome won't really accomplish much.
This is reminiscent of the M$ anti-trust suite in the '90s. To edict for example, the creation of an "open standard" for word documents. Which led to the creation of .docx, which has been harder for 3rd parties to functionally incorporate than the original .doc format. When the corps performs minimally compliant reforms, with continuing antagonistic behavior, there seems to be no real technically specifiable solution (sorry, I didn't go look up some obscure word to mean the same thing). That litigation also had web browsers as a central element, yet nothing was accomplished in diversifying the operating system market, or the web browser market.
To quote Cory Doctorow: capitalists hate capitalism
And so does the US government. What they both love is the unbridled concentration of wealth.
This is why similar comparisons could be made to the AT&T "break up", which was largely ineffective, with the clear oligopoly in telecommunications in existence today.
I do agree with one aspect of the article: if goggle is a monopoly (it obviously is), then don't take tangential measures, break it up, completely.
The semantic web, elimination of internet search via for-profit entities, widely applicable and enforced anti-surveillance and privacy laws. There are many approaches that could work. None of them will be applied, because they would lead to the very richest people making less money. The US will never implement any law with this consequence, period.
That was not an outcome of the 1990 anti-trust suit, or any other anti-trust case against Microsoft.
This is like if Microsoft was forced to sell Edge or Apple sold Safari.
I am thinking of switching from Chrome to Brave https://brave.com/
OS vendors being the only "big tech" companies allowed in the browser market doesn't strike me as a good move for the free and open internet.
See, here and I thought the primary purpose of software was to benefit the users.
About what you would expect from an article which sounds like it is going to play apologist to big tech monopolies.
Forcing Chrome to display a search engine choice doesn't even begin to solve the issue. Chrome spies on you regardless, and it also banned UBO and other ad-blocking extensions. It is a product made to deliberately spy on and harvest more data from you.
There's a middle position here, and although Google won't like it, it may be better than Google having to sell Chrome off—that is upon first use would be to ask users if they want to disable all forms of telemetry.
Right, many would choose to disable telemetry, but then many would not do so because they either couldn't give a damn about privacy or they may want to take advantage of say targeted advertising.
Whatever happens, there's a fundamental problem that has to be addressed here and that's how to make the web a more equitable place for all players both big and small.
One of the major problems with new technologies is that shortly after their introduction those who introduced them are often overrun by more business-savvy entrepreneurs who find it dead easy to monopolize the tech (we've seen this repeatedly from say the car industry through to operating systems—like MS and Windows, etc.).
By the time government determines that a monopoly exists it's often too late as unwinding the status quo proves very difficult and disruptive (imagine Social Media if rules had been worked out before it had been introduced, if they had then the scene nowadays would be very different).
When examining what constitutes a monopoly one has to look at what's involved. For example, economies of scale enter the picture—having say only one huge producer of steel would be a monopoly as there'd be no competition and steel—a critical commodity—prices would high so a better solution would be to have two or three large producers to encourage competition. This is what's happened in say the oil and motor vehicle industries. Moreover, it'd make no sense to strangle these large industries by making them comply with regulations that would enable the smallest of small manufacturers sans adequate resources to compete on an equal footing—everyone would end up worse off.
The trouble with the web—perhaps more so than with any other tech throughout history—is that because of its intrinsic nature it's been easier for the powerful (Big Tech) to monopolize the tech. It's also meant that the monopolies that now run the web not only became so almost overnight but also they're now entrenched—set in concrete so to speak—which now make them very difficult to regulate. This all developed so very quickly that unfortunately it happened in a regulations-free environment.
What makes the web very different to other tech—to say those that use physical materials—is that it's very scalable; that is, it's possible for huge monopolies such as Google, Microsoft, etc. to coexist with smaller entities without the smaller ones being stifled. The trouble is that that's not what's happened, monopolistic practices such as Chrome and like deliberately channeling web traffic to Big Tech's sites has effectively distorted the way the web works.
One could argue that the simple solution is to use an independent browser but there are many reasons why this is solution is far from ideal. For starters, web protocols—many of which have been forced on web users by Big Tech—are now so complex and convoluted that designing a fully compatible web browser from scratch is a very difficult and challenging undertaking.
In essence, the demands of Big Tech have been such that they've raised minimal entry level for participation on the web to a point where small players have had to sacrifice both their independence and visibility if they want their presence to be viable. That is, the present state of the web is somewhat analogous to those industries that require economies of scale to function—unless one owns either a 'steel mill'-sized infrastructure or at least has access to one then one's pretty much left out in the cold. For the vast majority who want to participate the obvious solution is to gain access to Big Tech's web—and that means they can only do so on its terms—terms which are often unfair and punitive if violated.
No matter how one looks at it, the web nowadays is effectively a monopoly run by a few large players. The purpose of antitrust law is to flatten the playing field for all, so whatever regulators decide to do with Chrome they need to take these factors into account.
It's hard to believe anyone can write a wall of text with so many assertions but fails to even touch on the central topic. You need to go way out of your way to be able to miss the point this hard.