People here seem to be underestimating the advantages that Google gets just because of Chrome:
- When you sign in to Google, you sign in browser-wide. Google now gets all of your browsing data, perfect for advertising. (If you ever doubt it, go check out Google Takeout. You'll be shocked at the amount of data you see there.)
- They have special APIs and features that they get to use, and nobody else. Only because they own Chrome. [1]
- They get to move forward with enabling and pushing features that allow for more advertising: see Manifest v3, FLoC.
- Google specifically serves a worse version of Search on Firefox for Mobile. You have to get an extension to get the full experience.
This isn't an isolated attempt. You can see more of the same thing with Android.
- AOSP (the open source counterpart of Android) is now unusable. It doesn't ship with most essential apps, including a Phone app. In previous versions of Android, all of these were a part of AOSP.
- Most third party launchers/stores struggle to implement features because they are only available for Google themselves.
- The signing in with Google thing from above continues here too: you sign in to Google system-wide.
> This isn't an isolated attempt. You can see more of the same thing with Android.
Here are more:
- (jumping off of your second point...) Play Services does more than just handle stuff you sign into as a user -- it's also a dependency for everything from push notifications to screen casting. This actively poses issues building competing platforms, in that in order to give developers a path to shipping in your ecosystem you have to provide functioning alternatives to all of those ancillary features. The compatibility issue also impacts user adoption, and then the user adoption and the barren marketplace impact each other... Even the combined resources of Amazon and Microsoft weren't enough to overcome this. (Facebook did, but I'm also not sure forking the OS into a separate VR platform is necessarily the same thing.)
- It also comes with integrity checking, so even if you do find a good third party image, and sideload Google packages, numerous things won't work unless you take part in a dumb arms race that ironically requires you to also root your device. By which I mean a feature that was originally built for banking applications is now used everywhere from streaming services (as an additional layer of DRM) to gacha games (for anti-cheat). This is actually the entire reason I dropped Pokemon Go, personally.
> Even the combined resources of Amazon and Microsoft weren't enough to overcome this.
Pedantically, their resources were never combined. They independently tried to compete, and they independently failed.
For what it's worth though, Amazon seems to be doing tidy business with entrypoint tablets and FireOS, which is a fork of Android, but still one they own.
Microsoft's exit of mobile was a short-sighted decision IMO. They have the entire office suite. They have windows and Windows has essentially become an app store model too.
I can easily imagine a future where Microsoft leaned in hard on Microsoft Mobile-exclusives for Word/Outlook/Excel/Teams/etc., bundled it with the rest of Office/Windows subscriptions, and had every office worker in the world carrying a windows phone for their work device.
I know, I know - everyone wanted only an iPhone. But it feels to me like Microsoft didn't try very hard.
- the browser is undeniably critical as everyone's window through which they view the online world;
- the user gains a huge amount of value by a browser being integrated into the OS, webviews in other applications, etc
- browsers aren't really a self funding product
- having a single for-profit US advertising company control everyone's view of the online world, however slightly (e.g. by obstructing adblockers), is Not Good
Splitting it off solves the latter problem but immediately raises the question of how to pay for it. A very artificial arrangement where Google pay "arms length browserco" to maintain Chrome?
I feel the same. I also feel the same about a modern C library and C compiler (and C++, if you like). They are essential to build any modern system and applications. Yet, those are also (mostly) no longer self-funding products.
What do you think will happen if Google is forced to divest Chrome?
Any potential buyer will have to be looking to use Chrome to accomplish the same kinds of synergies that Google is using it for, to get ahead in some adjacent market. Depending on the buyer that could be good for competition, at least in the short term, but it's not clear that it will be better for us as users.
How does splitting off Chrome as a separate company solve anything? They would still rely on Google for funding (like Mozilla) and being close friends they would do whatever Alphabet tells them to do.
A better solution is to implement a bill like DMA in the EU to enforce competition among web browser vendors and fight monopolies.
The issue is who controls Chromium. I would create a non profit and staff it with a handful of maintainers. Their primary job would be to ensure safety and squash exploits. Their other job is to curate and approve pull requests from volunteers for enhancements. They should make it open source with the caveat if it is used for commercial purposes, there will be a licensing fee to pay for security enhancements, bug bounties, and the like.
They could sell a lot of the data that Google now gets for free and uses for its ranking algorithms, like Clickstream sells data to SEO tools like AHrefs and SemRush.
They are, see how both Safari and Firefox, the 2nd and 3rd most popular browsers, have brought in tens of billions of revenue per year. Safari is immensely profitable, Firefox too would be if Mozilla wouldn't be run in an absurdly poor manner.
> the user gains a huge amount of value by a browser being integrated into the OS, webviews in other applications, etc
What is the huge value gain that e.g. Safari being integrated into MacOS is bringing me? Why couldn't webviews be backed by a browser of my choice?
Yeah... Because massive companies use them anti-competitively as a moat against other companies, and as a loss leader to enable massive data collection and vendor lock in.
"browsers aren't really a self funding product" is a symptom of dysfunction, not the inevitable conclusion of a fair market.
Google realized if they don't control the search distribution they gonna lose out sooner or later; which is kinda contradictory for them if they claim Google is the best search out there and that they are constantly improving it and that's why(they say), people choose it over other alternatives. But tbh distribution of your product/s is crucial.
Just look at Microsoft and their internet strategy, they chose the other route; push their internet browser(IE) down their massive distribution pipe called Windows and then introducing their search engine to this massive userbase. Fortunately this didn't work out for them but unfortunately that worked out for Google. And now Google essentially controls the Web in the more than half of the world.
> Fortunately this didn't work out for them but unfortunately that worked out for Google.
No, Google was better, then they used Chrome as an extremely powerful moat to protect their situation. Google at first was like magic compared to the Altavista of the time.
I don't disagree, but I'm also not sure what the alternative is.
Who's going to buy Chrome that also doesn't suffer from the same anti-trust problems? Who would want to buy Chrome? Who would want to fund Chrome?
What browser would Android ship? In one view I kind of like the idea that Google would have to shop around and 'buy' a browser for its OS (competition good!), but also that seems ridiculous and easy to fall right back into the same trap.
> Who's going to buy Chrome that also doesn't suffer from the same anti-trust problems? Who would want to buy Chrome? Who would want to fund Chrome?
Hmm. It's a good question, and I don't know the answer. I think there's a compelling argument that the problem is the scale of the harm. That is, even if the new owner has the same problems, the new owner won't also be the largest web company. So the problem still exists, yes, but becomes smaller. In particular having the #1 web browser strongly tied to the #1 web company has a lot of problematic dynamics that the #1 web browser being owned by the #25 web company doesn't. Maybe that company would be more open to forming beneficial relationships with the #2 and #3 web companies, for example.
> Who would want to buy Chrome? Who would want to fund Chrome?
This is interesting question especially when companies are usually just use Chromium instead of creating new browser (not even making hard fork of Chromium).
How about this: sell the browser to the entreprise [1] and use the profit to offer the browser to the public for free, which in turns helps you secure a user base.
> If you ever doubt it, go check out Google Takeout. You'll be shocked at the amount of data you see there.
I sign in browser-wide and I do takeouts regularly. I don't see my browsing data.
> It doesn't ship with most essential apps, including a Phone app. In previous versions of Android, all of these were a part of AOSP.
And back when they were part of AOSP I never saw these example apps in the wild. Every vendor ships their own phone app. Every single one.
There's some "hey we compile a extremely old and vulnerable version of AOSP"-style Android distributions, mainly advertised for builtin su/Magisk or "degoogle", which did use these example apps, though.
> - When you sign in to Google, you sign in browser-wide. Google now gets all of your browsing data, perfect for advertising. (If you ever doubt it, go check out Google Takeout. You'll be shocked at the amount of data you see there.)
I have yet to see evidence that Google uses browser sync data for advertising.
Go do something in chrome (look for cruises maybe), then delete the activity from myactivity.google.com, then wipe and reinstall chrome. You will see that you aren’t advertised based on that activity yet it’s still in your chrome history.
Another major point highlighted by Fishkin and King relates to how Google may use Chrome data in its search rankings. Google Search representatives have said that they don’t use anything from Chrome for ranking, but the leaked documents suggest that may not be true. One section, for example, lists “chrome_trans_clicks” as informing which links from a domain appear below the main webpage in search results. Fishkin interprets it as meaning Google “uses the number of clicks on pages in Chrome browsers and uses that to determine the most popular/important URLs on a site, which go into the calculation of which to include in the sitelinks feature.”
> - AOSP (the open source counterpart of Android) is now unusable. It doesn't ship with most essential apps, including a Phone app. In previous versions of Android, all of these were a part of AOSP.
Your comment unfortunately implies that Google still maintains them, which is farthest from the truth (as this document shows, it is only maintained for automotive use - it is not usable on a regular phone).
I know this is anecdotal and that I should look further into this but I recently had to switch to chromium because google suite products were slightly unusable in firefox: youtube used way more CPU than it should’ve (maybe this is due to codecs but I was not able to solve it), google sheets crashed constantly, google meet slowed my laptop to a halt and I couldn’t even share my screen, and for some reason google calendar would suddenly start to hog CPU and RAM randomly. Since I switched to chromium everything is smoother and I just can’t believe chromium per se is just this better than Firefox.
I'll ask what extensions you use on your Firefox, because I regularly use Google Meet on an 2014 MacBook Pro with latest Firefox, and it doesn't even make the fans spin, plus all the goodies like environmental noise cancellation is there. Meet team also recently ported some of the Chrome only features back to Firefox, due to some fear, I guess...
The YouTube videos in higher bitrates (like 4K) is generally due to Firefox's ability to hardware accelerate things, and there's a bit of difference there, yes. But on Linux and macOS (moreso in sequoia), I see no extreme CPU use. Just testing it on Firefox 132.02 on Debian Testing with Radeon 550 with open drivers, While I see a spike in CPU load, there's definitely some GPU load is also being produced, pointing to at least some GPU acceleration.
On the other hand, Intel N100 with on board graphics can visibly struggle at 4K as far as I can tell. That one runs Firefox ESR though, I need to retest.
I don't use WASM based Google Workspace tools (docs, sheets, etc.) heavily, but they don't crash when we use it on other pepople's documents that we collaborate on.
That's strange; I use all of those Google products (except Meet, I can't speak to that one) on a daily basis on Firefox (on Linux) and they all work just fine. YouTube in particular works very well, perhaps because I have the "Enhancer for YouTube" extension installed, plus uBlock Origin.
Teams was acting up on Firefox the other day, too. It wouldn't have Q&A and whatever button is to the left of it enabled. "Not supported in your browser", or something.
> Google specifically serves a worse version of Search on Firefox for Mobile.
I don't think Google owning Chrome is really a factor here, but just a raw traffic question where FF Mobile has basically zero uptake. The experience they serve on FF Mobile is just the "we arent subscribed to validating that all of our shiniest JS works with this version of this browser".
The extension spoofs the user agent and arbitrary obscure features that only trigger on specific queries may be broken.
Google does do the effort of validating on other browsers where the traffic threshold is higher, including Firefox on Desktop. If they didn't own Chrome nor Firefox they still wouldn't really have incentive to spend more time supporting the tiny fraction of users.
A browser with a huge userbase would be extremely lucrative for an unscrupulous owner. A new owner could sell full and identifiable clickstream data for all browser activity. A new owner could siphon information from the non-public web for AI training, corporate espionage, or any other purpose.
> Google specifically serves a worse version of Search on Firefox for Mobile. You have to get an extension to get the full experience.
Huh, I wonder if this is why I have perceived a drop in quality from Google Search. What a stupid move from them -- not only have I stopped using Google Search and now pay Kagi (yes I know money still flows from Kagi to Google but even still) and have been evangelizing Kagi as well as taking every opportunity to shit on Google Search.
Great job G, you made the product worse and made me a customer of someone else
Everything here you accuse Google of doing, Apple is running circles on. Ultimately, if this case goes through Google are right about one thing. The UX on Chrome is going to take a steep nose dive.
Apple does not run the largest advertising network on the planet. As simple as that.
Even for the matter of the browser, Apple does not have the same push as Google does. Yes, Safari is the default browser on a phone. But outside of the mobile world, Safari is a rounding error.
The APIs thing: it's not just Chrome, but Chromium too. I first noticed this when trying to replicate some of the screen sharing UI (buttons to share different things) from Google Meet, only to find that no non-Google domains have access to those APIs in the Chromium source code. Made a huge deal about it but nobody seemed to care.
Yes, Google gains advantages through the Chrome browser so do we as consumers. The competition for Chrome should come from a better Browser not by being forced to sell it. DOJ is wasting time and taxes on this pointless verdict. Even more economic wastes are coming when the selling happens.
To add: Google uses Chrome's established user base to bundle other products in the same way Microsoft uses Office subscriptions to push Teams.
The most recent example being Gemini now deeply integrated into Chrome. Had Gemini been a stand-alone product, it would have to fight for every user. Now billions of users have it at their fingertips.
What other solution do you have in mind? Legislation about architecture decisions taken in software products seems preferable?
In principle there is nothing wrong for example with a shared account for multiple products from the same company, many even prefer it. The problem only appears when this gets concentrated into too much power and can be leveraged in ways that distort the market and hurt consumers.
I'm happy to give all this to a cohesive experience google provides. There are competitors in this market too, but google was the first and best not sure why they deserve this blatant overstep in abuse of power
- They get to move forward with enabling and pushing features that allow for more hardware and software lockin to their platform: see unexportable passkeys
I'm all for competition and increasing consumer choices, but the government is really not making a case that this is supposed to help consumers.
The only reason I still use Chrome is because I already use other Google products and they integrate well together. There are many other better options out there otherwise, and they are all free. Breaking out Chrome from Google will not in any way benefit me as a consumer.
> The agency and the states have settled on recommending that Google be required to license the results and data from its popular search engine
> They are also prepared to seek a requirement that Google share more information with advertisers and give them more control over where their ads appear.
It sounds like the end goal of this is to enrich other companies, not customers. And if the DOJ has their way, they want to crack open Google's vault of customer data and propagate it across the internet.
Not only does this sound extremely bad for consumers, the DOJ is trying to completely change Google's business model and dictate how they are supposed to make money. Regardless of how you feel about Google, this seems like a far overreach from the DOJ on finding and fixing market manipulation.
I'm failing to see why "this product we built from the ground up integrates better with our other tools" is an anti trust problem
Isn't that what we want companies to do?
I have two frustrations with this kind of decision:
1. It's not clear to me that the judge has any interest in creating value.
2. It does feel a bit like being punished for success.
It's one thing when it's ill-gotten success, eg via coercive contracts (like Android has with play services), and we should aggressively deal with that sort of contract! However, what often seems to happen in these types of cases is the judge identifies a behavior they dislike and bans it without really considering more targeting / surgical treatments
Out of all the parts of Google that take advantage of integration to pump up ad revenues, I'd say Chrome is the least of them?
If we're serious about this, separate search and ads. Force ads-Google to pay search-Google for data on the open market, and let other people pay for the same data, make it transparent, and let consumers see exactly what's happening.
While we're at it, separate Google's display ad network from its RTB facilities, basically carving DoubleClick back out again.
> The only reason I still use Chrome is because I already use other Google products and they integrate well together.
And that is exactly why Chrome should be broken up/out. It is unfair competition. And you say there are many other well working options out there but that is simply not true. Googles web applications work best on Chrome and often break on non Chrome browsers. Mostly because of changes to those web applications and not because of random browser bugs. This is how you win people over and complete your browser world domination.
Browsing the internet hasn't really changed during the last 15 years or so. I hope that this will enable development of totally new browsers or even completely different ways to use the internet.
> DOJ is trying to completely change Google's business model and dictate how they are supposed to make money
This is good reasoning. It is overreach for a regulatory body to do something that could impact the business model of a monopoly. Monopolies are bad, unless being a monopoly is part of that monopoly’s business model and an important part of how the monopoly makes money, in which case nothing should be done.
I do mostly agree with grandparent, but not with your take.
What is the problem with government regulating, say, the ingredients that can be used in foods, forbidding addictive drugs from being added to them? Or selling drugs that are completely fake or outright dangerous?
This obsession with small governments (and basically, libertarianism) doesn't really stand on proper grounds.
Why can't the government work for you? Maybe it's an inherent bias given that I'm from Europe, but I think the stereotypical utopia about "big government" is much more true for huge corporations (which have absolutely no safety mechanisms built in to prevent a paper clip factory going overboard in the name of profit) compared to the slow-moving, democratic, slightly corrupt governments. Only one of these have accountability in a humane form, while the only metric for corporate is a single number.
> unless being a monopoly is part of that monopoly’s business model and an important part of how the monopoly makes money, in which case nothing should be done.
For years people have complained "ugh Google is selling your data, how awful" and here is the government seeking to mandate that Google sell your data! There's no way that this is the right remedy.
I see a lot of people saying Google services don't work well on other browsers. Can someone give an example? I've been using Firefox desktop and mobile for a year and haven't had any issues with Google stuff. At least YouTube, drive, docs, sheets, etc. seem to work just fine
So fuck all of the billions of users of Chrome I guess, and let the other advertising companies make some money.
I'm sure everyone will be thanking the DOJ for their poorer Web experience, knowing that their sacrifice is allowing other ad companies to earn their fair share.
> The only reason I still use Chrome is because I already use other Google products and they integrate well together.
Isn't that kind of the complaint though? Google, by controlling the platform and therefore sort of indirectly controlling the entire web, can make it artificially easier to push you to their products, and push you away from others.
If I wanted, for example, to make a competitor to Google Docs, I'm not just competing with Google Docs, I'm also competing with the integration of Google Docs with Chrome, meaning that Google Docs can be artificially better than my product. While I don't know if Google has actually done this, it would be pretty easy for them to actively gimp any Google Doc competitor in Chrome so that you're more likely to use their service instead.
This would be like if Tesla made the roads and the roads could recharge batteries but only to Tesla vehicles and you as a Tesla owner saying this is not anti-competitive.
Even as a non Tesla owner I would say that’s not anti competitive if every other OEM is also able to make their own roads, which is exactly the case with Chrome.
There’s multiple browsers, and people might choose Chrome because it has a better ecosystem around it. That means it’s a better product for those people.
But Chrome doesn't work that way at all? Google gives Chromium away for free - which has enabled innovation across the software industry beyond the browser space if I must say so.
> It sounds like the end goal of this is to enrich other companies, not customers.
Then end goal is fostering competitions in a market where there is basically none. So yes, it obviously benefits would be competitors. That's the point.
> The only reason I still use Chrome is because I already use other Google products and they integrate well together. There are many other better options out there otherwise, and they are all free. Breaking out Chrome from Google will not in any way benefit me as a consumer.
It will benefit you in many ways, including: Better compatibility of Google with multiple browsers, and a browser which doesn't actively encourage you to use Google products and services.
Indirectly, a reduction in Google's centralized power will make life easier for many people and organizations which offer you services and products (yes, I realize that's a bit vague and needs some elaboration).
> It will benefit you in many ways, including: Better compatibility of Google with multiple browsers
No, the way you do that is to pass a law that says Google can't intentionally make their websites work worse in other browsers. That's not what the dumb DOJ is doing.
Realistically nothing is going to happen. The incoming admin has made clear their distaste for Lina Khan. In other words, this is just an attempt at a swan song by the Biden White House.
I'm totally fine with this, but I wish they would do the same thing with Apple. Google's platform, at the very least is open and I can run my own apps.
One could ask, "How is Apple a Monopoly, and do they abuse that position?". In my view it is, since you can't have a business or build connected hardware without an iOS app. And as for abusing that position for gaining market share, there are just too many examples starting with say, watches.
Apple doesn't have a similar position in any space though, or do they? In terms of market share they're not even the biggest player in the smartphone market, they sit below 20 % (the most profitable 20 % though).
Google, in comparison, absolutely dominates the search and ad markets and sucks all oxygen out of them to keep any competition from springing up by controlling distribution and limiting choice. They e.g. paid vast amounts of money to Apple to make sure users don't get a free choice of search engine.
If you wanted to compare the Apple Watch with this it would mean that Apple would make exclusive deals with all stores (online and IRL) selling watches so that consumers would only see Apple watches everywhere they go and would need to look in the basement or on an obscure subpage to find any watches from a different manufacturer. Clearly that's not the case.
That said I'm not a fan of Apples walled garden either, I think this should be addressed (and in the EU it is being addressed). It's ridiculous to have this super powerful hardware and I can only run sanctioned apps on them instead of being able to install any kind of software I like.
> Apple doesn't have a similar position in any space though, or do they?
Apple has exclusive control over a market (AppStore), which has almost 2 million different products (Apps), 820,000 suppliers (app publishers) and over 1.3 billion customers (active iPhone users) which conducts more trade ($1.1 trillion) than the entire GDP of Luxemburg.
> It's ridiculous to have this super powerful hardware and I can only run sanctioned apps on them instead of being able to install any kind of software I like.
Buy different hardware then. You know these things when you buy the device. It isn't a secret. If the device doesn't meet your needs, there are alternatives that do. The fact that there are adequately substitutable products available other than iPhone destroys any concept of "monopoly." Saying Apple has a monopoly on iOS is ridiculous -- they _are_ iOS.
No, that's textbook price discrimination, aka standard pricing everywhere. Have you looked at the prices for add-ons for cars? Or even for pizza toppings?
There's no world in which you can tell me Apple has a monopoly on laptops. C'mon.
The App Store is one consideration, and the hardware ecosystem another. I personally think both are problems. The ability to cast audio from my device to another is less supported now than they were back when things had audio auxiliary jacks.
Apple are creating a walled marketing garden with their new privacy features too. If a person pays for iCloud storage of any time they get placed onto the Apple VPN and their IP address resolves one of two or three different values for any given country.
This makes web tracking and attribution impossible to anyone who is not Apple. Users might be happy with it but I think it is similar anti-competitive behaviour to what Google are doing.
Who would possibly buy Chrome? Letting any of the large tech companies purchase it (the only possible buyers) would just give someone else monopolistic power.
Chrome can’t exist as a standalone business without being even more consumer hostile.
Very few companies would be able to manage a gigantic project like Chromium.
I happen to be poking around the Chromium codebase the last few days. The size of the codebase itself is at the same level as all of our company's code. Something as important and critical as GPU rendering is only a small part of the entire project. You also have v8, ChromeOS, ANGLE etc to worry about, all requiring experts in those areas. Not to mention things like Widevine and other proprietary technology surrounding Chrome.
It's 95% of an operating system. In a way it is it's own OS. Chromium has ~ 500+ distinct APIs and features such as web APIs, extension APIs, DOM, JavaScript APIs, and platform-specific features.
This is illustrates the extent and magnitude of the problem to fix the internet. That regulators failed to give enough oversight of the internet and to regulate its monopolistic players several decades ago when these problems first became obvious has meant that they are now almost insurmountable.
Ideally, Google would be forced to divest itself of Chrome and that Chrome would become an open source project a la Linux. Clearly, that's very unlikely to happen.
For those who'd argue that Chrome would have no funding to further develop I'd respond by saying that it already works well as a browser and from observation that Google is channeling most of Chrome's development funds into anti-features that are hostile to users.
As an open source project that level of funding would be no longer necessary and its future development could progress at a slower pace.
> Ideally, Google would be forced to divest itself of Chrome and that Chrome would become an open source project a la Linux. Clearly, that's very unlikely to happen.
Chrome's upstream (Chromium) is already open source. If Google is forbidden from sponsoring Chromium's development, and that of its proprietary downstream distribution (Chrome) who's going to fund Chromium's development? Even if forced to divest, Google will always have an outsized sway on any open source browser due to the engineer-hours they can spend on contributions. If they are blocked from even that, then the whole exercise would be anti-consumer IMO.
The fundamental core problem with the internet is that users have an innate feeling that they have a right to view content without being charged for it.
Google's entire existence is predicated on the ad-model internet existing, and internet users have overwhelmingly voted for this model of internet over the last 30 years.
People hate ads, but they hate opening their wallet even more.
Having it owned by a non-profit foundation would make a huge amount of sense, especially if that foundation was then immediately funded by a variety of companies rather than just one big advertising company.
The obvious test for whether the browser is actually independent: what is the response to "let's add an ad-blocker by default".
With Mozilla becoming so hostile to their power users in recent years (or any user who just wants to customize the interface or core functionality), I'm not sure it would make much difference.
The userbase and trademark are both very valuable. I'm guessing it would also come with some controlling positions in the chromium open source project, since those are mostly held by google by being the biggest developer and user of the project.
Good question. Chrome itself isn't a standalone business, the money generated through Chrome still primarily comes from Ads. The hardware tied to Chromebooks generates some revenue, but even ChromeOS is essentially free. They generate a tiny amount of revenue selling ChromeOS management tools in Workspace. Why not spin off an actual revenue driver like YouTube?
> They are also prepared to seek a requirement that Google share more information with advertisers and give them more control over where their ads appear.
Seems like the DOJ is angling that Chrome should be spun off as an advertising platform of some kind.
A consortium of various tech companies, plus non-profits? Instead of it being in one corporate hand. One can dream of the EFF and Mozilla plus a bunch of other stakeholders owning it.
So the market/consumers decided (due to whatever reasons) that they don't want to use Mozilla's browser. Lets reward them for that failure by giving them control over someone else's browser?
ehm... jokes aside. I think a more reasonable way is to setup a foundation, composed of biggest players in tech, also companies like Google, Meta, Microsoft, Mozilla Foundation, Linux Foundation, Apple and EFF. The foundation should steer the further development of Chrome. In that way Chrome will be owned by community just like e.g. Linux Kernel or standards like C++ lang spec.
If Chrome would be bought by a private entity, that entity would probably start milking the current user base straight away. Expect adds in bookmarks bar, more address bar spyware (e.g. sending all phrases to the cloud) and paid extensions web store.
The most used and advanced browser that we have today must stay open source. It is more than a program, it is part of global internet infrastructure. We should not destroy it by a foolish political decision.
If the pool they're looking at is "talented people" looking to run a company, it'll be someone who's currently the CEO of 7 other companies and successfully driven each of them into the ground for short term profits, unfortunately.
Mozilla exist standalone, even if technically it depends on Googles money. They do the same, push Chrome to a separate Company, independent of Google, but getting money from who ever pays them the most for integrations and search engine-placments. It would need some additional constraints, but could position it on a more fair situation where there is not this harmful lock-in to google-services, but instead support for all services & companies equally.
Just reducing the direct influence from one company would already be beneficial for the market. And maybe Mozilla and other browser will get something out of it too.
Probably MicroFocus, they seem to buy everything and not do anything with it.
There is no potential buyers for Chrome that are serious and trustworthy. Chrome is not a profit center. Mozilla can't make money on Firefox and seems to be losing interest in the project, probably for the same reason. There's no reason to think that anyone would buy Chrome, keep it freely available and make money on the product.
Worst case is that some one will buy it, slap ads on it or turn it into a subscription service. Still I don't see that being enough to fund the Chromium/Blink development. While I do think the adding of features to the web could do with a slowdown, we're talking Internet Explorer 6 levels of stagnation if Chrome is sold of to the wrong entity.
It’s an open source project that can be forked - especially when google is not behind it to protect the market share, with users that don’t expect to pay and microsoft also involved with their own version.
Currently it’s probably worth bilingual because Google owns it. I expect it to rapidly lose value should that change.
The argument that something is untouchable because it can't continue as a going concern without continuing user-hostile behaviours is unconvincing. It's not our fault Google chose this business model, just as it's not a coincidence Google made it difficult to break up and just distinct enough to be (supposedly, formerly) legally sound.
Firefox gets along... with money from Google. And I think a good portion of the $$ that Google pays Mozilla, in their mind, isn't to be the default search engine... it's to keep competition alive in order to avoid this situation.
> Chrome can’t exist as a standalone business without being even more consumer hostile
Why not? Chrome's team isn't as prone to distracting itself as Mozilla. But there is still a lot of ancillary nonsense they get up to that wouldn't be necessary if it weren't in Google. Starting, for example, with not giving a fuck about how their product impacts ad sales.
Because you need to pay something like 1,000 engineers - and not just any engineers, but engineers used to Alphabet's SF Bay Area salaries and equity packages.
This quickly adds up to billions of dollars. You have the option to massively downsize, likely sacrificing product quality; or to sell something very valuable to a business-mined buyer. And there's really nothing a browser vendor can sell that isn't bad news for the users.
About the best option would be for Chrome to be spun off and then for Google to keep paying them for being the default search engine.
Given the current political climate, this is incredibly unlikely. Reference the situation with TikTok and the "Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act" which became US law earlier this year.
It doesn’t matter if no one buys it, or if it doesn’t even continue to exist as a standalone business. That’s preferable.
The important part is ending the egregious conflict of interest where an advertising behemoth controls access to the internet.
Ideal result is that Chrome ceases to exist and Chromium continues as an independent open source project controlled by a nonprofit. Even if Google is one of the contributors, so long as they don’t control the product they will exert a lot less control over the web and how people access it.
What would that even mean? Anyone can fork Chromium and do whatever they want including establishing a non-profit foundation to finance its development.
Should Google be banned from forking an open source project and/or just developing any type of browser at all?
The only reason Google "controls" Chromium is that they are spending the most money/development time on it.
Arguably out of the big 4 (Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon) Google gave the most back to humanity: Android, Chromium, Kubernetes, Google Office suite, the Go programming language, Tensor Flow, Alpha Fold (and Google DeepMind), donating to Linux, etc. All these are things everyone has access to precisely because Google is such a big player and can afford to lose money on innovation that fails. What did Microsoft and Apple gave us? Yet Google gets targeted while Microsoft, Apple and Amazon are left alone. Why is that?
1. Microsoft gets left alone - Really? You may want to ask the closest adult near you about this.
2. Amazon - The government has looked into Amazon multiple times. It’s hard to see where Amazon does anything to illegally use its monopoly (they don’t use their shopping advantage to cross sell AWS in any way, or Vice versa). Amazon is genuinely not a bad monopoly (they have pushed down prices), but they are a terrible monopsony (basically destroying retailers that are not Chinese knockoffs), but monopsony protection laws are weak to non-existent world wide.
3. Apple - Apple is not a monopoly in nearly anything, which makes antitrust action against them very difficult. The EU has better laws around this, which has allowed them to force Apple to do the right thing in many cases (USB-C, opening up the App Store, although Apple complies in the worst ways possible, even though compliance has often been beneficial for them, like in the case of USB-C connectivity), but US laws are far too rigid to be able to really do much with them, as long as they are not monopolies.
> It’s hard to see where Amazon does anything to illegally use its monopoly
Amazon literally uses the marketplace data to determine which products to make Amazon Basic versions of.
I think the better argument of "Google isn't getting targeted" is that literally all of those companies have been sued in the past (and will be in the future and probably currently have cases being worked against them).
> Microsoft gets left alone - Really? You may want to ask the closest adult near you about this.
I've got some bad news for you: 2001 was 23 years ago. It's possible to not just be a legal adult (18) but also old enough to drink (21) and still not have been born yet when that was going down.
> hey don’t use their shopping advantage to cross sell AWS in any way, or Vice versa
Isn't AWS directly sponsoring Amazon by essentially letting them run the biggest online retailer for free, which other retailers can't? And Amazon in itself is a terrible monopoly because it has unfair access to all user purchase data, while also selling their own amazon products on their platform.
By that logic, people should still be at the mercy of AT&T because Bell Labs gave so much back to humanity. Not to mention that multiple items on your list were bought by Google.
The world's biggest ad and surveillance company having control over the most widely used browser on the planet is a recipe for disaster. That's the only thing that matters in this discussion.
