IMHO, the real issue with Google isn't the control of the web browser, but the complete vertical integration of the ad space. Divest Google of its position as the ad broker (i.e., unwind its acquisition of DoubleClick), and prohibit any sort of privileged data flow from Google to ex-Google Ads, and you'd probably have a more viable solution than the poking DoJ is trying to do right now.
Why? Google develops ad-supported software, they run their own ad placement service for it, and they allow others to use that service to run ads on their own sites. I think there's a bit of a conflict of interest between running the website ranking service and running an ad service that ranked websites can choose to use, but that's minor compared to also controlling the browsing platform.
If Google started ranking sites that use AdSense higher than other sites, you could probably prove that in court fairly easily — your lawyers would make them hand over their ranking code during discovery, and it would say `if (usesAdSense) score++`, and you'd win.
But if they made (are making) subtle web platform changes via their control of the browsing platform that hurt competitors and help Google, that's extremely difficult to prove. Look at third-party cookies, for example.
This first one is about dominant market position by paying for placement on all surfaces (iPhone, Firefox, etc.) plus chrome. So splitting off chrome and android make sense in the context of the suit.
With the Privacy Sandbox Google already prepared for their sell side ad business to be sold. With the ad auctioning logic and data flow being handled directly in Chrome PS they wouldn't need GAM anymore and would probably easily accept this part to be split. And it could even reinforce their vertical integration.
On the other hand with no direct access to the browser and no 3rd party cookies anymore, they would probably be less relevant for media buyers on the open web, which could open a good chunk of the market for other ad platforms.
You have to wonder if Google didn't somehow maneuver the DOJ into telling them to do something that's going to result in higher costs and user inconvenience, as opposed to something effective like you've proposed here.
On the other hand, Google would argue that Doubleclick is Google, and everything else Google does is just to create channels for ads, and acquire data for ad targeting and pricing.
I think Google should just be split up into baby Google's that each have to cooperate with each other. Like we did with Bell. Also we should do the same thing to Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook. In fact I think we should do it again to AT&T and also Comcast. This should probably be done every so often as maintenance.
The problem with Google, Meta, Amazon, et. al. is that they have a steady stream of income from their main business, and use it to enter new markets with loss leader schemes obviously designed to destroy their pre-existing competition...
I'm not from the US, but it seems to me like the companies you mention stay in their respective market and don't try to destroy competition in other markets, like Walmart is a supermarket chain, UnitedHealth is just health insurance, Exxon just deals with gas, JPMorgan Chase is just a bank, etc...,
meanwhile Google operated YouTube, Chrome, Gmail and other services at significant losses for years up until the point where they basically have monopoly in those areas because the competition couldn't keep up with Google's free products, and now when the competition is destroyed, they are destroying these free services with increased pricing or ads, neither of which were there while they still had competition in those spheres...
The egg cartel, the potato cartel, the corn cartel, almost every food resource silo has its own monopsony or monopoly of some kind in the USA or globally. In the USA at least it seems many of these things are constructed to avoid the letter of the old laws around monopoly.
Yeah but it's also not great when Amazon can undercut their way into every market because AWS is a crazy cash cow, which hurt other US companies. Do you really need Amazon to be a "second government" who can decide what "you" buy, see and to some degree think.
It "works" in China where the government just stomps their feet if companies misbehave too much and everyone complies instantly or get replaced.
Edit: s/Amazon/Jeff Bezos/g?
We have megacorps in EU too, Airbus and Lidl comes to mind, though I don't think Lidl operates anything but their main business outside of Germany, in Sweden we have Lidl grocery stores however.
Breaking monopolies doesn't kneecap US companies. Noncompetitive markets do that. Forcing healthy competition is how we keep competitive advantage, failing to do so is how we lose it. See: Deepseek
Seen this argument a lot recently, it's a really interesting take that I wouldn't have really considered before.
The common argument for breaking up monopolies is to provide more competition in the key area, since monopolies tend to focus efforts on things that don't benefit the consumer (like buying out smaller companies to stop them existing).
From that view, monopolies don't really benefit the US, if anything it stops the US market functioning competitively, and eventually running themselves into the ground.
I guess the other view is that "somebody is going to have a monopoly so why shouldn't it be my country?", but I'd say that ignores the fact that you can just curb other non-competitive behaviour fron foreign countries, like the EU has been trying to do with Apple and Google.
Smaller companies would be more nimble and efficient. Also, Google’s main dominant product (e.g. search & ads) would be forced to compete & innovate vs leveraging Chrome & Android to keep themselves dominant.
I've noticed that the bigger a company gets, the shittier they get. I don't think the answer to the threats posed by countries like Russia and China lies in consolidating our markets under an oligarchy of bloated mega-corps.
Smaller companies are faster, more agile, and hungry for success. This breeds market competition, spurring innovation and rendering better products for the consumer. The Amazons and Googles and Microsofts of the world have largely outlived their purpose and only exist to hoover up money in their cornered markets rather than innovate.
