Comment by godelski

Your take is quite naïve. The problem is that Google is controlling all the protocols. We're already in a situation where chrome, and consequently chromium, is "the most up to date browser" because Google has a heavy influence in dictating what those standards are. This is, of course, why people fork chromium in the first place, because it gives them a leg up not needing to build everything from scratch and allows them to pull in security updates and new protocols as Google releases them. But that last part is the problem.

So in a way you're right. But the owner is Google as long as you are forking chromium. Because they control to protocols. Maybe they don't own the roads, but does that matter if they get to dictate how all the roads get used and how all the maps are made? You don't need to own the roads to control them