> By that logic, people should still be at the mercy of AT&T because Bell Labs gave so much back to humanity.
So your argument is that Bell Labs should have never happened since it's the result of a monopoly?
My argument is that Monopolies are trade offs. In a world without monopolies you have very little innovation in peace time. Monopolies are bad for consumers but the trade off is that they can afford to innovate and push the world forward. It's not as black and white as people like to think.
Getting rid of all monopolies and having a market in perfect competition will make Bell Labs impossible and all the innovation that came from there. A ballance is required. "There are no solutions only tradeoffs" - TS
Edit: Clarify my question about Bell Labs happening.
Why? What disaster? There can be no disaster when the product is free and there are many free alternatives with equal capability except for small conveniences. If you don't like Chrome because Google is being shady you can immediately seitch at zero cost. There is no disaster.
Yeah, that kind of sucks. I liked a sibling suggestion that splitting off YouTube would make more sense because at least it could be a self-sustaining product.
The average joe can't do shit with open source. The average coder cannot sell the fruits of the progession, because of open source. And most individuals can't do anything with open source, since they lack funding. Who profit from open source? Big companies.
Don't you get it? The whole initiative is a trojan horse.
Chromium was in the wild for five years running on WebKit, and the Blink engine they use today is an evolution of that codebase, not a rewrite. Of course, Apple did not create WebKit from scratch, it was based on KHTML/KJS, but it was WebKit that Google Chrome was built on top of, not the previous project.
Microsoft: VSCode, Typescript, ONNX/ONNXRuntime (TensorFlow is pretty much dead), Github, npm (they bought it but so did Google with Android - m$ still paying repo/packages hosting bill)
Also worth to mention Meta:
Pytorch, LLama, React, React Native, Segment-Anything
Google didn’t “give back” any of those things to humanity. Those are all products that Google is selling to you in exchange for your privacy so that they can make a profit. Don’t mistake Google for some benevolent entity that deserves special treatment for being “good”.
If you want to go that path, then Apple also “gave” iPhones to humanity, as well as AirPods, iCloud, iTunes, and is a primary reason that mouse-based graphical interfaces exist. Microsoft “gave” humanity the largest home operating system, the dot net programming languages, Microsoft Office, Xbox, and more. Should we give them all a “get out of jail free” card for their good deeds?
Even if you assume the situations are comparable and equitable, which most commenters are focusing on, there is still a problem:
There is no reason to expect the DOJ to pursue antitrust suits against all potentially relevant companies at the same time for analogous reasons. These are complex, labor-intensive cases that frequently play off precedent established by other earlier cases. The idea that Google is being "targeted," by implication unfairly so, is out of line with how complex antitrust law can be, and the simple fact that such cases are typically serialized rather than prosecuted in bulk.
Microsoft has the most monopoly. Bundle azure with office365, bundle teams with office365, bundle windows with azure, pushing bing, edge, OneDrive on windows. Why no one investigate them? Because they stay under off consumer minds, and has good lobby
> Google gave the most back to humanity: Android, Chromium, Kubernetes, Google Office suite, the Go programming language, Tensor Flow, Alpha Fold (and Google DeepMind), donating to Linux, etc.
Most of them are tools for making money for Google. Some others are on similar level that others are contributing to open source and the world. I mean you get Microsoft Office for free too, and even with more services than Google. And, most of Googles contributions started out one or two decades ago, but are just now moving into more harmful directions. Which is a relevant point with Google. The company today, is not the same it was 10-15 years ago when they were still heavily gaining goodwill.
> Yet Google gets targeted while Microsoft, Apple and Amazon are left alone.
They are also getting targeted all the time. Microsoft had a long, deep anti-trust-process around two decades ago, which still sees some restriction imposed onto them. Apple and Amazon do see some targeting, but more outside the USA or by competitors, which means there is less demand for official influence on them, at the moment. Additionally, their specific influence is simply not as big and harmful as Google has it on some parts.
As if Google didn't take anything from us. Google makes money selling your attention and brainpower to the highest bidder. Hands down. They are the biggest entity in the attention economy and their real customers are advertisers.
Google has two billion lines of code that determine the course of your daily life. It processes incredibly sensitive information, like every interaction you have with another person in a digital medium, and has a rootkit on basically every phone that collects "anonymous usage data" that is processed in a completely opaque manner and is subject to information "requests" from illiberal and sometimes even totalitarian governments, and a few open source contributions aren't going to change that.
Open source at Google is driven by engineers and contributors, not by executives or strategy. It's a fig leaf over one of the world's largest, most valuable, and well-guarded code bases that absolutely will not be made open.
None of them are good players for humanity. "Don't be evil" is long gone.
They don't pay taxes, pollute, give means to manipulate billions of humans, concentrate wealth in a few hands.
They all give with ulterior motives, never from the goodness of their heart.
While I don’t disagree with your argument, it is bad form to claim that companies like these don’t pay massive amounts of taxes, specifically payroll taxes. They do and it’s a huge amount.
"Monopoly" is a technical definition, not another way of saying "has a lot of money."
Google has been proved to be a monopoly precisely BECAUSE it gives away so much. By entrenching themselves with free products that outcompete just about anyone, they get access to a massive firehose of data that they then monetize with no competition in sight
Long story short: Giving away free stuff to cripple competition who don't have scale is anti-competitive (see: Microsoft IE case)
I meant OSS or free products. Windows / Office / Visual Studio are for profit products? GitHub was free before Microsoft bought it, they just made the private repos free as well. But arguably GitHub was better before.
But I do agree C#, VS Code and TypeScript are nice Microsoft OSS/Free gifts to the world.
One of the key issues. Google has not given me a phone OS. They have taken away my ability to chose a viable competitor, one that does not run on selling my data.
You're missing my point. In a perfect competition environment all profits go to 0. This is great for customers horrible for innovation. Innovation happens when there's enough capital to take huge risks and lose. Google had a ton of innovation attempts that flopped really hard and lost ton of money. Without the extra capital none of the attempts would have happened.
I agree regards Google (just beware I'm a massive Google fanboy) but I think that Microsoft do deserve at least a little bit of credit.
Microsoft gave us (counting only OSS and things they effectively gave away):
1. Microsoft Basic, the first language of a large number of developers in the 35+ age group. This was effectively given away which is part of why it was so popular (it was a small, fixed-price fee instead of the per-unit licensing)
2. TypeScript
3. C# and the CLR
4. Visual Studio Code
5. Since 2010 they've made large contributions to Open Source.
Commercially they've also been strong competition to enterprise players like Oracle and IBM and of course have done a huge amount for gaming.
Apple are narcissists, they're all take take take. They do, however, provide very strong competition which pushes other players to improve.
I agree. Love C#, VS Code and TypeScript. Microsoft changed a bit lately. But there's a lot of history with Microsoft and the recent CoPilot ripping off OSS code and blocking C# support in VS Code are still mudding the waters.
* The Apple I arguably changed the course of computer history. [0]
* The Laserwriter and the Mac inspired desktop publishing -- the Mac was the first computers with a font library.[1]
* The iPod literally changed culture. [2]
* The iTunes Store made piracy less desirable changed the music industry forever. It also led the way with digital video streaming -- while Netflix was still mailing out DVDs. [3]
And iPhone? Changed the world. [4] People have a hard time remembering pre-iPhone days. Samsung literally copied the iPhone. A judge in South Korea, in Samsung's home jurisdiction even ruled that Samsung copied iPhone. Android would still be a failed camera operating system if it were for iPhone leading the way.
* Kubernetes -- we lived just fine without it.
* Chromium? Who cares. My life isn't any different with or without it.
* Google Office? Aa cloud-based productivity suite? Nothing groundbreaking there, another competitor could have (and have) built the same thing.
* Go programming language? Apple gave us Swift and Objective C -- languages that are used for software running on over a billion devices. Go is a niche language. If Go didn't exist, humanity wouldn't notice.
We can have a difference of opinion on the relative merit of these details, but the idea that Google gave the _most_ to humanity is absolute nonsense. Amazon for example, empowered many small sellers around the world -- giving them access to a logistics network that would be impossible for a small business to recreate. Instead of selling on Main Street, sellers now can sell to literally any street in the world. I'm not the biggest fan an Amazon, however that being said, their contribution to humanity is enormous, especially in logistics. It has also changed publishing forever in ways that provide a significant benefit to independent authors -- many of whom have made careers out of self-publishing because of Amazon.
I'm not a fan of Microsoft, but their contribution to humanity is undeniable. Excel is probably the most important piece of software ever written. I'm sure others can expand on Microsoft's contributions to humanity.
By the way, I'm not saying all of these companies are "good" or altruistic, I'm only rating them on "contribution to humanity."
You're comparing Golang and Kubernetes to products that happen to have big market share. There are loads of spreadsheet apps and smartphones out there. They are replaceable. The iPhone definitely advanced the field, but it wasn't a sacrifice on Apple's part. They made boatloads of money from it. How much money did Google make from selling Golang and K8s? A large negative sum. Yet those techs have contributed enormously to economic efficiency.
All of these companies provide values, that's why they are so successful.
In particular (as opposed to Google), Apple is giving us products where the user isn't just an entity that you try to get as much data from as you can.
Without Apple we'd be stuck with tiny initiative such as GrapheneOS on mobile, limited to a small subset of apps and phones.
With AI, Apple is also being privacy conscious, i think they are doing interesting work with their private cloud compute setup.
But does it mean that Apple and Google should get a free pass? Hell no!
I'm very confused. Chrome is just Chromium with Google's own Telemetry. Chromium is open and maintained primarily by Google.
Sure, there's a userbase, but you need a business model to take advantage of it in the first place because the benefit was the Telemetry (Google's) and Google's Ecosystem.
Also, the article specifically mentions Chrome, NOT Chromium (which again, is open), so what incentive would Google have to maintaining the project without their own version of it? Would they be bared from starting a new one? Would someone else take over Chromium? Who would have the resources to do such a thing other than say Microsoft who currently uses a Chromium browser?
Why not just go for the jugular and separate Adsense from the rest of Alphabet? It's the main driving force in all their dark patterns for all other platforms (Youtube, Android, Chrome, Search...)
> Also, the article specifically mentions Chrome, NOT Chromium (which again, is open), so what incentive would Google have to maintaining the project without their own version of it? Would they be bared from starting a new one?
I wonder similarly if they are only selling the brand and the existing installation base. I do not see what is stopping them from just creating a chrome clone called Manganese and continuing.
It would be an interesting experiment though to see if the google version will regain the same market share or if chrome will maintain its current market share under the new stewardship.
> Why not just go for the jugular and separate Adsense from the rest of Alphabet? It's the main driving force in all their dark patterns for all other platforms (Youtube, Android, Chrome, Search...)
Because this is not the case about display advertising, but the one about search engines and search advertising.
But also, if you think the display ads business is the jugular, I don't think you really understand their business. Have a look at the financials. The entire display ads business is <10% of their business, and shrinking in both absolute and relative terms.
I'm worried about what happens to the Chrome extension store. If Google sells Chrome, then does that also mean the Chrome store? I guess it would have to. So not only does someone need to buy Chrome, they also have to operate the Chrome store too. I'm not sure this is going to work out well.
Interesting idea. I'm not against forcing Google to choose either all the user platforms they run or Adsense. If they sold off Google Drive, Suite, YouTube, Google Play, etc they might improve faster. At the very least it would drive more alternatives. That seems so unlikely though.
Google kills all their other projects often enough that I don't think they are contributing to many spaces anymore so giving the technical assets to other companies would be interesting.
As much as I dislike thinking it, out of the realistic possibilities for who could buy it, Microsoft is probably among the more preferable. Their primary income isn't from advertising, at least. Most other big players would be even more likely to continue with Google's direction of killing ad blockers. MS, to their credit, has never shown interest in doing that.
So we'd end up with even less competition? As flawed as Edge is it still somewhat new/innovative/different features that Chrome doesn't because MS has to try and compete with Google.
So I understand trying to break up monopolistic companies to provide better competition in the market which is generally better for the consumer as a whole. This strategy of saying Chrome should be sold off seems strange to me because unlike other monopolies Google's monopoly with Chrome is fundamentally different.
Since Chrome at its core is the open source chromium browser engine the ability for your competition to leverage what you do is already there. The dynamic here is fundamentally different than many other monopolies of the past due to this fact. It must be asked are people gravitating toward Chrome because they feel there is no other viable option to offer a similar experience or is it because they choose that because it feels to them to be the best choice to make in a free market.
In the context of Google's ad business the fact that chrome is open source has little bearing. Chrome is both massively popular and also a loss leader designed to further entrench Google's ad monopoly. If Chrome were broken off then a competitor in the ads space like Meta could purchase the search traffic instead which would force Google's ad business to be more competitive.
People gravitate towards Chrome in part because of Google’s heavy marketing of it. Whenever I sign into Gmail in Safari I get a pop up about a “better experience” awaiting me.
That is true in a valid point but install Windows sometimes and see how much it pushes you toward the edge browser. Which is chromium at its core but the experience it provides is not as good as Chrome even with all of Chrome's downsides.
So while I don't have the specific answer I think there is a much bigger question here of is it free market choice that is gravitated everyone here or is it monopolistic pressure that is squeezed out the competition. Microsoft is no small player in this space they're just the suckier player as they lost their crown with Internet explorer when they effectively owned the market too.
Google also turns every link tap in their iOS apps into an opportunity to upsell Chrome for iOS when it should just open the link with the user’s default browser.
Chrome is definitely a better experience than Safari, and not by a little bit. In many ways Safari is the worst browser out there right now. Most of its market share comes from the fact that Apple still forces Safari to be used on iOS no matter what browser you think you have installed. I think the DOJ should go after Apple harder on that than they are on Google, because nobody is forcing anyone to use Chrome the same way Apple is forcing their users to use Safari.
But I don't see how that equates to a monopoly. They certainly have the ability to direct their development of their product in the way that they want. Since the core foundation of their product is open and available to every other competing browser they could implement better privacy protections while still leveraging all of the other benefits of Chrome.
If the edge browser was so much better and much better privacy wise or the kiwi browser or any of the others the internet can move fairly quickly from one choice to another when that choice is better. For all the downsides that Chrome has I don't see anything that fits the term better for my use case. I'm also guessing that most other users also haven't found anything "better"
Isn't it even worse than that? Didn't they make changes via Manifest v3, which will not allow me to follow the FBI's advisory about using ad blockers, to make sure their ad revenue does not decline?
I do realize you can still use uBlock, but my understanding is that updates will be slow rolled, correct? Doesn't this open the window to malicious people to serve me mal-ads?
No. They're not doing those changes because regulators like the DOJ[0] threatened them with anti-trust action if they did. That's the same DOJ that's now asking for Chrome to be divested.
I genuinely have no idea what "missing features" or incompatibilities keep people on Chrome compared to the benefits of uBlock just plain working better on Firefox.
Bookmarks, passwords, payment information, recent tabs, extensions... all synced with your Google account in Chrome. Firefox can't sync to your Google account. All that information is synced across the entire Google account system, to your Android phone, other Chrome browser instances and so on. Yes I know you could export your data from Google and pull it into Firefox's sync system, but that's a hurdle.
uBlock Origin Lite works perfectly fine for me on Chrome.
Maybe there's some 0.01% of ads that would get blocked in the Firefox version that aren't in Chrome. But I don't see any regular users switching because they're noticing ads not getting blocked now.
I use FF full-time but have to use Chromium for WebEx and Teams calls to avoid massive jank.
I bought Ozlo Sleep buds recently. Really cool hardware that does exactly what they say they do. However, the device I read with at night runs Android 11 which is too old for their app (requires Android 12). I can configure and update the sleep buds through a browser with WebUSB...but only with Chrome.
The only reason I keep a Chrome installation is for when I want seemless in-page translation. Firefox just added a version of this feature but, for some reason, didn't include the most important language for nerds: Japanese.
In what way does uBlock work better on Firefox? I don't see any ads in Chrome. Ad block is more important to me than any browse. I use Kiwi on Android instead of Chrome, and would switch immediately on desktop if I saw ads.
I disagree. We get things in Chrome that is not in the consumer's interest simply because Google wants to get more data from its users and display more ads.
If Chrome were to be separated from the Ad business, it would be beneficial for privacy.
> It must be asked are people gravitating toward Chrome because
....
It's because Chrome used to be shoved down everyone's throat up until few years ago. Once stable base of users was made (by force and deception) the market took momentum
I do think you're rewriting history a bit here. Of course a Google advertised to their product but people didn't move to Chrome simply because of the advertisements. Chrome took hold because literally every other choice sucked and sucked hard. When you only have sucky choices you have to deal with them and they made something massively better than anything else at the time. Companies with buckets of money like Microsoft didn't innovate in this space and even when they saw what Google was doing with Chrome their ability to compete with it was laughable. Even when they finally switch to their edge browser because the Internet explorer name was so tainted with bad experiences they still suck in this space. Even with Bing and the billions of dollars they can throw at it they still suck in this space.
A lot of discussion in this thread is pointing out that chromium is a thing and that it would be hard for a company to properly fund a web browser without the backing of a tech giant whose more direct revenue stream is elsewhere. I think this showcases a larger issue with the web as it stands today. Why has building a browser for the "open web" become such a complex piece of software that it requires the graces of a tech giant to even keep pace? Can nothing be done to the web to lower the barrier to entry such that an independent group (a la OpenBSD or similar) can maintain their own? Right now it seems this is only possible if you accept that you'll only be able to build on top of chromium.
I know the focus by the DOJ here seems to be more on search and less on the technical control that Google has over the web experience through implementation complexity, however I can only hope that by turning off the flow of free cash more "alternative" browsers are given some space to catch up. Things like manifest V3 show that Google is no stranger to tightening the leash if the innovation of web technologies impact their bottom line, I'd like to have a web where this type of control isn't possible.
That was the goal, not an accident. The length of the standard itself is comparable to medium-sized serious project kloc count.
They driven these numbers up to ensure that no one except them and their leashed pets could repeat it.
And here we are, you can have ten internet-enabled apps with texts, images and videos, basically the same functionality, but you can only copy nine of them.
Can nothing be done to the web to lower the barrier to entry such that an independent group (a la OpenBSD or similar) can maintain their own?
Sure, we can have the original web with text and the occasional embedded photo. But if you want what amounts to a full blown operating system, with a rock solid sandbox, plus an extremely performant virtual machine, that’s going to be a high bar.
> Can nothing be done to the web to lower the barrier to entry such that an independent group (a la OpenBSD or similar) can maintain their own?
Of course it can and it is done: Linux Foundation Europe runs Servo, GNOME Foundation runs WebKitGTK and Epiphany, Ladybird Browser Initiative runs Ladybird.
> A lot of discussion in this thread is pointing out that chromium is a thing and that it would be hard for a company to properly fund a web browser without the backing of a tech giant whose more direct revenue stream is elsewhere.
This is not an issue though is it?
Like all those magazine subscriptions make their money off ads. The idea that a business can't survive on its own is fine, no?
If it's a singular tech giant then that's a problem but if chrome had contracts with like a dozen+ companies then it sounds really sustainable.
> Like all those magazine subscriptions make their money off ads. The idea that a business can't survive on its own is fine, no?
This is not quite the same, if a single magazine starts to become more ads than decent content it is not insurmountable for another company to start a competitor. It's not ad income itself that is bad, it's that in the case of a web browser it is insurmountable for a company to start up a competitor from scratch. It wasn't always the case, but because google has dumped so much engineering in to chrome they've effectively pulled up the ladder behind them.
One of the hidden costs of Chrome on society is it supports radically ramping up the complexity of web specifications in order to extend the moat around it. It is one of the most extraordinary software engineering projects ever done, with multiple components each of which are game changers. (ANGLE, v8 and libwebrtc immediately come to mind). It is no accident Rust spun out of an effort to compete with this complexity explosion without having infinite financial resources.
Personally I would prioritize spinning off Android though, and partly pragmatically since at least that would have a clear revenue stream. Maybe the Chrome App Store will experience a sudden surge in importance. A degoogled Chrome OS could almost start to look better than the direction Windows is going in.
Chrome makes enormous sums of money through ads. Also, these companies pay fortunes for default settings like search engines and other backroom deals. Someone could buy Chrome and ask Microsoft for 30% of Bing's search revenue to be the default search engine and Microsoft would agree.
This makes sense, but it is made even more nonsensical by the fact that the DOJ is also separately saying traffic aquisition deals are anticompetitive as well.
Google makes money from ads by having control of Chrome. I don't see how that would continue if it's spun out. I'm not aware of any ads in Chrome itself (but I've been using FF for years, so what do I know). And Chrome controlling the default search engine is exactly why they want it spun out from Google, so if the result was simply that it makes money by defaulting to a different search engine, that would be an absurd, pointless result.
This is good guess unfortunately. However, there are second order effects as we've seen with X that will drive people to Firefox so this could end up being a good thing.
> They are also prepared to seek a requirement that Google share more information with advertisers and give them more control over where their ads appear.
I don't think Google are fully clean in all this by any stretch, but for all the people saying that Google is just privacy-violating data junkies, did you catch that aspect of the DOJ statement?? The DOJ wants the advertisers to have MORE information (about us). That makes me sick.
I definitely glossed over this line. This line of thinking makes me worried that someone in the upcoming government will get the "good" idea of trying to ban adblockers.
The trademarks, the team, and the infrastructure. Mozilla spun out of Netscape exactly like that, with the trademarks, part of the team and part of the infra.
The monetization is up to the spinoff or acquirer to figure out.
The main problem is that, thanks to Chrome's massive market share, Google is in a position where they can effectively dictate the future of the Web as a platform.
We've already seen a few instances of this: Manifest v3 and FLoC/Privacy Sandbox, for example, were met with widespread opposition, but eventually they made their way into Chrome; WEI, on the other hand, was withdrawn due to backlash, but make no mistake, it will come back at some point.
The current state of Web standards can be summed up as: whatever Chrome does is the standard. The other browsers have to follow along, either because their modest market share doesn't afford them the luxury to be incompatible with Chrome, or because they're based on Chromium, so they hardly have a choice. The only exception is Apple, but let's be honest, they only do so because of their own business interests.
Ideally, Chrome/Chromium should be spun off as an independent non-profit foundation set up to act in the public interest. Obviously there would be trade-offs: a slower development cycle, new features taking longer to be shipped, etc. But in my opinion that's far preferrable to having Google continue to exert this level of control over the Web.
Unfortunately, the current administration has two months left in its term, so it's not going to happen.
My primary worry here is that this would hurt the open web - whether or not splitting out Chrome into a separate business would be good for consumers in and of itself.
It's true that Google adds a lot of things to Chrome or their own benefit or even the potential detriment of others like Mozilla.
That being said, they also do a tremendous amount of work to push the state of the web forward and, most importantly, they release Chromium 100% free and open source. That's not to mention the other incredibly impactful free projects that have stemmed from it like V8/NodeJS, Electron, Puppeteer, Chrome Devtools, etc.
On the flip side, it's been argued that Google's control over web standards is too strong and they can essentially strong-arm other browser vendors into implementing whatever they want. It's also been argued that Google pushes too fast and makes it impossible for other vendors to keep up, leading people to use Chrome if they want the latest + greatest web features.
But when we look at the other browser vendors, I personally feel like Google seems like a much better alternative. Mozilla feels like a dried up husk of the company it apparently once was and Apple pushes a buggy, closed-source, locked-down browser which has been purposely held back from critical features in the past (I think they did that to try to keep users off web apps and keep them paying Apple huge app store fees).
----
Anyway, I certainly have very mixed feelings on this one. My main hope is that this doesn't spell the beginning of the end for Chromium because I truly believe it's a piece of software that has provided immense public benefit.
Google has to be dismantled in parts one way or another - too much control over search and Youtube to the point where they are able to enforce Chrome standards that prevent adblocks from working.
> Youtube to the point where they are able to enforce Chrome standards that prevent adblocks from working.
Youtube needs to profitable somehow, and advertisers are the best way to do this. If Youtube couldn't generate the revenue through advertising, what else can they do?
It's insanely expensive to do video streaming, hence why Google invests a lot in the new compression formats today, WEBP, Brotli, AV1.
Do you just expect them to just do all of this for free?
Thinking this through, it’s hard to even imagine how such a selloff and transfer could happen.
Chrome, which is built downstream from the open-source Chromium, is a behemoth project with development spanning nearly every domain — rendering, GPU ops, WASM, AI, js engines, web standards, and much more.
Sure, Google doesn’t always prioritize developments that don’t align with its ad monopoly. Still, Chrome remains a polished & widely used product.
As far as I can see, it would be best to establish a "Chromium Foundation," akin to the Linux Foundation, with emphasis on advancing web standards, unencumbered by corporate priorities.
That said, the more entrenched monopoly Google maintains lies in its "Search Experience," integrated with complementary products like Maps, YouTube, Android, and others.
I don't see any other viable alternative that serves the needs of most users across the board.
Bing doesn’t come close, and while private search engines cater to power users, the average web user rarely switches search engines.
For many, Google Search has become the de facto entry point to the internet and their view of the Web.
With those rulings come conditions. Corporations under a judgement under monopoly practices can't do anything they want wily-nily. AT&T, for example, was forbidden from selling computers in 1956.
"make" Mozilla buy it, give em a heaping grant from the Library of Congress to keep the open web open, and be the engine behind every browser keeping things fair... sounds good to me!
In this scenario I’d much rather that heaping grant goes to a newly independent Chromium nonprofit org. Browser engine diversity is a good thing and worth trying to preserve.
The conflict of interest between owning search, being a provider of user identity/login, and effectively owning the entire internet ads marketplace, and being a provider of the "user agent" (remember when people thought of that way!?) is immense.
This should have happened years ago.
TBF, I worked in Chrome almost 7 years and I didn't see anything outright nefarious. I don't know how user-hostile decisions (like breaking ad blockers and serving advertisers better) get made, but they do get made, or defaulted into. Trust me, the leadership of Chrome knows exactly how to justify its $300 million+ budget to the rest of Google, revenue numbers and all.
But there's no vendor lock-in from providing the user agent. It only costs a few minutes to switch to a different browser. The problem is other browsers suck, through no fault of Chrome (other than setting the bar high).
Looking at this case and the recent case against SpaceX (which is required to only hire US permanent residents and citizens) for not hiring asylees, makes me think DOJ which has the bandwidth to only work on few very important cases isn't doing a good job overall.
You could make all these arguments against Android, no? Perhaps moreso while they maintain the garden wall.
It isn't wrong to point out how harmful to society monopolies are, and to identify them, but the development of Chrome, Android, etc, do also present genuine value to anybody who wants that code.
Without Google making money from the search/targeting/advertising model, who is paying for Chrome, Firefox and Google Search? Who is paying for Android after third party marketplaces take off?
I'm not making any recommendations here except that I think we need to be careful what we wish for. Tools we rely on might evaporate.
Why is this a better solution than forcing chrome to have no defaults and select an option just like IE.
Chrome google pulled the entire browser market forward by investing in chrome.
A stand alone chrome is just going to make money by charging by default status or be bought by someone else trying to create push their defaults.
+ No platform ever must include an Internet Brower by default. User must install one some way without anyone being suggested or hinted by platform. Platform can inform user an internet browser can be installed but not saying how. Platform owner can set a default anytime
+ No Internet Browser ever must default, or suggest or hint a search engine. The platform owner can always pick one himself.
Internet Browser is defined as any program with a User Interface which can acquire content from any public network
The devil is inthe defaults.
Edit: I forgot to add how to finance it: Internet browser will now datamine the customer. Customer can pay for a privacy respecting browser, but we all know how that doesn't fly (yet)
Again, no idea how Google's supposed monopoly of web browsers is worse for the consumer than Apple's actual monopoly on iPhone browsers (they're all Safari under the hood) and on App stores.
The DOJ is after monopoly in search space (and how Google is using chrome position to strengthen the search monopoly) not the browser space itself (Which is another monopoly but to less extend). People don't look into one product and DOJ are not naive to fall into this trap.
> no idea how Google's supposed monopoly of web browsers is worse for the consumer than Apple's actual monopoly on iPhone browsers (they're all Safari under the hood) and on App stores
For the same reason proprietary cables aren't generally a monopoly problem: Apple hasn't been declared a monopoly. Google has [1].
Kagi’s argument is simple: Google should give public access to their Search Index so that any company can take advantage of the core machine directly, under some terms of agreement. Like an API.
Am I alone in thinking that all the stuff I get for free (in exchange for some amount of targeted advertising) from Google is pretty cool and that these attempts to break up big tech are going to be very bad for consumers and the economy and is just punishing successful companies that produce products that customers want to use. You all can use mosaic/edge if you want to.
You get nice stuff for free, right up until the moment Google decide that they've done enough. Then you get nothing. And the unfair funding and disparity in features means no competitors can ever provide a superior alternative.
And then it might not be for free. It's very tempting to rent-seek when you have a captive user base. That's bad for consumers and bad for the economy.
Focusing on what we get today is myopic and it's not by mistake that Google give them to us.
You are certainly not alone. I’d say you’re in the vast vast majority, just not necessarily on our little corner of the Internet (hackernews), but realistically probably the majority here as well.
Selling off Chrome might help, or it might just be the lesser evil/a pawn sacrifice in order to prevent split up of AdSense from Google Search (which is in obvious conflict of interest, as Google's ad business is already under scrutiny under alleged price fixing along with Meta), or of YouTube. Neither Google's acquisition of YouTube nor that of DoubleClick should've been allowed in the first place under any reasonable antitrust enforcement, the purpose of which is to prevent exactly this kind of monopoly.
Chrome can't really be sold unless it'd mean Google is not allowed to maintain a fork of Chromium.
While you can sell access to the existing installations (control over the update url), if Google continues to invest development into a fork (and just drops the information about it on Google frontpage) then that new fork will become defacto Chrome.
EDIT: To clarify, the value of Chrome is not only the userbase, but also its placement in Google products and importantly, the development effort on a scale few can afford.
I think this would be a very unfair action to perform so late in the administration.
Simply because the other two dominant personal computer OS vendors, Microsoft and Apple, will be allowed to maintain their browsers. The less entrenched company and younger company is getting singled out?
If they had more time to build cases against the more entrenched Apple and MS, maybe I'd give them some benefit of the doubt. But we can't assume the next administration's antitrust policy will be consistent or even sensible.
Browsers are complicated enough that I don’t see how a company could do the right thing without it being subsidized by a larger business. I feel like this is paving the ground for a Chinese startup to come take its place.
Browsers simply require paying a few hundred very in demand engineers, and that's hardly impossible if Mozilla's been doing it for 20 years as a non-profit. How many software shops out there have 500 engineers? I'm guessing literal hundreds US companies have that today and wouldn't be surprised if someone could build something that scale in a couple years with the proper budget and leadership.
But they won't have to build it, they'll just buy a chunk of Google's team with the Chrome trademarks and the chromium infrastructure and then scale back attempts to outpace the few other engine makers by piling on features only useful to an advertising monopoly and instead focus on the core feature set while raking in big bucks selling search and ad distribution to all the search and ad companies not named Google (and perhaps some even from Google too.)
Mozilla does it by getting Google to pay them a bunch of money, which itself is the subject of anti-trust investigations. That money could dry up if Google is forced to no longer fund Mozilla, and if that happens, they’re screwed. It’ll also mean others likely won’t be able to pay either, which only leaves either buying software (who will pay for a browser?) or ads.
Also note that Mozilla has been doing this a long time, and yet they’re effectively irrelevant in market share now. So they’ve done a terrible job.
Browsers are a specialized technology and skill set that isn’t easily found, nor can you just throw any old SWE at the problem.
