Comment by keepamovin
1 year ago
At the risk of smoting from the Google Gods ( I should be careful, I make a product that depends on their browser ), I think the best thing that should happen to Chrome, if it's going to be sold off - is it becomes a "public utility" and basically is a model for actually publicly stewarded open development. Like maybe what the Mozilla Foundation should have been, like what many actual C-based open source OS projects seems to be (tho I'm no expert).
Why? Because it's essentially the defacto way/portal/thing to access to the biggest source of information humanity has: the web.
It's too big and important for any 1 company - tho saying that, I'm okay with Windows being owned by Microsoft which is (was) basically the same thing in a way.
My unsolicited advice to Google: sacrifice it, focus on AI. To all the people on the Chrome team? They should be financially taken care of, and should be part of the foundation that develops it if they want. The foundation should not be controlled by Alphabet, but should be truly public.
This is all probably too vague and unspecified for you lot...but it is just an idea.
> I'm okay with Windows being owned by Microsoft which is (was) basically the same thing in a way
Windows is much worse by most metrics. I can't fork Windowsium and build (and sell) my own fully-compatible, 99.999999% R&D paid for by Microsoft, OS.
> This is all probably too vague and unspecified for you lot...but it is just an idea
It is a bit vague :) In that: who pays for it? Who decides what features are in or out? Public utilities are generally what we make things when they're feature complete and the only challenge is rolling it out as cheaply as possible. But it feels like web browsers have a way to go yet. There's nothing stopping the US government (or any government) from bulding their own browser off Chromium right now. Nothing needs selling or splitting.
I think the control should be in the hands of the public. Stewarded by a public organization with government funds. What do you think?
> I think the control should be in the hands of the public. Stewarded by a public organization with government funds. What do you think?
I don't know. I think today the EU could set up EUBrowser, a fork of Chromium, and start work. Almost all the hard work has been done by OSS contributions. Google engineers, and Google-funded things such as Firefox. They could live off that comfortably while providing a more locked-down browser if they liked.
A more meaningful, less parasitic option would take longer: the EU (or whomoever) writes a browser from scratch. Then they could decide exactly what goes into it, and have independent input into standards etc.
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Good luck paying engineers to work on chrome on the GS pay scale, subject to the whims of Elon Musk's DOGE.
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>This is all probably too vague and unspecified for you lot...but it is just an idea.
Forgive me for being blunt, but what idea? If the question is who is supposed to fund Chromium and Firefox going forward then you haven't actually offered any ideas.
It's okay. Yes, it is just an idea, specifically of making it public. I think the government should pay for it. What do you think?
Governments are unreliable (e.g. USAID or recently disappeared government datasets) and have even more conflicts of interest than Google itself (e.g. debates around encryption). Many people don't trust their government.
Commercial funding is not necessarily more reliable in general. Google keeps shutting down stuff all the time. But in this particular case, the commercial interest is so strong that funding is secure.
In my opinion, governments should focus on natural monopolies (taxation, violence, justice, transport infrastructure, water, etc) and on areas where there is broad consensus for a public option (health, schools, etc).
Where governments fund random stuff that few people understand the importance of, there is a big risk of the whole thing getting DOGEd or starved to stagnation. The government would never put up a fight against Apple relegating the web platform to the status of a glorified document viewer.
In my opinion, the status quo is flawed but the alternatives are worse.
If the court decides that Google must "divest" Chrome, they will have to say what that means for an open source project. If it basically comes down to Google being banned from controlling the default search engine setting in any web browser, then their main incentive for funding Chrome would be gone.
If that happens, the only solution I see is a joint "Chrome Foundation" effort funded by a number of corporations with a less direct interest in the viability of the web, i.e the Linux model. But this would be very disruptive. I fear that browser development would be aimless and start to stagnate. Other oligopolists would quickly take advantage of the ensuing power vacuum.
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so every 4 years a new group can shift the priorities completely and what should be a technical challenge becomes a political one, dominated by those with money. I'm sure before long you would be required to input your government ID to use it. I am not sure a worse idea is even possible.
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Agree with another comment that I absolutely do not want the US government running chrome at this point.
Maybeee the EU but we are talking about an American ruling.