Comment by kweingar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kweingar | Hacker News Reader

I've brought this up before, but I never got a response and I'm really interested what people think the business case is here. I keep wondering what a buyer would actually value beyond Chrome's userbase. Chrome is just Chromium with Google integrations, similar to how Edge is Chromium with Microsoft integrations.

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?

Business model is the same as Firefox: Google pays to be the default search engine.

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.

> Business model is the same as Firefox: Google pays to be the default search engine.

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?

They are no more already banned from that than they have already been forced to divest chrome. None of this is final.

If Meta buys Chrome (which is a real possibility) why do you think they will not try to push similar stuff like ManifestV3 ?

Well, they won't be as effective given Google's absolute dominance in web properties and the reach of its surveillance advertising network. When Gmail or Docs mysteriously breaks in Firefox for 3 days peeling off 10M more Firefox users for Chrome, the web suffers. Meta won't be able to do nearly as much of that given their major effort is all in apps and barely on the web any more.

I truely believe there is none. There is literally nothing people would pay for. We got ourselves into a situation where browsers have become so complex that they need an incredible amount of resources to get developed but the only way to get any money with them is to either sell the data of your users or have partners that do that (Google paying Mozilla for being the Firefox default search engine).

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.

> Chromium is open source, with contributions from many organizations (who retain the copyright to their contributed code).

To contribute anything to Chromium or V8 you need to sign a CLA, afterwards there are very little rights you retain.

The CLA just gives Google a license to use the code your contribute (and a license to any associated patents). You still own the copyright, and Google cannot sell the rights to your code.

https://cla.developers.google.com/about/google-individual

Google would retain copyright to all of it's employees contributions to Chromium. Which I recall being 90%+ of contributions. The propsal PDF from justice.gov doesn't mention Chromium anywhere, so maybe Google will retain copyrights, but the sale would seem pointless if they do.

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.

Copyrights do not mean much here except that Google could license that code differently at some point, though the previous licenses are irrevocable so the "sold" Chrome would be the new main line, and Google's 90% of a browser fork under a new license could do something else. They'd certainly have to do some work to get it to be a browser again though because the 10% they cannot arbitrarily re-license is scattered around the codebase and some of it in critical parts of the system.

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