What kind of continuity can be expected when the head of the DoJ is a political appointee by the president, and we're getting a new president in 2 months with radically different ideas compared to our current one?
Stuff like this. It feels like there's less of a case here than with Microsoft. In the 90s, Windows nearly became _the_ OS, especially had Apple folded like it nearly did. There really wasn't an alternative in the emerging home computer space as well as the OEM shenanigans among other things. Threatening to pull office for Mac if Apple failed to include IE.
I'm struggling to see how Google is truly behaving monopolistic here. Chrome is available for compile, and is part of other browsers like edge. It's like suggesting linux has a monopoly because almost all web servers run on it.
I'm reading this on a non-Chrome browser based on Chromium, the project Google gave freely to the world that enables competitors to reach hundreds of millions of users
You can look up details of the lawsuit, but the idea is that Google paying Apple to be the default search engine prevents other search engines from competing with Google search. The default search selection has been shown to be quite important. Anti-trust law is built around the idea of maintaining competition - “monopolies” aren’t inherently illegal.
Google says the proposals would harm consumers and developers
Hey Google - I'm both, and your trend over the years of degrading products I used to love with increasingly user-hostile choices has already caused me more harm than I can imagine could arise out of fixing the incentives.
We went from hardware we could trust & control and gopher + plain html to hardware that spies on us and have limited control over and fully turing complete software with access to all hardware & DRM. - and no sensible way out.
Maybe not only Google, but everyone needs to rethink the concept of a browser.
A much better decision would have been to require them to fund some amount of the various open source competitors so there can be alternatives. Makes as much sense as forcing them to sell a thing that has no market.
"Selling" off chrome is probably not even really possible in any reasonable business way.
First, it's important to keep a clear view of what's actually for sale here. Chromium is an open source project that already forms the basis of other browsers (most prominently Edge and Brave) and does not include all the weird Google stuff that the the DOJ takes issue with (tracking for ads, special privileges for Google websites, etc.). Chrome is basically a thin layer of shittiness on top of Chromium. That thin layer of shittiness is what's for sale. Its entire value is derived from the fact that it's already dominant. So whoever buys it is effectively buying that user base, but not much of a technical moat to keep them all in.
Who might buy it? I can list them:
- Apple
- Microsoft
That's it. Turns out you can't properly invest in a Browser without conflicts of interest. Apple might buy it to help drive more users toward the App Store. Microsoft might buy it for similar, all-too-familiar reasons. They both have the funds and incentives to want this massive "captive" audience, and the means to exploit it, and I can't think of anybody else who would care enough to bid much.
So what would happen to Google? That's the real question. Seems like the point is not selling anything. The point is to ban Google from having influence over any web browser. I wonder if Judge Mehta will be able to craft an effective order to that end.
I was one of the very few voices against using Chrome when it debuted in 2008. How on earth did it make sense, even for the supposedly enlightened programmer/IT tech/gamer/nerd crowd to use a browser made by a company whose business model depends on profiling user data to sell ads? And mind that in 2008 they had already ditched the 'don't be evil' slogan for those naive enough to think that businesses are anything but amoral.
And splitting hairs over Chrome vs Blink (the engine), or switching to the multiple other Blink wrapper browsers that are there, or Chrome's controlled opposition Firefox() makes no sense either; by using any of these you only help maintain Google's hegemony over the web and its standards.
() - they don't get to call themselves a scrappy little privacy crusading rebel when bankrolled by Mozilla whose multi million dollar revenue remains primarily from Google being the default search engine in Firefox, plus their own shenanigans.
Not to be dramatic, but from a security perspective, it feels a little like the scene in Ghost Busters where the EPA inspector orders a Con Ed worker to shut down the containment system.
I'm trying to imagine all the operational implications and this particular suggestion feels hasty.
Buying the browser should come with most of the engineers that actively work on it, or at least the ones with most experience working on it, maybe even give them a tiny part of the shares of whatever company gets to own it, or perhaps with a contract for at least for a couple of years (and then could return to Google or whatever), and if possible include some incentives to make them focus on working on security bugs over new features, which tbh I think there is just too many every year.
The revenue and profitability of "the Chrome Company" is going to be far less than Google, since Google's rising tide is what lifted that particular boat.
How would the Chrome Company deal with this?
Would they do closed source development going forward, no more free lunch for other browsers or shells using Chrome as an engine?
How much of a hit does this mean for employees salaries? They are currently making Google money, and now they're about to make Microsoft money.
How many would just be flat out laid off due to a lack of revenue, at least in the short term? Would it be a 50% lay off? Into a job market that's already bad?
Firefox makes hundred of millions of dollars in revenue per year. If you assume the same revenue per user and apply it to Chrome's market size (about 30x that of firefox) then you have a top 20(?) tech company in revenue terms.
They will have more money than they know what to do with. But yes, going closed source does seem more likely.
Yeah, especially if this breaks Chrome Remote Desktop in any way, seems like that capability would be tied into the Google ecosystem... I wonder how long we will have to say goodbye to the simplest remote desktop that has ever existed.
Finally! My only concern is that this should have been done much sooner, in particular before the recent anti-trust ruling that basically forced Google's hands to pull the rug under Mozilla.
Google's sole business is to make people look at content they don't want to look at (ads), and I find it deeply problematic that they not only control the operating system and software distribution platform for a large fraction of devices, but now also the browser and by extension the standards of what used to be the open web.
That's not how this works. They'll sign a consent decree that forbids them from just that for a decade or three and the DOJ will have staff officed in Google campuses monitoring them for the entire time.
Not sure how this works but if some party purchased chrome, isn't the best business for it to sell advertising back to google? And then sell the default search engine back to google?
DuckDuckGo has a web browser. Brave has a search engine. Kagi has a web browser.
It seems weird to single Google for this. Wasn't the core issue behind this that these other search engines couldn't compete with Google?
Vivaldi is a much better browser than their Chromium re-skins. Perhaps if their browsers were better people would use them instead of using Chrome. Additionally, perhaps if their search was better than Google, they would use it as well!
Google shoves AI overviews in your face now, and if that sucks, the only reasonable alternative is to use Bing currently. I can't use Brave's search or Mojeek. Brave ignores underscores. Mojeek doesn't even have a business model so it stops anyone from actually using it as a search engine. Yandex is full of results in Russian.
I wish someone would tell me what is this fabled competitor to Google that would benefit from crippling Google because so far I haven't been able to find one. I'd say the only engines better than Google are Wiby and Kiddle, because they focus on a specific niche instead of trying to compete on general web search.
Interesting, when I was taking a look at alternative search engines I tried Mojeek and I never saw a single ad, so I assumed it had no way to make money (just like Wiby).
But where are the ads?
I just searched for "best cars 2024." Not a single ad. "Insurance lawyers," no ads. "Best keyboard," no ads.
Maybe the reason why this happens is because I'm not from the US/EU/UK?
Also when I use a search operator, like "insurance lawyers" surrounded by double quotes, I get a 403 forbidden error because I appear "to be sending automated queries so we can't process your search at this time." To me, that means Mojeek won't let me use it as a search engine.
Every time these cases come up, I ask the same question: what is this supposed to actually achieve and how will it work?
Who will buy chrome? And how will they make a profit from doing so?
Presumably they will charge google for good to remain the default search engine? But then we will just end up in the same place as now won't we? (Chrome being a popular but not the only browser; Google being the default but not only search engine).
So how will this make the end user or the advertisers (don't forget, they are the consumer here, since they are paying, not the user) richer or happier or whatever else?
People seem stuck on "monopoly bad" and that something has to be done. But are not clear on what the harm is here, or how to prevent that harm. Instead, this is something and something has to be done...
It is mostly better advertising compared to what Mozilla was pulling of, the initial edge in performance (at least that’s what people said), integration with google for the android users (Firefox was late to this) as well as some issues if garbage websites didn’t test on Firefox.
Regarding features, things I’d miss include PWA, some APIs like WebUSB that let me flash microcontrollers in the browser and I think WebGPU is still only in Firefox nightly.
Most of those things are very specific to what I do. Most people don’t need PWAs. Most people have no need for WebUSB and most applications run on WebGL so that’s mostly an issue for developers.
It’s not like Firefox is bad but I think Google just managed to capture the market and now the userbase doesn’t have a good reason to switch to Firefox (most people don’t think about privacy if it’s not in their face. Very few people will have no passcode on their phone. But even less people will think twice before uploading the images of stranger’s kids to Google Drive because they happened to be in the background when you made a photo of your own kids even though google has no reason to respect your privacy).
Maybe force of habit from years ago when Mozilla was the dominant non-default browser and chrome rolled in and ate their lunch by feeling so much faster.
If Google is forced to sell off Chrome why would any company buy it? They wouldn't get the developers that work on Chrome / Chromium. They wouldn't get access to the proprietary Google services that Chrome uses so they would be buying a copy of Chromium. Google could then close the Chromium source code and develop a new closed source browser. The Chrome browser would then slowly die due to lack of development resources, money, and innovation while the new Google browser would quickly gain the market share that was taken away from them.
They had these alleged resources for almost two decades now. Did they manage to force Apple? Or do they give them two digit billions dollars for Google to be the default search engine on safari?
Weird that this is so doom and gloom, the world's most popular browser decoupled from the ad machine. What's not to love? People champion Firefox and Brave constantly and they're independent browsers.
Brave is not an independent browser, the majority of development comes for free through Chromium, funded by… Google. Firefox by Mozilla Corp survives on loads of cash from… Google.
Whoever’s going to pay for the acquisition and the shit ton of ongoing development costs will have to milk it a lot harder than Google (unless the buyer is something like Microsoft, but what’s the point then). A browser alone, especially the type people here champion, is a bad business.
I think there's an implicit assumption here that Google isn't milking the browser for all it's worth. It isn't as if Google is footing the bill for all those ongoing costs for nothing. I think the argument that Chrome avoids some general badness because Google gets value from a purely strategic interest isn't without merit but even that value is captured eventually. Sure they'll probably sell their default search placement to Google for a pretty penny to sustain development just like Firefox but I consider that a strict improvement over the status quo because Google has less direct power over the new company.
This will likely lead to a Safari hegemony. Possibly an Edge / Safari duopoly.
Chrome doesn't have a business model to make money. If it gets calved off into its own thing, it'll either need to find another line of business to supplement the cost of building and maintaining a browser, or it'll go bankrupt. Close-to-nobody is willing to pay money for a browser alone, so it's unlikely they'll be able to float a business on selling the browser itself.
This feels like doing something just to do something. I hate the fact that Google owns Chrome just as much as the next person here, but what's going to happen next? Are you going to sell it to ByteDance since they have the biggest offer? Just having half a plan can be worse than having a full plan.
At the same time, it might be just a thread from the DOJ to get Google to play ball on something else, but it's hard to assume competence and forethought for something like this.
Maybe this will lead to Chromium finally getting proper vertical tabs which Google clearly otherwise block due to it eating up horizontal real estate that would otherwise be used for ads.
I wonder what the bounds of this would be. Most people still think of Chrome as just a browser, but there is quite a bit of other stuff:
Chrome Web Store
ChromeOS
Chromebook (somewhat intertwined with Android)
Chromecast (discontinued, sort of; succeeded by Google TV Streamer)
Web.dev (not Chrome branded, but probably wouldn't exist if Google didn't start Chrome)
Also, I have to wonder, if breaking off Chrome makes sense to the DOJ, does breaking off Android also make sense? Is that the next piece that they will propose?
I don’t really understand how this would work and the article doesn’t really give me enough detail to know. But for me, Google abandoning their plans to disable third party cookies tells me everything I need to know: their ad business calls the shots and an ad company having monopoly over the browser market is an unequivocally bad thing.
I just have no idea how we get from here to there. And let’s be real, with Trump re-elected the chance of the DOJ following through with this is very low.
It is not clear to me how Chrome having a majority share in the browser market is a monopoly. Is it somehow constraining other browsers to not be developed? On the contrary Google maintains the Chromium project, and funds Mozilla directly. I don't think that's what monopolies do, i.e., monopolies don't actively cultivate competitors.
If people aren't choosing to use Firefox, Brave, Edge, etc. even though many of the competitors get the benefit of free Google engg labor on Chromium and are not connected to the so-called ad machine, maybe they don't want like the alternatives.
It feels odd to me that this was the first proposal from the DOJ, considering that the case initially seemed quite focused on the advertising side of Google's business:
I thought Trump could be bought off to make this go away like he flipped on the til too forced sale of ban. But this whole thing began under his last administration (sic):
“If Mehta accepts the proposals, they have the potential to reshape the online search market and the burgeoning AI industry. The case was filed under the first Trump administration and continued under President Joe Biden. It marks the most aggressive effort to rein in a technology company since Washington unsuccessfully sought to break up Microsoft Corp. two decades ago.”
The thing is chrome isn’t as sticky or important as the ads marketplace. Google would be wise to let chrome go and hold on to the cash cow that is the ads marketplace where they make most of their money.
Right now a healthy web ecosystem is Google's existential hedge, against all the closed platforms of the world coming to devour the web and Google's business.
Getting rid of Google as a patron for the web would be one of the most harmful damaging & awful things the DOJ could do this world. Strongly opposed, what a godforsaken heinous crime against humanity to consider leaving no one funding the web at scale.
Antimonopoly action is good for the market, but let's be honest nobody will make a better chrome, at best they will inject ads or turn it to a walled garden. It will be a bad thing in the end for us web developers , and we will lose the last open platform.
Why is this considered a good move anyway? The obvious way to split google is to separate the buy side from the sell side of ads market
I haven't read the article but I immediately see a few comments about benefitting consumers. I don't think that's the DOJ's charter. I think when you consider all the things that Google is to the government and to the people, this decision makes sense. It's weird that it becomes a discussion about what consumers want.
How exactly does Chrome make money without leveraging the exact antitrust behaviors that are driving this decision?
Do they become like Firefox and make themselves dependent on Google to pay top dollar for the default search engine? Wouldn't that just make them beholden to their original owner anyways?
Taking into account all the noise the EU is making about Internet, privacy, digital laws it's mind-bending that there is no the EU WebBrowser. There is Opera, there are original KHTML/Webkit creators - just use them and make an engine that's not adverts powered.
The DOJ is technically illiterate if they think Google selling Chrome is the solution. If Google was forced to divest itself from Chrome, I see no need for Google to keep Chromium open source.
This is the strangest decision I've ever seen. Chrome isn't the default anywhere except Pixel branded devices (most or all of the Android OEMs have their own browsers) and you need to actually seek out and download Chrome from Google.com. So how will Google selling Chrome lead to less traffic towards Google? It seems the DOJ has cause and effect completely backwards.
IF Google is a monopoly that abuses search and ads, IMO it would make much more sense to split it like this:
- Google Search
- Ads
- Consumer facing everything, so Chrome, Android, Pixel devices, Nest, etc... all together
- YouTube
This kind of split would prevent Google dominating search, abusing their dominance of ads while also enabling their device division to become a proper competitor to Apple and Samsung.
Simply splitting off Chrome is weird, kills Chrome for absolutely no reason, does nothing to help consumers and most importantly doesn't prevent Google from dominated search and ads which is the whole point of the suit in the first place...
It's also strange that the DOJ is letting Apple, MS and Meta off the hook when those businesses clearly engage in anti-competitive practices.
albeit n=1 sample size, but looking at firefox should give enough indication to what would become of chrome if it gets detached from google.
it is wishful thinking to assume that maintaining a dominant browser can be done if not through subsidizing through other means. as time has shown repeatedly that nobody wants to pay for this directly, it seems like any new ownership would resort to things that would ultimately ruin the browser for everyone.
maybe that is the goal all along, but it is hard to debate whether that is going to be a net positive.
Spin off, maybe. Make it something more akin to The Linux Foundation where a consortium of vested interests donate time and resources. This should also include public funds as part of civic infrastructure and national defense funding. BTW, Mozilla really should be in such a bin too.
I have a feeling this will get worse. I can think of these companies which have the resources to take over Chrome - Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle, Apple and Facebook.
I can't see anybody else. They are all monopolies and is gonna screw it up big time for us consumers.
>I can think of these companies which have the resources to take over Chrome...
Exactly, who on Earth could build a competitor? You're describing the problem!
The ability to take stunning losses each year without worry, knowing that it pays dividends in the value to search, ensures competition can't flourish. So it is anti-competitive.
I am definitely not a google fan here. In fact a privacy nerd. But if they sell it off like this, it will hurt consumers more.
We need to make Google play by the rules so that we can set an example for the rest. Not recreate the same problem with another company so that we will have to do the same after a decade all over again.
Cos at that point, nothing will change for the consumers except the brand logo of the company that is doing crazy things.
Am not saying no one complained about it. FLoC aand many many decisions by google proves they are horrible. But I dont think this will solve the problem. This will make it more worse.
I dont think anyone has pointed this out - Apple and Google have long fought against improvements in mobile browsers. Specifically because they threaten the app store monopoly.
Push notifications in PWA was one of the big big ones. Apple blocked it for years and years.
splitting Chrome and Android off from Google will do little to kneecap Google's monopoly power, and will just cause those two projects to fail, with no revenue source. There's no way to make money from Chrome that wouldn't just _suck_ for consumers.
google's monopoly powers come from its ads business, and the data collection network that comes with search and other facilities.
Split crawling/indexing (for search), search itself, and search ads/display ads out into separate businesses. Search has to pay for the index, and others could buy access into the same index. Ads has to pay search for data. etc etc.
Antitrust and antimonopoly would do so much for the economy over in the USA. We need smaller companies, and more of them. Leads to more innovation, better jobs / distributions of wealth.
My understanding is that google lets anyone freely use chromium, and chrome is just their flavour of chromium with google services integrated ontop of it. Microsoft took chromium and sprinkled ai-enhanced microsoft flavours on top to make edge, which doesn't look like a monopoly. Presumably, microsoft is able to use windows to push edge, and use edge to push bing. If chrome was sold and had the google integration removed I would switch to a vanilla chromium.
I see some argument for google paying firefox to be the default search engine, but is that worse than firefox not existing at all?
In terms of search engines, I think there's just a lack of good competition. The search engines I'm aware of are:
Google: Just works. The only problem is you need to add "reddit" to most searches to get actual real, human-written non-seospam text, but I doubt that's unique to just google.
Bing: I'm greeted with an uncomfortably flashy layout shift, a page full of american news and some popup about AI. They also cover up and censor for the CCP.
Kagi: Their website is literally broken right now and I can't even see the pricing or other pages. I tried safari, chrome, firefox and edge, the hamburger menu doesn't open. Ultimately though, nobody except the kind of audience on HN is going to pay for it. If I told anyone else about a search engine that costs $16/month to use, I'm sure they'd think i'm joking, irregardless of how good it may be.
Yandex: Good for the reverse image searching, but otherwise probably not good to use.
Most of this article is ads, and it's paywalled so I can only read the first couple sentences, so if this is addressed in it I apologise.
> Ultimately though, nobody except the kind of audience on HN is going to pay for it. If I told anyone else about a search engine that costs $16/month to use, I'm sure they'd think i'm joking, irregardless of how good it may be.
What do you want out of an alternative though - Better search or free? Because you can't have both. Ad-based search being free is exactly the reason it is bad. You get what you pay for?
They could spin it off and then set up the same kind of pay-for-default-search deal that Mozilla has. This might put just enough distance between the two orgs to satisfy the DOJ without actually changing much.
Thats lovely but I think ultimately not going after the root problem. Going after the root problem would be pushing them to divorce the advertising business from the rest.
Honestly, on a consumer/public interest level, this would be a great thing to see. Google would have to make sure their sites work well on all browsers, since they wouldn't maintain Chrome anymore (or have control over its functionality), Chrome wouldn't get an extra marketing, since Google wouldn't be able to market it to people using its products or services, and there would be far less of an incentive to do things like change addon APIs if it's not the parent company losing money from blocked ads.
The two big questions however are:
1. Who would buy it?
Because if it's someone like Microsoft, then we're back to square 1. It's another IE6/Chrome situation, with conflicting interests and unfair marketing efforts. Personally I can't see Apple, Meta or Microsoft buying Chrome though (or being allowed to under anti monopoly laws), so lord knows who'd end up with it. Mozilla or an open foundation of sorts would be the best option, but I somehow doubt it'll be those either
2. How is it going to be funded?
You ideally don't want the Firefox 'solution' where Google basically pays them to exist, but you can't really sell a browser either. So how it could be standalone and remain a viable venture is anyone's guess.
Chrome and Chrome-related employees of Google worrying about their future compensation under a smaller company.
Don't worry, I'm sure that Chrome / Chromium will be picked up by several big players together, Microsoft is involved via Edge, ... I don't see much changing.
I think that government should limit its interference in the market as much as possible, but Chrome is just so monopoly-oriented from the get go, it's no wonder it will deservedly get split off.
Also, look from the bright side, multiple large players have it in their interest to keep Chrome / Chromium alive, so it will survive the death of Google and it's main ads business.
The sale wouldn't involve Chromium nor the Google employees that work on Chromium or Chrome. But good luck to whoever buys it to keep funding it and acquire the talent to work on it at the speed Google does. Meanwhile, Chromium will go closed source as there's no incentive to keep it open and Google will develop a new closed sourced browser to reclaim its market share.
Chrome data may be feeding Search Results based on how long people stay at different pages and where they go. Thus removing Chrome may remove a substantial data advantage for search.
I believe they'll settle on splitting out Youtube - which I believe makes perfect sense and from a rev/valuation perspective, would be a top 20 company.
I have no idea how this would work either, but I feel like the election makes this more likely to happen, not less, after the amount of rhetoric that Google needs taking down a peg.
Google as Microsoft did years ago will stall until a new administration is in office and reach a settlement for what is effectively a slap on the wrist.
It's very weird to see that same point brought up multiple times in this thread. It makes me worried that this all was cooked up my M$ all along (A company which doesn't have any antitrust litigation being brought against them despite putting ads in their latest operating system)
In 62 days we will have a completely different Department of Justice that is unlikely to follow the current administration’s approach to these issues, so I’m surprised that they’re even bothering.
A single attempt to separate google and chrome (with all its products) would make the eco-system pointless and swipe away google entirely from the global market.
why not to give Youtube instead tho? (even if the revenue/monetization of every single channel would be heavily impacted)
Android and chrome are necessary for google to live, so Youtube or something else would be better
The point is not to do what is good for Google. The point is to do what is good for users and the market. Separating Chrome from Google's despotic plans such as AMP and blocking ad-blockers so that the browser is independent from their attempts to further control the web would be a good thing.
If it's sold to Opera I'll stop using it. Old Opera was good, and the people who made it are now making Vivaldi. New Opera promotes cryptocurrencies. :-(
Ultimately, how does Chrome itself make any money? As far as I know it doesn't, so the value to Google is ultimately control. The positives include not having to tolerate the whims of Microsoft or Apple or Mozilla or Amazon or beg any of these to implement features or endure microsabotage. The negatives are the temptation to subject everyone else to Google's whims and sabotage competitors.
This is too complicated Chrome couldn't survive on its own without Google. Chrome is fundamentally a way for users to interface with their products. However it would be better to give regulation to Goolge about information handling.
Facepalm. So I guess this weak cookie cutter approach is what we get for the high water mark of opposition before the imminent corporate coup against constitutionally limited government.
Splitting the surveillance giants into different vertical markets makes no sense at all, and this particular division illustrates it well. We might have had a chance if government, two decades ago, had worked towards creating new specific types of regulations that reflected what competition in the digital realm actually requires - for example prohibiting this now widespread bundling of proprietary client software with hosted services, by mandating that hosted services must only be offered through published APIs. Instead we got some token opposition of "selling off" (checks notes) a web browser that's ultimately "open source".
State owned web browser might be a thing. If it's in the interest of many the state should pay for it.
I know what you're thinking, "but that's communism".
Well, you can't clench and fart, how they say.
This of course adds new problems, like backdooring by 3 letter agencies, corruption, abuse by politicians who exclude certain countries by agenda etc
The DOJ are apparently idiots that do not understand tech, let alone anti-trust or monopolies... for instance: I create a useful device that consumers love and use, I sell ads on the device to anyone who will pay, in fact I auction them to the highest bidder... DOJ: you are a monopoly and must sell the device... wtf?
eg Just spent a fair bit of time trying to figure out why links in outlook open in edge even if browser is set to chrome. Microsoft chose to just ignore what browser you select (in their OS). It’s just so blatantly monopolistic behaviour
How likely will Trump DOJ drop this? Consumers have choice, albeit just a handful of credible options. Nobody is forced to use Chrome (unlike MSFT pushing IE back in the day)
Trumpers in the GOP hate Big Tech too, but their concerns are exclusively about censorship of conservatives (for Google) and domestic manufacturing (for Apple). Market competition is not their framework. Gaetz is in that group, but he's also a moron who doesn't care about policy details.
If he's smarter than I think, then expect him to go after Google Search (the alleged source of anti-conservative bias). But if he's as dumb as I think, expect him to support the Chrome breakup, even though it would not advance his goals and wouldn't be coherent antitrust policy, because it would let him claim a "win".
This is so stupid. I am a fan of the books Privacy is Power and The Tech Coup, both books do a great job arguing for privacy and mitigating the harm of tech giants.
What should be done is having strong privacy laws, requirements for encrypting user data, 100% transparency on how user data is sold (require all buyer and seller information to be public), prohibiting sale of user data in most cases, super fine control privacy and security settings.
Google already does a good job on some of these things, and they and other tech giants need to be fenced in by strong privacy and user rights laws.
Corporations are good at still making profits when they have to follow laws that are inconvenient to them.
If members of the US Congress were prohibited by law from stock trading, that might help clean up the logjams preventing better laws.
> number of brilliant people being paid for doing nothing at google is what slows US down compared to china
Ever read the Transformer paper? Or AlphaGo? You know that two of this year's nobel laureates are from Google? A few years ago the Turing award was won by a Googler?
I'd like to remind you all.. You were the ones who abandoned Firefox and pushed Chrome and clones ruining Firefox and Mozilla as a whole by market dumbassery in the process.
NOW Microsoft is primed as they have defacto control of the windows chromium branch to go full force Internet Explorer with Edge .. i been seeing the features creep up toward that end. Re-interpretations of 25 year ideas that frankly would have been better then than now.
GOOD WORK TECHIES you just handed the web back to Microsoft. Guess that counts as part of .. some sort of great reset huh?
The EU uses better terms such as "dominant position" which deal with the fact that although a big vendor(s) can fully steer the market and has no meaningful competition while at the same time not "technically" being a monopoly / duopoly etc.
Monopolies are bad. Splitting up monopolies is good for the consumer.
That doesn't mean this makes any sense.
How are they going to separate Chrome from Chromium? If they do, what incentive does Google have to keep maintaining Chromium? Can Google make another new fork of Chromium and start yet another browser? Or are they now banned from making browsers? What company has the resources to maintain Chrome's massive codebase? What profit incentive is there in maintaining Chrome without Google's ad business? What about ChromeOS? How are they going to handle the extensions store and ecosystem? How is this going to impact web standards?
There's just a lot of significant unknowns surrounding this.
in general, I find a little bit distasteful that the only way to build a browser is as a loss leading project for the largest advertising company on the planet
No wonder nobody can compete, loss leaders tend to kill competition as they can be maintained without direct business revenue at all.
The same issue plagues domesticated cats, they don’t need to hunt for food since they have an abundance at home so instead without risk of starvation they are free to hunt all birds in the territory for fun.
There are no browsers left except the artificial ecosystem of Safari. Firefox is not a blip on the radar.
So, everything is chrome and chrome is the web standard. Having a single private company in charge of what is and what is not web standards is a little bit scary, as, like the cat, they don’t really need to see and serve the needs of the environment. They are fed at home.
> If they do, what incentive does Google have to keep maintaining Chromium?
I agree, this is a problem, but there should be a trivial solution: Users of the browser should pay a small amount of "money" for the product they use all day every day. This money should go into paying to maintain it.
Anything else is perpetuating the Trash Web as it's come to be.
The only reason a "web browser" is "free" (as in beer) is because Microsoft in the 90s was (belatedly) very worried about a world where Netscape held a lot of power, and realized making and giving away a slightly better browser would neutralize this upstart. Everything flowed from that one tactical decision by a couple of execs at MS.
I'd argue that a browser should be a part of the OS or be a paid product, but funding it with ad money from under the same corporate umbrella is a gross practice which promotes things like... Google nerfing adblocker plugins, and Google trying to kill cookies in favor of something only they control. (Although on that last one, by some miracle their hand was stayed and they backed down.)
Of course the DOJ can't ban the idea of a browser funded by ad money (and most are) but separating it from the other side of the business which should have zero say in how it's implemented, that's common sense to me.
If no one can maintain Chromium, well, that's a pity. On the other hand other projects can catch up then, and maybe the web as a whole can take a breather, without Google pushing more and more "standards". That's actually a good reason to do this. I really couldn't care less about Google's ad business. It is a burden on society.
I think it cannot get much worse than it currently is, with one company dictating the web's future and raking in the money from that. So while there are significant unknowns, probably the result will be something at least a little bit better. I am a little worried about Chrome being only fake sold, to some company that is indirectly controlled by Google again.
> What company has the resources to maintain Chrome's massive codebase? What profit incentive is there in maintaining Chrome without Google's ad business?
As an aside, maybe this is part of the issue. We have been privileged to enjoy some of the most advanced and complex software created for free since basically their inception. Nobody every paid for a web browser.
But then look around the software industry and every software of even remotely similar complexity need to be paid for, or are a kept free due to a convergence of interest of people who can make money out of it (most notably: Linux).
Now, a web browser could be seen exactly the same way Linux is: Many, many, (many!) company makes ton of profit from people have access to a web browser, therefor, they should be fine with paying people to develop it. And in some way, considering that chromium and firefox are open-source, this is what could happen. But it does not really happen. Google is bankrolling both FF and Chromium, and they have basically total control over Chromium development. Who else is even giving remotely even money for 1 FTE for FF or Chromium ?
Thing is, no company would do it for Chromium because it is seen as a Google product, so why pay them for something they will do in any case. Company could have financed Firefox, but now that it is the underdog (and that the Mozilla Foundation makes questionable decision), it doesn't seem like a very good investment.
This is in many way crazy to me that almost every tech company heavily really on people having free access to a web browser, yet nobody is really trying to finance one. But I do think it is a political issue, and that, maybe just maybe, separating Chromium from Google would actually give incentive to the rest of the industry to finance the development of a browser that is not directly own by neither of them. Again, some what just like Linux.
There's an implicit assumption embedded in this comment that the Chromium project is indispensable, whereas I'm unconvinced it's even a net positive at all.
Anyone who follows standards discourse would probably appreciate the prospect of this open source codebase having independent stewards much more than any fears over maintenance resources.
> There's just a lot of significant unknowns surrounding this.
That's what happen when you let anomalies like this become the norm. Antitrust actions should have been taken against Google 15 years ago, and at that point it wouldn't have undermined the whole web because back then didn't yet control the entire web (but the trend was clear and that's why action should have been taken).
I use Brave which is based off of Chromium just like Chrome, and the experience is great. I’d say I’ve had to go to chrome maybe 3 times in the last year, and it was always for some super complicated SPA.
Whatever decrease we see to our browsing experience will be worth the gains I expect to see from dealing a blow to a monopoly like Google.
> I'm very surprised by the number of people in this thread who don't seem to understand that monopolies are _very_ bad for consumers.
Bad for consumers, how? Financially? How does that translate to the current situation? The average "consumer" here is paying $0.00 for Google, Chrome, Gmail, Maps, Flights, Docs, Sheets, Chat, Meet, Books, Scholar, Shopping, YouTube, News, Groups, Voice... how are you going to argue that this "monopoly" (?) is bad for consumers? Do you imagine Microsoft or Apple would've created better search, email, news, etc., or that the mom & pop shop down the store would've done that?
