OpenAI wants to buy Chrome and make it an "AI-first" experience
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
He contrasted that with someone like Jenson who pulled Nvidia off of a cliff more than once and so has the scartissue to limit his reach to keep focus on core business.
Do you mean no checks and balances? A check is a restriction or constraint.
I checked to see if that pun occurs elsewhere and didn't see it. Someone who doesn't have English as a first language may not know the more obscure usage of check since you don't use it much these days other than as part of phrases and idioms like "checks and balances", which is 18th century English
I got excited first thinking I’m starting my day off right by learning a new word, but nope :-)
OpenAI probably senses they're not making ASI anytime soon. They have enough money to will themselves into a FAANG by essentially minting consumer and enterprise products. That could secure their long term future and returns.
So a scammer?
Is Apple a good buyer? Oracle? OpenAI? NVIDIA? The Saudis? (I think I’m kidding about that?)
Someone is going to buy this for $100B and find a way to make a (big) profit off of it. I’m not sure the new landlord is going to be less rapacious than the last one was.
Similar to the current antitrust case with Meta. The time to have tackled these problems was probably about a decade ago.
Only if you wait a few decades to break a monopoly up. This is the fall out of the lack of US government intervention in their megatech companies.
We see the EU trying to fight back, but really all of this is far too late. There will be significant fall out, I’m sure. The sale of Chrome could be an unmitigated disaster.
Eg. Google could become, Google Search (and AI), YouTube, and an independent ad tech company with the remnants of DoubleClick (maybe Google Ads moves into this group as well and has deals with the other two entities).
Best case scenario is this pisses off enough people to create a sea change toward alternative browsers.
After all, the new buyer gets value out of your loyalty in using their browser to view more pages than ever before, so that it can use that data to train its LLMs! People bouncing from pages due to ads just gets in the way. We will have freedom from online advertising, for the low, low cost of a Larry Ellison or Elon Musk-managed panopticon!
One more step, sama, and you too can have an advertising company.
You missed
> I’d imagine that would quickly become one of the most used browsers
Chrome (and control over Chromium) go to a newly formed, independent nonprofit. The nonprofit is not in any way under Google's control.
Google receives zero compensation. The nonprofit is funded by Google at say $250M/year for 20 years... by which I mean Google writes checks and gets absolutely nothing in exchange. The funding is conditional only on the nonprofit doing something that can be vaguely viewed as shipping a browser. Don't like that? Shoulda thought about it before you started getting all monopolistic.
The nonprofit is required to spend all its incoming funds, and forbidden to do anything but provide a browser. Just the browser. No services. All elements of the browser are AGPL. The nonprofit is forbidden to accept any offer that would put it under the control of any other entity. Every Chrome/Chromium user can become a member of the noprofit and then vote for the board. The board may not recommend its own candidates.
The browser isn't allowed to have a default search engine, LLM, "safe sites list", sync server, or whatever. In fact, it's not even allowed to provide a list to choose from. The user has to find them.
No, I don't know if that's feasible under applicable law, and honestly I doubt it is. But it'd be the right direction to go.
> It’d be the right direction to go
Putting the legality of this aside for a moment, the second order effects of the government seizing IP at this scale would cause a massive downscaling of R&D investment followed by IP rapidly fleeing the country.
Yep. Billions of dollars of capital knowingly invested in an illegal enterprise results in penalties. Film at 11.
The charges were against search and ads.
If the government made a decision like this it would discourage companies from trying to invest in OSS the way that Google has. Considering that this model has worked out amazingly well for the average person, that would be bad.
> The charges were against search and ads.
The textbook definition of “monopolistic behavior” is “using your monopoly in one sector to extend your power in another sector”.
It’s not illegal to have a monopoly. That can happen if you are completely innocent, just because no competitors choose to compete with you.
It’s illegal to abuse the power of your monopoly.
What was the biggest browser when Chrome launched? It was Firefox. Where are they now? On death’s door.
What was the biggest commercial browser when Chrome launched? It was Opera. Where are they now? Also on death’s door.
Do you ever remember seeing ads for Chrome in any of Googles other offerings?
A better question would be, “Before 2020 or so, do you think it was possible to use Google Search without having Chrome advertised to you?”
Chrome got special treatment above and beyond anything available to anyone else. Even more than anyone else with an unlimited Google ad budget. It got special placement in the Google search interface. “Try chrome!” On the otherwise bare Google search page. You know, the one that was famously minimalistic and “ad-free”.