I think with the current monopolistic trajectory there will not be the next generation of US companies because current companies just buy up everything that shows any kind of potential. There's no benefit to society from trillion-dollar companies - they don't need to innovate and they have the power to stop any would-be competitors.
and how does your worldview work in practice? a protected and empowered US/Western conglomerate is more motivated innovate and outcompete mega corps of Russia/China/latest-boogieman and destroys them because of this? or is the point to just say: well Russia/China have their own mediocre protected conglomerates lets have ours too?
Both of those countries dislike powerful, large corporations because they are a base of power that could compete with the state or party. The Wagner Group comes to mind. But China also did a huge crackdown affecting companies like Alibaba and Tencent.
There's no reason why there can't be international co-operation on this subject.
I'm happy to let China and Russia be the global leaders in panopticons and mass propaganda for their citizens. Google and Meta would be no great loss for Americans.
Browser development doesnt need to go as fast as Google is pushing it. Its OK to slow down and not push new features and standards all the time. It doesnt need to be as expensive as Google is making it.
If Mozilla can make up a significant portion of funding by selling default search engine placement, I'm sure an independent Chrome could get 10x that (based on userbase/usage) and be reasonably self-sufficient for continued browser development.
The owner of Chrome could go to the manufactures of any non Apple phone and tablet and ask them royalties to ship Chrome with their phones. Maintenance releases included. Per unit royalty, flat, whatever they agree upon. The alternative would be Firefox or any other browser, which would have an incentive to follow suit. Or build their own browser. Samsung has one. They might leave the desktop browser free or as Microsoft for money. After all they would be developing the engine used by Edge. Again the alternative would be resuming the development of their own engine, starting with forking Blink.
The owner of Android could do the same. There is a long history of OS licensed to phone manufacturers. The incentive for manufacturers to keep using a common OS is probably much bigger than keep installing Chrome: nobody wants to sell phones without apps and nobody wants to pay developers to develop four or five versions of the same app. Think about home banking or games. Web apps might be enough and I very welcome that, but they are not enough for everything especially on low specs devices.
That’s sort of the point, right? The monopoly laws are designed to go after companies that are using their monopoly position in one market to subsidize other product lines to keep out competition.
Whats weird is that nobody has tried to sell browsers for a very long time. It's not like they gave away Chrome to drive some other browser out of the market.
They developed Chrome because their business was web based and they wanted a solid platform for their apps.
And we all benefited from that stable platform. And it's mostly open source in Chromium. And they are paying Mozilla to stay in the game - an arms length, independent implementation of standards.
I think its wrong to suggest what they should have done is build an entire walled garden like Apple has done.
Update: I think the important part of your statement was "too keep out competition." I don't see how developing and giving away Chrome is stifling the browser market.
I can see how paying other people to make Google search default might stifling the search market, but that has nothing to do with Chrome.
I agree that's what the laws are supposed to go after, but forced sale or divestment seems like the wrong remedy here.
Force Google to charge money for the service, or to pay a portion of imputed stolen revenue to competitors. But Chrome itself is not a viable business without the huge fountain of money that is search ads.
Honest question: who are the potential realistic buyers of Chrome? OS vendors already have their own browsers and Chrome doesn't directly make much (any?) money.
Nobody is going to buy it given the perverse incentives set in the last two decades. However, Chrome does have value to SaaS providers making use of browsers as frontends, and it should be possible to setup a foundation for Chrome maintenance. Funding could also come from the "ad industry" or what's left of it. If however it turns out Google plus very few other actors (Fb) will totally dominate this consortium once again, then obviously there must be additional measures, such as selling YT and/or DoubleClick.
Google pays many companies tens of billions to make sure Google Search is the default engine on a variety of browsers.
Something tells me a product that can garner billions of dollars will do just fine if sliced away. If Google gives firefox $500million to be the default search at 5% user share, they should pay Chrome $20 billion for the same privilege.
The true damage that should be done is to separate Gmail + workspaces, Maps, Youtube, GCP, Android, and Search as their own separate entities then undo the DoubleClick merger.
It doesnt need to be sustained at the level Google is pushing it.
Development could slow down considerably and it wouldnt harm anything, in fact it would do just what the DoJ wants and make it a fairer playing field for other browsers to catch up and compete.
Hadn't though about openai, which does seem like a possible interested party. The problem for them however is that they make money from subscriptions, not ads which presumably makes it much harder to monetize via control of the browser.
I don't mean this because he is topical but Musk makes the most sense. In the same way Brave has Brave Wallet, if Musk really wants to force his X Pay and Wallet on the world, integrating with the most popular browser is a solid move.
A point that is often overlooked in discussions of this, which seems huge: they would also be banned from buying search engine dominance (as in, the primary source of Mozilla's revenue).
