Comment by 43920
7 months ago
This has already been discussed extensively in prior threads, but the biggest question is, how does a spun-off Chrome get funded?
Chrome/Firefox/Safari all cost hundreds of millions of dollars a year to maintain. Currently, Safari and Firefox both make essentially all their revenue through default search agreements. Chrome, Edge, and now Brave are produced by companies that also own the search engines, so they're essentially a loss-generating product, that exist because they cancel out distribution costs that Google and Microsoft would otherwise have to pay other browsers.
But the DOJ order is also asking to ban payments between search engines and browser makers: > As detailed in Section IV, the PFJ prohibits Google from providing third parties something of value (including financial payments) in order to make Google the default general search engine or otherwise discouraging those third parties from offering competing search products
With that revenue gone, the only real options to fund a browser are:
* Directly charge users for it. This is effectively a non-starter, because the vast majority of people aren't willing to pay for it.
* Insert ads or sell user data - users also hate this, it's probably not legal in the EU, and it may not be legal in most of the US in the future either.
* Use the browser as a platform to push some product that does make money - a non-Google search engine? A social network? An LLM interface?
Alternatively, a narrow reading of the proposed order is that this only applies to Google. In that case, perhaps Bing or OpenAI takes over all the distribution agreements and becomes the top search engine. Whether that's better for consumers seems fairly questionable.
The most likely answer is that it will take the Linux model, with a foundation put together to fund Chrome's development. Then all of the parties interested in people having access to the Web, including Google, will have an incentive to fund this without requiring it to push their specific products.
Chrome currently has far more paid full time engineers than the linux kernel does. I struggle to see how they get paid - except again, by charging search engines to be the default browser or something.
Chrome does a lot of things. I know there are downsides and many people don't agree, but I think overall the browser/internet experience would benefit from simpler browsers that don't move so fast.
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Google can keep engineers working on Chrome employed without having control over Chrome.
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I am not sure that is a good thing. Do we really need so many people working on it, or adding more and more features?
IMO more engineers = more bloat, rather than more engineers = a better product.
> Chrome currently has far more paid full time engineers than the linux kernel does.
Are you sure? Do you know how many people work on Chrome? 2,000 people contributed to Linux 6.12. only a small portion of those will be full time but it's still likely many hundred full-time-equivalent engineers.
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That may be, but Firefox certainly doesn't, and it's not that far from Chrome in terms of feature set, particularly in terms of supported web standards, or security. So I don't feel that a smaller Chrome team would be a catastrophe for Chrome.
At the same time, if every company that actively make money from the web where to pitch in, we would have the most funded foundation in the world.
One minor nit, it will be all parties interested in influence over future web standards and their eventual implementation.
Right, those would have the biggest incentive. But I'm sure good fundraisers will be bale to even get some large companies that aren't engaging in the standards at any level to throw some money to support a standard web browser, if they can convince everyone that without this there won't be a good way for people to access their web sites.
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There's always the Opera model: attempt to sell inserted ads, fail, sell it to a Chinese holding company, and have future development funded by the Russians. What could possibly go wrong?
Can you please share a details about the part related to Russians? I used to be big fan of Opera browser, but don't follow theirs recent news
Opera has always been relatively very popular in Eastern Europe. I don’t know if there is any clandestine Russian operation behind it (unlikely), there are just many comments and reviews about Opera and its extensions in Russian language.
> Currently, Safari and Firefox both make essentially all their revenue through default search agreements.
Safari is funded by Apple's hardware sales. It can afford to develop its own browser because it's table stakes for devices and gives Apple the ability to do deeper integrations and targeted performance optimizations. The search revenue is the cherry on top.
> Alternatively, a narrow reading of the proposed order is that this only applies to Google.
That doesn't seem like a narrow reading, but the only possible one. How could the order be applying to deals strictly between companies neither of which was the party of the lawsuit? That doesn't seem like anything that could possibly be within the court's powers.
> Chrome/Firefox/Safari all cost hundreds of millions of dollars a year to maintain.
The reason? Infinite[1] complexity. To Google that is a feature: as long as they can outspend competitors, they can control the complexity in their favor.
The question should not be "how do we fund development of operating system in a trench coat?", but rather "how much do we actually need to fetch and render HTML?" and the answer is in the ballpark of single digit FTEs.
In theory, we should expect browser complexity to converge on available funding, with the upside that webpages created two hours ago would continue working. In reality, some foundation, funded by majority chromium supporters, will be set up and distribute compensation for Google employees working on open-source Chromium "totally on their free time, mr. prosecutor".
[1]: https://xkcd.com/285/
Parity with other application platforms demands more than just showing static HTML. Imagine the world with no XMLHTTPRequest because Microsoft wasn't allowed to innovate on the web.
> "how much do we actually need to fetch and render HTML?" and the answer is in the ballpark of single digit FTEs
Sorry, but we're not going back to Lynx...
> the DOJ order is also asking to ban payments between search engines and browser makers
The remedy document does not ask this.
What you cite after "> As detailed in..." does not ban any and all payments from a search engine (or only from Google) to a browser. The remedy doc is based on the antitrust case's finding that Google violated U.S. Law by abusing its monopoly through "tying", and in particular by forcing partners to lock out competitors through exclusive (default search only) deals.