Google leveraged its search and ads pseudo-monopolies to help Chrome become its own pseudo+monopoly.
And now that Chrome is its own pseudo-monopoly, what is their behavior?
Well, now, you can’t install (good) ad blockers anymore. Does that benefit users, or is that abusing their browser monopoly to help Google’s other business lines?
And until approximately yesterday, they were saying they were going to disable third party cookies. That’s nice. It probably would help some users. Note that it will definitely hurt Google’s competitors.
And it’s interesting timing, isn’t it? They could have done this, to help users, at any point in the past 15 years, but they only decided to do it recently, when their search and ad businesses are a little shaky compared to where they used to be.
Google absolutely used its search and ad monopolies to build a browser monopoly. And now that they have a browser monopoly, they’re using the power of that monopoly to act in ways contrary to their users interests.
No way. Internet Explorer had about 70% of the market, with Firefox at about 15%.
Today Chrome has basically the same marketshare as IE back then. Courts found that Microsoft created IE's dominant position by abusing its monopoly, and now it seems to be Google's turn.
More than for any other Google product, Chrome won because it was good in its own right.
Now that Google has gotten rid of adblockers we will see exactly how much ability they have to compel people to use the browser :)
This third-party cookie thing has been in the news for half a decade at this point. It's not a new idea at all.
That’s the nature of enshittification, and a core tactic of monopolists: give your customers something for free (or below cost) until you have killed the competition, and then exploit your “customers” (victims).
> Google's search and ad monopoly do not matter
Some questions:
When Google used its search monopoly to promote Chrome in a way that no other company is capable of (a link on the Google search main page), did that have some impact, or zero impact?
When Google used its ad monopoly to give Chrome free ad placement… That is, when the Chrome team was able to ‘buy’ keywords for free that Firefox, IE, and Opera had to pay 5 cents per click for… Did that have some impact, or zero impact?
No more impact than bundling a default web browser which can then be used to download another one. That's pretty uncontroversial these days, seeing as how iOS bundles a default browser BUT STILL forces you into using WebKit regardless of if you wanted to switch or not :)
> When Google used its ad monopoly to give Chrome free ad placement…
Except it's not free. There is an opportunity cost to flogging your own product in space that you otherwise could sell more ads in. You said it yourself: if other browsers were willing to pay 5c/click, how is it possible for that space to be free to Google?
I'm not even taking Google's side on this, just cannot see that side of it where they were evil to get to that point with it. If anything, Chrome made monopoly go away from clutches of Microsoft and to an extent Apple.
This relationship means that Google can be throwing whatever they wanted into Chrome, and not necessarily have it make its way into Chromium.
VS Code is the same way, and a lot of forks are finding out about that relationship right now when Microsoft blocked their C++ extensions from running on anything other than the proprietary build.
They were amazing marketers. They made television, bus stop, billboard, and other real life advertisements that you couldn't miss walking down the street. Firefox did... uhhhhh an online certificate[1] that only people who were devs or chronically online would know or care about.
Marketing and sales has long been the Achilles' heel of computer software. Mozilla and all these Firefox forks screwed up and continue to screw up to this day by only marketing their products (not just code anymore - think of it as an actual product or good) to internet niches and not at all in real life. The majority of the planet does log off sometime and touch grass, so that's where the sales pitch has to happen.
As we know, communism has all kinds of unintended problems as a result of broken incentives. Even if it were legal, it’s unlikely to work.
Before Chrome, Google had an Internet Explorer plugin called Google Gears that enabled functionality like LocalStorage and Service Workers since those were not standard web features at the time. Eventually they made Chrome and only then were they able to push to make those things into web standards.
Apart from Google, Chrome can't survive in its current form. It's not profitable on its own, and any attempt to make it so will inevitably result in either huge cuts to development staff or some pretty intense enshitification, or both.
But my question is, do we need Chrome to actually continue in its current state?
Chromium could continue as open source with multiple companies contributing to it (and maybe it falls under the linux foundation to oversee it) then with companies like Microsoft making their own forks.
We have Safari, Edge, Firefox (which its future is also in question, but that's a separate topic). I guess Oprah is still kicking around.
When not under Google's control, what value does Chrome really serve beyond its existing install base (which not discounting, but that can change)
For you (and me), switching browsers is annoying but doable. There was a time when I used Firefox, and then a time when I used Chrome, and someday I'll use something else. But for the vast majority of the world, the idea of switching browsers feels like a big challenge.