"Similarly, Google would be prevented from pressuring its partners to use Google search or AI services over the competition."
Feel like splitting ad sales from search is the one meaningful structural change they could insist upon that would actually make a difference to Google's monopoly position. Anything like this is really more window-dressing than anything.
And then have ad companies bid on spots instead of companies? That just sounds like adding a middleman (inefficency) to the system. Like making me go to a car dealer instead of just adding to cart like anything else.
The other alternative would be paying for search, in which case everyone would just leave for another search engine the next day.
Which is honestly why I have so much calling google search a monopoly. The switching cost is comically cheap and easy. You could cut out Google search within the next 5 minutes from the rest of your life.
The whole point is to introduce more players into the system so there is the possibility of competition. At present it is very efficient in the sense that you have a single company with monopolistic control over what content gets surfaced and how content gets monetised. That's a conflict of interest that's so obviously harmful to consumers Page and Brin actually call it out in the original "Anatomy of a Search Engine" paper.
"Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users...we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.
Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious."
I wonder who would buy "Chromium with a Google skin." You'd get a massive user base, but what would you do with the product? The only thing that distinguishes it from other Chromium-based browsers is integration with Google account features, which doesn't seem useful for a non-Google company.
Buying Chromium is a more interesting proposition, but you can't really "buy" it (aside from the trademark, infrastructure, domains) because the codebase isn't Google's to sell. Would the web coalesce around the new owners just because they inherit the CI and the repo?
Personally, I’m increasingly looking into native app development; maybe starting with iOS.
It’s good to have a diversified portfolio of skills, and if Chrome should be sold and not sustainable, there is the possibility that the rollout of new features to the web will feel like an Internet Explorer era malaise. The web may very well become a mostly frozen platform; warts and all.
I’m also not interested in following the inevitable JavaScript framework attempts to overcome this. At least this time, we have Web Components, WASM, and Canvas, making polyfilling almost anything theoretically possible.
If anything, a DOJ under any Republican president is more likely to lean into the criterion of consumer welfare to determine antitrust priorities. You can bet Google's strategy is tuned for making the most of this theory of antitrust. There's almost nothing you can do to Google that won't make consumers have to pay more for a less convenient solution, due to messy technical issues.
How would you feel if Google shut down Chrome, and created an app called the Google Application Platform. (GAP). The GAP would be the only place you could use Search, Workspace, YouTube, Maps, and every other google website.
What would you think if Google just abandoned the open web entirely.
> The artificial price point for GMail, GDocs, GMeet has killed so much competition.
It literally led to the creation of Office 365 and broke open a market that had been closed to competition in the face of an unbreakable Microsoft Monopoly for decades! That sounds ridiculous on its face. Of all the product areas to complain about Google having a monopoly, you picked the office suite!?
HN tends strongly to one side of this argument, but really this is trending towards a "Google Derangement Syndrome" kind of analysis.
Microsoft have always made a point that they can never compete with Google on price of office apps, therefore they try to compete on service, support, and included bells and whistles. This is why when you buy an O365 license you basically get anything Microsoft has ever developed thrown in with it.
Office is Microsofts bread and butter, for Google its a side project that disrupts Microsofts business model.
>> The artificial price point for GMail, GDocs, GMeet has killed so much competition.
> It literally led to the creation of Office 365 and broke open a market that had been closed to competition in the face of an unbreakable Microsoft Monopoly for decades
Both can be true at the same time. For example Tmobile and Sprint merging led to even more pressure on any new or existing networks that were/are not in the top 4. But it also led to increased competition with Verizon and AT&T.
My guess is this may go to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Linux Foundation, or other industry consortium, since Chromium is already an industry standard and that structure would enable Google et al to continue to directly employ the developer teams currently working on it.
How about we raise some money and buy Chrome for the users? First order of business will be removing all privacy invading "features" and re-enabling Manifest V2. If somehow we'll have some cash left, we might even contract Igalia to build blocker right into browser.
I have no idea how a for-profit company can exist that solely produces a browser.
There's only one model that can work long-term here: collective ownership. The closest model is probably the Wikimedia Foundation. Firefox and the Mozilla Foundation are here, obviously, but they've tried to act like a corporation with rising costs and lower earnings going over years. The money Google pays them is basically poison.
Linux has survived and thrived with something analagous to this but it's also dependent to an unsettling degree on one person (Linus Torvalds). I realize his power has decentralized over the years (intentionally, by Linus) but there's still the constnat risk of a schism.
Google and Chrome is just one small part of the problem. Apple's Safari monopoly on iOS is also a problem. Browsers really need to be a common good.
I suspect none of this will happen. Even though these efforts began in the Biden administration, I suspect this will now become a shakedown. This administration will look to Google to fall in line and kiss the ring. That is now the cost of doing business.
The big question is, would it keep that market share without Google. The big selling point of Google Chrome is the seamless integration with all the other Google services.