I can think of so many other arguments you could use to suggest the current situation is bad, but monopolies are bad for consumers seems like a really tough argument to apply here.
Edit: You need to argue more than "the current situation is bad". Because that in itself does not imply "removing the 'monopoly' would necessarily lead to the better outcome in my imagination." Exhibit A is all the behemoths trying to compete against Google and still offering objectively worse products.
They are not paying $0. They are manipulated into believing they are paying $0.
If people were offered the google suite for 'free','you just have to let us siphon 4 liters of blood from you every year', would people still claim the price was 'zero dollars'.
Just because you extract the price from your users in a different denomination/method than ordinary dollars, doesn't mean it's 'free'.
Precisely because they are not asking for dollars, indicates they are actually extracting value from their users. They are not giving, they are taking, and it is also clear they are taking more than they are giving, given their revenue and profits.
I could see a similar argument being made by plantation owners in the past "we are lodging these guests from africa for FREE", they don't even have to PAY to live in the houses we offer them! There is only the small detail of the activities they will have to do in OUR fields, which will kill them off in 10-15 years, but that is another matter which should not be confused".
"Deals" of the kind google and facebook offer are not to the consumer's advantage. Insisting on not having a facebook account is akin to choosing not to use the paved asphalt roads the society makes available to you.
I could "choose" not to have a facebook account, but it would lock me out of effectively both my friends group and my family's daily communication.
This has the same energy as arguing that gathering your private data to give you more accurate ads does not hurt consumers, it's in fact helping them!
Google has been the one pushing for getting rid of the v2 manifest for browsers extensions, which just so happens to seriously nerf ad blockers. Because so many browsers are forks of Chromium v2 will disappear from a majority of browsers. Meanwhile if you try to use a non-Chrome browser like Firefox a lot of websites are buggy and outright don't work. Opening images in issues broke in GitHub for firefox a year ago and they still haven't fixed it.
You are being *very* naive if you think that Google having this sort of monopolistic power over the web does not hurt consumers.
Your implication that google services are free is untrue.
You are paying with your privacy and data. And the price is such that, if I ever made a better mail service than gmail that openly asked to sell and privately use all your data, nobody would subscribe.
You are paying by seeing ads.
You are paying by being coerced into a certain ecosystem.
You are paying by having one company chose what standards are the de facto web standards of tomorrow. And their main business is selling your data.
You are paying by losing access to your data if a company feels like it.
etc.
It's very similar to the situation in the nineties where Microsoft used their OS monopoly to push Internet Explorer "for free". You could make the same argument there "now consumers have free access to an internet browser, how is that bad?".
It was bad because it effectively ended innovation in the browser space for decades by pushing Netscape out of business (and discouraging others from entering that space).
Similarly, many consumers are unaware of alternative search engines, if Chrome pushes Google as the default. This kills innovation and puts more power in Google's hands as to what parts of the web get promoted.
Many a business owner can tell you that when Google changes their search ranking it can have an effect on the bottom line. This is also bad for consumers, as only bigger businesses which have the dough to pay for many Google ads get returned in a search.
> Do you imagine Microsoft or Apple would've created better search, email, news, etc., or that the mom & pop shop down the store would've done that?
Yes, enthusiastically yes. With the exception of maybe search, products like gmail, docs, and sheets are basic projects tossed out into the ecosystem for free to suck up all the oxygen for minimal dev cost. How is an upstart supposed to compete with a better mail/doc/spreadsheet app if the basic use case is covered for free by some loss leader funded from a different vertical?
Most of these classes of apps have been stagnant for decades.
On other hand splitting "free" product is somewhat questionable. When the competitor don't have exactly viable business model. Pushing for something that will clearly in not too distant future kill the split product is not helpful.
This exactly. An independent Chrome’s best path toward financial sustainability is closing down the source code and selling everyone’s browsing data to the highest bidder.
We all like to have a high minded ideal of some kind of wonderful fully independent for-the-good-of-society entity stewarding Chrome, but history has shown us that’s not what will happen.
> Pushing for something that will clearly in not too distant future kill the split product is not helpful.
They’re not considering this because of Chrome’s market share, but because of Google’s power in the search engine market. Indirectly killing Chrome may be acceptable if it makes the market for search engines more competitive.
Having said that, I don’t think it will matter much as long as Apple and, in particular (because they also have a search engine) Microsoft can ship browsers with preconfigured search engines with their OSes, but we will see.
I think there are 2 products. Google Chrome and Chromium. For one of them: Good riddance! For the other: Well, actually you cannot really kill that, because anyone can fork it or contribute patches, so if the world thinks some change is needed, the world can make it happen. There is no need to be worried about the project. We could also put it under a copyleft license that obligates anyone to contribute modifications and we will be fine, if some company decides to fork it.
Chrome is like a service not a product it is effectively Google installing a window so you can see it's fresh baked goods. It isn't something they should break up because it isn't something that inherently makes money and nor should it.
Most of Google is "free" products that feed into its surveillance advertising platform. That's the problem. How are you supposed to break that sort of thing up without destroying most of the products? They were never designed to work independently from the network.
Why? "Big companies bad" are one of those fundamental truthiness we are all supposed to believe for some reason but as a European I wish we had more US/Chinese-style megacorps who have dominant positions in some fields that allows them to innovate or provide free/cost-cutting products in other niches.
Maybe we should reconsider what we consider monopolies in the 21st century. I'm already using ChatGPT and Perplexity more than Google.
It follows from a few premises. The point of creating/allowing private companies to compete in a market and profit from doing so is to encourage them to innovate via competitive pressure. If you just wanted to produce well-understood goods or infrastructure then the most efficient way to do that is to pool resources and have the State do it, because they don't need to make a profit and, if not totally dysfunctional, are accountable to the people. If you let private companies consolidate power and influence then they largely escape competitive pressure and can streamline operations to maximize profits. That is, they benefit from the same efficiency the State does, but capture more of the value and remain unaccountable to the people, existing only to enrich their owners.
Free products are not the consequence of megacorps existence. Free products exist, because you are the product. Big companies also doesn't necessarily mean monopolies.
Splitting off Chrome doesn't make any sense as a stand alone business. Anyone who could buy Chrome would immediately cause other anti-trust issues. This solution for Google is probably bad for consumers.
What the DoJ should be pursuing is having Google divest YouTube. Now we're talking real change.
And if they sold off Youtube, we'd have 500 comments saying, "This is a bad idea. They can't make a profit. They should divest from Chrome."
Splitting Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, etc up all at once and into multiple separate pieces each would be great for consumers. But that's a huge undertaking, and the bigger the changes required, the less likely they are to happen. Taking it one step at a time, with the first step being Chrome and Google search (two products that strongly push users of one to use the other) being split up, is better than no progress at all.
At the very least, the biggest force in killing adblockers (Google gradually gutting them in Chrome) will have fewer means to kill them in browsers. That's a win for consumers.
It's a balance. If you would dissolve anything that slightly looks like a monopoly, then there would be lower incentive for innovation. Even though there are many things wrong with venture capital, they do occasionally produce useful companies. Also let's not forget that Bell Labs was sponsored by a monopoly too. So I'm not saying monopolies are great. I'm saying that it's important to find a balance.
It's a balance but IMO there should be no realistic concept of "winning the market". If it gets to that point then sure the company is probably making a lot of money but they also have the power to squeeze as much as they can. The irony of posting this on a forum originating from VC culture does not escape me.
Seeing for years the views expressed here about Meta & TikTok, I think at least some of this must come down to a gap in understanding of web technologies.
Meta & TikTok decidedly don't have monopolies, yet still come under fierce scrutiny for their pervasive handling of consumer behaviour & data. What seems to be less evident to people is that Google's monopolies give them far greater reach in these areas than either of the other two. The majority of that reach is entirely invisible to most: I think if this negative impact was more visible it might drive home the downside of these particular monopolies.
Not sure if this is an innocent comment or not but I'll answer earnestly.
They're not, technically. They're hegemons, which doesn't make them much better. In fact, I'd argue the situation is worse.
Chrome predominantly owns the web at this point. There are few contenders, and making a new browser is a lot of work (see the Verso browser). Google has the arguably unearned luxury of dictating what APIs and protocols the nebulous "web" should use, can throw a bunch of money at adding them quickly, and leave competitors struggling to keep up, effectively buying chrome's guaranteed superiority.
"But there are standards committees!" Yes, but it really doesn't matter when Chrome either uses its own APIs privately on its sites[0] or just adds new APIs without any committee consideration for people to use and fall in love with and demand that other vendors add them (or something similar, such as proposing a great idea at the committee, it's accepted, and the other vendors lagging for months or even years - see WebGPU as an example).
One might think "it's just a browser". Yes, but browsers are -for better or for worse - the global defacto for sending and receiving almost all of our sensitive data. Even "desktop apps" like Whatsapp, Signal, and Bitwarden all either use or have used Chromium to display their contents (via Electron).
Much of the community has asserted Google owns the web at this point, and I tend to agree. It's very, very hard for smaller vendors to have much of a day these days without Google getting theirs, too.
Google (the search engine) has a market share of over 85% worldwide. [0]
Google therefore controls what can be found on the Internet for 85% of search engine users. Recent updates, or Core Updates, have demonstrated how easy it is for Google to put businesses out of business by removing their visibility. [1]
It seems to me that this is a problem.
Ditto for Chrome, which has +60% market share [2]. A failed or deliberate update could make a website inaccessible to 60% of the population.
Monopoly is probably not the right word. "Trust" (as in "anti-trust") is maybe better, but I'm not sure the last gilded age really had a perfect analogy to what's been happening in the tech services sector.
The problem is these sprawling companies who make so many interrelated services and can suppress competition in one area (browsers, e-mail, video-over-the-internet) due to extreme profits in another area (ads).
* Google effectively holds a monopoly of the browser market (Chrome). Apple (Safari) only exists because of vendor lock-in, and Mozilla (Firefox) is a vassal state; all "other" browsers are Chrome.
* Google shares a duopoly of the mobile OS market with Apple (Android vs. iOS).
* Google holds a monopoly of the video streaming market (Youtube).
* Google holds a monopoly of the malvertising market (Adsense, Doubleclick, et al.).
* Google effectively holds a monopoly of the web search market (Google Search).
* Google holds the vast majority of the email market (Gmail).
* Google is the absolutely dominant player in the consumer cloud market (Google Drive).
* Google shares a duopoly with Apple in the cloud photo market (Google Photos vs. iCloud Photos).
* Google shares a duopoly with Microsoft in the consumer office software market (Google Docs vs. Office 365).
* Google shares a duopoly with Apple in the digital wallet market (Google Pay/Wallet vs. Apple Pay).
I can go on, but with this being said let me ask you: Why the hell should Google not be split and cut apart nine ways to Sunday?
I'm not claiming they are. But given their current market share and its trajectory, they're marching towards one. Furthermore, it's a clear mechanism for further monopolizing the search engine market (I'm more comfortable calling google a monopoly on this front). I'm a staunch capitalist and believe in the innovative power of competition, and monopolies ground that whole machine to a halt.
I'm not surprised at all, because I've used AirPods and AirDrop on an iPhone and MacBook.
You have to have a much deeper understanding of tech to understand why they're bad, yet the examples of why they're good are obvious when a consumer stays within one ecosystem.
No, most user don't choose. Android doesn't provide a menaingful way to choose to the users, it pushes you to choose Google. That's a big difference. It would be a choice if, when you start android for the first time, it asks you which browser you want to use, in a list where all browsers are shown equal; not "hey you'll use chrome and you can change later any time you want". Ideally, it would provide an explnanation of each browser. That would be a better way to propose a choice.
Would it make users smarter about their choice ? Probably not. But at least, they could smell there is an actual choice.
Monopolies tends to maintain users in ignorance. This way, although they can look elsewhere, they won't feel the urge to do so.
Users must be helped to make their own choice, not guided to make the monopoly's choice. And that must be done before the choice is made.
As long as there will be monoplies, this tension will exist and people like me will continue to explain that the State is the best way to push the balance in favor of those who don't get the importance of the choice.
The problem is not that there is a dominant player. The problem is the dominant player uses ignorance and subtle strategies to make sure users saty with it.
> There is no monopoly. There are a lot of other browsers. A lot of people use them.
There is market dominance: Chrome has 65%, Safari has 18% but that’s because of iOS, and the few others have the rest. It’s false to say there are "a lot" of other browsers when nobody can enter the space anymore.
> They chose to do it. If you ask them, they think it's good.
Most people don’t choose their browser, they just take whatever comes preinstalled. Even then, Google pushes you to use their browser every time you use their services: I know a lot of non-tech people who use Chrome on iOS not because they chose to, but because they got a pop-in on Google that told them to do so.
> It is bad for you.
The current situation is indeed bad for the consumer, even if it’s not a monopoly per se.
There's a very vocal subset of people here that believe monopolistic entities arise due to how much better they are than their competition, and thus deserve to be monopolies.
The very same users believe that such companies aren't "bad" yet, but in some kind of intermediate stage between successful startup and evil MEGAcorp.
I don't know. I think it's the mix of nostalgia, and being too invested in their ecosystem/products. Fanboying, basically.
When Microsoft did it 25 years ago, it was bad. When Google does it now, it's not bad.
If your goal is to reduce the influence Google has on the browser market is this really the best move? From a practical standpoint I find it hard to believe.
While I agree that monopolies era bad for consumers and that the position Chrome currently have is pretty much a monopoly I don't think this particular move would be good for consumers in the short and mid time-frame. Maybe in the long run this is the correct decision, but this will cause quite a lot of pain for quite a lot of time.
I think one of the ways this could backfire against the users is that removing Chrome from Google will create a 'power vacuum' in the web standards. Currently Chrome is this de facto standard, for better of for worse. Removing that can create a situation where we have a couple of competing standards.
In my opinion the problem with this kind of competition is that making browsers will become significantly harder, because now instead of just copying Chrome you will have to implement several standards. And this is why I expect the web experience to become significantly worse in the short term.
And you know what will happen when the web experience degrades? Every company will push their own app. And even more experiences/services will be locked behind an android/ios app with the excuse "we want to deliver a great experience to our users". And this is WAY worse for users than the monopoly Google has in the browser.
Maybe a better solution would be for the US government to create/adopt a web standard and create a rule that says "if you want to sell to the US government you need to be fully compliant with standard XYZ". This way you create a goal that everyone can work towards.
As far as I know this is how the government handle this situation in the medical sector, where they have HL7 to create the relevant standards. And I'm fully aware that this brings a lot of problems to the table. The first one is that definition of standards for the web will become a political topic, and this is never a good sign. However, I think this is really the only option if we want the web to be a place with fair competition.
Thank goodness the era of ridiculous anti-trust is coming to an end.
Every "normie" knows about edge, it comes with your new Windows. no one uses it, people know quality when they see it and everyone prefers chrome. If there was a better browser we'd use it.
The default should definitely be: Companies should be incentivized to create great products.
If the incentives include, get 90% market share, that's great! No one would put it the amount of work Google has if the incentives were small
That really does not come as a surprise and that was totally expected. [0] As soon as Chrome started to become more of a platform (for their extension API) with many other companies using it in their own browsers, it tells you why they had >90% of the search market for years.
This is what the folks at Google have all feared and why they started to run away from the company, spurring up 'Google' competitors (including Microsoft & OpenAI) all bringing it down.
Google will appeal and fight back and either way will survive. But we have given Sundar enough time to turn it around and it's time for him to leave and a wartime CEO to step up.
It's possible as Sataya Nadella did this for Microsoft. Google needs to do the same.
https://archive.ph/PPGGV
People here seem to be underestimating the advantages that Google gets just because of Chrome:
- When you sign in to Google, you sign in browser-wide. Google now gets all of your browsing data, perfect for advertising. (If you ever doubt it, go check out Google Takeout. You'll be shocked at the amount of data you see there.)
- They have special APIs and features that they get to use, and nobody else. Only because they own Chrome. [1]
- They get to move forward with enabling and pushing features that allow for more advertising: see Manifest v3, FLoC.
- Google specifically serves a worse version of Search on Firefox for Mobile. You have to get an extension to get the full experience.
This isn't an isolated attempt. You can see more of the same thing with Android.
- AOSP (the open source counterpart of Android) is now unusable. It doesn't ship with most essential apps, including a Phone app. In previous versions of Android, all of these were a part of AOSP.
- Most third party launchers/stores struggle to implement features because they are only available for Google themselves.
- The signing in with Google thing from above continues here too: you sign in to Google system-wide.
[1]: https://x.com/lcasdev/status/1810696257137959018
> This isn't an isolated attempt. You can see more of the same thing with Android.
Here are more:
- (jumping off of your second point...) Play Services does more than just handle stuff you sign into as a user -- it's also a dependency for everything from push notifications to screen casting. This actively poses issues building competing platforms, in that in order to give developers a path to shipping in your ecosystem you have to provide functioning alternatives to all of those ancillary features. The compatibility issue also impacts user adoption, and then the user adoption and the barren marketplace impact each other... Even the combined resources of Amazon and Microsoft weren't enough to overcome this. (Facebook did, but I'm also not sure forking the OS into a separate VR platform is necessarily the same thing.)
- It also comes with integrity checking, so even if you do find a good third party image, and sideload Google packages, numerous things won't work unless you take part in a dumb arms race that ironically requires you to also root your device. By which I mean a feature that was originally built for banking applications is now used everywhere from streaming services (as an additional layer of DRM) to gacha games (for anti-cheat). This is actually the entire reason I dropped Pokemon Go, personally.
Obligatory link to the excellent Ars piece on this topic: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/07/googles-iron-grip-on...
> Even the combined resources of Amazon and Microsoft weren't enough to overcome this.
Pedantically, their resources were never combined. They independently tried to compete, and they independently failed.
For what it's worth though, Amazon seems to be doing tidy business with entrypoint tablets and FireOS, which is a fork of Android, but still one they own.
Microsoft's exit of mobile was a short-sighted decision IMO. They have the entire office suite. They have windows and Windows has essentially become an app store model too.
I can easily imagine a future where Microsoft leaned in hard on Microsoft Mobile-exclusives for Word/Outlook/Excel/Teams/etc., bundled it with the rest of Office/Windows subscriptions, and had every office worker in the world carrying a windows phone for their work device.
I know, I know - everyone wanted only an iPhone. But it feels to me like Microsoft didn't try very hard.
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If we could just have a competing push notifications service, I would be over the moon.
I would love to see ads split off from search.
You can root your Android device and replace Google Play Services with microG (https://microg.org).
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The problem is this:
- the browser is undeniably critical as everyone's window through which they view the online world;
- the user gains a huge amount of value by a browser being integrated into the OS, webviews in other applications, etc
- browsers aren't really a self funding product
- having a single for-profit US advertising company control everyone's view of the online world, however slightly (e.g. by obstructing adblockers), is Not Good
Splitting it off solves the latter problem but immediately raises the question of how to pay for it. A very artificial arrangement where Google pay "arms length browserco" to maintain Chrome?
You raise some very important points.
Specifically, this one:
I feel the same. I also feel the same about a modern C library and C compiler (and C++, if you like). They are essential to build any modern system and applications. Yet, those are also (mostly) no longer self-funding products.
What do you think will happen if Google is forced to divest Chrome?
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Any potential buyer will have to be looking to use Chrome to accomplish the same kinds of synergies that Google is using it for, to get ahead in some adjacent market. Depending on the buyer that could be good for competition, at least in the short term, but it's not clear that it will be better for us as users.
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How does splitting off Chrome as a separate company solve anything? They would still rely on Google for funding (like Mozilla) and being close friends they would do whatever Alphabet tells them to do.
A better solution is to implement a bill like DMA in the EU to enforce competition among web browser vendors and fight monopolies.
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> A very artificial arrangement where Google pay "arms length browserco" to maintain [a browser]?
Sounds almost like Firefox.
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The issue is who controls Chromium. I would create a non profit and staff it with a handful of maintainers. Their primary job would be to ensure safety and squash exploits. Their other job is to curate and approve pull requests from volunteers for enhancements. They should make it open source with the caveat if it is used for commercial purposes, there will be a licensing fee to pay for security enhancements, bug bounties, and the like.
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They could sell a lot of the data that Google now gets for free and uses for its ranking algorithms, like Clickstream sells data to SEO tools like AHrefs and SemRush.
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Sort of sounds like you are one step short of suggesting a browser is critical infrastructure.
I’m consistently fascinated to look at Chrome/Google and think of all the things we lost when we broke IE/Microsoft.
To what extent and I holding a stupid belief, and why? I think I might like to be talked out of this, if reasonable. Want to try?
> browsers aren't really a self funding product
They are, see how both Safari and Firefox, the 2nd and 3rd most popular browsers, have brought in tens of billions of revenue per year. Safari is immensely profitable, Firefox too would be if Mozilla wouldn't be run in an absurdly poor manner.
> the user gains a huge amount of value by a browser being integrated into the OS, webviews in other applications, etc
What is the huge value gain that e.g. Safari being integrated into MacOS is bringing me? Why couldn't webviews be backed by a browser of my choice?
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> browsers aren't really a self funding product
Yeah... Because massive companies use them anti-competitively as a moat against other companies, and as a loss leader to enable massive data collection and vendor lock in.
"browsers aren't really a self funding product" is a symptom of dysfunction, not the inevitable conclusion of a fair market.
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Firefox has made a mountain of money off of their tiny market share. Chrome as a company would instantly rake in billions.
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Browsers should be developed by an intercountry nonprofit. Funded by all the countries' governments.
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>browsers aren't really a self funding product
You can use Firefox 3, programs don't rot.
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Google realized if they don't control the search distribution they gonna lose out sooner or later; which is kinda contradictory for them if they claim Google is the best search out there and that they are constantly improving it and that's why(they say), people choose it over other alternatives. But tbh distribution of your product/s is crucial.
Just look at Microsoft and their internet strategy, they chose the other route; push their internet browser(IE) down their massive distribution pipe called Windows and then introducing their search engine to this massive userbase. Fortunately this didn't work out for them but unfortunately that worked out for Google. And now Google essentially controls the Web in the more than half of the world.
> Fortunately this didn't work out for them but unfortunately that worked out for Google.
No, Google was better, then they used Chrome as an extremely powerful moat to protect their situation. Google at first was like magic compared to the Altavista of the time.
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TBH, when Google did that, Apple was already threatening making it impossible for IOS users to use Google's services.
I don't disagree, but I'm also not sure what the alternative is.
Who's going to buy Chrome that also doesn't suffer from the same anti-trust problems? Who would want to buy Chrome? Who would want to fund Chrome?
What browser would Android ship? In one view I kind of like the idea that Google would have to shop around and 'buy' a browser for its OS (competition good!), but also that seems ridiculous and easy to fall right back into the same trap.
> Who's going to buy Chrome that also doesn't suffer from the same anti-trust problems? Who would want to buy Chrome? Who would want to fund Chrome?
Hmm. It's a good question, and I don't know the answer. I think there's a compelling argument that the problem is the scale of the harm. That is, even if the new owner has the same problems, the new owner won't also be the largest web company. So the problem still exists, yes, but becomes smaller. In particular having the #1 web browser strongly tied to the #1 web company has a lot of problematic dynamics that the #1 web browser being owned by the #25 web company doesn't. Maybe that company would be more open to forming beneficial relationships with the #2 and #3 web companies, for example.
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> Who would want to buy Chrome? Who would want to fund Chrome?
This is interesting question especially when companies are usually just use Chromium instead of creating new browser (not even making hard fork of Chromium).
Most Android devices ship Samsung Internet.
Chrome is only the default on Pixel devices...
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Open source browsers already exist though
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How about this: sell the browser to the entreprise [1] and use the profit to offer the browser to the public for free, which in turns helps you secure a user base.
[1] https://www.island.io/
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There doesn't have to be a buyer. They can spin it off as an independent company. Surely it can be a profitable enterprise on its own.
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> If you ever doubt it, go check out Google Takeout. You'll be shocked at the amount of data you see there.
I sign in browser-wide and I do takeouts regularly. I don't see my browsing data.
> It doesn't ship with most essential apps, including a Phone app. In previous versions of Android, all of these were a part of AOSP.
And back when they were part of AOSP I never saw these example apps in the wild. Every vendor ships their own phone app. Every single one.
There's some "hey we compile a extremely old and vulnerable version of AOSP"-style Android distributions, mainly advertised for builtin su/Magisk or "degoogle", which did use these example apps, though.
I agree with other critics, they are toxic.
You've disabled the option to see it. Your data is still being collected.
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> - When you sign in to Google, you sign in browser-wide. Google now gets all of your browsing data, perfect for advertising. (If you ever doubt it, go check out Google Takeout. You'll be shocked at the amount of data you see there.)
I have yet to see evidence that Google uses browser sync data for advertising.
Go do something in chrome (look for cruises maybe), then delete the activity from myactivity.google.com, then wipe and reinstall chrome. You will see that you aren’t advertised based on that activity yet it’s still in your chrome history.
>I have yet to see evidence that Google uses browser sync data for advertising.
Then you probably don't get out much:
https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/31/24167119/google-search-al...
Another major point highlighted by Fishkin and King relates to how Google may use Chrome data in its search rankings. Google Search representatives have said that they don’t use anything from Chrome for ranking, but the leaked documents suggest that may not be true. One section, for example, lists “chrome_trans_clicks” as informing which links from a domain appear below the main webpage in search results. Fishkin interprets it as meaning Google “uses the number of clicks on pages in Chrome browsers and uses that to determine the most popular/important URLs on a site, which go into the calculation of which to include in the sitelinks feature.”
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> - AOSP (the open source counterpart of Android) is now unusable. It doesn't ship with most essential apps, including a Phone app. In previous versions of Android, all of these were a part of AOSP.
This particular example is a bit misleading as those apps are still available; they're just unbundled from the system image: https://source.android.com/docs/automotive/unbundled_apps/re...
Your comment unfortunately implies that Google still maintains them, which is farthest from the truth (as this document shows, it is only maintained for automotive use - it is not usable on a regular phone).
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I know this is anecdotal and that I should look further into this but I recently had to switch to chromium because google suite products were slightly unusable in firefox: youtube used way more CPU than it should’ve (maybe this is due to codecs but I was not able to solve it), google sheets crashed constantly, google meet slowed my laptop to a halt and I couldn’t even share my screen, and for some reason google calendar would suddenly start to hog CPU and RAM randomly. Since I switched to chromium everything is smoother and I just can’t believe chromium per se is just this better than Firefox.
I'll ask what extensions you use on your Firefox, because I regularly use Google Meet on an 2014 MacBook Pro with latest Firefox, and it doesn't even make the fans spin, plus all the goodies like environmental noise cancellation is there. Meet team also recently ported some of the Chrome only features back to Firefox, due to some fear, I guess...
The YouTube videos in higher bitrates (like 4K) is generally due to Firefox's ability to hardware accelerate things, and there's a bit of difference there, yes. But on Linux and macOS (moreso in sequoia), I see no extreme CPU use. Just testing it on Firefox 132.02 on Debian Testing with Radeon 550 with open drivers, While I see a spike in CPU load, there's definitely some GPU load is also being produced, pointing to at least some GPU acceleration.
On the other hand, Intel N100 with on board graphics can visibly struggle at 4K as far as I can tell. That one runs Firefox ESR though, I need to retest.
I don't use WASM based Google Workspace tools (docs, sheets, etc.) heavily, but they don't crash when we use it on other pepople's documents that we collaborate on.
That's strange; I use all of those Google products (except Meet, I can't speak to that one) on a daily basis on Firefox (on Linux) and they all work just fine. YouTube in particular works very well, perhaps because I have the "Enhancer for YouTube" extension installed, plus uBlock Origin.
You can use chrome only for those google things where Firefox is crippled on purpose, and use Firefox for everything else.
Teams was acting up on Firefox the other day, too. It wouldn't have Q&A and whatever button is to the left of it enabled. "Not supported in your browser", or something.
I keep Chromium only for Google Meet, Datadog and Google Cloud Console. Opening these apps in Firefox makes fans on my laptop spin like crazy.
> Google specifically serves a worse version of Search on Firefox for Mobile.
I don't think Google owning Chrome is really a factor here, but just a raw traffic question where FF Mobile has basically zero uptake. The experience they serve on FF Mobile is just the "we arent subscribed to validating that all of our shiniest JS works with this version of this browser".
The extension spoofs the user agent and arbitrary obscure features that only trigger on specific queries may be broken.
Google does do the effort of validating on other browsers where the traffic threshold is higher, including Firefox on Desktop. If they didn't own Chrome nor Firefox they still wouldn't really have incentive to spend more time supporting the tiny fraction of users.
A browser with a huge userbase would be extremely lucrative for an unscrupulous owner. A new owner could sell full and identifiable clickstream data for all browser activity. A new owner could siphon information from the non-public web for AI training, corporate espionage, or any other purpose.
> Google specifically serves a worse version of Search on Firefox for Mobile. You have to get an extension to get the full experience.
Huh, I wonder if this is why I have perceived a drop in quality from Google Search. What a stupid move from them -- not only have I stopped using Google Search and now pay Kagi (yes I know money still flows from Kagi to Google but even still) and have been evangelizing Kagi as well as taking every opportunity to shit on Google Search.
Great job G, you made the product worse and made me a customer of someone else
> Google specifically serves a worse version of Search on Firefox for Mobile.
Can't say I've noticed that, but YouTube definitively feels like it's getting an especially slow-loading version on Firefox.
Everything here you accuse Google of doing, Apple is running circles on. Ultimately, if this case goes through Google are right about one thing. The UX on Chrome is going to take a steep nose dive.
Apple does not run the largest advertising network on the planet. As simple as that.
Even for the matter of the browser, Apple does not have the same push as Google does. Yes, Safari is the default browser on a phone. But outside of the mobile world, Safari is a rounding error.
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> The UX on Chrome is going to take a steep nose dive.
In order to dive any further, it would have to begin excavation.
Apple does not have a monopoly.
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In what way?
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The APIs thing: it's not just Chrome, but Chromium too. I first noticed this when trying to replicate some of the screen sharing UI (buttons to share different things) from Google Meet, only to find that no non-Google domains have access to those APIs in the Chromium source code. Made a huge deal about it but nobody seemed to care.
You could just edit the domain restriction out of the Chromium source, no?
How far can one go from 'don't be evil', right.
And that's one aspect of one product. Company-wide list would be probably impressive in the worst way possible
Don't be evil was only the wifi password
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>AOSP is now unusable. It doesn't ship with most essential apps, including a Phone app.
That's OK: these days, the phone (voice calling) app is only useful for receiving calls from scammers and telemarketers. I wouldn't miss it.
Yes, Google gains advantages through the Chrome browser so do we as consumers. The competition for Chrome should come from a better Browser not by being forced to sell it. DOJ is wasting time and taxes on this pointless verdict. Even more economic wastes are coming when the selling happens.
Thinking things just "should" happen is how we get to this issue in the first place.
To add: Google uses Chrome's established user base to bundle other products in the same way Microsoft uses Office subscriptions to push Teams.
The most recent example being Gemini now deeply integrated into Chrome. Had Gemini been a stand-alone product, it would have to fight for every user. Now billions of users have it at their fingertips.
I sincerely doubt that forcing Google to spin off Chrome is the only or best solution for this.
What other solution do you have in mind? Legislation about architecture decisions taken in software products seems preferable?
In principle there is nothing wrong for example with a shared account for multiple products from the same company, many even prefer it. The problem only appears when this gets concentrated into too much power and can be leveraged in ways that distort the market and hurt consumers.