This does not mean Google cannot pay for search traffic, and indeed Google has a relatively open, albeit lower-monetizing, system called Adsense for Search, which allows a toolbar to monetize -- but not a browser via queries entered into its address bar (aka Omnibus). Bing does many API deals, or did (it hiked prices last year). Brave has an API business (not yet an ads feed, just search).
I'm having a bit of a hard time imagining what kind of payment Google could make under this structure. Do you have something in mind?
I agree that if Google was paying a browser for something other than default search placement, that would likely fall outside the scope of the proposal. But historically, default placement = traffic, and is also the only leverage the browsers have - ie if Google wasn't the default, Google would only get users who explicitly selected it, and if Google knows all of their users are actively selecting them already, they have no reason to pay extra for that traffic.
API access seems like a good alternative way for Google to monetize, but it doesn't solve the problem of providing funding for browsers (except in your case, since you're combining a search engine and browser in one company). Or am I missing something?
Yes, you are missing how browsers without search engines could do fair and non-discriminatory pay for traffic deals with Google in a remedy that follows the spirit and letter of Sherman-Clayton and Robinson-Patman.
Again, the document does not say "no payment of any kind under any terms".
Fair and non-discriminatory (standard rate card, open ad confirmation/reporting tech using least-tracking and first party scripts, no native Chromium tracking crap) search and search ads feed API deals would let 1000 browsers bloom.
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Spellcorrekt got me: "Omnibox".
Unfortunately the real answer is:
* Only operating system vendors can ship web browsers. (But not Google.)
The USG in general seems to love giving Apple more monopoly power. This will effectively constrain browser development to just Apple and Microsoft, since as you note, the DOJ is also trying to regulate Firefox out of existence; and Apple has huge incentives to simply pause browser feature development (and has been dragging its feet on Safari for years).
Incredibly, this will also hamstring Android even further, since its parent company can't even make a web browser for it anymore! Only Apple, the Biden administration's favorite company, can do that kind of thing.
Seriously, first Apple's App Store is declared not a monopoly while the Play Store is, despite Android allowing alternative stores while iOS doesn't. Now Google is forbidden from developing web browsers while Apple is free to continue monopolizing browser engines on iOS and holding back the web from competing with native apps?
> Seriously, first Apple's App Store is declared not a monopoly while the Play Store is, despite Android allowing alternative stores while iOS doesn't.
1)Because Apple didn't conspire with (potential) competitors to Google Play - both cellular providers and device manufacturers - bribing them with payments and revenue sharing agreements on condition they not pre-load their own app stores, thus maintaining a monopoly that caused injury to Epic. Motorola is a competitor to Google Play. F-droid and whatever other alternative app stores are out there, are not. https://mashable.com/article/google-epic-antitrust-play-stor...
Nobody, and I mean nobody, considers "you can install non-play-store apps if you go deep into menus, click past scary warnings, and the app developer will not get access to a huge swath of APIs and toolkits" to be "competition" to Google Play.
2)The matter in Epic v. Google was about Epic's app being removed after they added in-app payments - forced to use Google for in-app payments because of the monopoly Google was actively maintaining - not "Google won't let us run an alternative app store."
3)Apple was not a defendant in Epic v Google. That was a separate case. In Epic v Apple, Epic lost on all but one of their claims - Apple was found to have violated California's Unfair Competition Law in barring app developers from "steering" users to purchase content in places other than in-app (and thus through Apple's payment processing and their 30% cut etc.)
Maybe the next time you can't figure out why something is the way it is, your reaction should be "I should try to learn about why this is, see what experts in this incredibly complicated field have to say on the matter, or at least google it and read major tech industry news coverage" instead of forming an incredibly strong opinion rooted in complete and total ignorance of the matter at hand.
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> Directly charge users for it. This is effectively a non-starter, because the vast majority of people aren't willing to pay for it.
Chrome already has paid offerings - chrome enterprise and educational products. It's quite common for enterprise customers to subsidize free tiers.
Advertising deal with google/others to pay for full time staff along with volunteers?
And the underlying chromium will be maintained by all the browser companies that are using it
> This has already been discussed extensively in prior threads, but the biggest question is, how does a spun-off Chrome get funded?
How about... just don't fund them and let it "die"?
Everybody is using Chromium -- Microsoft, Google, Opera, Electron, etc.. Some of them will step up and fork chromium.
Or just don't fork Chromium at all and Google can make the upstream their recommended browser.
Display ad insertion would be legal and there are definitely ways to do it all client side.
Just like scraping the entire Web for AI training is totally fair use? Enjoy ten years of lawsuits to prove it. Web sites would never tolerate ads being inserted that don't pay them.
> Directly charge users for it. This is effectively a non-starter, because the vast majority of people aren't willing to pay for it.
I would gladly pay for Firefox, but I only found a way to donate to Mozilla, which also finances many other things that I am not interested in.
> Insert ads or sell user data - users also hate this, it's probably not legal in the EU, and it may not be legal in most of the US in the future either.
Adds are legal, but "selling user data" is more tricky. Many news websites are currently paywalling access to their website unless a monthly fee is paid. As far as I know, there has been no ruling yet whether that is legal.
> Use the browser as a platform to push some product that does make money - a non-Google search engine? A social network? An LLM interface?
Firefox tried to sell a VPN product that way, but it was not priced competitively.
The same way ff does. Google will pay to be the main search engine and to ensure all their Web apps continue to work performantly.
Google will be prohibited from doing that under the DOJ's proposal.