That share will plummet to near 0% the moment it is transferred because people will just switch to Chromium.
The only difference between Chrome without Google and Chromium is the name and logo. You lose all integration with Google services like sync, suggestions, etc.
You'd be stuck with only the captives that can't switch because they're using older appliances with Chrome baked in.
Look, I hate how dominant Chrome is. It’s basically a glorified data vacuum for Google—and it’s only getting worse. But at the end of the day, people choose to use Chrome, and I don’t see why Google shouldn’t be allowed to own and develop it. There are still plenty of other browsers people can switch to.
Now, what’s actually dangerous is the growing trend of sites blocking non-Google search engines from indexing their content. That’s a real issue—and it’s escalating fast. Selling Chrome won’t do a damn thing to fix that.
Besides, no other company has the budget or incentive to maintain Chrome at the level Google does. If they’re forced to give it up, then what? A half-baked, underfunded mess? A fragmented ecosystem? None of this feels like a win.
... unless your goal is to have Elon be able to pick up a new browser to go along with Twitter and TickTock.
How would that work, exactly? Would Google’s search algorithm highlight pro-TRUMP articles to pump the token price? I think you’ll be waiting a long time.
nope, just a direct payment, but since it's crypto it's untracable. Basically money laundering. Why do you think the purpose is of all these shit-coins (besides pump-and-dumps).
Honestly I don't care if Google gets broken up, so long as Apple is first.
People complain about whataboutism, but the Apple versus almost any other 'monopoly' is insane. You can switch browsers within the next 30s, you can't install an app from a third party vendor ever on iOS. [1]
[1] Yes I know you can pay $100 a year, and then compile your own/open source apps weekly and move them to your device. No this is not a reasonable solution.
You won’t hear that here because HN is notoriously pro Apple for some reason, even though all the evidence points to Apple being the same, if not bigger evil than Google
I think the issue is horizontal vs. vertical monopolies. Apple do have a monopoly, but it's vertically integrated one. That's arguably their unique selling point; tightly integrated products without a great deal of customization.
Google on the other hand have a monolithic market share in a number of key markets. There's really no competition to them in search or video for instance, whereby they command extremely dominant market share.
Apple on the other hand do not dominate any markets, they just have a locked down product. Pretty similar to luxury cars, Nintendo, and other companies that think their customers value the integration over an open ecosystem.
This makes sense. Musk is an authoritarian and buying the most popular browser lets him force Twitter and his crypto shit on everyone at once. Especially at a time where Mozilla is faltering. The moral of the story in all of this is that there are no viable alternatives to most things.
In a completely unrelated story, the #1 post on HN at the moment is "uBlock Origin is no longer available on the Chrome Store" <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43322922>
IMHO, the real issue with Google isn't the control of the web browser, but the complete vertical integration of the ad space. Divest Google of its position as the ad broker (i.e., unwind its acquisition of DoubleClick), and prohibit any sort of privileged data flow from Google to ex-Google Ads, and you'd probably have a more viable solution than the poking DoJ is trying to do right now.
Why? Google develops ad-supported software, they run their own ad placement service for it, and they allow others to use that service to run ads on their own sites. I think there's a bit of a conflict of interest between running the website ranking service and running an ad service that ranked websites can choose to use, but that's minor compared to also controlling the browsing platform.
If Google started ranking sites that use AdSense higher than other sites, you could probably prove that in court fairly easily — your lawyers would make them hand over their ranking code during discovery, and it would say `if (usesAdSense) score++`, and you'd win.
But if they made (are making) subtle web platform changes via their control of the browsing platform that hurt competitors and help Google, that's extremely difficult to prove. Look at third-party cookies, for example.
Confusingly, this is the contents of a second and separate antitrust suit against Google: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_...
This first one is about dominant market position by paying for placement on all surfaces (iPhone, Firefox, etc.) plus chrome. So splitting off chrome and android make sense in the context of the suit.
With the Privacy Sandbox Google already prepared for their sell side ad business to be sold. With the ad auctioning logic and data flow being handled directly in Chrome PS they wouldn't need GAM anymore and would probably easily accept this part to be split. And it could even reinforce their vertical integration. On the other hand with no direct access to the browser and no 3rd party cookies anymore, they would probably be less relevant for media buyers on the open web, which could open a good chunk of the market for other ad platforms.
You have to wonder if Google didn't somehow maneuver the DOJ into telling them to do something that's going to result in higher costs and user inconvenience, as opposed to something effective like you've proposed here.
On the other hand, Google would argue that Doubleclick is Google, and everything else Google does is just to create channels for ads, and acquire data for ad targeting and pricing.
This case wasn't about that, unfortunately.
I believe that this will happen though, at some point in the next few years.
I think Google should just be split up into baby Google's that each have to cooperate with each other. Like we did with Bell. Also we should do the same thing to Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook. In fact I think we should do it again to AT&T and also Comcast. This should probably be done every so often as maintenance.
