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Comment by afavour

6 days ago

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.