A lot of the world needs Chrome to keep working well for them.
Beyond the old stereotype "grandparent thinks the E is the internet", there is not much of a difference in how each browser behaves. The UI's are shockingly similar.
If it was, I would not think that Google would be as successful as they are to push Chrome heavily. Users would not transition over.
I will admit that I do sometimes have a different view of technology than many people, I mean as it is I have multiple browsers running right now. And generally when I step back I can see, oh yeah this really may be a bigger deal for most people.
I am struggling to see it in this case, especially with every browser trying very hard to make it as easy as possible.
That stereotype is now "grandparent thinks Chrome is the internet". It still exists in a big way. It also exists in the sense that "no one ever got fired for downloading Google Chrome".
Given this paragraph suggests you haven't changed browsers in over 15 years, you should probably give it a try sometime and see if what you think is true still is true.
(If you don't want to do your homework, it is not true. A not-very-technical person could change browsers three times between now and dinner and have no issues)
Unlikely. Maybe if they have no saved bookmarks, no saved passwords, and no saved cookies (which isn't most users). Let alone usability differences. They might get lucky for certain OSes and certain browser current combos that auto-import, or they might not.
Whenever I watch someone change to a new browser, there are multiple serious issues to deal with.
I know how to install Arc :)
Wouldn't have been my first choice, but she's not the worst idea I've seen so far in this discussion.
Oracle? Fuck no. To my knowledge, nothing good has ever come from Oracle.
OpenAI? Privacy nightmare.
NVidia? uh, why? Not even remotely their gig.
The Saudis? Not their gig, but wind blows, river flows, who know? But, not exactly known for their software devlopment prowess.
I actually wonder what the price tag is for that, lol.
They’d be buying the user base.
Android and ChromeOS
> According to Turley, OpenAI would throw its proverbial hat in the ring if Google had to sell. When asked if OpenAI would want Chrome, he was unequivocal. "Yes, we would, as would many other parties," Turley said.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/bengoodger/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/darin-fisher-7059ab/
Chrome specifically hands a huge audience of tech laggards over to OpenAI very very quickly.
Momentum. Any change of direction they take after such a purchase is taken by a huge number of current users whether they like it or not (unless they dislike it enough to make the effort to switch their daily driver browser).
> They can just fork it.
That would result in much lower user numbers unless their changes are incredibly attractive. Most users will start where they are due, again, to product momentum.
That's going to be difficult to maintain. If OpenAI takes over i expect Chrome and Chromium to go closed source.
So, chromium won't go away. Those 1000+ people are the main resource here. Effectively they work mostly on chromium and not on chrome. What happens to chromium if that stops?
My guess is MS might step up and hire people.
Sadly, it absolutely can go closed-source as it's licensed under BSD-3 clause, which is not a copyleft license.
Technically any form of re-licensing the original implies some kind of fork happens. The old system continues to exist for anyone that has a copy. The license allows anyone to fork of course. So anyone with a copy could just pretend that's the main fork.
Chromium is actually a complicated project. Some of the project coordination is actually taken care of by the Linux Foundation; not by Google. But Google of course controls and hosts the key code repositories. However, they don't own the code base exclusively though because they have been accepting contributions from e.g. Microsoft and the many other companies that base their browser on Chromium. And of course individual developers. Copyright stays with those.
The partial permissive licensing (it's a mixed license code base) makes it possible to incorporate the code in a closed source system. But some of the components are LGPL, which still would require publishing the code of those components. And of course Chrome is an example of such a system and Chromium is the way they publish the source code. And Edge. And Brave. Etc. Chromium is the shared source code base for those. But it doesn't allow Google (or anyone) to take away the copyright from contributors. That would require a copyright transfer agreement. And no such thing exists for Chromium.
So, Chromium is unlikely to stop existing. And if it somehow does, it would immediately trigger a fork with a different name created by all the stakeholders that would require such a thing.
The only question is who ends up employing the Google employees that currently provide most of the code contributions and who owns the Chromium trademark (Google currently). IMHO that's an unhealthy situation that should be resolved in any case. And with multiple wealthy companies using chromium, funding that should be no issue.
> And with multiple wealthy companies using chromium, funding that should be no issue.
You're assuming tech companies aren't being cheap lately when, in fact, they are being cheap. We should assume that the mooching (using Chromium without contributing code or money) would go to 11.