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I'm happy to give all this to a cohesive experience google provides. There are competitors in this market too, but google was the first and best not sure why they deserve this blatant overstep in abuse of power
> Google specifically serves a worse version of Search on Firefox for Mobile. You have to get an extension to get the full experience.
What's the difference, and where can I find this extension?
On Firefox, the design of the search results page looks about a decade older. Some people would argue that's a good thing :)
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Google Search Fixer. It's a recommended extension for Firefox on Mobile.
Uploads to google drive from Firefox are throttled to 10% of the bandwidth I get using Chrome
AOSP is so useless that I refuse to even call it an "operating system."
You missed one:
- They get to move forward with enabling and pushing features that allow for more hardware and software lockin to their platform: see unexportable passkeys
Manifest V3 is just another nail in the coffin.
Yolo
I'm all for competition and increasing consumer choices, but the government is really not making a case that this is supposed to help consumers.
The only reason I still use Chrome is because I already use other Google products and they integrate well together. There are many other better options out there otherwise, and they are all free. Breaking out Chrome from Google will not in any way benefit me as a consumer.
> The agency and the states have settled on recommending that Google be required to license the results and data from its popular search engine
> They are also prepared to seek a requirement that Google share more information with advertisers and give them more control over where their ads appear.
It sounds like the end goal of this is to enrich other companies, not customers. And if the DOJ has their way, they want to crack open Google's vault of customer data and propagate it across the internet.
Not only does this sound extremely bad for consumers, the DOJ is trying to completely change Google's business model and dictate how they are supposed to make money. Regardless of how you feel about Google, this seems like a far overreach from the DOJ on finding and fixing market manipulation.
> only reason I still use Chrome is because I already use other Google products and they integrate well together
This is the point. Google's products integrate with Chrome better than non-Google products. Including its ad platform.
I'm failing to see why "this product we built from the ground up integrates better with our other tools" is an anti trust problem
Isn't that what we want companies to do?
I have two frustrations with this kind of decision:
1. It's not clear to me that the judge has any interest in creating value. 2. It does feel a bit like being punished for success.
It's one thing when it's ill-gotten success, eg via coercive contracts (like Android has with play services), and we should aggressively deal with that sort of contract! However, what often seems to happen in these types of cases is the judge identifies a behavior they dislike and bans it without really considering more targeting / surgical treatments
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1) does it though? It seems like the Google-specific parts of it are pretty ancillary to the whole experience
2) how is it different to Apples integration with Safari?
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But where is the consumer benefit?
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Out of all the parts of Google that take advantage of integration to pump up ad revenues, I'd say Chrome is the least of them?
If we're serious about this, separate search and ads. Force ads-Google to pay search-Google for data on the open market, and let other people pay for the same data, make it transparent, and let consumers see exactly what's happening.
While we're at it, separate Google's display ad network from its RTB facilities, basically carving DoubleClick back out again.
Then watch the stock tumble.
> The only reason I still use Chrome is because I already use other Google products and they integrate well together.
And that is exactly why Chrome should be broken up/out. It is unfair competition. And you say there are many other well working options out there but that is simply not true. Googles web applications work best on Chrome and often break on non Chrome browsers. Mostly because of changes to those web applications and not because of random browser bugs. This is how you win people over and complete your browser world domination.
"And that is exactly why Chrome should be broken up/out."
Exactly, we saw this with MS's IE 2—3 decades ago. That governments didn't learn from this and let it repeat with Chrome is so damn annoying.
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Browsing the internet hasn't really changed during the last 15 years or so. I hope that this will enable development of totally new browsers or even completely different ways to use the internet.
> DOJ is trying to completely change Google's business model and dictate how they are supposed to make money
This is good reasoning. It is overreach for a regulatory body to do something that could impact the business model of a monopoly. Monopolies are bad, unless being a monopoly is part of that monopoly’s business model and an important part of how the monopoly makes money, in which case nothing should be done.
I do mostly agree with grandparent, but not with your take.
What is the problem with government regulating, say, the ingredients that can be used in foods, forbidding addictive drugs from being added to them? Or selling drugs that are completely fake or outright dangerous?
This obsession with small governments (and basically, libertarianism) doesn't really stand on proper grounds.
Why can't the government work for you? Maybe it's an inherent bias given that I'm from Europe, but I think the stereotypical utopia about "big government" is much more true for huge corporations (which have absolutely no safety mechanisms built in to prevent a paper clip factory going overboard in the name of profit) compared to the slow-moving, democratic, slightly corrupt governments. Only one of these have accountability in a humane form, while the only metric for corporate is a single number.
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> unless being a monopoly is part of that monopoly’s business model and an important part of how the monopoly makes money, in which case nothing should be done.
Can you expand on this?
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For years people have complained "ugh Google is selling your data, how awful" and here is the government seeking to mandate that Google sell your data! There's no way that this is the right remedy.
How so?
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It would be great for consumers. Google would be forced to make their products work just as well with other browsers as it does with their own.
I only use Chrome to interact with Google properties. I'd love to use Firefox for everything.
I see a lot of people saying Google services don't work well on other browsers. Can someone give an example? I've been using Firefox desktop and mobile for a year and haven't had any issues with Google stuff. At least YouTube, drive, docs, sheets, etc. seem to work just fine
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> There are many other better options out there otherwise, and they are all free.
For how long, though?
The trajectory for Firefox doesn’t look good at all (and it’s completely dependent on Google too).
Apple are doing their share of anticompetitive shenanigans with Safari on iOS, although the other way around.
Everything else is based on Chromium and therefore not contributing to any heterogeneity of implementations.
> The trajectory for Firefox doesn’t look good at all (and it’s completely dependent on Google too).
Can you elaborate on this? I am using Firefox since it was released, and it is getting better, not worse.
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Not everything else is based on Chromium - see: Epiphany, Servo, Ladybird.
Can anyone think of a hero to save us?
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> It sounds like the end goal of this is to enrich other companies, not customers.
In this case, the "customers" are other companies.
Antitrust markets can be defined broadly or narrowly. In this case, the market was "general web search advertising" (among others).
Who are the consumers in this market? People and companies that want their ads placed where (and to who) it matters.
So fuck all of the billions of users of Chrome I guess, and let the other advertising companies make some money.
I'm sure everyone will be thanking the DOJ for their poorer Web experience, knowing that their sacrifice is allowing other ad companies to earn their fair share.
Exactly. Everybody thinks they're the consumer, but often times consumers are other companies.
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> The only reason I still use Chrome is because I already use other Google products and they integrate well together.
Isn't that kind of the complaint though? Google, by controlling the platform and therefore sort of indirectly controlling the entire web, can make it artificially easier to push you to their products, and push you away from others.
If I wanted, for example, to make a competitor to Google Docs, I'm not just competing with Google Docs, I'm also competing with the integration of Google Docs with Chrome, meaning that Google Docs can be artificially better than my product. While I don't know if Google has actually done this, it would be pretty easy for them to actively gimp any Google Doc competitor in Chrome so that you're more likely to use their service instead.
This would be like if Tesla made the roads and the roads could recharge batteries but only to Tesla vehicles and you as a Tesla owner saying this is not anti-competitive.
Even as a non Tesla owner I would say that’s not anti competitive if every other OEM is also able to make their own roads, which is exactly the case with Chrome.
There’s multiple browsers, and people might choose Chrome because it has a better ecosystem around it. That means it’s a better product for those people.
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But Chrome doesn't work that way at all? Google gives Chromium away for free - which has enabled innovation across the software industry beyond the browser space if I must say so.
In this scenario do I get a free car and get to drive on the fancy roads for free? Sign me up.
By that same logic, Safari is the #1 browser on mobile in the US and should also be spun off.
> It sounds like the end goal of this is to enrich other companies, not customers.
Then end goal is fostering competitions in a market where there is basically none. So yes, it obviously benefits would be competitors. That's the point.
> The only reason I still use Chrome is because I already use other Google products and they integrate well together. There are many other better options out there otherwise, and they are all free. Breaking out Chrome from Google will not in any way benefit me as a consumer.
It will benefit you in many ways, including: Better compatibility of Google with multiple browsers, and a browser which doesn't actively encourage you to use Google products and services.
Indirectly, a reduction in Google's centralized power will make life easier for many people and organizations which offer you services and products (yes, I realize that's a bit vague and needs some elaboration).
> It will benefit you in many ways, including: Better compatibility of Google with multiple browsers
No, the way you do that is to pass a law that says Google can't intentionally make their websites work worse in other browsers. That's not what the dumb DOJ is doing.
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This is the government answer to doing something about privacy. It's what the people said they wanted when they voted. Right?
Realistically nothing is going to happen. The incoming admin has made clear their distaste for Lina Khan. In other words, this is just an attempt at a swan song by the Biden White House.
This Trump admin lawsuit began this lawsuit, and Trump previously expressed distaste for Google. Things may change but they may not
I'm totally fine with this, but I wish they would do the same thing with Apple. Google's platform, at the very least is open and I can run my own apps.
One could ask, "How is Apple a Monopoly, and do they abuse that position?". In my view it is, since you can't have a business or build connected hardware without an iOS app. And as for abusing that position for gaining market share, there are just too many examples starting with say, watches.
Apple doesn't have a similar position in any space though, or do they? In terms of market share they're not even the biggest player in the smartphone market, they sit below 20 % (the most profitable 20 % though).
Google, in comparison, absolutely dominates the search and ad markets and sucks all oxygen out of them to keep any competition from springing up by controlling distribution and limiting choice. They e.g. paid vast amounts of money to Apple to make sure users don't get a free choice of search engine.
If you wanted to compare the Apple Watch with this it would mean that Apple would make exclusive deals with all stores (online and IRL) selling watches so that consumers would only see Apple watches everywhere they go and would need to look in the basement or on an obscure subpage to find any watches from a different manufacturer. Clearly that's not the case.
That said I'm not a fan of Apples walled garden either, I think this should be addressed (and in the EU it is being addressed). It's ridiculous to have this super powerful hardware and I can only run sanctioned apps on them instead of being able to install any kind of software I like.
Apple has 57% of the US phone market: https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/us-smartphone-market-share
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> Apple doesn't have a similar position in any space though, or do they?
Apple has exclusive control over a market (AppStore), which has almost 2 million different products (Apps), 820,000 suppliers (app publishers) and over 1.3 billion customers (active iPhone users) which conducts more trade ($1.1 trillion) than the entire GDP of Luxemburg.
If that's not a monopoly i don't know what is.
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This is why regulators prefer talking about dominant position rather than just market share.
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> It's ridiculous to have this super powerful hardware and I can only run sanctioned apps on them instead of being able to install any kind of software I like.
Buy different hardware then. You know these things when you buy the device. It isn't a secret. If the device doesn't meet your needs, there are alternatives that do. The fact that there are adequately substitutable products available other than iPhone destroys any concept of "monopoly." Saying Apple has a monopoly on iOS is ridiculous -- they _are_ iOS.
> they're not even the biggest player in the smartphone market
I think worldwide numbers are skewing your data there, for antitrust only the US numbers matter and those are 59% for Apple on mobile.
There’s a similar antitrust lawsuit against Apple: https://www.npr.org/2024/09/20/nx-s1-5119948/a-look-at-the-d...
These things take a long time, though. I think the Apple one is just not as far along.
> One could ask, "How is Apple a Monopoly, and do they abuse that position?"
I opened my local configurator to buy a 13" M3 MacBook Air.
Textbook monopolistic price gouging.
Aston Martin charges $1000 to add a six CD changer in the trunk of Vanquish.
Clearly textbook price gouging from the monopolistic auto manufacturer, Aston Martin.
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> Textbook monopolistic price gouging
So they’re a monopoly because you can only buy Apple laptops from them?
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You’re free to purchase a Dell, then.
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No, that's textbook price discrimination, aka standard pricing everywhere. Have you looked at the prices for add-ons for cars? Or even for pizza toppings?
There's no world in which you can tell me Apple has a monopoly on laptops. C'mon.
Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42057758
The App Store is one consideration, and the hardware ecosystem another. I personally think both are problems. The ability to cast audio from my device to another is less supported now than they were back when things had audio auxiliary jacks.
How so? Because you need to buy a converter cable?
That sounds like “marginally more expensive”, and certainly not a monopoly-abusing position.
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Apple are creating a walled marketing garden with their new privacy features too. If a person pays for iCloud storage of any time they get placed onto the Apple VPN and their IP address resolves one of two or three different values for any given country.
This makes web tracking and attribution impossible to anyone who is not Apple. Users might be happy with it but I think it is similar anti-competitive behaviour to what Google are doing.
Google abuses privacy in every product they own via their monopoly over the ad ecosystem. Very different to Apple.
Who would possibly buy Chrome? Letting any of the large tech companies purchase it (the only possible buyers) would just give someone else monopolistic power.
Chrome can’t exist as a standalone business without being even more consumer hostile.
Very few companies would be able to manage a gigantic project like Chromium.
I happen to be poking around the Chromium codebase the last few days. The size of the codebase itself is at the same level as all of our company's code. Something as important and critical as GPU rendering is only a small part of the entire project. You also have v8, ChromeOS, ANGLE etc to worry about, all requiring experts in those areas. Not to mention things like Widevine and other proprietary technology surrounding Chrome.
I'll do it, if they agree to sell it to me, I'll run it.
I have a few hundred bucks that I'm willing to put into the pie, but based on the financials, it's probably going to go bankrupt pretty quick.
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It's 95% of an operating system. In a way it is it's own OS. Chromium has ~ 500+ distinct APIs and features such as web APIs, extension APIs, DOM, JavaScript APIs, and platform-specific features.
Would you buy an IPO of Chrome? The key supplier of like half of Google's searches? Seems like a no brainer.
"Who would possibly buy Chrome?"
This is illustrates the extent and magnitude of the problem to fix the internet. That regulators failed to give enough oversight of the internet and to regulate its monopolistic players several decades ago when these problems first became obvious has meant that they are now almost insurmountable.
Ideally, Google would be forced to divest itself of Chrome and that Chrome would become an open source project a la Linux. Clearly, that's very unlikely to happen.
For those who'd argue that Chrome would have no funding to further develop I'd respond by saying that it already works well as a browser and from observation that Google is channeling most of Chrome's development funds into anti-features that are hostile to users.
As an open source project that level of funding would be no longer necessary and its future development could progress at a slower pace.
> Ideally, Google would be forced to divest itself of Chrome and that Chrome would become an open source project a la Linux. Clearly, that's very unlikely to happen.
Chrome's upstream (Chromium) is already open source. If Google is forbidden from sponsoring Chromium's development, and that of its proprietary downstream distribution (Chrome) who's going to fund Chromium's development? Even if forced to divest, Google will always have an outsized sway on any open source browser due to the engineer-hours they can spend on contributions. If they are blocked from even that, then the whole exercise would be anti-consumer IMO.
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The fundamental core problem with the internet is that users have an innate feeling that they have a right to view content without being charged for it.
Google's entire existence is predicated on the ad-model internet existing, and internet users have overwhelmingly voted for this model of internet over the last 30 years.
People hate ads, but they hate opening their wallet even more.
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may as well just discontinue it then and let Chromium take its place
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An internet tax could pay for it.
In the most chaotic alternate reality possible: Mozilla
Interestingly if I recall correctly a lot of the original talent for Chrome/Chromium originally worked at Mozilla and were poached by Google. [1]
[1] https://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/2008/09/google-chrome.html...
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Having it owned by a non-profit foundation would make a huge amount of sense, especially if that foundation was then immediately funded by a variety of companies rather than just one big advertising company.
The obvious test for whether the browser is actually independent: what is the response to "let's add an ad-blocker by default".
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In that same alternate reality: WPEngine is given control of Automattic/WordPress as a result of the lawsuits.
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With Mozilla becoming so hostile to their power users in recent years (or any user who just wants to customize the interface or core functionality), I'm not sure it would make much difference.
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That's just a different kind of monopoly.
na... Oracle.
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How would they even sell it, chrome is based off of chromium. What is there to sell exactly? You can already fork chromium
The userbase and trademark are both very valuable. I'm guessing it would also come with some controlling positions in the chromium open source project, since those are mostly held by google by being the biggest developer and user of the project.
Good question. Chrome itself isn't a standalone business, the money generated through Chrome still primarily comes from Ads. The hardware tied to Chromebooks generates some revenue, but even ChromeOS is essentially free. They generate a tiny amount of revenue selling ChromeOS management tools in Workspace. Why not spin off an actual revenue driver like YouTube?
> What is there to sell exactly?
The user base
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> What is there to sell exactly?
widevine and all the other DRMy bits.
Or, better yet, deprecate and disable all the DRMy bits. (One can wish)
The full circle of course is MS will end up acquiring it.
This is surely the only real possibility, and puts Edge's shift to Chromium in a new light; could MS have predicted/lobbied for this push?
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Then MS is such a giant that it will have to sell it after some time
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> They are also prepared to seek a requirement that Google share more information with advertisers and give them more control over where their ads appear.
Seems like the DOJ is angling that Chrome should be spun off as an advertising platform of some kind.
Seems so, so much worse.
A consortium of various tech companies, plus non-profits? Instead of it being in one corporate hand. One can dream of the EFF and Mozilla plus a bunch of other stakeholders owning it.
Is Chrome being run so bad that we need even more committees, councils and bureaucrats to implement every single feature ?
Microsoft is already using the Chromium and changing the default search engine to Bing and shipping it as Edge. What else is needed?
This DOJ looks like they just want to pad their resumes with some grandiose case which might be bad for everyone else.
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> and Mozilla
So the market/consumers decided (due to whatever reasons) that they don't want to use Mozilla's browser. Lets reward them for that failure by giving them control over someone else's browser?
Let's hope it won't be Oracle.
ehm... jokes aside. I think a more reasonable way is to setup a foundation, composed of biggest players in tech, also companies like Google, Meta, Microsoft, Mozilla Foundation, Linux Foundation, Apple and EFF. The foundation should steer the further development of Chrome. In that way Chrome will be owned by community just like e.g. Linux Kernel or standards like C++ lang spec.
If Chrome would be bought by a private entity, that entity would probably start milking the current user base straight away. Expect adds in bookmarks bar, more address bar spyware (e.g. sending all phrases to the cloud) and paid extensions web store.
The most used and advanced browser that we have today must stay open source. It is more than a program, it is part of global internet infrastructure. We should not destroy it by a foolish political decision.
Oracle was the front-runner for buying TikTok last time they were under pressure to sell: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54148474
They were the first company I thought of.
I doubt Mozilla would like to be part of a foundation owning another browser.
They don’t have to sell it. They have to spin it off. Which means an independent company with a C suite, RSUs and a P&L.
There’s probably a number of talented people out there who would love to drive that truck.
If the pool they're looking at is "talented people" looking to run a company, it'll be someone who's currently the CEO of 7 other companies and successfully driven each of them into the ground for short term profits, unfortunately.
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Mozilla exist standalone, even if technically it depends on Googles money. They do the same, push Chrome to a separate Company, independent of Google, but getting money from who ever pays them the most for integrations and search engine-placments. It would need some additional constraints, but could position it on a more fair situation where there is not this harmful lock-in to google-services, but instead support for all services & companies equally.
Just reducing the direct influence from one company would already be beneficial for the market. And maybe Mozilla and other browser will get something out of it too.
Probably MicroFocus, they seem to buy everything and not do anything with it.
There is no potential buyers for Chrome that are serious and trustworthy. Chrome is not a profit center. Mozilla can't make money on Firefox and seems to be losing interest in the project, probably for the same reason. There's no reason to think that anyone would buy Chrome, keep it freely available and make money on the product.
Worst case is that some one will buy it, slap ads on it or turn it into a subscription service. Still I don't see that being enough to fund the Chromium/Blink development. While I do think the adding of features to the web could do with a slowdown, we're talking Internet Explorer 6 levels of stagnation if Chrome is sold of to the wrong entity.
Who would like to own the #1 most popular browser in the world?
How is that even a question. It's worth billions. User data, ability to inject ads, ability to drive the future of web and web-based apps.
It’s an open source project that can be forked - especially when google is not behind it to protect the market share, with users that don’t expect to pay and microsoft also involved with their own version.
Currently it’s probably worth bilingual because Google owns it. I expect it to rapidly lose value should that change.
The argument that something is untouchable because it can't continue as a going concern without continuing user-hostile behaviours is unconvincing. It's not our fault Google chose this business model, just as it's not a coincidence Google made it difficult to break up and just distinct enough to be (supposedly, formerly) legally sound.
firefox gets along fine
how it could exist without getting money for setting the default search engine is certainly a question though
Firefox gets along... with money from Google. And I think a good portion of the $$ that Google pays Mozilla, in their mind, isn't to be the default search engine... it's to keep competition alive in order to avoid this situation.
> Who would possibly buy Chrome?
Somehow I think that if they will decide to stay in their niche, Cloudflare might be a good fit for Chrome
No one should. It should get an IPO. Chrome will make a lot of money from Google, Bing, ChatGPT, etc by selling default search.
> Chrome can’t exist as a standalone business without being even more consumer hostile
Why not? Chrome's team isn't as prone to distracting itself as Mozilla. But there is still a lot of ancillary nonsense they get up to that wouldn't be necessary if it weren't in Google. Starting, for example, with not giving a fuck about how their product impacts ad sales.
Because you need to pay something like 1,000 engineers - and not just any engineers, but engineers used to Alphabet's SF Bay Area salaries and equity packages.
This quickly adds up to billions of dollars. You have the option to massively downsize, likely sacrificing product quality; or to sell something very valuable to a business-mined buyer. And there's really nothing a browser vendor can sell that isn't bad news for the users.
About the best option would be for Chrome to be spun off and then for Google to keep paying them for being the default search engine.
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I'll buy it for $5, final offer.
IBM? Amazon (that sounds worse)
Maybe Opera would buy it?
ByteDance, or another Chinese company.
Given the current political climate, this is incredibly unlikely. Reference the situation with TikTok and the "Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act" which became US law earlier this year.
What about X (the everything app)?
Could happen under Trump...
It doesn’t matter if no one buys it, or if it doesn’t even continue to exist as a standalone business. That’s preferable.
The important part is ending the egregious conflict of interest where an advertising behemoth controls access to the internet.
Ideal result is that Chrome ceases to exist and Chromium continues as an independent open source project controlled by a nonprofit. Even if Google is one of the contributors, so long as they don’t control the product they will exert a lot less control over the web and how people access it.
TLDR just be like Mozilla
What would that even mean? Anyone can fork Chromium and do whatever they want including establishing a non-profit foundation to finance its development.
Should Google be banned from forking an open source project and/or just developing any type of browser at all?
The only reason Google "controls" Chromium is that they are spending the most money/development time on it.
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To the users who use chrome, it will matter. Not clear to me how strong Chromium will be if the Google efforts for Chrome go away.
> TLDR just be like Mozilla
Please don't.
Do we really want incompetent management going into ad business? Declining market share, while raising management salaries and firing developers?
> TLDR just be like Mozilla
Mozilla is rapidly deciding they want to be an advertising and AI company at the expense of their primary product.
So, tl;dr: be like Mozilla used to be, not like they are now.
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[dead]
Arguably out of the big 4 (Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon) Google gave the most back to humanity: Android, Chromium, Kubernetes, Google Office suite, the Go programming language, Tensor Flow, Alpha Fold (and Google DeepMind), donating to Linux, etc. All these are things everyone has access to precisely because Google is such a big player and can afford to lose money on innovation that fails. What did Microsoft and Apple gave us? Yet Google gets targeted while Microsoft, Apple and Amazon are left alone. Why is that?
Google isn’t “getting targeted”.
But to answer your question.
1. Microsoft gets left alone - Really? You may want to ask the closest adult near you about this.
2. Amazon - The government has looked into Amazon multiple times. It’s hard to see where Amazon does anything to illegally use its monopoly (they don’t use their shopping advantage to cross sell AWS in any way, or Vice versa). Amazon is genuinely not a bad monopoly (they have pushed down prices), but they are a terrible monopsony (basically destroying retailers that are not Chinese knockoffs), but monopsony protection laws are weak to non-existent world wide.
3. Apple - Apple is not a monopoly in nearly anything, which makes antitrust action against them very difficult. The EU has better laws around this, which has allowed them to force Apple to do the right thing in many cases (USB-C, opening up the App Store, although Apple complies in the worst ways possible, even though compliance has often been beneficial for them, like in the case of USB-C connectivity), but US laws are far too rigid to be able to really do much with them, as long as they are not monopolies.
> It’s hard to see where Amazon does anything to illegally use its monopoly
Amazon literally uses the marketplace data to determine which products to make Amazon Basic versions of.
I think the better argument of "Google isn't getting targeted" is that literally all of those companies have been sued in the past (and will be in the future and probably currently have cases being worked against them).
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> Microsoft gets left alone - Really? You may want to ask the closest adult near you about this.
I've got some bad news for you: 2001 was 23 years ago. It's possible to not just be a legal adult (18) but also old enough to drink (21) and still not have been born yet when that was going down.
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> hey don’t use their shopping advantage to cross sell AWS in any way, or Vice versa
Isn't AWS directly sponsoring Amazon by essentially letting them run the biggest online retailer for free, which other retailers can't? And Amazon in itself is a terrible monopoly because it has unfair access to all user purchase data, while also selling their own amazon products on their platform.
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> You may want to ask the closest adult near you about this.
This doesn't belong on this site. Find another way to say it.
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> they are a terrible monopsony (basically destroying retailers that are not Chinese knockoffs)
Wondering if you or someone could explain this. I looked up monopsonies but still confused.
By that logic, people should still be at the mercy of AT&T because Bell Labs gave so much back to humanity. Not to mention that multiple items on your list were bought by Google.
The world's biggest ad and surveillance company having control over the most widely used browser on the planet is a recipe for disaster. That's the only thing that matters in this discussion.
> By that logic, people should still be at the mercy of AT&T because Bell Labs gave so much back to humanity.
So your argument is that Bell Labs should have never happened since it's the result of a monopoly?
My argument is that Monopolies are trade offs. In a world without monopolies you have very little innovation in peace time. Monopolies are bad for consumers but the trade off is that they can afford to innovate and push the world forward. It's not as black and white as people like to think.
Getting rid of all monopolies and having a market in perfect competition will make Bell Labs impossible and all the innovation that came from there. A ballance is required. "There are no solutions only tradeoffs" - TS
Edit: Clarify my question about Bell Labs happening.
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Why? What disaster? There can be no disaster when the product is free and there are many free alternatives with equal capability except for small conveniences. If you don't like Chrome because Google is being shady you can immediately seitch at zero cost. There is no disaster.
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It tickled me how much power they have over the web. Do web standards even matter when Chromium's implementation is all that matters for 90% of users?
I never got over that one either: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/youtube-responds-to-delaye...
Yeah, that kind of sucks. I liked a sibling suggestion that splitting off YouTube would make more sense because at least it could be a self-sustaining product.
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I know it's not comparable to Google, but Microsoft did significantly invest in open source, they also open sourced .NET, made TypeScript, VS Code
It also made Linux viable on desktop :P
WSL is my favourite Linux distro...well favourite is too strong. It's the one I hate the least.
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Fair. These are good examples of open source that Microsoft did! I love all 3 of those.
The average joe can't do shit with open source. The average coder cannot sell the fruits of the progession, because of open source. And most individuals can't do anything with open source, since they lack funding. Who profit from open source? Big companies.
Don't you get it? The whole initiative is a trojan horse.
> Chromium
> What did Microsoft and Apple gave us
Chromium was in the wild for five years running on WebKit, and the Blink engine they use today is an evolution of that codebase, not a rewrite. Of course, Apple did not create WebKit from scratch, it was based on KHTML/KJS, but it was WebKit that Google Chrome was built on top of, not the previous project.
> What did Microsoft and Apple gave us?
Microsoft: VSCode, Typescript, ONNX/ONNXRuntime (TensorFlow is pretty much dead), Github, npm (they bought it but so did Google with Android - m$ still paying repo/packages hosting bill)
Also worth to mention Meta: Pytorch, LLama, React, React Native, Segment-Anything
"What have the Romans ever done for us?"
Monopolies are bad, and it's not because some players were not punished that others shouldn't be (they all should).
Maybe this sets a precedent, and they are all targeted.
Google didn’t “give back” any of those things to humanity. Those are all products that Google is selling to you in exchange for your privacy so that they can make a profit. Don’t mistake Google for some benevolent entity that deserves special treatment for being “good”.
If you want to go that path, then Apple also “gave” iPhones to humanity, as well as AirPods, iCloud, iTunes, and is a primary reason that mouse-based graphical interfaces exist. Microsoft “gave” humanity the largest home operating system, the dot net programming languages, Microsoft Office, Xbox, and more. Should we give them all a “get out of jail free” card for their good deeds?
How is Google selling Go or Kubernetes in exchange for your privacy?
Even if you assume the situations are comparable and equitable, which most commenters are focusing on, there is still a problem:
There is no reason to expect the DOJ to pursue antitrust suits against all potentially relevant companies at the same time for analogous reasons. These are complex, labor-intensive cases that frequently play off precedent established by other earlier cases. The idea that Google is being "targeted," by implication unfairly so, is out of line with how complex antitrust law can be, and the simple fact that such cases are typically serialized rather than prosecuted in bulk.
Yes, they provide those things. They also have an illegal monopoly on search, and use those free offerings to entrench their monopoly.
Microsoft has the most monopoly. Bundle azure with office365, bundle teams with office365, bundle windows with azure, pushing bing, edge, OneDrive on windows. Why no one investigate them? Because they stay under off consumer minds, and has good lobby
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> illegal monopoly on search Just by being better than bing
> Google gave the most back to humanity: Android, Chromium, Kubernetes, Google Office suite, the Go programming language, Tensor Flow, Alpha Fold (and Google DeepMind), donating to Linux, etc.
Most of them are tools for making money for Google. Some others are on similar level that others are contributing to open source and the world. I mean you get Microsoft Office for free too, and even with more services than Google. And, most of Googles contributions started out one or two decades ago, but are just now moving into more harmful directions. Which is a relevant point with Google. The company today, is not the same it was 10-15 years ago when they were still heavily gaining goodwill.
> Yet Google gets targeted while Microsoft, Apple and Amazon are left alone.
They are also getting targeted all the time. Microsoft had a long, deep anti-trust-process around two decades ago, which still sees some restriction imposed onto them. Apple and Amazon do see some targeting, but more outside the USA or by competitors, which means there is less demand for official influence on them, at the moment. Additionally, their specific influence is simply not as big and harmful as Google has it on some parts.
As if Google didn't take anything from us. Google makes money selling your attention and brainpower to the highest bidder. Hands down. They are the biggest entity in the attention economy and their real customers are advertisers.
Google has two billion lines of code that determine the course of your daily life. It processes incredibly sensitive information, like every interaction you have with another person in a digital medium, and has a rootkit on basically every phone that collects "anonymous usage data" that is processed in a completely opaque manner and is subject to information "requests" from illiberal and sometimes even totalitarian governments, and a few open source contributions aren't going to change that.
Open source at Google is driven by engineers and contributors, not by executives or strategy. It's a fig leaf over one of the world's largest, most valuable, and well-guarded code bases that absolutely will not be made open.
How is that different from any other big tech company? Show me a single large company that doesn't comply with NSLs.
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None of them are good players for humanity. "Don't be evil" is long gone. They don't pay taxes, pollute, give means to manipulate billions of humans, concentrate wealth in a few hands. They all give with ulterior motives, never from the goodness of their heart.
While I don’t disagree with your argument, it is bad form to claim that companies like these don’t pay massive amounts of taxes, specifically payroll taxes. They do and it’s a huge amount.