Don't forget the other industries suffering from the same problem: Walmart, UnitedHealth Group, Berkshiere Hathaway, ExxonMobil, JPMorgan Chase, etc.
The problem with Google, Meta, Amazon, et. al. is that they have a steady stream of income from their main business, and use it to enter new markets with loss leader schemes obviously designed to destroy their pre-existing competition...
I'm not from the US, but it seems to me like the companies you mention stay in their respective market and don't try to destroy competition in other markets, like Walmart is a supermarket chain, UnitedHealth is just health insurance, Exxon just deals with gas, JPMorgan Chase is just a bank, etc...,
meanwhile Google operated YouTube, Chrome, Gmail and other services at significant losses for years up until the point where they basically have monopoly in those areas because the competition couldn't keep up with Google's free products, and now when the competition is destroyed, they are destroying these free services with increased pricing or ads, neither of which were there while they still had competition in those spheres...
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The egg cartel, the potato cartel, the corn cartel, almost every food resource silo has its own monopsony or monopoly of some kind in the USA or globally. In the USA at least it seems many of these things are constructed to avoid the letter of the old laws around monopoly.
I don't understand how this worldview coexists with countries like Russia and China.
If the feds kneecap US companies, it's not going to make the next generation of US companies stronger, just cede influence to worse jurisdictions.
Yeah but it's also not great when Amazon can undercut their way into every market because AWS is a crazy cash cow, which hurt other US companies. Do you really need Amazon to be a "second government" who can decide what "you" buy, see and to some degree think.
It "works" in China where the government just stomps their feet if companies misbehave too much and everyone complies instantly or get replaced.
Edit: s/Amazon/Jeff Bezos/g?
We have megacorps in EU too, Airbus and Lidl comes to mind, though I don't think Lidl operates anything but their main business outside of Germany, in Sweden we have Lidl grocery stores however.
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Breaking monopolies doesn't kneecap US companies. Noncompetitive markets do that. Forcing healthy competition is how we keep competitive advantage, failing to do so is how we lose it. See: Deepseek
Seen this argument a lot recently, it's a really interesting take that I wouldn't have really considered before.
The common argument for breaking up monopolies is to provide more competition in the key area, since monopolies tend to focus efforts on things that don't benefit the consumer (like buying out smaller companies to stop them existing).
From that view, monopolies don't really benefit the US, if anything it stops the US market functioning competitively, and eventually running themselves into the ground.
I guess the other view is that "somebody is going to have a monopoly so why shouldn't it be my country?", but I'd say that ignores the fact that you can just curb other non-competitive behaviour fron foreign countries, like the EU has been trying to do with Apple and Google.
Smaller companies would be more nimble and efficient. Also, Google’s main dominant product (e.g. search & ads) would be forced to compete & innovate vs leveraging Chrome & Android to keep themselves dominant.
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We should run our economy in the way that has the best long term outcome, which is likely with plenty of competition rather than monopolies.
If other countries are doing something to advantage themselves relative to that, there’s tariffs or other ways to relevel the playing field.
> If the feds kneecap US companies, it's not going to make the next generation of US companies stronger
Worked pretty well when they broke AT&T and not only got an extremely innovative lab full of small projects, but also kickstarted the internet era.
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You think monopolies should exist?
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I've noticed that the bigger a company gets, the shittier they get. I don't think the answer to the threats posed by countries like Russia and China lies in consolidating our markets under an oligarchy of bloated mega-corps.
Smaller companies are faster, more agile, and hungry for success. This breeds market competition, spurring innovation and rendering better products for the consumer. The Amazons and Googles and Microsofts of the world have largely outlived their purpose and only exist to hoover up money in their cornered markets rather than innovate.
I think with the current monopolistic trajectory there will not be the next generation of US companies because current companies just buy up everything that shows any kind of potential. There's no benefit to society from trillion-dollar companies - they don't need to innovate and they have the power to stop any would-be competitors.
and how does your worldview work in practice? a protected and empowered US/Western conglomerate is more motivated innovate and outcompete mega corps of Russia/China/latest-boogieman and destroys them because of this? or is the point to just say: well Russia/China have their own mediocre protected conglomerates lets have ours too?
Both of those countries dislike powerful, large corporations because they are a base of power that could compete with the state or party. The Wagner Group comes to mind. But China also did a huge crackdown affecting companies like Alibaba and Tencent.
There's no reason why there can't be international co-operation on this subject.
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Just ban the ones from worse jurisdictions then.
I'm happy to let China and Russia be the global leaders in panopticons and mass propaganda for their citizens. Google and Meta would be no great loss for Americans.
So competition isn’t actually good for free market economics?
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[dead]
Which business units should be broken up?
Microsoft and Azure, Bing, Office 365
Amazon (the retailer portion) and AWS, and probably their logistics wing
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Chrome, search/ads, youtube, consumer apps - gmail & docs etc.