What would stop Google to build another browser say Information Explorer with the same engine and code? And market the hell out of it on its Web property?
Presumably they would be selling the IP rights, so at least some kind of rewrite would be required, possibly without utilizing staff who worked on Chrome.
It would be funny though if they hire different people to build another browser on top of webkit again XD.
The courts. The courts would stop them. The entire premise for Google selling-off Chrome is a mandate that they divest themselves from the business itself.
Probably a court order, no? If you’re ordered to sell something, can you just recreate it immediately?
But US? The place that is perhaps the most pro Business or capitalistic on earth?
I also do not see Google parting with something so critical to their advertising. With their own browser they control the full length of the wire between the ad-server and the user. Without it, they don't. Only way I could see this happening is if Google then released what they considered a better browser.
This is not really their choice at this point. They were already found to have abused their position so it's up to a judge to decide what Google has to to next. Google doesn't need "a browser", they need a tool that allows them to exercise more control and this whole court case is about preventing that.
OpenAI is just looking for new ways to funnel data into the training of their models. And I'm afraid so many people would eat it up as long as OpenAI gives them some AI candy in return.
They've already been convicted of anti-trust behavior for precisely this reason. Now the trial is in the remedy phase where the DOJ is asking that they be forced to divest ownership of Chrome and other properties.
Google will have no choice in the matter. It's entirely up to the judge at this point.
I had to run it for something the other day and immediately got nagged to remove uBlock Origin because they automatically disabled it. And I'm just thinking.. I will never, ever use this browser for anything other than light dev work if I really needed to.
These days, OpenAI seems to be leaning more toward expending its business beyond AI. Not sure why, but they may have come across a roadblock that is holding them back from achieving AGI soon. The past few days we heard that they maybe in the process of building a social network [1] and the willingness to buy the AI IDE, Windsurf [2].
Also, from the article:
> Among the DOJ's witnesses on the second day of the trial was Nick Turley, head of product for ChatGPT at OpenAI.
Perplexity has also been asked to testify in the Google DOJ case [3] and their opinion about Chrome was:
"Google should not be broken up. Chrome should remain within and continue to be run by Google. Google deserves a lot of credit for open-sourcing Chromium, which powers Microsoft's Edge and will also power Perplexity's Comet. Chrome has become the dominant browser due to incredible execution quality at the scale of billions of users"
_________________
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43694877
There are many names for this: co-opt, assimilate, bribing ...
A lot of times it is like when Tony Soprano offers you a deal, or like when the U.S. made the NAFTA deal with Canada and Mexico.
It feels good and awesome at the beginning but later on, when you become dependent on it, you'll have to pay an heavy price.
Having just closed a $40 billion USD funding round [1], OpenAI might actually be able to afford a fair price for Chrome (supposedly $15-20 billion USD [2]).
[1] There are some catches to that: https://www.investopedia.com/openai-closes-up-to-usd40b-fund...
https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2025/01/the-great-goo...
Mozilla response: mess around with Firefox's privacy notice in such a way that it generates _negative_ press
Potential future Chrome: gets bought by OpenAI
Estimated future Mozilla response: "every time a user installs Firefox, a healthy tree is chopped down, the wood is used to create bats with the user's name engraved on them, and the bats are used to hit endangered animals"
So I guess the last resort for people who don't want to surrender to the Big Tech will be niche hard forks of Firefox, of which there are 3 - Pale Moon, Basilisk and SeaMonkey.
It's the same data rush. Don't fr a second think that "AI" will be used for anything but ads and selling your data t the highest bidder
Once the sale details are finalized, Google pushes out a final update that changes where the next update to Chrome would come from (and it would be a random selection from the list of buyers).
If the data collection is moved to the browser, though, then requiring a login would no longer be adequate protection. I'd have to also ban the use of Chrome itself. I'd have to seriously consider the possibility of just not having a web presence in any form.
How would PoW be effective when the adversary is the user's browser itself and the user is already authenticated?
I am working on making it allow more traffic by default and then applying challenges based on request pressure or other factors like system load. I also need to finish the WebAssembly PR and a few other important things.
It's a work in progress, but it's used by the United Nations so it can't be that bad :)
The specific risk I was talking about was that if OpenAI buys Chrome, they could (and I think it's likely they would) use the contents of whatever pages the users browse to as training for their models. Basically, turning the browser into a disguised crawler that would be immune from the usual anti-crawling methods, including putting up a login page.