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>pollute Seriously? You can't blame Google for its emissions.
> What did Microsoft and Apple gave us?
“A computer on every desk and in every home”
Google Office suite isn't open source, is it?
It's not but it is free to use.
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"Monopoly" is a technical definition, not another way of saying "has a lot of money."
Google has been proved to be a monopoly precisely BECAUSE it gives away so much. By entrenching themselves with free products that outcompete just about anyone, they get access to a massive firehose of data that they then monetize with no competition in sight
Long story short: Giving away free stuff to cripple competition who don't have scale is anti-competitive (see: Microsoft IE case)
They "gave away" to make more profits. It's strategic.
Also: Google Project Zero.
Doing Apple's work for free.
Microsoft had significant antitrust penalties back in the early 2000s due to windows/IE.
The other 3 all have antitrust lawsuits currently going. Google’s is just the furthest along.
>What did Microsoft and Apple gave us?
Windows, Office (Excel), .NET / C#, Vs Code, Visual Studio, free GitHub and more?
I meant OSS or free products. Windows / Office / Visual Studio are for profit products? GitHub was free before Microsoft bought it, they just made the private repos free as well. But arguably GitHub was better before.
But I do agree C#, VS Code and TypeScript are nice Microsoft OSS/Free gifts to the world.
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> Android [..] everyone has access
One of the key issues. Google has not given me a phone OS. They have taken away my ability to chose a viable competitor, one that does not run on selling my data.
But you can buy a pine phone or a Purism Librem phone.
Yes, target them all.
Giving back doesn't mean you should be allowed to be a monopoly. Other companies you listed are or have been targeted by DOJ as well.
you might need to go outside if you think Kubernetes is "giving back to humanity"
"Your honor, I made a bunch of cool stuff, anti-trust should apply to me last!"
That's obviously not how it works
You're missing my point. In a perfect competition environment all profits go to 0. This is great for customers horrible for innovation. Innovation happens when there's enough capital to take huge risks and lose. Google had a ton of innovation attempts that flopped really hard and lost ton of money. Without the extra capital none of the attempts would have happened.
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leave-the-multibillion-dollar-company-alone.jpg, literally
microsoft gave us VSCode from the top of my head, I could probably list 50 other things
I find selling product for money more honorable than buying indulgences with open source.
I agree regards Google (just beware I'm a massive Google fanboy) but I think that Microsoft do deserve at least a little bit of credit.
Microsoft gave us (counting only OSS and things they effectively gave away):
1. Microsoft Basic, the first language of a large number of developers in the 35+ age group. This was effectively given away which is part of why it was so popular (it was a small, fixed-price fee instead of the per-unit licensing)
2. TypeScript
3. C# and the CLR
4. Visual Studio Code
5. Since 2010 they've made large contributions to Open Source.
Commercially they've also been strong competition to enterprise players like Oracle and IBM and of course have done a huge amount for gaming.
Apple are narcissists, they're all take take take. They do, however, provide very strong competition which pushes other players to improve.
I agree. Love C#, VS Code and TypeScript. Microsoft changed a bit lately. But there's a lot of history with Microsoft and the recent CoPilot ripping off OSS code and blocking C# support in VS Code are still mudding the waters.
"Leave the multibillion dollar company alone!"
* The Apple I arguably changed the course of computer history. [0] * The Laserwriter and the Mac inspired desktop publishing -- the Mac was the first computers with a font library.[1] * The iPod literally changed culture. [2] * The iTunes Store made piracy less desirable changed the music industry forever. It also led the way with digital video streaming -- while Netflix was still mailing out DVDs. [3]
And iPhone? Changed the world. [4] People have a hard time remembering pre-iPhone days. Samsung literally copied the iPhone. A judge in South Korea, in Samsung's home jurisdiction even ruled that Samsung copied iPhone. Android would still be a failed camera operating system if it were for iPhone leading the way.
* Kubernetes -- we lived just fine without it. * Chromium? Who cares. My life isn't any different with or without it. * Google Office? Aa cloud-based productivity suite? Nothing groundbreaking there, another competitor could have (and have) built the same thing. * Go programming language? Apple gave us Swift and Objective C -- languages that are used for software running on over a billion devices. Go is a niche language. If Go didn't exist, humanity wouldn't notice.
We can have a difference of opinion on the relative merit of these details, but the idea that Google gave the _most_ to humanity is absolute nonsense. Amazon for example, empowered many small sellers around the world -- giving them access to a logistics network that would be impossible for a small business to recreate. Instead of selling on Main Street, sellers now can sell to literally any street in the world. I'm not the biggest fan an Amazon, however that being said, their contribution to humanity is enormous, especially in logistics. It has also changed publishing forever in ways that provide a significant benefit to independent authors -- many of whom have made careers out of self-publishing because of Amazon.
I'm not a fan of Microsoft, but their contribution to humanity is undeniable. Excel is probably the most important piece of software ever written. I'm sure others can expand on Microsoft's contributions to humanity.
By the way, I'm not saying all of these companies are "good" or altruistic, I'm only rating them on "contribution to humanity."
[0] https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object/nmah_16921... [1] https://multimediaman.blog/tag/apple-laserwriter/ [2] https://www.futureplatforms.com/blog/death-of-the-ipod-and-w... [3] https://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/seven-ways-itunes... [4] https://www.vox.com/2017/6/26/15821652/iphone-apple-10-year-...
You're comparing Golang and Kubernetes to products that happen to have big market share. There are loads of spreadsheet apps and smartphones out there. They are replaceable. The iPhone definitely advanced the field, but it wasn't a sacrifice on Apple's part. They made boatloads of money from it. How much money did Google make from selling Golang and K8s? A large negative sum. Yet those techs have contributed enormously to economic efficiency.
All of these companies provide values, that's why they are so successful.
In particular (as opposed to Google), Apple is giving us products where the user isn't just an entity that you try to get as much data from as you can.
Without Apple we'd be stuck with tiny initiative such as GrapheneOS on mobile, limited to a small subset of apps and phones.
With AI, Apple is also being privacy conscious, i think they are doing interesting work with their private cloud compute setup.
But does it mean that Apple and Google should get a free pass? Hell no!
I'm very confused. Chrome is just Chromium with Google's own Telemetry. Chromium is open and maintained primarily by Google.
Sure, there's a userbase, but you need a business model to take advantage of it in the first place because the benefit was the Telemetry (Google's) and Google's Ecosystem.
Also, the article specifically mentions Chrome, NOT Chromium (which again, is open), so what incentive would Google have to maintaining the project without their own version of it? Would they be bared from starting a new one? Would someone else take over Chromium? Who would have the resources to do such a thing other than say Microsoft who currently uses a Chromium browser?
Why not just go for the jugular and separate Adsense from the rest of Alphabet? It's the main driving force in all their dark patterns for all other platforms (Youtube, Android, Chrome, Search...)
> Also, the article specifically mentions Chrome, NOT Chromium (which again, is open), so what incentive would Google have to maintaining the project without their own version of it? Would they be bared from starting a new one?
I wonder similarly if they are only selling the brand and the existing installation base. I do not see what is stopping them from just creating a chrome clone called Manganese and continuing.
It would be an interesting experiment though to see if the google version will regain the same market share or if chrome will maintain its current market share under the new stewardship.
Forcing Google to sell their ad business would be the death of that company. After all, it's mostly an ad company...
They would just have to go back to their original business model before they became an ad company when they ran third-party ads on Google search.
Granted, that may not get them enough income at their current scale. They would definitely have to scale back hard for that.
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> Why not just go for the jugular and separate Adsense from the rest of Alphabet? It's the main driving force in all their dark patterns for all other platforms (Youtube, Android, Chrome, Search...)
Because this is not the case about display advertising, but the one about search engines and search advertising.
But also, if you think the display ads business is the jugular, I don't think you really understand their business. Have a look at the financials. The entire display ads business is <10% of their business, and shrinking in both absolute and relative terms.
I'm worried about what happens to the Chrome extension store. If Google sells Chrome, then does that also mean the Chrome store? I guess it would have to. So not only does someone need to buy Chrome, they also have to operate the Chrome store too. I'm not sure this is going to work out well.
Interesting idea. I'm not against forcing Google to choose either all the user platforms they run or Adsense. If they sold off Google Drive, Suite, YouTube, Google Play, etc they might improve faster. At the very least it would drive more alternatives. That seems so unlikely though.
Google kills all their other projects often enough that I don't think they are contributing to many spaces anymore so giving the technical assets to other companies would be interesting.
As much as I dislike thinking it, out of the realistic possibilities for who could buy it, Microsoft is probably among the more preferable. Their primary income isn't from advertising, at least. Most other big players would be even more likely to continue with Google's direction of killing ad blockers. MS, to their credit, has never shown interest in doing that.
> Microsoft
So we'd end up with even less competition? As flawed as Edge is it still somewhat new/innovative/different features that Chrome doesn't because MS has to try and compete with Google.
> Their primary income isn't from advertising, at least
Surely they wouldn't auto-default Chrome to Bing and try to become an ad company.
It's not like they're selling ads in the Start menu or anything...
MS gaining control of Chrome would be the worst timeline
[dead]
So I understand trying to break up monopolistic companies to provide better competition in the market which is generally better for the consumer as a whole. This strategy of saying Chrome should be sold off seems strange to me because unlike other monopolies Google's monopoly with Chrome is fundamentally different.
Since Chrome at its core is the open source chromium browser engine the ability for your competition to leverage what you do is already there. The dynamic here is fundamentally different than many other monopolies of the past due to this fact. It must be asked are people gravitating toward Chrome because they feel there is no other viable option to offer a similar experience or is it because they choose that because it feels to them to be the best choice to make in a free market.
In the context of Google's ad business the fact that chrome is open source has little bearing. Chrome is both massively popular and also a loss leader designed to further entrench Google's ad monopoly. If Chrome were broken off then a competitor in the ads space like Meta could purchase the search traffic instead which would force Google's ad business to be more competitive.
Is Meta or Microsoft buying Chrome a good outcome?
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Not really. If Chrome is forked they kill third party cookies and search ads remain king.
Only search has high propensity to buy right there from the interaction. Third party and even meta don't have that.
People gravitate towards Chrome in part because of Google’s heavy marketing of it. Whenever I sign into Gmail in Safari I get a pop up about a “better experience” awaiting me.
That is true in a valid point but install Windows sometimes and see how much it pushes you toward the edge browser. Which is chromium at its core but the experience it provides is not as good as Chrome even with all of Chrome's downsides.
So while I don't have the specific answer I think there is a much bigger question here of is it free market choice that is gravitated everyone here or is it monopolistic pressure that is squeezed out the competition. Microsoft is no small player in this space they're just the suckier player as they lost their crown with Internet explorer when they effectively owned the market too.
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Google also turns every link tap in their iOS apps into an opportunity to upsell Chrome for iOS when it should just open the link with the user’s default browser.
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Chrome is definitely a better experience than Safari, and not by a little bit. In many ways Safari is the worst browser out there right now. Most of its market share comes from the fact that Apple still forces Safari to be used on iOS no matter what browser you think you have installed. I think the DOJ should go after Apple harder on that than they are on Google, because nobody is forcing anyone to use Chrome the same way Apple is forcing their users to use Safari.
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I think the real issue is Google is able to use Chrome to push web standards in any direction they want.
Isn’t Google refusing to make changes that boost online privacy because it’ll tank their ad revenue?
But I don't see how that equates to a monopoly. They certainly have the ability to direct their development of their product in the way that they want. Since the core foundation of their product is open and available to every other competing browser they could implement better privacy protections while still leveraging all of the other benefits of Chrome.
If the edge browser was so much better and much better privacy wise or the kiwi browser or any of the others the internet can move fairly quickly from one choice to another when that choice is better. For all the downsides that Chrome has I don't see anything that fits the term better for my use case. I'm also guessing that most other users also haven't found anything "better"
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Isn't it even worse than that? Didn't they make changes via Manifest v3, which will not allow me to follow the FBI's advisory about using ad blockers, to make sure their ad revenue does not decline?
I do realize you can still use uBlock, but my understanding is that updates will be slow rolled, correct? Doesn't this open the window to malicious people to serve me mal-ads?
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No. They're not doing those changes because regulators like the DOJ[0] threatened them with anti-trust action if they did. That's the same DOJ that's now asking for Chrome to be divested.
[0] https://www.engadget.com/google-antitrust-doj-cookies-privac...
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Everyone else's ad revenue. The UK computing regulator is the main player here.
Quite the opposite, Google is the key sponsor of Privacy Sandbox: https://privacysandbox.com/intl/en_us/
Working out why they're doing this is left as an exercise to the reader.
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The DOJ has renounced the consumer welfare standard [https://prospect.org/justice/2024-08-09-will-googles-monopol...].
>The DOJ has renounced the consumer welfare standard [https://prospect.org/justice/2024-08-09-will-googles-monopol...].
And, apparently, these guys[0] think that's a good thing.
[0] https://law.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Publish_...
I genuinely have no idea what "missing features" or incompatibilities keep people on Chrome compared to the benefits of uBlock just plain working better on Firefox.
Bookmarks, passwords, payment information, recent tabs, extensions... all synced with your Google account in Chrome. Firefox can't sync to your Google account. All that information is synced across the entire Google account system, to your Android phone, other Chrome browser instances and so on. Yes I know you could export your data from Google and pull it into Firefox's sync system, but that's a hurdle.
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PWAs being entirely unsupported by Firefox for instance.
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uBlock Origin Lite works perfectly fine for me on Chrome.
Maybe there's some 0.01% of ads that would get blocked in the Firefox version that aren't in Chrome. But I don't see any regular users switching because they're noticing ads not getting blocked now.
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I use FF full-time but have to use Chromium for WebEx and Teams calls to avoid massive jank.
I bought Ozlo Sleep buds recently. Really cool hardware that does exactly what they say they do. However, the device I read with at night runs Android 11 which is too old for their app (requires Android 12). I can configure and update the sleep buds through a browser with WebUSB...but only with Chrome.
The only reason I keep a Chrome installation is for when I want seemless in-page translation. Firefox just added a version of this feature but, for some reason, didn't include the most important language for nerds: Japanese.
Firefox still lacks webgpu support.
> uBlock just plain working better on Firefox.
In what way does uBlock work better on Firefox? I don't see any ads in Chrome. Ad block is more important to me than any browse. I use Kiwi on Android instead of Chrome, and would switch immediately on desktop if I saw ads.
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I disagree. We get things in Chrome that is not in the consumer's interest simply because Google wants to get more data from its users and display more ads.
If Chrome were to be separated from the Ad business, it would be beneficial for privacy.
> It must be asked are people gravitating toward Chrome because ....
It's because Chrome used to be shoved down everyone's throat up until few years ago. Once stable base of users was made (by force and deception) the market took momentum
Nah, it was faster, lighter and better.
I say this as someone who has been back on Firefox for years at this point.
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It also used to be distributed like an adware, bundled with along other softwares during installation.
I do think you're rewriting history a bit here. Of course a Google advertised to their product but people didn't move to Chrome simply because of the advertisements. Chrome took hold because literally every other choice sucked and sucked hard. When you only have sucky choices you have to deal with them and they made something massively better than anything else at the time. Companies with buckets of money like Microsoft didn't innovate in this space and even when they saw what Google was doing with Chrome their ability to compete with it was laughable. Even when they finally switch to their edge browser because the Internet explorer name was so tainted with bad experiences they still suck in this space. Even with Bing and the billions of dollars they can throw at it they still suck in this space.
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A lot of discussion in this thread is pointing out that chromium is a thing and that it would be hard for a company to properly fund a web browser without the backing of a tech giant whose more direct revenue stream is elsewhere. I think this showcases a larger issue with the web as it stands today. Why has building a browser for the "open web" become such a complex piece of software that it requires the graces of a tech giant to even keep pace? Can nothing be done to the web to lower the barrier to entry such that an independent group (a la OpenBSD or similar) can maintain their own? Right now it seems this is only possible if you accept that you'll only be able to build on top of chromium.
I know the focus by the DOJ here seems to be more on search and less on the technical control that Google has over the web experience through implementation complexity, however I can only hope that by turning off the flow of free cash more "alternative" browsers are given some space to catch up. Things like manifest V3 show that Google is no stranger to tightening the leash if the innovation of web technologies impact their bottom line, I'd like to have a web where this type of control isn't possible.
That was the goal, not an accident. The length of the standard itself is comparable to medium-sized serious project kloc count.
They driven these numbers up to ensure that no one except them and their leashed pets could repeat it.
And here we are, you can have ten internet-enabled apps with texts, images and videos, basically the same functionality, but you can only copy nine of them.
You can’t even keep up with a simple fork.
Can nothing be done to the web to lower the barrier to entry such that an independent group (a la OpenBSD or similar) can maintain their own?
Sure, we can have the original web with text and the occasional embedded photo. But if you want what amounts to a full blown operating system, with a rock solid sandbox, plus an extremely performant virtual machine, that’s going to be a high bar.
> Can nothing be done to the web to lower the barrier to entry such that an independent group (a la OpenBSD or similar) can maintain their own?
Of course it can and it is done: Linux Foundation Europe runs Servo, GNOME Foundation runs WebKitGTK and Epiphany, Ladybird Browser Initiative runs Ladybird.
Only WebKitGTK is feature complete. Servo and especially Ladybird are still likely to run into missing features while browsing.
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These guys think it can be done: https://ladybird.org
> A lot of discussion in this thread is pointing out that chromium is a thing and that it would be hard for a company to properly fund a web browser without the backing of a tech giant whose more direct revenue stream is elsewhere.
This is not an issue though is it?
Like all those magazine subscriptions make their money off ads. The idea that a business can't survive on its own is fine, no?
If it's a singular tech giant then that's a problem but if chrome had contracts with like a dozen+ companies then it sounds really sustainable.
> Like all those magazine subscriptions make their money off ads. The idea that a business can't survive on its own is fine, no?
This is not quite the same, if a single magazine starts to become more ads than decent content it is not insurmountable for another company to start a competitor. It's not ad income itself that is bad, it's that in the case of a web browser it is insurmountable for a company to start up a competitor from scratch. It wasn't always the case, but because google has dumped so much engineering in to chrome they've effectively pulled up the ladder behind them.
One of the hidden costs of Chrome on society is it supports radically ramping up the complexity of web specifications in order to extend the moat around it. It is one of the most extraordinary software engineering projects ever done, with multiple components each of which are game changers. (ANGLE, v8 and libwebrtc immediately come to mind). It is no accident Rust spun out of an effort to compete with this complexity explosion without having infinite financial resources.
Personally I would prioritize spinning off Android though, and partly pragmatically since at least that would have a clear revenue stream. Maybe the Chrome App Store will experience a sudden surge in importance. A degoogled Chrome OS could almost start to look better than the direction Windows is going in.
libwebrtc not good
Why don't you like libwebrtc? There's a lot of good stuff in there.
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What would that even mean? Chrome doesn't make money. Who would buy it, except maybe someone who plans to do something even more nefarious?
Chrome makes enormous sums of money through ads. Also, these companies pay fortunes for default settings like search engines and other backroom deals. Someone could buy Chrome and ask Microsoft for 30% of Bing's search revenue to be the default search engine and Microsoft would agree.
This makes sense, but it is made even more nonsensical by the fact that the DOJ is also separately saying traffic aquisition deals are anticompetitive as well.
Chrome has ads? Or do you just mean any browser that defaults omnibox searches to google.com? a.k.a. firefox, safari, opera, chrome, etc
What ads does Chrome make money from?
Google makes money from ads by having control of Chrome. I don't see how that would continue if it's spun out. I'm not aware of any ads in Chrome itself (but I've been using FF for years, so what do I know). And Chrome controlling the default search engine is exactly why they want it spun out from Google, so if the result was simply that it makes money by defaulting to a different search engine, that would be an absurd, pointless result.
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> Who would buy it
If the decision drags on into the new administration, then the answer is probably Elon Musk.
This is good guess unfortunately. However, there are second order effects as we've seen with X that will drive people to Firefox so this could end up being a good thing.
> They are also prepared to seek a requirement that Google share more information with advertisers and give them more control over where their ads appear.
I don't think Google are fully clean in all this by any stretch, but for all the people saying that Google is just privacy-violating data junkies, did you catch that aspect of the DOJ statement?? The DOJ wants the advertisers to have MORE information (about us). That makes me sick.
I definitely glossed over this line. This line of thinking makes me worried that someone in the upcoming government will get the "good" idea of trying to ban adblockers.
Antitrust leads to weird outcomes in markets where all the players are anti-consumer. (advertising, antivirus, car dealers, etc.)
What is the actual asset to buy precisely? The code is already mostly open. You'd be paying for a user base who could leave at any moment?
Users could switch from Google search at any moment, would you say search is not an actual asset to buy?
User has to choose search engine once. During every install of Chrome I see forced selection of search engine.
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They can already do that.
Chrome is funded by Google search.
Why would anyone buy it without Google search?
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The trademarks, the team, and the infrastructure. Mozilla spun out of Netscape exactly like that, with the trademarks, part of the team and part of the infra.
The monetization is up to the spinoff or acquirer to figure out.
The team would dismantle pretty quickly once they stop receiving Google stock grants.
For something supposedly valueless, Google are really interested in keeping it!
If that hadn't forked WebKit DOJ would have to prove collusion instead.
This absolutely needs to happen.
The main problem is that, thanks to Chrome's massive market share, Google is in a position where they can effectively dictate the future of the Web as a platform.
We've already seen a few instances of this: Manifest v3 and FLoC/Privacy Sandbox, for example, were met with widespread opposition, but eventually they made their way into Chrome; WEI, on the other hand, was withdrawn due to backlash, but make no mistake, it will come back at some point.
The current state of Web standards can be summed up as: whatever Chrome does is the standard. The other browsers have to follow along, either because their modest market share doesn't afford them the luxury to be incompatible with Chrome, or because they're based on Chromium, so they hardly have a choice. The only exception is Apple, but let's be honest, they only do so because of their own business interests.
Ideally, Chrome/Chromium should be spun off as an independent non-profit foundation set up to act in the public interest. Obviously there would be trade-offs: a slower development cycle, new features taking longer to be shipped, etc. But in my opinion that's far preferrable to having Google continue to exert this level of control over the Web.
Unfortunately, the current administration has two months left in its term, so it's not going to happen.
The incoming administration has a bone to pick with these tech companies, so I expect these endeavors to continue to fruition.
My primary worry here is that this would hurt the open web - whether or not splitting out Chrome into a separate business would be good for consumers in and of itself.
It's true that Google adds a lot of things to Chrome or their own benefit or even the potential detriment of others like Mozilla.
That being said, they also do a tremendous amount of work to push the state of the web forward and, most importantly, they release Chromium 100% free and open source. That's not to mention the other incredibly impactful free projects that have stemmed from it like V8/NodeJS, Electron, Puppeteer, Chrome Devtools, etc.
On the flip side, it's been argued that Google's control over web standards is too strong and they can essentially strong-arm other browser vendors into implementing whatever they want. It's also been argued that Google pushes too fast and makes it impossible for other vendors to keep up, leading people to use Chrome if they want the latest + greatest web features.
But when we look at the other browser vendors, I personally feel like Google seems like a much better alternative. Mozilla feels like a dried up husk of the company it apparently once was and Apple pushes a buggy, closed-source, locked-down browser which has been purposely held back from critical features in the past (I think they did that to try to keep users off web apps and keep them paying Apple huge app store fees).
----
Anyway, I certainly have very mixed feelings on this one. My main hope is that this doesn't spell the beginning of the end for Chromium because I truly believe it's a piece of software that has provided immense public benefit.
Google has to be dismantled in parts one way or another - too much control over search and Youtube to the point where they are able to enforce Chrome standards that prevent adblocks from working.
> Youtube to the point where they are able to enforce Chrome standards that prevent adblocks from working.
Youtube needs to profitable somehow, and advertisers are the best way to do this. If Youtube couldn't generate the revenue through advertising, what else can they do?
It's insanely expensive to do video streaming, hence why Google invests a lot in the new compression formats today, WEBP, Brotli, AV1.
Do you just expect them to just do all of this for free?
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Yeah selling chrome makes no sense, who would buy it? It doesn’t make any money.
Thinking this through, it’s hard to even imagine how such a selloff and transfer could happen. Chrome, which is built downstream from the open-source Chromium, is a behemoth project with development spanning nearly every domain — rendering, GPU ops, WASM, AI, js engines, web standards, and much more.
Sure, Google doesn’t always prioritize developments that don’t align with its ad monopoly. Still, Chrome remains a polished & widely used product.
As far as I can see, it would be best to establish a "Chromium Foundation," akin to the Linux Foundation, with emphasis on advancing web standards, unencumbered by corporate priorities.
That said, the more entrenched monopoly Google maintains lies in its "Search Experience," integrated with complementary products like Maps, YouTube, Android, and others.
I don't see any other viable alternative that serves the needs of most users across the board. Bing doesn’t come close, and while private search engines cater to power users, the average web user rarely switches search engines. For many, Google Search has become the de facto entry point to the internet and their view of the Web.
This feels like a feel good headline for DoJ that doesn't materially impact the Search/Ads ecosystem nor improve things for the end consumer.
Chromium exists - literally as a baseline for several other corporations to build a browser.
If you wanted to do something meaningful - you must separate search and ads, everything else is rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
Plot Twist:
Google sells Chrome, then immediately forks Chromium and starts a new “completely unrelated” browser with all the same features called “Magnesium”
With those rulings come conditions. Corporations under a judgement under monopoly practices can't do anything they want wily-nily. AT&T, for example, was forbidden from selling computers in 1956.
https://economics.yale.edu/sites/default/files/how_antitrust...
The actual plot twist will be Google transacts some business with Trump and the problem will be "solved".
I'd be so excited if the did this and named it "Ultron".
Google Matte. chrome is out of fashion now.
"make" Mozilla buy it, give em a heaping grant from the Library of Congress to keep the open web open, and be the engine behind every browser keeping things fair... sounds good to me!
In this scenario I’d much rather that heaping grant goes to a newly independent Chromium nonprofit org. Browser engine diversity is a good thing and worth trying to preserve.
Seriously the chromium project needs an endowment to sustain operations. Especially when you consider chromium OS too.
Are they being forced to sell Chromium? How would that work?
That’s what the article for this thread is about…
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Then instead of two browser engines we end up with one? That doesn't sound like a win.
The conflict of interest between owning search, being a provider of user identity/login, and effectively owning the entire internet ads marketplace, and being a provider of the "user agent" (remember when people thought of that way!?) is immense.
This should have happened years ago.
TBF, I worked in Chrome almost 7 years and I didn't see anything outright nefarious. I don't know how user-hostile decisions (like breaking ad blockers and serving advertisers better) get made, but they do get made, or defaulted into. Trust me, the leadership of Chrome knows exactly how to justify its $300 million+ budget to the rest of Google, revenue numbers and all.
But there's no vendor lock-in from providing the user agent. It only costs a few minutes to switch to a different browser. The problem is other browsers suck, through no fault of Chrome (other than setting the bar high).
I'm guessing that budget is well over half a billion today. Got data?
"Conflict of interest" has a precise ethical/legal definition. It doesn't mean "somebody is doing something I don't like".
From the Oxford dictionary:
conflict of interest, n:
a situation in which the concerns or aims of two different parties are incompatible.
"the conflict of interest between elected officials and corporate lobbyists"
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Looking at this case and the recent case against SpaceX (which is required to only hire US permanent residents and citizens) for not hiring asylees, makes me think DOJ which has the bandwidth to only work on few very important cases isn't doing a good job overall.
You could make all these arguments against Android, no? Perhaps moreso while they maintain the garden wall.
It isn't wrong to point out how harmful to society monopolies are, and to identify them, but the development of Chrome, Android, etc, do also present genuine value to anybody who wants that code.
Without Google making money from the search/targeting/advertising model, who is paying for Chrome, Firefox and Google Search? Who is paying for Android after third party marketplaces take off?
I'm not making any recommendations here except that I think we need to be careful what we wish for. Tools we rely on might evaporate.
You could, and I would.
The toys we enjoy today are not worth sacrificing future developments. Nothing advances customer interests as much as competition.
Why is this a better solution than forcing chrome to have no defaults and select an option just like IE.
Chrome google pulled the entire browser market forward by investing in chrome. A stand alone chrome is just going to make money by charging by default status or be bought by someone else trying to create push their defaults.
I will fix the internet for you:
+ No platform ever must include an Internet Brower by default. User must install one some way without anyone being suggested or hinted by platform. Platform can inform user an internet browser can be installed but not saying how. Platform owner can set a default anytime
+ No Internet Browser ever must default, or suggest or hint a search engine. The platform owner can always pick one himself.
Internet Browser is defined as any program with a User Interface which can acquire content from any public network
The devil is inthe defaults.
Edit: I forgot to add how to finance it: Internet browser will now datamine the customer. Customer can pay for a privacy respecting browser, but we all know how that doesn't fly (yet)
How would new users install a browser without having a browser? The browser is where 99% of users spend 99% of their time.
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Again, no idea how Google's supposed monopoly of web browsers is worse for the consumer than Apple's actual monopoly on iPhone browsers (they're all Safari under the hood) and on App stores.
The DOJ is after monopoly in search space (and how Google is using chrome position to strengthen the search monopoly) not the browser space itself (Which is another monopoly but to less extend). People don't look into one product and DOJ are not naive to fall into this trap.
Then pass a law that says all browsers must give a choice of search engine.
I'm not sure your right though.
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^This. Apple's lock on the mobile market is far worse for consumers. Break off the App Store from Apple, a company that would actually be valuable.
> no idea how Google's supposed monopoly of web browsers is worse for the consumer than Apple's actual monopoly on iPhone browsers (they're all Safari under the hood) and on App stores
For the same reason proprietary cables aren't generally a monopoly problem: Apple hasn't been declared a monopoly. Google has [1].
[1] https://apnews.com/article/google-search-antitrust-case-5911...
This is exactly the blunt, hammer-based solution I would expect from a bunch of crusty bureaucrats.
It seems none of them bothered to read Kagi’s outstanding suggestions on the topic. [1]
1: https://blog.kagi.com/dawn-new-era-search
Decided to give this a read.
Kagi’s argument is simple: Google should give public access to their Search Index so that any company can take advantage of the core machine directly, under some terms of agreement. Like an API.
Am I alone in thinking that all the stuff I get for free (in exchange for some amount of targeted advertising) from Google is pretty cool and that these attempts to break up big tech are going to be very bad for consumers and the economy and is just punishing successful companies that produce products that customers want to use. You all can use mosaic/edge if you want to.
You get nice stuff for free, right up until the moment Google decide that they've done enough. Then you get nothing. And the unfair funding and disparity in features means no competitors can ever provide a superior alternative.
And then it might not be for free. It's very tempting to rent-seek when you have a captive user base. That's bad for consumers and bad for the economy.
Focusing on what we get today is myopic and it's not by mistake that Google give them to us.
You are certainly not alone. I’d say you’re in the vast vast majority, just not necessarily on our little corner of the Internet (hackernews), but realistically probably the majority here as well.
Selling off Chrome might help, or it might just be the lesser evil/a pawn sacrifice in order to prevent split up of AdSense from Google Search (which is in obvious conflict of interest, as Google's ad business is already under scrutiny under alleged price fixing along with Meta), or of YouTube. Neither Google's acquisition of YouTube nor that of DoubleClick should've been allowed in the first place under any reasonable antitrust enforcement, the purpose of which is to prevent exactly this kind of monopoly.
Chrome can't really be sold unless it'd mean Google is not allowed to maintain a fork of Chromium.