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This headline seems misleading; the way I'm reading this, it's still just a request to the courts, who will make the final decision right?
Yes. This is the DOJ’s proposal for what should happen now that Google was found guilty.
Google will make their own proposal, I think. Then the judge will decide.
Then 50 years of appeals.
it indeed is. when I saw it in my mstdn feed, i too was shocked but upon reading, uh, no.
But would these services even be financially viable as separate entities?
How does Chrome make income? Isn't it basically developed at a loss, but it makes money for Google's other business units?
Browser development doesnt need to go as fast as Google is pushing it. Its OK to slow down and not push new features and standards all the time. It doesnt need to be as expensive as Google is making it.
If Mozilla can make up a significant portion of funding by selling default search engine placement, I'm sure an independent Chrome could get 10x that (based on userbase/usage) and be reasonably self-sufficient for continued browser development.
That is one of the tactics that the DOJ was going after (at least previously, not sure any more).
The owner of Chrome could go to the manufactures of any non Apple phone and tablet and ask them royalties to ship Chrome with their phones. Maintenance releases included. Per unit royalty, flat, whatever they agree upon. The alternative would be Firefox or any other browser, which would have an incentive to follow suit. Or build their own browser. Samsung has one. They might leave the desktop browser free or as Microsoft for money. After all they would be developing the engine used by Edge. Again the alternative would be resuming the development of their own engine, starting with forking Blink.
The owner of Android could do the same. There is a long history of OS licensed to phone manufacturers. The incentive for manufacturers to keep using a common OS is probably much bigger than keep installing Chrome: nobody wants to sell phones without apps and nobody wants to pay developers to develop four or five versions of the same app. Think about home banking or games. Web apps might be enough and I very welcome that, but they are not enough for everything especially on low specs devices.
That’s sort of the point, right? The monopoly laws are designed to go after companies that are using their monopoly position in one market to subsidize other product lines to keep out competition.
Whats weird is that nobody has tried to sell browsers for a very long time. It's not like they gave away Chrome to drive some other browser out of the market.
They developed Chrome because their business was web based and they wanted a solid platform for their apps.
And we all benefited from that stable platform. And it's mostly open source in Chromium. And they are paying Mozilla to stay in the game - an arms length, independent implementation of standards.
I think its wrong to suggest what they should have done is build an entire walled garden like Apple has done.
Update: I think the important part of your statement was "too keep out competition." I don't see how developing and giving away Chrome is stifling the browser market.
I can see how paying other people to make Google search default might stifling the search market, but that has nothing to do with Chrome.
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I agree that's what the laws are supposed to go after, but forced sale or divestment seems like the wrong remedy here.
Force Google to charge money for the service, or to pay a portion of imputed stolen revenue to competitors. But Chrome itself is not a viable business without the huge fountain of money that is search ads.
Discussion (467 points, 2 days ago, 651 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43299886
Honest question: who are the potential realistic buyers of Chrome? OS vendors already have their own browsers and Chrome doesn't directly make much (any?) money.
Nobody is going to buy it given the perverse incentives set in the last two decades. However, Chrome does have value to SaaS providers making use of browsers as frontends, and it should be possible to setup a foundation for Chrome maintenance. Funding could also come from the "ad industry" or what's left of it. If however it turns out Google plus very few other actors (Fb) will totally dominate this consortium once again, then obviously there must be additional measures, such as selling YT and/or DoubleClick.
No one. Chrome would be bought for pennies on the dollar, and the buyer wouldn't be able to sustain the project.
Google pays many companies tens of billions to make sure Google Search is the default engine on a variety of browsers.
Something tells me a product that can garner billions of dollars will do just fine if sliced away. If Google gives firefox $500million to be the default search at 5% user share, they should pay Chrome $20 billion for the same privilege.
The true damage that should be done is to separate Gmail + workspaces, Maps, Youtube, GCP, Android, and Search as their own separate entities then undo the DoubleClick merger.
That would be true justice.
It doesnt need to be sustained at the level Google is pushing it. Development could slow down considerably and it wouldnt harm anything, in fact it would do just what the DoJ wants and make it a fairer playing field for other browsers to catch up and compete.
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The kingdom of saudia arabia.
Softbank
Crypto.com
Alphabet
new vectors of monetization:
- ecom (amazon?)
- AI (openai?)
Hadn't though about openai, which does seem like a possible interested party. The problem for them however is that they make money from subscriptions, not ads which presumably makes it much harder to monetize via control of the browser.
Elon Musk
I don't mean this because he is topical but Musk makes the most sense. In the same way Brave has Brave Wallet, if Musk really wants to force his X Pay and Wallet on the world, integrating with the most popular browser is a solid move.
No way. He is part of the government forcing the sale. What have we come to in this country.
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Hellworld.
A point that is often overlooked in discussions of this, which seems huge: they would also be banned from buying search engine dominance (as in, the primary source of Mozilla's revenue).
