Comment by abirch
1 year ago
I agree with you. Of all the remedies to address Google's "monopoly" this seems to the most bizarre.
My question is if Google has to divest from Chrome, would they be able to build a new web browser? In the article it said that they'd need approval for any new joint venture, collaboration, or partnership with any company that competes with Google in search or in search text ads.
It makes no mention of web browsers.
> My question is if Google has to divest from Chrome, would they be able to build a new web browser?
I'm not a lawyer, and didn't read the verdict, but your query is very Hacker News. Justice is not code. If Google is forced to divest from Chrome, it of course means it can't turn around and make the Google Dhrome browser. If Google did, they'd be sued for ignoring the verdict.
There court hasn't set a remedy to its verdict yet. From the article
The proposal, filed Friday afternoon, says that Google must “promptly and fully divest Chrome, along with any assets or services necessary to successfully complete the divestiture, to a buyer approved by the Plaintiffs in their sole discretion, subject to terms that the Court and Plaintiffs approve.” It also would require Google to stop paying partners for preferential treatment of its search engine.
Think of it like MySQL and then MariaDB. So if Google sells Chromium to say Saleforce (they seem to buy everything) then Chrome is no longer Google's. Google would have complied with the verdict.
What does it mean to sell Chromium? Chromium code is Copyright The Chromium Authors. It contains a substantial amount of code not written by Google, which isn't Google's to sell.
I suppose Google could sell the rights to their parts of the codebase, possibly the rights to future Googler contributions, admin rights to the repo, domains, trademarks, CI, hardware labs, and maybe some other things I'm forgetting... but in terms of the tech being developed and shipped, there isn't really anything substantive to sell.
You're right in the short term but look how quickly the required outcomes from United States v. Microsoft Corp were relaxed and eventually ignored.
The difference between that case and the Google one now is that Microsoft was forced to sell nothing. It was a pyrrhic victory for the DOJ that comforted Microsoft.
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The only reason Google is trying to take away cookies is because they make you log into Chrome which gives you all their browsing data anyway and probably anything you type. So maybe not having a browser controlled by Google would be good.