Comment by mattlondon
1 year ago
So they sell Chrome today and create Ghrome tomorrow?
I can't see Chrome surviving as a standalone product - where is the revenue? I am sure someone will buy it and try to create some "premium" version, but ultimately it will wither and die I expect.
If the remedy doesn't forbid them from creating Ghrome tomorrow, and for many years after, then the remedy is seriously flawed. Somehow I doubt that all the people at DOJ working on this lacked your insights and failed to consider that outcome.
Why should the remedy prevent them creating a new product and start again from zero? If people choose to install and use it - like they did for chrome - then that is not monopolistic behaviour, it is people making a choice.
Is this about breaking Google from a popular browser, or just about punishing Google for offering services people find useful?
It feels to me that it is more about punishing Google than about chrome. Apple and Microsoft seem to be able to get away with wat worse with their browsers - literally every time i use my win11 laptop it is nagging me to use edge or warn me that I should change my default browser to use edge or whatever. Apple won't even let you use another browser at all. But that is somehow fine and allowed?
I assume Oracle will buy it and start threatening to change APIs and then sell a enterprise version
- Google pays Firefox ~$500M/year for 2.5% market share, 65% market share should get a healthy annual payout for default search status.
- A pure focus on web browser monetization could lead to some interesting enterprise options. Presumably there'll be a lot of attempts to leverage Chromium, and an aggressive fork at some point.
- As AI proliferates, can they pull additional revenue by getting revshare from subscription AI products, alongside SEM? Or even revshare?
This could also change the calculus for Apple building a search engine. If they could get an independent Chrome to sign on, with some data sharing provisions to help with development, they'd have a huge leg-up.
Alternatively, maybe they try to create a fusion of search results and AI from a variety of providers, so they can monetize SERPs themselves.
Revenue seems incredibly strong. My question would be whether they could get back to aggressive product execution, given the size of the codebase.