"Similarly, Google would be prevented from pressuring its partners to use Google search or AI services over the competition."
Feel like splitting ad sales from search is the one meaningful structural change they could insist upon that would actually make a difference to Google's monopoly position. Anything like this is really more window-dressing than anything.
Android is pretty important as well, with its forced Google integration.
And then have ad companies bid on spots instead of companies? That just sounds like adding a middleman (inefficency) to the system. Like making me go to a car dealer instead of just adding to cart like anything else.
The other alternative would be paying for search, in which case everyone would just leave for another search engine the next day.
Which is honestly why I have so much calling google search a monopoly. The switching cost is comically cheap and easy. You could cut out Google search within the next 5 minutes from the rest of your life.
The whole point is to introduce more players into the system so there is the possibility of competition. At present it is very efficient in the sense that you have a single company with monopolistic control over what content gets surfaced and how content gets monetised. That's a conflict of interest that's so obviously harmful to consumers Page and Brin actually call it out in the original "Anatomy of a Search Engine" paper.
http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf (see the whole section entitled "Advertising and Mixed Motives".
I wonder who would buy "Chromium with a Google skin." You'd get a massive user base, but what would you do with the product? The only thing that distinguishes it from other Chromium-based browsers is integration with Google account features, which doesn't seem useful for a non-Google company.
Buying Chromium is a more interesting proposition, but you can't really "buy" it (aside from the trademark, infrastructure, domains) because the codebase isn't Google's to sell. Would the web coalesce around the new owners just because they inherit the CI and the repo?
Personally, I’m increasingly looking into native app development; maybe starting with iOS.
It’s good to have a diversified portfolio of skills, and if Chrome should be sold and not sustainable, there is the possibility that the rollout of new features to the web will feel like an Internet Explorer era malaise. The web may very well become a mostly frozen platform; warts and all.
I’m also not interested in following the inevitable JavaScript framework attempts to overcome this. At least this time, we have Web Components, WASM, and Canvas, making polyfilling almost anything theoretically possible.
The article mentions "Trump's DOJ" but in actuality the DOJ has been building a case against Google since at least 2021 [0].
[0] https://www.justice.gov/atr/case/us-and-plaintiff-states-v-g...
If anything, a DOJ under any Republican president is more likely to lean into the criterion of consumer welfare to determine antitrust priorities. You can bet Google's strategy is tuned for making the most of this theory of antitrust. There's almost nothing you can do to Google that won't make consumers have to pay more for a less convenient solution, due to messy technical issues.
Here is a question for everybody.
How would you feel if Google shut down Chrome, and created an app called the Google Application Platform. (GAP). The GAP would be the only place you could use Search, Workspace, YouTube, Maps, and every other google website.
What would you think if Google just abandoned the open web entirely.
Man, I hope they break out Google Business apps.
The artificial price point for GMail, GDocs, GMeet has killed so much competition.
Try pricing something against this insane dumping price Google sets - there is no TAM, the M does not payback enough to justify the effort.
The cross-financing with Ads would finally stop and fair pricing would come.
> The artificial price point for GMail, GDocs, GMeet has killed so much competition.
It literally led to the creation of Office 365 and broke open a market that had been closed to competition in the face of an unbreakable Microsoft Monopoly for decades! That sounds ridiculous on its face. Of all the product areas to complain about Google having a monopoly, you picked the office suite!?
HN tends strongly to one side of this argument, but really this is trending towards a "Google Derangement Syndrome" kind of analysis.
Microsoft have always made a point that they can never compete with Google on price of office apps, therefore they try to compete on service, support, and included bells and whistles. This is why when you buy an O365 license you basically get anything Microsoft has ever developed thrown in with it.
Office is Microsofts bread and butter, for Google its a side project that disrupts Microsofts business model.
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>> The artificial price point for GMail, GDocs, GMeet has killed so much competition.
> It literally led to the creation of Office 365 and broke open a market that had been closed to competition in the face of an unbreakable Microsoft Monopoly for decades
Both can be true at the same time. For example Tmobile and Sprint merging led to even more pressure on any new or existing networks that were/are not in the top 4. But it also led to increased competition with Verizon and AT&T.
When Chrome launched, Google was still in their "if it's good for the open web, it's good for Google" phase.
Now, with Google as the entrenched incumbent in so many different spaces, what's good for the web is not necessarily good for Google anymore.
My guess is this may go to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Linux Foundation, or other industry consortium, since Chromium is already an industry standard and that structure would enable Google et al to continue to directly employ the developer teams currently working on it.
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How about we raise some money and buy Chrome for the users? First order of business will be removing all privacy invading "features" and re-enabling Manifest V2. If somehow we'll have some cash left, we might even contract Igalia to build blocker right into browser.
90% of the people here wouldn't pay $3/mo for a browser. Who do you think is going to raise the money?
