You can ignore it, this is just a page taken from the Musk school of attention farming.
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