Comment by kittikitti

6 days ago

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.

6 comments

kittikitti

Reply
richard_fey2  6 days ago

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.

geor9e  6 days ago

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

andrewflnr  6 days ago

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.

  • wmf  6 days ago

    Imagine if Google isn't allowed to pay Chrome Inc for traffic acquisition so Chrome changes the default search engine to Bing and now Bing is a monopoly because 90% of browsers default to Bing.