While you can sell access to the existing installations (control over the update url), if Google continues to invest development into a fork (and just drops the information about it on Google frontpage) then that new fork will become defacto Chrome.
EDIT: To clarify, the value of Chrome is not only the userbase, but also its placement in Google products and importantly, the development effort on a scale few can afford.
I think this would be a very unfair action to perform so late in the administration.
Simply because the other two dominant personal computer OS vendors, Microsoft and Apple, will be allowed to maintain their browsers. The less entrenched company and younger company is getting singled out?
If they had more time to build cases against the more entrenched Apple and MS, maybe I'd give them some benefit of the doubt. But we can't assume the next administration's antitrust policy will be consistent or even sensible.
Browsers are complicated enough that I don’t see how a company could do the right thing without it being subsidized by a larger business. I feel like this is paving the ground for a Chinese startup to come take its place.
Browsers simply require paying a few hundred very in demand engineers, and that's hardly impossible if Mozilla's been doing it for 20 years as a non-profit. How many software shops out there have 500 engineers? I'm guessing literal hundreds US companies have that today and wouldn't be surprised if someone could build something that scale in a couple years with the proper budget and leadership.
But they won't have to build it, they'll just buy a chunk of Google's team with the Chrome trademarks and the chromium infrastructure and then scale back attempts to outpace the few other engine makers by piling on features only useful to an advertising monopoly and instead focus on the core feature set while raking in big bucks selling search and ad distribution to all the search and ad companies not named Google (and perhaps some even from Google too.)
Mozilla does it by getting Google to pay them a bunch of money, which itself is the subject of anti-trust investigations. That money could dry up if Google is forced to no longer fund Mozilla, and if that happens, they’re screwed. It’ll also mean others likely won’t be able to pay either, which only leaves either buying software (who will pay for a browser?) or ads.
Also note that Mozilla has been doing this a long time, and yet they’re effectively irrelevant in market share now. So they’ve done a terrible job.
Browsers are a specialized technology and skill set that isn’t easily found, nor can you just throw any old SWE at the problem.
How about Servo and Ladybird?
Servo is dead but Mozilla is subsidized by Google. Ladybird is not a real serious contender but more a hobby project with effectively 0% market share.
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What kind of continuity can be expected when the head of the DoJ is a political appointee by the president, and we're getting a new president in 2 months with radically different ideas compared to our current one?
I’m not sure, but per the article it’s a continuation of it’s beginning:
> The case was filed under the first Trump administration and continued under President Joe Biden.
Trump is known to change his mind about stuff on a whim or who he talks to most recently, I guess we'll see.
None, lol.
Stuff like this. It feels like there's less of a case here than with Microsoft. In the 90s, Windows nearly became _the_ OS, especially had Apple folded like it nearly did. There really wasn't an alternative in the emerging home computer space as well as the OEM shenanigans among other things. Threatening to pull office for Mac if Apple failed to include IE.
I'm struggling to see how Google is truly behaving monopolistic here. Chrome is available for compile, and is part of other browsers like edge. It's like suggesting linux has a monopoly because almost all web servers run on it.
Maybe one of the big spyware players will buy chrome
Dang it, I think we missed a chance for it to be bought by the Onion
Microsoft?
ITT: panicked Google employees try to convince you this is a very bad thing
"Big tech companies aren't allowed to distribute their own web browser" is going to come as a big surprise to Microsoft and Apple.
Except that's not what they are saying.
I'm reading this on a non Chrome browser and I can search for it on a non Google search engine. I don't understand where the monopoly is.
I'm reading this on a non-Chrome browser based on Chromium, the project Google gave freely to the world that enables competitors to reach hundreds of millions of users
You can look up details of the lawsuit, but the idea is that Google paying Apple to be the default search engine prevents other search engines from competing with Google search. The default search selection has been shown to be quite important. Anti-trust law is built around the idea of maintaining competition - “monopolies” aren’t inherently illegal.
Every company does this though. They pay to be the exclusive or official XYZ of some company or event.
For example, Bud Light being the official drink of the NFL.
Or Coca-Cola being the exclusive drink that can be sold at the Olympics and many other sporting venues.
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Google says the proposals would harm consumers and developers
Hey Google - I'm both, and your trend over the years of degrading products I used to love with increasingly user-hostile choices has already caused me more harm than I can imagine could arise out of fixing the incentives.
We went from hardware we could trust & control and gopher + plain html to hardware that spies on us and have limited control over and fully turing complete software with access to all hardware & DRM. - and no sensible way out.
Maybe not only Google, but everyone needs to rethink the concept of a browser.
A much better decision would have been to require them to fund some amount of the various open source competitors so there can be alternatives. Makes as much sense as forcing them to sell a thing that has no market.
"Selling" off chrome is probably not even really possible in any reasonable business way.
It could be spun off into a separate company, or Microsoft could buy it seeing Edge uses the engine.
>Microsoft could buy it
I wish you understood why that is funny.
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First, it's important to keep a clear view of what's actually for sale here. Chromium is an open source project that already forms the basis of other browsers (most prominently Edge and Brave) and does not include all the weird Google stuff that the the DOJ takes issue with (tracking for ads, special privileges for Google websites, etc.). Chrome is basically a thin layer of shittiness on top of Chromium. That thin layer of shittiness is what's for sale. Its entire value is derived from the fact that it's already dominant. So whoever buys it is effectively buying that user base, but not much of a technical moat to keep them all in.
Who might buy it? I can list them:
- Apple
- Microsoft
That's it. Turns out you can't properly invest in a Browser without conflicts of interest. Apple might buy it to help drive more users toward the App Store. Microsoft might buy it for similar, all-too-familiar reasons. They both have the funds and incentives to want this massive "captive" audience, and the means to exploit it, and I can't think of anybody else who would care enough to bid much.
So what would happen to Google? That's the real question. Seems like the point is not selling anything. The point is to ban Google from having influence over any web browser. I wonder if Judge Mehta will be able to craft an effective order to that end.
Amazon or Meta could buy it as well.
I was one of the very few voices against using Chrome when it debuted in 2008. How on earth did it make sense, even for the supposedly enlightened programmer/IT tech/gamer/nerd crowd to use a browser made by a company whose business model depends on profiling user data to sell ads? And mind that in 2008 they had already ditched the 'don't be evil' slogan for those naive enough to think that businesses are anything but amoral.
And splitting hairs over Chrome vs Blink (the engine), or switching to the multiple other Blink wrapper browsers that are there, or Chrome's controlled opposition Firefox() makes no sense either; by using any of these you only help maintain Google's hegemony over the web and its standards.
() - they don't get to call themselves a scrappy little privacy crusading rebel when bankrolled by Mozilla whose multi million dollar revenue remains primarily from Google being the default search engine in Firefox, plus their own shenanigans.
This...doesn't seem like a good idea.
Not to be dramatic, but from a security perspective, it feels a little like the scene in Ghost Busters where the EPA inspector orders a Con Ed worker to shut down the containment system.
I'm trying to imagine all the operational implications and this particular suggestion feels hasty.
I'm open to hearing different opinions.
Buying the browser should come with most of the engineers that actively work on it, or at least the ones with most experience working on it, maybe even give them a tiny part of the shares of whatever company gets to own it, or perhaps with a contract for at least for a couple of years (and then could return to Google or whatever), and if possible include some incentives to make them focus on working on security bugs over new features, which tbh I think there is just too many every year.
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The revenue and profitability of "the Chrome Company" is going to be far less than Google, since Google's rising tide is what lifted that particular boat.
How would the Chrome Company deal with this?
Would they do closed source development going forward, no more free lunch for other browsers or shells using Chrome as an engine?
How much of a hit does this mean for employees salaries? They are currently making Google money, and now they're about to make Microsoft money.
How many would just be flat out laid off due to a lack of revenue, at least in the short term? Would it be a 50% lay off? Into a job market that's already bad?
Firefox makes hundred of millions of dollars in revenue per year. If you assume the same revenue per user and apply it to Chrome's market size (about 30x that of firefox) then you have a top 20(?) tech company in revenue terms.
They will have more money than they know what to do with. But yes, going closed source does seem more likely.
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Yeah, especially if this breaks Chrome Remote Desktop in any way, seems like that capability would be tied into the Google ecosystem... I wonder how long we will have to say goodbye to the simplest remote desktop that has ever existed.
If getting more open protocols/APIs for that kind of thing is a consequence of this then I’ll take it.
Next please make Apple open up all the secret integration between iOS and Watch so that Fitbit and others can more fairly compete.
Why would it be a bad idea?
No Javascript:
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/doj-will-push-goog...
No SNI:
https://web.archive.org/web/20241119090808if_/https://news.b...
Finally! My only concern is that this should have been done much sooner, in particular before the recent anti-trust ruling that basically forced Google's hands to pull the rug under Mozilla.
Google's sole business is to make people look at content they don't want to look at (ads), and I find it deeply problematic that they not only control the operating system and software distribution platform for a large fraction of devices, but now also the browser and by extension the standards of what used to be the open web.
Why does Apple get to get it app store and its browser and its phones and OS etc. What about Microsoft with its OS's and apps.
They can sell Chrome, keep Chromium, rebrand ChromeOS to nAndroidOS, and launch a new browser called Google DrEdge (based on Chromium).
Full circle ⭕. Back to where we started.
That's not how this works. They'll sign a consent decree that forbids them from just that for a decade or three and the DOJ will have staff officed in Google campuses monitoring them for the entire time.
Sale of chrome can include non compete by the buyer. DOJ cant itself do something like that.
Not sure how this works but if some party purchased chrome, isn't the best business for it to sell advertising back to google? And then sell the default search engine back to google?
And thus confirming the whole point about Chrome being the new IE discussion from yesterday.
DuckDuckGo has a web browser. Brave has a search engine. Kagi has a web browser.
It seems weird to single Google for this. Wasn't the core issue behind this that these other search engines couldn't compete with Google?
Vivaldi is a much better browser than their Chromium re-skins. Perhaps if their browsers were better people would use them instead of using Chrome. Additionally, perhaps if their search was better than Google, they would use it as well!
Google shoves AI overviews in your face now, and if that sucks, the only reasonable alternative is to use Bing currently. I can't use Brave's search or Mojeek. Brave ignores underscores. Mojeek doesn't even have a business model so it stops anyone from actually using it as a search engine. Yandex is full of results in Russian.
I wish someone would tell me what is this fabled competitor to Google that would benefit from crippling Google because so far I haven't been able to find one. I'd say the only engines better than Google are Wiby and Kiddle, because they focus on a specific niche instead of trying to compete on general web search.
Mojeek CEO here: Our business model is our paid API and contextual, no-tracking ads.
Interesting, when I was taking a look at alternative search engines I tried Mojeek and I never saw a single ad, so I assumed it had no way to make money (just like Wiby).
But where are the ads?
I just searched for "best cars 2024." Not a single ad. "Insurance lawyers," no ads. "Best keyboard," no ads.
Maybe the reason why this happens is because I'm not from the US/EU/UK?
Also when I use a search operator, like "insurance lawyers" surrounded by double quotes, I get a 403 forbidden error because I appear "to be sending automated queries so we can't process your search at this time." To me, that means Mojeek won't let me use it as a search engine.
Tell us you don't understand the first thing about centuries of anti-trust law without telling us you don't understand anti-trust law.
Why don't you illuminate me if you're so knowledgeable?
This seems like the best case scenario for them.....losing Android would have been a far bigger problem
Every time these cases come up, I ask the same question: what is this supposed to actually achieve and how will it work?
Who will buy chrome? And how will they make a profit from doing so?
Presumably they will charge google for good to remain the default search engine? But then we will just end up in the same place as now won't we? (Chrome being a popular but not the only browser; Google being the default but not only search engine).
So how will this make the end user or the advertisers (don't forget, they are the consumer here, since they are paying, not the user) richer or happier or whatever else?
People seem stuck on "monopoly bad" and that something has to be done. But are not clear on what the harm is here, or how to prevent that harm. Instead, this is something and something has to be done...
Slightly off-topic:
I am always baffled with the widespread use of Chrome.
On all my machines (including work) I use Firefox. Even on Android I disabled Chrome, so that the feed will have to use Firefox.
Chrome is neither faster nor more convenient than Firefox, so it is a bit of a mystery to me - I guess on Android it comes as the default.
It is mostly better advertising compared to what Mozilla was pulling of, the initial edge in performance (at least that’s what people said), integration with google for the android users (Firefox was late to this) as well as some issues if garbage websites didn’t test on Firefox.
Regarding features, things I’d miss include PWA, some APIs like WebUSB that let me flash microcontrollers in the browser and I think WebGPU is still only in Firefox nightly.
Most of those things are very specific to what I do. Most people don’t need PWAs. Most people have no need for WebUSB and most applications run on WebGL so that’s mostly an issue for developers.
It’s not like Firefox is bad but I think Google just managed to capture the market and now the userbase doesn’t have a good reason to switch to Firefox (most people don’t think about privacy if it’s not in their face. Very few people will have no passcode on their phone. But even less people will think twice before uploading the images of stranger’s kids to Google Drive because they happened to be in the background when you made a photo of your own kids even though google has no reason to respect your privacy).
To the average person, all the browsers are exactly the same. I use Chrome, Edge, and Firefox at work at its all the same to me as well.
Maybe force of habit from years ago when Mozilla was the dominant non-default browser and chrome rolled in and ate their lunch by feeling so much faster.
Netflix was tipping point for me, at the time Chrome was only browser on Linux that let me watch Netflix.
There are a lot of pages that work better in Chrome than Firefox. I say that as someone who always defaults to Firefox.
Would this even survive the coming change of administration? Why attempt this now?
If Google is forced to sell off Chrome why would any company buy it? They wouldn't get the developers that work on Chrome / Chromium. They wouldn't get access to the proprietary Google services that Chrome uses so they would be buying a copy of Chromium. Google could then close the Chromium source code and develop a new closed source browser. The Chrome browser would then slowly die due to lack of development resources, money, and innovation while the new Google browser would quickly gain the market share that was taken away from them.
They'll spin it off into its own company.
I would much rather Google be forced to fund alternative browsers (other than Firefox)
It would be a shame if the DOJ forced this. Google has the resources to continue to pressure Apple to allow non-nerfed Chrome on iOS.
That said, this might be my favorite of the DOJ remedies I've heard because it would probably do the least harm.
They had these alleged resources for almost two decades now. Did they manage to force Apple? Or do they give them two digit billions dollars for Google to be the default search engine on safari?
Could Google just circumvent this entirely by making Chrome 100% open source?
I realize Chrome is partially open source, but IIRC Google still has some special abilities that no fork has the ability to access.
Weird that this is so doom and gloom, the world's most popular browser decoupled from the ad machine. What's not to love? People champion Firefox and Brave constantly and they're independent browsers.
Brave is not an independent browser, the majority of development comes for free through Chromium, funded by… Google. Firefox by Mozilla Corp survives on loads of cash from… Google.
Whoever’s going to pay for the acquisition and the shit ton of ongoing development costs will have to milk it a lot harder than Google (unless the buyer is something like Microsoft, but what’s the point then). A browser alone, especially the type people here champion, is a bad business.
I think there's an implicit assumption here that Google isn't milking the browser for all it's worth. It isn't as if Google is footing the bill for all those ongoing costs for nothing. I think the argument that Chrome avoids some general badness because Google gets value from a purely strategic interest isn't without merit but even that value is captured eventually. Sure they'll probably sell their default search placement to Google for a pretty penny to sustain development just like Firefox but I consider that a strict improvement over the status quo because Google has less direct power over the new company.
This will likely lead to a Safari hegemony. Possibly an Edge / Safari duopoly.
Chrome doesn't have a business model to make money. If it gets calved off into its own thing, it'll either need to find another line of business to supplement the cost of building and maintaining a browser, or it'll go bankrupt. Close-to-nobody is willing to pay money for a browser alone, so it's unlikely they'll be able to float a business on selling the browser itself.
This feels like doing something just to do something. I hate the fact that Google owns Chrome just as much as the next person here, but what's going to happen next? Are you going to sell it to ByteDance since they have the biggest offer? Just having half a plan can be worse than having a full plan.
At the same time, it might be just a thread from the DOJ to get Google to play ball on something else, but it's hard to assume competence and forethought for something like this.
Maybe this will lead to Chromium finally getting proper vertical tabs which Google clearly otherwise block due to it eating up horizontal real estate that would otherwise be used for ads.
I assumed this theory long back and I thought I was alone. Now it's great to see someone else has same theory.
I wonder what the bounds of this would be. Most people still think of Chrome as just a browser, but there is quite a bit of other stuff:
Chrome Web Store
ChromeOS
Chromebook (somewhat intertwined with Android)
Chromecast (discontinued, sort of; succeeded by Google TV Streamer)
Web.dev (not Chrome branded, but probably wouldn't exist if Google didn't start Chrome)
Also, I have to wonder, if breaking off Chrome makes sense to the DOJ, does breaking off Android also make sense? Is that the next piece that they will propose?
I don’t really understand how this would work and the article doesn’t really give me enough detail to know. But for me, Google abandoning their plans to disable third party cookies tells me everything I need to know: their ad business calls the shots and an ad company having monopoly over the browser market is an unequivocally bad thing.
I just have no idea how we get from here to there. And let’s be real, with Trump re-elected the chance of the DOJ following through with this is very low.
It is not clear to me how Chrome having a majority share in the browser market is a monopoly. Is it somehow constraining other browsers to not be developed? On the contrary Google maintains the Chromium project, and funds Mozilla directly. I don't think that's what monopolies do, i.e., monopolies don't actively cultivate competitors.
If people aren't choosing to use Firefox, Brave, Edge, etc. even though many of the competitors get the benefit of free Google engg labor on Chromium and are not connected to the so-called ad machine, maybe they don't want like the alternatives.
Somewhere in a possible future, Trump hands Chrome to Elon and he makes X Browser.
If this comes true, I take full responsibility for causing it.
It feels odd to me that this was the first proposal from the DOJ, considering that the case initially seemed quite focused on the advertising side of Google's business:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=United_States_v._...
That is a different case, this is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2...
Wow, thanks for the correction. Interesting that there's more than one monopoly US vs Google case.
I thought Trump could be bought off to make this go away like he flipped on the til too forced sale of ban. But this whole thing began under his last administration (sic):
“If Mehta accepts the proposals, they have the potential to reshape the online search market and the burgeoning AI industry. The case was filed under the first Trump administration and continued under President Joe Biden. It marks the most aggressive effort to rein in a technology company since Washington unsuccessfully sought to break up Microsoft Corp. two decades ago.”
The thing is chrome isn’t as sticky or important as the ads marketplace. Google would be wise to let chrome go and hold on to the cash cow that is the ads marketplace where they make most of their money.
s/til too/tiktok
This would be outrageously bad for the web.
Right now a healthy web ecosystem is Google's existential hedge, against all the closed platforms of the world coming to devour the web and Google's business.
Getting rid of Google as a patron for the web would be one of the most harmful damaging & awful things the DOJ could do this world. Strongly opposed, what a godforsaken heinous crime against humanity to consider leaving no one funding the web at scale.
Wow, what a world! Next they might make Microsoft sell of the army of evil monkeys that they got when they bought evil from Satan:
https://www.bbspot.com/2000/05/04/linux-kernel-delayed-by-mi...
(yes, that's 24-year-old humor, sorry.)
Antimonopoly action is good for the market, but let's be honest nobody will make a better chrome, at best they will inject ads or turn it to a walled garden. It will be a bad thing in the end for us web developers , and we will lose the last open platform.
Why is this considered a good move anyway? The obvious way to split google is to separate the buy side from the sell side of ads market
I haven't been using Chrome for a while because of the unacceptable privacy issues.
"We will lose the last open platform" - umm, have you heard about Mozilla Firefox? It works really well.
In recent years, otherwise proud nerds have become absurdly hostile to the idea that Firefox could function as a daily browser.
Yet I often forget which one I'm using until I look at the shape of the tabs.
Something like YouTube would have been a much better idea.
I haven't read the article but I immediately see a few comments about benefitting consumers. I don't think that's the DOJ's charter. I think when you consider all the things that Google is to the government and to the people, this decision makes sense. It's weird that it becomes a discussion about what consumers want.
True, but that might be the way for the DOJ to win legally.
How exactly does Chrome make money without leveraging the exact antitrust behaviors that are driving this decision?
Do they become like Firefox and make themselves dependent on Google to pay top dollar for the default search engine? Wouldn't that just make them beholden to their original owner anyways?
Taking into account all the noise the EU is making about Internet, privacy, digital laws it's mind-bending that there is no the EU WebBrowser. There is Opera, there are original KHTML/Webkit creators - just use them and make an engine that's not adverts powered.
There are many EU web browsers: https://fosstodon.org/@niutech/113285649386968003
Like sponsored and controlled by the EU, the organization.
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Why does Google have to sell Chrome? Any potential acquirer could build their own browser with Chromium.
The DOJ is technically illiterate if they think Google selling Chrome is the solution. If Google was forced to divest itself from Chrome, I see no need for Google to keep Chromium open source.
This is the strangest decision I've ever seen. Chrome isn't the default anywhere except Pixel branded devices (most or all of the Android OEMs have their own browsers) and you need to actually seek out and download Chrome from Google.com. So how will Google selling Chrome lead to less traffic towards Google? It seems the DOJ has cause and effect completely backwards.
IF Google is a monopoly that abuses search and ads, IMO it would make much more sense to split it like this: - Google Search - Ads - Consumer facing everything, so Chrome, Android, Pixel devices, Nest, etc... all together - YouTube
This kind of split would prevent Google dominating search, abusing their dominance of ads while also enabling their device division to become a proper competitor to Apple and Samsung.
Simply splitting off Chrome is weird, kills Chrome for absolutely no reason, does nothing to help consumers and most importantly doesn't prevent Google from dominated search and ads which is the whole point of the suit in the first place...
It's also strange that the DOJ is letting Apple, MS and Meta off the hook when those businesses clearly engage in anti-competitive practices.
ByteDance has lots of extra cash. I hope DOJ is prepared to stop this from completely backfiring on the public.
I hope the DOJ and American public face the consequences of this incompetent decision.
albeit n=1 sample size, but looking at firefox should give enough indication to what would become of chrome if it gets detached from google.
it is wishful thinking to assume that maintaining a dominant browser can be done if not through subsidizing through other means. as time has shown repeatedly that nobody wants to pay for this directly, it seems like any new ownership would resort to things that would ultimately ruin the browser for everyone.
maybe that is the goal all along, but it is hard to debate whether that is going to be a net positive.
Spin off, maybe. Make it something more akin to The Linux Foundation where a consortium of vested interests donate time and resources. This should also include public funds as part of civic infrastructure and national defense funding. BTW, Mozilla really should be in such a bin too.
I have a feeling this will get worse. I can think of these companies which have the resources to take over Chrome - Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle, Apple and Facebook.
I can't see anybody else. They are all monopolies and is gonna screw it up big time for us consumers.
>I can think of these companies which have the resources to take over Chrome...
Exactly, who on Earth could build a competitor? You're describing the problem!
The ability to take stunning losses each year without worry, knowing that it pays dividends in the value to search, ensures competition can't flourish. So it is anti-competitive.
I am definitely not a google fan here. In fact a privacy nerd. But if they sell it off like this, it will hurt consumers more.
We need to make Google play by the rules so that we can set an example for the rest. Not recreate the same problem with another company so that we will have to do the same after a decade all over again.
Cos at that point, nothing will change for the consumers except the brand logo of the company that is doing crazy things.
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Same.
This seems like a 'lets pretend to hurt google' thing.
No one complained about Chrome.
Am not saying no one complained about it. FLoC aand many many decisions by google proves they are horrible. But I dont think this will solve the problem. This will make it more worse.
I dont think anyone has pointed this out - Apple and Google have long fought against improvements in mobile browsers. Specifically because they threaten the app store monopoly.
Push notifications in PWA was one of the big big ones. Apple blocked it for years and years.
splitting Chrome and Android off from Google will do little to kneecap Google's monopoly power, and will just cause those two projects to fail, with no revenue source. There's no way to make money from Chrome that wouldn't just _suck_ for consumers.
google's monopoly powers come from its ads business, and the data collection network that comes with search and other facilities.
Split crawling/indexing (for search), search itself, and search ads/display ads out into separate businesses. Search has to pay for the index, and others could buy access into the same index. Ads has to pay search for data. etc etc.
Then you'll see some changes.
So what would happen to Chromebooks?
There was an article from Android Authority today that said it's being rebased on Android.
https://www.androidauthority.com/chrome-os-becoming-android-...
this is it ... chromeOS is dead
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So who would set the price in this? If Google just sets something moderately absurd then what?
That’s what they mean by “force” - if this does happen, the government will have a hand in the behind-closed-door negotiations with potential buyers.
Company forced to sell cannot simply set an absurd price to evade regulators, as that would be plainly acting in bad faith
Antitrust and antimonopoly would do so much for the economy over in the USA. We need smaller companies, and more of them. Leads to more innovation, better jobs / distributions of wealth.
My understanding is that google lets anyone freely use chromium, and chrome is just their flavour of chromium with google services integrated ontop of it. Microsoft took chromium and sprinkled ai-enhanced microsoft flavours on top to make edge, which doesn't look like a monopoly. Presumably, microsoft is able to use windows to push edge, and use edge to push bing. If chrome was sold and had the google integration removed I would switch to a vanilla chromium.
I see some argument for google paying firefox to be the default search engine, but is that worse than firefox not existing at all?
In terms of search engines, I think there's just a lack of good competition. The search engines I'm aware of are:
Google: Just works. The only problem is you need to add "reddit" to most searches to get actual real, human-written non-seospam text, but I doubt that's unique to just google.
Bing: I'm greeted with an uncomfortably flashy layout shift, a page full of american news and some popup about AI. They also cover up and censor for the CCP.
Kagi: Their website is literally broken right now and I can't even see the pricing or other pages. I tried safari, chrome, firefox and edge, the hamburger menu doesn't open. Ultimately though, nobody except the kind of audience on HN is going to pay for it. If I told anyone else about a search engine that costs $16/month to use, I'm sure they'd think i'm joking, irregardless of how good it may be.
Yandex: Good for the reverse image searching, but otherwise probably not good to use.
Most of this article is ads, and it's paywalled so I can only read the first couple sentences, so if this is addressed in it I apologise.
> Ultimately though, nobody except the kind of audience on HN is going to pay for it. If I told anyone else about a search engine that costs $16/month to use, I'm sure they'd think i'm joking, irregardless of how good it may be.
What do you want out of an alternative though - Better search or free? Because you can't have both. Ad-based search being free is exactly the reason it is bad. You get what you pay for?
Forget to add Brave search.
Spoiler alert; Elon buys all your web browsers.
Is this why Google is trying to deprecate Chrome OS and merge it into Android? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42175069
Another advantage. Chrome also have 65% market share according to google search, and they get to default the search to Google.com.
They could spin it off and then set up the same kind of pay-for-default-search deal that Mozilla has. This might put just enough distance between the two orgs to satisfy the DOJ without actually changing much.
Thats lovely but I think ultimately not going after the root problem. Going after the root problem would be pushing them to divorce the advertising business from the rest.
Honestly, on a consumer/public interest level, this would be a great thing to see. Google would have to make sure their sites work well on all browsers, since they wouldn't maintain Chrome anymore (or have control over its functionality), Chrome wouldn't get an extra marketing, since Google wouldn't be able to market it to people using its products or services, and there would be far less of an incentive to do things like change addon APIs if it's not the parent company losing money from blocked ads.
The two big questions however are:
1. Who would buy it?
Because if it's someone like Microsoft, then we're back to square 1. It's another IE6/Chrome situation, with conflicting interests and unfair marketing efforts. Personally I can't see Apple, Meta or Microsoft buying Chrome though (or being allowed to under anti monopoly laws), so lord knows who'd end up with it. Mozilla or an open foundation of sorts would be the best option, but I somehow doubt it'll be those either
2. How is it going to be funded?
You ideally don't want the Firefox 'solution' where Google basically pays them to exist, but you can't really sell a browser either. So how it could be standalone and remain a viable venture is anyone's guess.
In this thread:
Chrome and Chrome-related employees of Google worrying about their future compensation under a smaller company.
Don't worry, I'm sure that Chrome / Chromium will be picked up by several big players together, Microsoft is involved via Edge, ... I don't see much changing.
I think that government should limit its interference in the market as much as possible, but Chrome is just so monopoly-oriented from the get go, it's no wonder it will deservedly get split off.
Also, look from the bright side, multiple large players have it in their interest to keep Chrome / Chromium alive, so it will survive the death of Google and it's main ads business.
The sale wouldn't involve Chromium nor the Google employees that work on Chromium or Chrome. But good luck to whoever buys it to keep funding it and acquire the talent to work on it at the speed Google does. Meanwhile, Chromium will go closed source as there's no incentive to keep it open and Google will develop a new closed sourced browser to reclaim its market share.
I would expect them to prevent Google from fielding a browser (any browser, not just Chrome) for some time (several years).
This seems unnecessary. Google's search business is being disrupted along different axes already ... LLMs, voice agents, Apple Intelligence, etc.
the wheels of justice turn slowly and incompetently
Chrome data may be feeding Search Results based on how long people stay at different pages and where they go. Thus removing Chrome may remove a substantial data advantage for search.
Hopefully BlackRock buys it and runs it into the ground.
I believe they'll settle on splitting out Youtube - which I believe makes perfect sense and from a rev/valuation perspective, would be a top 20 company.
I have no idea how this would work either, but I feel like the election makes this more likely to happen, not less, after the amount of rhetoric that Google needs taking down a peg.
Could someone make a new company with the sole purpose of buying Chrome, then just sell Google back the same data they were already collecting?
I can think of other ways to break up Google that don't involve selling Chrome. I'm not sure I understand how selling Chrome would weaken Google.
They're trying to weaken the links between Google Ads and their other products.
Google as Microsoft did years ago will stall until a new administration is in office and reach a settlement for what is effectively a slap on the wrist.
The ideal solution would be if they sell Chrome to a player like Shopify would buy it that actually makes money in a traditional sense.
This doesn't seem helpful... Yet, Microsoft owning Chrome feels better. They are less incentivized to bake in features related to advertising.
Is this sarcasm? Because Windows 11 has a ton of ads and more ads/telemetry are getting added with every update.
It's very weird to see that same point brought up multiple times in this thread. It makes me worried that this all was cooked up my M$ all along (A company which doesn't have any antitrust litigation being brought against them despite putting ads in their latest operating system)
Is this really going to happen in the next 62 days?
No, of course not. The article has the timeline. Hearings in April 2025, decision in August 2025. (Followed by years of appeals, I'm sure.)
In 62 days we will have a completely different Department of Justice that is unlikely to follow the current administration’s approach to these issues, so I’m surprised that they’re even bothering.
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https://archive.ph/bBDQt
Would Google be stopped from selling Chrome to a spin-off of a former Alphabet company?
They should split Chrome, search, ADS, Gmail, Youtube, Cloud and Android at least.
This is an extremely weak remedy. They should force Google to sell YouTube and Android.
Nope, browsers should be developed by countries, together, not by some faceless entity.
the government can't even build us a public toilet at this point
If it's not Google, it will be someone else that dominates the browser market.
A single attempt to separate google and chrome (with all its products) would make the eco-system pointless and swipe away google entirely from the global market.
why not to give Youtube instead tho? (even if the revenue/monetization of every single channel would be heavily impacted)
Android and chrome are necessary for google to live, so Youtube or something else would be better
The point is not to do what is good for Google. The point is to do what is good for users and the market. Separating Chrome from Google's despotic plans such as AMP and blocking ad-blockers so that the browser is independent from their attempts to further control the web would be a good thing.
