They track you. There IS a business model for Chrome: monetizing user data.
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.
And some people wonder how Chrome could ever make money if it were divested from Google...
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.