Everyone uses Chrome basically for crypto extensions anecdotally. They did a good job there.
All developers I know build pretty much exclusively on Chrome desktop wise.
I have no idea how a for-profit company can exist that solely produces a browser.
There's only one model that can work long-term here: collective ownership. The closest model is probably the Wikimedia Foundation. Firefox and the Mozilla Foundation are here, obviously, but they've tried to act like a corporation with rising costs and lower earnings going over years. The money Google pays them is basically poison.
Linux has survived and thrived with something analagous to this but it's also dependent to an unsettling degree on one person (Linus Torvalds). I realize his power has decentralized over the years (intentionally, by Linus) but there's still the constnat risk of a schism.
Google and Chrome is just one small part of the problem. Apple's Safari monopoly on iOS is also a problem. Browsers really need to be a common good.
I suspect none of this will happen. Even though these efforts began in the Biden administration, I suspect this will now become a shakedown. This administration will look to Google to fall in line and kiss the ring. That is now the cost of doing business.
A Browser with 65% share of the worlds web access can be leveraged to do a lot of things.
The big question is, would it keep that market share without Google. The big selling point of Google Chrome is the seamless integration with all the other Google services.
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That share will plummet to near 0% the moment it is transferred because people will just switch to Chromium.
The only difference between Chrome without Google and Chromium is the name and logo. You lose all integration with Google services like sync, suggestions, etc.
You'd be stuck with only the captives that can't switch because they're using older appliances with Chrome baked in.
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This is so dumb.
Look, I hate how dominant Chrome is. It’s basically a glorified data vacuum for Google—and it’s only getting worse. But at the end of the day, people choose to use Chrome, and I don’t see why Google shouldn’t be allowed to own and develop it. There are still plenty of other browsers people can switch to.
Now, what’s actually dangerous is the growing trend of sites blocking non-Google search engines from indexing their content. That’s a real issue—and it’s escalating fast. Selling Chrome won’t do a damn thing to fix that.
Besides, no other company has the budget or incentive to maintain Chrome at the level Google does. If they’re forced to give it up, then what? A half-baked, underfunded mess? A fragmented ecosystem? None of this feels like a win.
... unless your goal is to have Elon be able to pick up a new browser to go along with Twitter and TickTock.
It would make more sense that Google be forced to sell Google Play + Services, not Android.
Can we go back to buying software? This free software subsidized by big ad money has fucked the whole market up.
Agreed. Would much rather pay $100-200/year for ad-free OS / productivity software that is patched and secure and doesn't sell my data.
Alas, very people put that high a value on their privacy.
You could switch to a Linux distro for that. Most of them are gratis, but accept donations or contributions. For example Debian & LibreOffice.
That said, even well intentioned distros that don't sell your data will have some privacy issues, inherited from upstreams.
https://wiki.debian.org/PrivacyIssues
The end result of this will be that Microsoft gets the Chrome team. I don’t know what the DOJ is thinking.
This could be actually one of good decisions here...
Let's wait how long it takes for Trump's crypto / meme coin to get a spike and this DOJ thing to go away. After all, all is transactional with Trump.
How would that work, exactly? Would Google’s search algorithm highlight pro-TRUMP articles to pump the token price? I think you’ll be waiting a long time.
nope, just a direct payment, but since it's crypto it's untracable. Basically money laundering. Why do you think the purpose is of all these shit-coins (besides pump-and-dumps).
Honestly I don't care if Google gets broken up, so long as Apple is first.
People complain about whataboutism, but the Apple versus almost any other 'monopoly' is insane. You can switch browsers within the next 30s, you can't install an app from a third party vendor ever on iOS. [1]
[1] Yes I know you can pay $100 a year, and then compile your own/open source apps weekly and move them to your device. No this is not a reasonable solution.
You won’t hear that here because HN is notoriously pro Apple for some reason, even though all the evidence points to Apple being the same, if not bigger evil than Google
I think the issue is horizontal vs. vertical monopolies. Apple do have a monopoly, but it's vertically integrated one. That's arguably their unique selling point; tightly integrated products without a great deal of customization.
Google on the other hand have a monolithic market share in a number of key markets. There's really no competition to them in search or video for instance, whereby they command extremely dominant market share.
Apple on the other hand do not dominate any markets, they just have a locked down product. Pretty similar to luxury cars, Nintendo, and other companies that think their customers value the integration over an open ecosystem.
Good! Next: Android, YouTube
Ah yes Internet Explorer all over again. boring.
I guess Elon Musk is working on a web browser and a bunch of put options were put on Google.
Let's be real, this administration is just doing stock manipulations and looting the public purse while running a media circus to distract people.
This makes sense. Musk is an authoritarian and buying the most popular browser lets him force Twitter and his crypto shit on everyone at once. Especially at a time where Mozilla is faltering. The moral of the story in all of this is that there are no viable alternatives to most things.
Or wants to buy one.