Just open source it and call it a day - the world isn’t all about money
Ok good and who will then deliver the same or better vode quality, who could?
Serious question: sell it to who? how the new owner will make money out of it?
Maybe Opera? They have profit from providing a web browser: https://investor.opera.com/news-releases/news-release-detail...
If it's sold to Opera I'll stop using it. Old Opera was good, and the people who made it are now making Vivaldi. New Opera promotes cryptocurrencies. :-(
If there is an auction for Chrome maybe the Onion could place a bid?
At this point, I feel like Chrome is more valuable than Search.
Ultimately, how does Chrome itself make any money? As far as I know it doesn't, so the value to Google is ultimately control. The positives include not having to tolerate the whims of Microsoft or Apple or Mozilla or Amazon or beg any of these to implement features or endure microsabotage. The negatives are the temptation to subject everyone else to Google's whims and sabotage competitors.
Good, Google's browser monopoly is a threat to the open web.
This is too complicated Chrome couldn't survive on its own without Google. Chrome is fundamentally a way for users to interface with their products. However it would be better to give regulation to Goolge about information handling.
Mozilla has a chance to do something really funny
Lets hope Apple doesn't buy and Dark Sky it.
Google needs to be punished for what they did to the web.
Arguably the web is still in better position than the app store and the android store. Google's effect on the web is mixed at best, positive overall.
ChatGPT / OpenAI is next in line to revolutionize and ruin the web.
How does one sell an open source project exactly?
Elon and Trumo will buy it and rename it Gold
Facepalm. So I guess this weak cookie cutter approach is what we get for the high water mark of opposition before the imminent corporate coup against constitutionally limited government.
Splitting the surveillance giants into different vertical markets makes no sense at all, and this particular division illustrates it well. We might have had a chance if government, two decades ago, had worked towards creating new specific types of regulations that reflected what competition in the digital realm actually requires - for example prohibiting this now widespread bundling of proprietary client software with hosted services, by mandating that hosted services must only be offered through published APIs. Instead we got some token opposition of "selling off" (checks notes) a web browser that's ultimately "open source".
perplexity's valuation just doubled!
Maybe they are just totally incompetent.
Who will be the buyer? ORCL or IBM?
More likely Microsoft since they are using the Chrome engine in Edge.
selling off chrome seems like a terrible idea for this simple reason
the new owner needs to recoup a
twenty billion dollar investment
I think chrome can become independent company and provide search and usage apis to all the companies like google, msft, apple etc.
you hate to see it.. no wait. love it.
My bet is that this is just lame-duck flailing, and the case will be dropped by the incoming administration.
Alternatively, the Trump admin forces the issue, Google sells off Chrome, and Musk buys it.
How does this affect Chromium?
State owned web browser might be a thing. If it's in the interest of many the state should pay for it. I know what you're thinking, "but that's communism". Well, you can't clench and fart, how they say. This of course adds new problems, like backdooring by 3 letter agencies, corruption, abuse by politicians who exclude certain countries by agenda etc
No, I'm thinking why would I, a Brazilian, use a U.S. web browser.
Yes, you're not wrong, I didn't want to write international gremium , or UN, but the state owned implying owned by the public.
The DOJ are apparently idiots that do not understand tech, let alone anti-trust or monopolies... for instance: I create a useful device that consumers love and use, I sell ads on the device to anyone who will pay, in fact I auction them to the highest bidder... DOJ: you are a monopoly and must sell the device... wtf?
This is just the corporate captured government pretending to do something significant as a performative act for an ignorant public.
The DOJ knows this is pointless. The DOJ knows where Google's profits come from.
The DOJ is pretending that thr public still thinks about the internet in terms of Microsoft/Internet Explorer bundling.
Shame on you DOJ for wasting everyone's time and money.
The shakeup coming to the DOJ next year can't come soon enough.
They all seem to have gotten rather cozy.
eg Just spent a fair bit of time trying to figure out why links in outlook open in edge even if browser is set to chrome. Microsoft chose to just ignore what browser you select (in their OS). It’s just so blatantly monopolistic behaviour
No they won’t.
How likely will Trump DOJ drop this? Consumers have choice, albeit just a handful of credible options. Nobody is forced to use Chrome (unlike MSFT pushing IE back in the day)
Trumpers in the GOP hate Big Tech too, but their concerns are exclusively about censorship of conservatives (for Google) and domestic manufacturing (for Apple). Market competition is not their framework. Gaetz is in that group, but he's also a moron who doesn't care about policy details.
If he's smarter than I think, then expect him to go after Google Search (the alleged source of anti-conservative bias). But if he's as dumb as I think, expect him to support the Chrome breakup, even though it would not advance his goals and wouldn't be coherent antitrust policy, because it would let him claim a "win".
This is so stupid. I am a fan of the books Privacy is Power and The Tech Coup, both books do a great job arguing for privacy and mitigating the harm of tech giants.
What should be done is having strong privacy laws, requirements for encrypting user data, 100% transparency on how user data is sold (require all buyer and seller information to be public), prohibiting sale of user data in most cases, super fine control privacy and security settings.
Google already does a good job on some of these things, and they and other tech giants need to be fenced in by strong privacy and user rights laws.
Corporations are good at still making profits when they have to follow laws that are inconvenient to them.
If members of the US Congress were prohibited by law from stock trading, that might help clean up the logjams preventing better laws.
“Push google”
In what way
Why? What a stupid move. It’s like actively working to drive our largest corporations into the ground so China can replace it with some bullshit.
I think on the contrary, that the number of brilliant people being paid for doing nothing at google is what slows US down compared to china.
Only monopoles like google can afford to burn so much cash. And that's a clear loss for the economy.
> number of brilliant people being paid for doing nothing at google is what slows US down compared to china
Ever read the Transformer paper? Or AlphaGo? You know that two of this year's nobel laureates are from Google? A few years ago the Turing award was won by a Googler?
If they're "burning" money how is that a loss for the economy? They're spending the money on something; effectively stimulating the economy.
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This is terrible news for the web
Why?
This is so stupid. When will we learn some common sense from Milton Friedman?
I bet the Trump people will stop such an effort immediately
Are they going to request this only for Trump to unrequest this?
This farce we call capitalism works really well.
Good.
I mean, it won't matter by mid-2025, but the thought is nice.
One 675 MB tab at a time, please.
I'd like to remind you all.. You were the ones who abandoned Firefox and pushed Chrome and clones ruining Firefox and Mozilla as a whole by market dumbassery in the process.
NOW Microsoft is primed as they have defacto control of the windows chromium branch to go full force Internet Explorer with Edge .. i been seeing the features creep up toward that end. Re-interpretations of 25 year ideas that frankly would have been better then than now.
GOOD WORK TECHIES you just handed the web back to Microsoft. Guess that counts as part of .. some sort of great reset huh?
-Tobin, former Pale Moon Asshole
I'm very surprised by the number of people in this thread who don't seem to understand that monopolies are _very_ bad for consumers.
The EU uses better terms such as "dominant position" which deal with the fact that although a big vendor(s) can fully steer the market and has no meaningful competition while at the same time not "technically" being a monopoly / duopoly etc.
coughs in Nvidia
I should ask a doctor about that, it keeps happening.
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Monopolies are bad. Splitting up monopolies is good for the consumer.
That doesn't mean this makes any sense.
How are they going to separate Chrome from Chromium? If they do, what incentive does Google have to keep maintaining Chromium? Can Google make another new fork of Chromium and start yet another browser? Or are they now banned from making browsers? What company has the resources to maintain Chrome's massive codebase? What profit incentive is there in maintaining Chrome without Google's ad business? What about ChromeOS? How are they going to handle the extensions store and ecosystem? How is this going to impact web standards?
There's just a lot of significant unknowns surrounding this.
in general, I find a little bit distasteful that the only way to build a browser is as a loss leading project for the largest advertising company on the planet
No wonder nobody can compete, loss leaders tend to kill competition as they can be maintained without direct business revenue at all.
The same issue plagues domesticated cats, they don’t need to hunt for food since they have an abundance at home so instead without risk of starvation they are free to hunt all birds in the territory for fun.
There are no browsers left except the artificial ecosystem of Safari. Firefox is not a blip on the radar.
So, everything is chrome and chrome is the web standard. Having a single private company in charge of what is and what is not web standards is a little bit scary, as, like the cat, they don’t really need to see and serve the needs of the environment. They are fed at home.
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> If they do, what incentive does Google have to keep maintaining Chromium?
I agree, this is a problem, but there should be a trivial solution: Users of the browser should pay a small amount of "money" for the product they use all day every day. This money should go into paying to maintain it.
Anything else is perpetuating the Trash Web as it's come to be.
The only reason a "web browser" is "free" (as in beer) is because Microsoft in the 90s was (belatedly) very worried about a world where Netscape held a lot of power, and realized making and giving away a slightly better browser would neutralize this upstart. Everything flowed from that one tactical decision by a couple of execs at MS.
I'd argue that a browser should be a part of the OS or be a paid product, but funding it with ad money from under the same corporate umbrella is a gross practice which promotes things like... Google nerfing adblocker plugins, and Google trying to kill cookies in favor of something only they control. (Although on that last one, by some miracle their hand was stayed and they backed down.)
Of course the DOJ can't ban the idea of a browser funded by ad money (and most are) but separating it from the other side of the business which should have zero say in how it's implemented, that's common sense to me.
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If no one can maintain Chromium, well, that's a pity. On the other hand other projects can catch up then, and maybe the web as a whole can take a breather, without Google pushing more and more "standards". That's actually a good reason to do this. I really couldn't care less about Google's ad business. It is a burden on society.
I think it cannot get much worse than it currently is, with one company dictating the web's future and raking in the money from that. So while there are significant unknowns, probably the result will be something at least a little bit better. I am a little worried about Chrome being only fake sold, to some company that is indirectly controlled by Google again.
> What company has the resources to maintain Chrome's massive codebase? What profit incentive is there in maintaining Chrome without Google's ad business?
As an aside, maybe this is part of the issue. We have been privileged to enjoy some of the most advanced and complex software created for free since basically their inception. Nobody every paid for a web browser.
But then look around the software industry and every software of even remotely similar complexity need to be paid for, or are a kept free due to a convergence of interest of people who can make money out of it (most notably: Linux).
Now, a web browser could be seen exactly the same way Linux is: Many, many, (many!) company makes ton of profit from people have access to a web browser, therefor, they should be fine with paying people to develop it. And in some way, considering that chromium and firefox are open-source, this is what could happen. But it does not really happen. Google is bankrolling both FF and Chromium, and they have basically total control over Chromium development. Who else is even giving remotely even money for 1 FTE for FF or Chromium ? Thing is, no company would do it for Chromium because it is seen as a Google product, so why pay them for something they will do in any case. Company could have financed Firefox, but now that it is the underdog (and that the Mozilla Foundation makes questionable decision), it doesn't seem like a very good investment.
This is in many way crazy to me that almost every tech company heavily really on people having free access to a web browser, yet nobody is really trying to finance one. But I do think it is a political issue, and that, maybe just maybe, separating Chromium from Google would actually give incentive to the rest of the industry to finance the development of a browser that is not directly own by neither of them. Again, some what just like Linux.
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There's an implicit assumption embedded in this comment that the Chromium project is indispensable, whereas I'm unconvinced it's even a net positive at all.
Anyone who follows standards discourse would probably appreciate the prospect of this open source codebase having independent stewards much more than any fears over maintenance resources.
Sounds like a Google problem.
The web existed before Chrome, and will continue to exist afterward.
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> There's just a lot of significant unknowns surrounding this.
That's what happen when you let anomalies like this become the norm. Antitrust actions should have been taken against Google 15 years ago, and at that point it wouldn't have undermined the whole web because back then didn't yet control the entire web (but the trend was clear and that's why action should have been taken).
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Firefox is massively profitable at a fraction of Chrome's marketshare.
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I use Brave which is based off of Chromium just like Chrome, and the experience is great. I’d say I’ve had to go to chrome maybe 3 times in the last year, and it was always for some super complicated SPA.
Whatever decrease we see to our browsing experience will be worth the gains I expect to see from dealing a blow to a monopoly like Google.
The question of who would likely buy it is just as important. I can't help but think that MS would love to have the dominant browser again.
If there's no market for that it will die, simple as.
keeping chrome alive isn't the goal, keeping the web not being at whims of a single company is.
> I'm very surprised by the number of people in this thread who don't seem to understand that monopolies are _very_ bad for consumers.
Bad for consumers, how? Financially? How does that translate to the current situation? The average "consumer" here is paying $0.00 for Google, Chrome, Gmail, Maps, Flights, Docs, Sheets, Chat, Meet, Books, Scholar, Shopping, YouTube, News, Groups, Voice... how are you going to argue that this "monopoly" (?) is bad for consumers? Do you imagine Microsoft or Apple would've created better search, email, news, etc., or that the mom & pop shop down the store would've done that?
I can think of so many other arguments you could use to suggest the current situation is bad, but monopolies are bad for consumers seems like a really tough argument to apply here.
Edit: You need to argue more than "the current situation is bad". Because that in itself does not imply "removing the 'monopoly' would necessarily lead to the better outcome in my imagination." Exhibit A is all the behemoths trying to compete against Google and still offering objectively worse products.
They are not paying $0. They are manipulated into believing they are paying $0. If people were offered the google suite for 'free','you just have to let us siphon 4 liters of blood from you every year', would people still claim the price was 'zero dollars'. Just because you extract the price from your users in a different denomination/method than ordinary dollars, doesn't mean it's 'free'. Precisely because they are not asking for dollars, indicates they are actually extracting value from their users. They are not giving, they are taking, and it is also clear they are taking more than they are giving, given their revenue and profits.
I could see a similar argument being made by plantation owners in the past "we are lodging these guests from africa for FREE", they don't even have to PAY to live in the houses we offer them! There is only the small detail of the activities they will have to do in OUR fields, which will kill them off in 10-15 years, but that is another matter which should not be confused".
"Deals" of the kind google and facebook offer are not to the consumer's advantage. Insisting on not having a facebook account is akin to choosing not to use the paved asphalt roads the society makes available to you. I could "choose" not to have a facebook account, but it would lock me out of effectively both my friends group and my family's daily communication.
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This has the same energy as arguing that gathering your private data to give you more accurate ads does not hurt consumers, it's in fact helping them!
Google has been the one pushing for getting rid of the v2 manifest for browsers extensions, which just so happens to seriously nerf ad blockers. Because so many browsers are forks of Chromium v2 will disappear from a majority of browsers. Meanwhile if you try to use a non-Chrome browser like Firefox a lot of websites are buggy and outright don't work. Opening images in issues broke in GitHub for firefox a year ago and they still haven't fixed it.
You are being *very* naive if you think that Google having this sort of monopolistic power over the web does not hurt consumers.
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Your implication that google services are free is untrue. You are paying with your privacy and data. And the price is such that, if I ever made a better mail service than gmail that openly asked to sell and privately use all your data, nobody would subscribe. You are paying by seeing ads. You are paying by being coerced into a certain ecosystem. You are paying by having one company chose what standards are the de facto web standards of tomorrow. And their main business is selling your data. You are paying by losing access to your data if a company feels like it. etc.
It's very similar to the situation in the nineties where Microsoft used their OS monopoly to push Internet Explorer "for free". You could make the same argument there "now consumers have free access to an internet browser, how is that bad?".
It was bad because it effectively ended innovation in the browser space for decades by pushing Netscape out of business (and discouraging others from entering that space).
Similarly, many consumers are unaware of alternative search engines, if Chrome pushes Google as the default. This kills innovation and puts more power in Google's hands as to what parts of the web get promoted.
Many a business owner can tell you that when Google changes their search ranking it can have an effect on the bottom line. This is also bad for consumers, as only bigger businesses which have the dough to pay for many Google ads get returned in a search.
> Do you imagine Microsoft or Apple would've created better search, email, news, etc., or that the mom & pop shop down the store would've done that?
Yes, enthusiastically yes. With the exception of maybe search, products like gmail, docs, and sheets are basic projects tossed out into the ecosystem for free to suck up all the oxygen for minimal dev cost. How is an upstart supposed to compete with a better mail/doc/spreadsheet app if the basic use case is covered for free by some loss leader funded from a different vertical?
Most of these classes of apps have been stagnant for decades.
The most obvious example is malvertising.
Chrome is pushing ManifestV3 with extreme prejudice and Youtube pushes ever more malvertising by the day. Why can Google do this?
Because there is no competition.
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you seems too afraid to lose your big tech salary
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Splitting monopolies is good.
On other hand splitting "free" product is somewhat questionable. When the competitor don't have exactly viable business model. Pushing for something that will clearly in not too distant future kill the split product is not helpful.
What if this browser killed lots of other viable browsers because it was "free" (yet supported by and supporting a monopoly)?
You never get to compare the products that never got to exist.
related, I think google supported firefox to have a "viable" competitor to chrome and prevent monopoly scrutiny.
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This exactly. An independent Chrome’s best path toward financial sustainability is closing down the source code and selling everyone’s browsing data to the highest bidder.
We all like to have a high minded ideal of some kind of wonderful fully independent for-the-good-of-society entity stewarding Chrome, but history has shown us that’s not what will happen.
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The product is never free, it’s just you’re not the one paying for it. This setup prevents new entrants from competing just the same.
[edit] the same way zero rating certain data traffic is still a net neutrality violation.
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> Pushing for something that will clearly in not too distant future kill the split product is not helpful.
They’re not considering this because of Chrome’s market share, but because of Google’s power in the search engine market. Indirectly killing Chrome may be acceptable if it makes the market for search engines more competitive.
Having said that, I don’t think it will matter much as long as Apple and, in particular (because they also have a search engine) Microsoft can ship browsers with preconfigured search engines with their OSes, but we will see.
I think there are 2 products. Google Chrome and Chromium. For one of them: Good riddance! For the other: Well, actually you cannot really kill that, because anyone can fork it or contribute patches, so if the world thinks some change is needed, the world can make it happen. There is no need to be worried about the project. We could also put it under a copyleft license that obligates anyone to contribute modifications and we will be fine, if some company decides to fork it.
Chrome is like a service not a product it is effectively Google installing a window so you can see it's fresh baked goods. It isn't something they should break up because it isn't something that inherently makes money and nor should it.
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Three hours a year of nagging window in rich countries will provide all the financing chrome, the web browser, will ever need.
We are talking about the most advertised, most installed most used program. Asking users to pay will do more good than harm
So you‘re saying Chrome can only survive because it feeds Alpahabet‘s ad service?
Seems like a good reason for a product to die.
Most of Google is "free" products that feed into its surveillance advertising platform. That's the problem. How are you supposed to break that sort of thing up without destroying most of the products? They were never designed to work independently from the network.
>monopolies are _very_ bad for consumers
Why? "Big companies bad" are one of those fundamental truthiness we are all supposed to believe for some reason but as a European I wish we had more US/Chinese-style megacorps who have dominant positions in some fields that allows them to innovate or provide free/cost-cutting products in other niches.
Maybe we should reconsider what we consider monopolies in the 21st century. I'm already using ChatGPT and Perplexity more than Google.
It follows from a few premises. The point of creating/allowing private companies to compete in a market and profit from doing so is to encourage them to innovate via competitive pressure. If you just wanted to produce well-understood goods or infrastructure then the most efficient way to do that is to pool resources and have the State do it, because they don't need to make a profit and, if not totally dysfunctional, are accountable to the people. If you let private companies consolidate power and influence then they largely escape competitive pressure and can streamline operations to maximize profits. That is, they benefit from the same efficiency the State does, but capture more of the value and remain unaccountable to the people, existing only to enrich their owners.
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Free products are not the consequence of megacorps existence. Free products exist, because you are the product. Big companies also doesn't necessarily mean monopolies.
Splitting off Chrome doesn't make any sense as a stand alone business. Anyone who could buy Chrome would immediately cause other anti-trust issues. This solution for Google is probably bad for consumers.
What the DoJ should be pursuing is having Google divest YouTube. Now we're talking real change.
And if they sold off Youtube, we'd have 500 comments saying, "This is a bad idea. They can't make a profit. They should divest from Chrome."
Splitting Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, etc up all at once and into multiple separate pieces each would be great for consumers. But that's a huge undertaking, and the bigger the changes required, the less likely they are to happen. Taking it one step at a time, with the first step being Chrome and Google search (two products that strongly push users of one to use the other) being split up, is better than no progress at all.
At the very least, the biggest force in killing adblockers (Google gradually gutting them in Chrome) will have fewer means to kill them in browsers. That's a win for consumers.
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Firefox is massively profitable. Why couldn't Chrome be?
Goggle would compete with other search engines for being the default search. So this would have knock on effects on search as well.
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It's a balance. If you would dissolve anything that slightly looks like a monopoly, then there would be lower incentive for innovation. Even though there are many things wrong with venture capital, they do occasionally produce useful companies. Also let's not forget that Bell Labs was sponsored by a monopoly too. So I'm not saying monopolies are great. I'm saying that it's important to find a balance.
It's a balance but IMO there should be no realistic concept of "winning the market". If it gets to that point then sure the company is probably making a lot of money but they also have the power to squeeze as much as they can. The irony of posting this on a forum originating from VC culture does not escape me.
This very site is an advertising arm of a venture capital fund. What did you expect? That capitalists condemn capitalism?
Seeing for years the views expressed here about Meta & TikTok, I think at least some of this must come down to a gap in understanding of web technologies.
Meta & TikTok decidedly don't have monopolies, yet still come under fierce scrutiny for their pervasive handling of consumer behaviour & data. What seems to be less evident to people is that Google's monopolies give them far greater reach in these areas than either of the other two. The majority of that reach is entirely invisible to most: I think if this negative impact was more visible it might drive home the downside of these particular monopolies.
How is Chrome or Google a monopoly?
Not sure if this is an innocent comment or not but I'll answer earnestly.
They're not, technically. They're hegemons, which doesn't make them much better. In fact, I'd argue the situation is worse.
Chrome predominantly owns the web at this point. There are few contenders, and making a new browser is a lot of work (see the Verso browser). Google has the arguably unearned luxury of dictating what APIs and protocols the nebulous "web" should use, can throw a bunch of money at adding them quickly, and leave competitors struggling to keep up, effectively buying chrome's guaranteed superiority.
"But there are standards committees!" Yes, but it really doesn't matter when Chrome either uses its own APIs privately on its sites[0] or just adds new APIs without any committee consideration for people to use and fall in love with and demand that other vendors add them (or something similar, such as proposing a great idea at the committee, it's accepted, and the other vendors lagging for months or even years - see WebGPU as an example).
One might think "it's just a browser". Yes, but browsers are -for better or for worse - the global defacto for sending and receiving almost all of our sensitive data. Even "desktop apps" like Whatsapp, Signal, and Bitwarden all either use or have used Chromium to display their contents (via Electron).
Much of the community has asserted Google owns the web at this point, and I tend to agree. It's very, very hard for smaller vendors to have much of a day these days without Google getting theirs, too.
[0] https://x.com/lcasdev/status/1810696257137959018
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I think we can think in terms of market share.
Google (the search engine) has a market share of over 85% worldwide. [0]
Google therefore controls what can be found on the Internet for 85% of search engine users. Recent updates, or Core Updates, have demonstrated how easy it is for Google to put businesses out of business by removing their visibility. [1]
It seems to me that this is a problem.
Ditto for Chrome, which has +60% market share [2]. A failed or deliberate update could make a website inaccessible to 60% of the population.
[0] https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share [1] https://retrododo.com/google-is-killing-retro-dodo/ [2] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share
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Monopoly is probably not the right word. "Trust" (as in "anti-trust") is maybe better, but I'm not sure the last gilded age really had a perfect analogy to what's been happening in the tech services sector.
The problem is these sprawling companies who make so many interrelated services and can suppress competition in one area (browsers, e-mail, video-over-the-internet) due to extreme profits in another area (ads).
Allow me to break this down:
* Google effectively holds a monopoly of the browser market (Chrome). Apple (Safari) only exists because of vendor lock-in, and Mozilla (Firefox) is a vassal state; all "other" browsers are Chrome.
* Google shares a duopoly of the mobile OS market with Apple (Android vs. iOS).
* Google holds a monopoly of the video streaming market (Youtube).
* Google holds a monopoly of the malvertising market (Adsense, Doubleclick, et al.).
* Google effectively holds a monopoly of the web search market (Google Search).
* Google holds the vast majority of the email market (Gmail).
* Google is the absolutely dominant player in the consumer cloud market (Google Drive).
* Google shares a duopoly with Apple in the cloud photo market (Google Photos vs. iCloud Photos).
* Google shares a duopoly with Microsoft in the consumer office software market (Google Docs vs. Office 365).
* Google shares a duopoly with Apple in the digital wallet market (Google Pay/Wallet vs. Apple Pay).
I can go on, but with this being said let me ask you: Why the hell should Google not be split and cut apart nine ways to Sunday?
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The Web is basically ChromeOS nowadays, if we ignore iDevice for a moment.
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I'm not claiming they are. But given their current market share and its trajectory, they're marching towards one. Furthermore, it's a clear mechanism for further monopolizing the search engine market (I'm more comfortable calling google a monopoly on this front). I'm a staunch capitalist and believe in the innovative power of competition, and monopolies ground that whole machine to a halt.
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I would expect the monopoly referred here to be the government.
I'm not surprised at all, because I've used AirPods and AirDrop on an iPhone and MacBook.
You have to have a much deeper understanding of tech to understand why they're bad, yet the examples of why they're good are obvious when a consumer stays within one ecosystem.
Google has a lot of employees and suppliers who have vested interest in their market dominance
There is no monopoly.
There are a lot of other browsers.
A lot of people use them.
Most people use one of them.
They chose to do it. If you ask them, they think it's good.
But no.
There is a monopoly.
It is bad for you.
Only we the State can save you from it.
A lie repeated a thousand times becomes truth.
No, most user don't choose. Android doesn't provide a menaingful way to choose to the users, it pushes you to choose Google. That's a big difference. It would be a choice if, when you start android for the first time, it asks you which browser you want to use, in a list where all browsers are shown equal; not "hey you'll use chrome and you can change later any time you want". Ideally, it would provide an explnanation of each browser. That would be a better way to propose a choice.
Would it make users smarter about their choice ? Probably not. But at least, they could smell there is an actual choice.
Monopolies tends to maintain users in ignorance. This way, although they can look elsewhere, they won't feel the urge to do so.
Users must be helped to make their own choice, not guided to make the monopoly's choice. And that must be done before the choice is made.
As long as there will be monoplies, this tension will exist and people like me will continue to explain that the State is the best way to push the balance in favor of those who don't get the importance of the choice.
The problem is not that there is a dominant player. The problem is the dominant player uses ignorance and subtle strategies to make sure users saty with it.
> There is no monopoly. There are a lot of other browsers. A lot of people use them.
There is market dominance: Chrome has 65%, Safari has 18% but that’s because of iOS, and the few others have the rest. It’s false to say there are "a lot" of other browsers when nobody can enter the space anymore.
> They chose to do it. If you ask them, they think it's good.
Most people don’t choose their browser, they just take whatever comes preinstalled. Even then, Google pushes you to use their browser every time you use their services: I know a lot of non-tech people who use Chrome on iOS not because they chose to, but because they got a pop-in on Google that told them to do so.
> It is bad for you.
The current situation is indeed bad for the consumer, even if it’s not a monopoly per se.
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Splitting up is good except when it is bad.
In UK you have to subscribe to so many channels just to watch football. Because apparently this would stop monopolies.
Monopolies are not inherently bad. They are only bad when they abuse that position to retain a monopoly or allow a decline in product quality.
There's a very vocal subset of people here that believe monopolistic entities arise due to how much better they are than their competition, and thus deserve to be monopolies.
The very same users believe that such companies aren't "bad" yet, but in some kind of intermediate stage between successful startup and evil MEGAcorp.
I don't know. I think it's the mix of nostalgia, and being too invested in their ecosystem/products. Fanboying, basically.
When Microsoft did it 25 years ago, it was bad. When Google does it now, it's not bad.
The vast majority of people just like their free stuff and don't go on hacker news to discuss it
oh no, please don't give me any more free stuff, Google!
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Trump DOJ is gonna be very friendly to PAC donations.
100% bet, Trump gonna be easy on corporations that kiss his butt.
Whatever it takes to stop nonesense like this.
Chrome??? Dude. THAT plus:
* Android
* Search
* Advertising
* YouTube
Smash it into tiny pieces. Then the same for Apple and Facebook.
We've been stalled for technological progress for 15+ years. Tear down the giants holding us back.
How is Google holding back android or YouTube?
Apple will never be broken. Most of these folks use Apple and see it as the good guy versus Google, plus it would impact their daily lives.
Also once they see the mess separating Google would do, theyd leave apple in tact
Do that in a simulator and see how the world starts to tear apart
I love every moment of it.
Outstanding news!
If your goal is to reduce the influence Google has on the browser market is this really the best move? From a practical standpoint I find it hard to believe.
While I agree that monopolies era bad for consumers and that the position Chrome currently have is pretty much a monopoly I don't think this particular move would be good for consumers in the short and mid time-frame. Maybe in the long run this is the correct decision, but this will cause quite a lot of pain for quite a lot of time.
I think one of the ways this could backfire against the users is that removing Chrome from Google will create a 'power vacuum' in the web standards. Currently Chrome is this de facto standard, for better of for worse. Removing that can create a situation where we have a couple of competing standards.
In my opinion the problem with this kind of competition is that making browsers will become significantly harder, because now instead of just copying Chrome you will have to implement several standards. And this is why I expect the web experience to become significantly worse in the short term.
And you know what will happen when the web experience degrades? Every company will push their own app. And even more experiences/services will be locked behind an android/ios app with the excuse "we want to deliver a great experience to our users". And this is WAY worse for users than the monopoly Google has in the browser.
Maybe a better solution would be for the US government to create/adopt a web standard and create a rule that says "if you want to sell to the US government you need to be fully compliant with standard XYZ". This way you create a goal that everyone can work towards.
As far as I know this is how the government handle this situation in the medical sector, where they have HL7 to create the relevant standards. And I'm fully aware that this brings a lot of problems to the table. The first one is that definition of standards for the web will become a political topic, and this is never a good sign. However, I think this is really the only option if we want the web to be a place with fair competition.
Thank goodness the era of ridiculous anti-trust is coming to an end.
Every "normie" knows about edge, it comes with your new Windows. no one uses it, people know quality when they see it and everyone prefers chrome. If there was a better browser we'd use it.
The default should definitely be: Companies should be incentivized to create great products.
If the incentives include, get 90% market share, that's great! No one would put it the amount of work Google has if the incentives were small
That really does not come as a surprise and that was totally expected. [0] As soon as Chrome started to become more of a platform (for their extension API) with many other companies using it in their own browsers, it tells you why they had >90% of the search market for years.
This is what the folks at Google have all feared and why they started to run away from the company, spurring up 'Google' competitors (including Microsoft & OpenAI) all bringing it down.
Google will appeal and fight back and either way will survive. But we have given Sundar enough time to turn it around and it's time for him to leave and a wartime CEO to step up.
It's possible as Sataya Nadella did this for Microsoft. Google needs to do the same.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37116034
Who would buy Chrome and why would they buy it? And why would they be trusted to not do something nefarious?
I’m guessing Meta would like to buy it. Probably for nefarious data sucking reasons tho
Anyone with a search engine or equivalent product to sell that is not a monopoly.
You really like making predictions about the future
Yes I do. Usually they turn out to be true. [0]
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/20/technology/google-search-...