Easy to convince at least 10% of the users to sign in to their browser with a verified credit card to 'protect the children', and governments around the world would give you full support.
At that point, would be trivial for them to track browsing habits, and then to start offering personalised assistants which save you time and eventually cost money.
Pretty sure you could save money throuh having a huge botnet of computers to tap into, and a huge amount of data to help cache and standardise common requests.
In which case, what is the monetization model for the new owner of Chrome - other than just buying a daily portal where users go?
The DOJ doesn't require anything. They are the ones arguing for Chrome to be sold off. The federal court is the one that would require a particular remedy outcome to the anti-trust conviction.
> they would also not allow the new owner of Chrome to get revenue from search engines to be the default search engine
There would be no such mandate. Google will be allowed to pay the new company to be their default search provider. And other search providers can bid on that opportunity as well.
Google itself just cannot own the business end-to-end as it does now.
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/internet-policy/google-r...
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/11/business/dealbook/china-o...
I think at the least I should be able to have Ai interact with anything on my screen. And beyond that it could even code interfaces on the fly depending on the task.
Not a new "AI phone", which has to gain traction, find users, convince people to switch, compete in highly competitive (hardware( and duopolized (OS, Software) landscape.
I won't be suprised if amongst Android users, Chrome is one of the most installed apps - if only because many phones have it locked (i.e. its really hard or impossible to remove).
Maybe "Google Assistant" is installed more than chrome, IDK. But Chrome has the additional benefit that it is also installed on many iPhones. Sou Chrome would be a gateway into "making your iPhone an AI phone" too.
I disabled most of it within a few days because it mostly gets in the way of normal basic things like taking screenshots or just reading my actual notifications in full.
The picture editing can be nice, but realistically there's just no need for most of its 'support', it's just clippy on your phone getting in the way.
By making search an AI first experience, both behemoths will signal the new dawn of AI is here.
Google’s greatest advantage is the use of AI in drive and docs and presentation and excel and cloud services.
OpenAI can't afford to buy Search.
The Chrome & derivatives mono-culture is going to become a problem down the line.
ah nevermind, it's just billionaire pissing contest
Why not get the user to pay the energy and processing bill for subsequent rounds?
Being able to track the habits of 3.5 billion users at source is probably quite useful, too.
/tinfoil
The DOJ wants to break what it considers to be Google's monopoly, and Chrome is a prime target. The problem is that Chrome by itself is worse than worthless, it is a money sink and it only makes sense as a part of a system.
OpenAI is starting to feel the competition. ChatGPT is no longer the only game in town, DeepSeek happened, Google is becoming actually good, Claude is quite popular among coders, and Grok is not a joke anymore. They need something if they don't want to lose out, and buying the most popular browser to make it into a gateway into their service may be an option.
Where?
Or, just an out-there idea, what if the Chrome became property of the government instead? Forced to be FOSS, put into maintenance mode and offer it as a truly user-focused browser instead of driven by any for-profit company (which will eventually run it into the ground).
Or turn it into a tightly regulated natural monopoly, a la a public utility.
But I totally agree with you: some things should just be state-owned. We should put our energies into identifying those things and addressing any legitimate concerns (e.g. spying via requiring open source and reproducible builds) instead of trying to free market all the things.
That's pretty much the optimal state of the current iteration of democracy, isn't it? I'd feel more scared if everyone agreed to it and there was no complaints, then something is guaranteed to be fucky-wucky for the normal person, but without knowing about it. At least if both sides complain about the other, it's relatively impartial.
The only part that isn't is the brand, and the ties with Google. And I am not a fan of the idea of a (foreign in my case) government browser, I'd rather have Google. At least, Google has a presence in my country and is bound by its laws,
That seems like a death sentence. The standards aren't stagnant.
Not sure how to extract that part from Google now. It would be difficult, but probably quite effective.
Google has a bunch of nice things (search, gmail, maps, ...) that cost money, and an advertising business that makes money, the former helping the latter. Split the two and the nice stuff will be without funding and die out, and only the "evil" part will survive. Or so I think. Splitting out Chrome will not change the face of the world, but Firefox has shown that an (somewhat) independent browser can work.
I feel like the whole tech industry, especially the American part, really dropped the ball on this.
Not only. Google controls a lot of user attention. See how many services they link together to serve you ads .... erm .... recommendations to make browsing better or something: https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1908951546869498085 And one of those services is Chrome
Welcome to the internet post-2008