Comment by Hizonner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Hizonner | Hacker News Reader

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So don't allow that.

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.

This is hilarious! So billions of dollars of capital invested by Google on R&D results in all of the IP being seized with a $250m/year annual obligation?

> 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.

> So billions of dollars of capital invested by Google on R&D results in all of the IP being seized with a $250m/year annual obligation?

Yep. Billions of dollars of capital knowingly invested in an illegal enterprise results in penalties. Film at 11.

...except Chrome was not and is not an illegal enterprise.

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.

It could be argued that having Google retain ownership of Chrome would give them too much of a business incentive to repeat the monopoly in the near future.

> ...except Chrome was not and is not an illegal enterprise.

> 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.

> "What was the biggest browser when Chrome launched? It was Firefox"

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.

Oops, sorry, you’re right. The biggest browser was IE. The same rhetorical argument holds… IE isn’t even on death’s door. It’s so dead that I forgot about it.

Chrome is wildly popular because it's a GOOD BROWSER. Google's search and ad monopoly do not matter; people loved the browser because it was fast, minimalist, bundled flash and PDF readers, and had great support for adblockers.

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.

Yes, Chrome was great. Google search was also great.

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?

> 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?

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?

True, and consider that the current US government would probably not be a good custodian, of, well, anything, but specifically, software of any sort.

I think my preferred outcome would be donating it to either the Linux foundation or Apache software foundation rather than to a new foundation. But otherwise agree no default search/llm/etc...

"donating" in that case would be burdening

This might fly in North Korea or Soviet Union, but seriously? At that point they could just abandon the project altogether. If we're discussing monopolistic position, we have to then account for what made Chrome come to such a position in the first place, aside from technical superiority of course. Leveraging google.com for promotion, integration with google services, android? What makes that different from what apple is doing? Yes, dominance was accelerated by strategic push from Google, but would it happen regardless? Was there even a war going on and won over FF, Safari, IE/Edge with unruly moves? It now needs to be broken away from a company because it's a success story? Was there a moment like "if you don't install/bundle Chrome we'll crush your business?" in style of Microsoft? Was there a moment like "Chrome or take a hike" in style of Apple?

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.

I'd be happy to talk about doing something similar with Windows or iOS...

Chrome being open source and free seems like a significant difference.

Technically Chrome isn't open source, Chromium is and there are differences mostly related to Google services and branding.

* As far as we all know. *

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.

> If we're discussing monopolistic position, we have to then account for what made Chrome come to such a position in the first place, aside from technical superiority of course.

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.

[1] https://notaniche.com/firefox-3-new-logo-weave/660/

One commenter said this is funny. I don’t think it’s funny but I do think it’s the notional promise of communism.

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.

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