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...
hotmail, yahoo mail, etc. were also free when google started gmail. gmail won because it was just way better, and it has changed very little in terms of its value proposition in all that time.
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.
Absolutely agree on the fact that we don't need / should not have "second gouvernements" (and non democratically choosen too). Which is why we should also apply this regular "maintainance split" to largest fortunes too.
Some companies / services are just not viable as a standalone company, but still provide immense value to customers.
What will end up happening is not that Amazon will have to compete with others on video game streaming for example, what will happen is that video game streaming will disappear because not viable.
Browsers won't suddenly flourish when Google cannot finance browsers anymore, they'll just turn to shit.
People won't spend $50 a month to subscribe to what Google currently provides for free, they will just lose access.
In the end the users will just flock to the Chinese equivalents which will be happy to steal all of the western data for the low cost of providing file hosting.
> Browsers won't suddenly flourish when Google cannot finance browsers anymore, they'll just turn to shit.
Maybe what will happen is there will be a slowdown of new browser standards as Google wont have the muscle to push things through in the browser space anymore. This would be a great thing, as it would stop the moving target of web standards and would allow other browsers to catch up.
It would also stop google being able to do things like force Manifest V2 out of Chromium just because it serves their own purpose.
Alternative browsers raise money in proportion to how many people use them. Google funds Chromium development and advertises to get people to use Chrome, so Firefox market share is eroded until they don't have enough to sustain themselves. Meanwhile Google pushes through changes to web standards at a rapid pace which consumes smaller competitors' resources implementing them. Also, Mozilla in particular is a mismanaged organization.
If you take Google out of it, Chromium gets to be its own thing. Then Chromium and Firefox compete with each other on equal footing and people use whichever one is better, but they're both actually open source instead of "Chromium is open source but everybody actually uses Chrome" and the latter isn't controlled by the company trying to break ad blocking and push DRM.
In the narrow case of zero day vulnerabilities perhaps, but a good ad blocker is part of any reasonable security posture and is key to avoiding exploitation in practice.
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.
They also don’t have the communication and process overheads and don’t have existing contracts that constrain how fast and where they can go. If smaller companies weren’t possibly to run more efficiently, you’d never see startups leapfrogging established players. Economies of scale are a strength and can also be a weakness (e.g. your economy of scale to do X means you can’t do Y which is more profitable / cheaper)
Instead of smashing up successful businesses, you should tax them, and use the tax revenue to improve deficiencies in the market.
If the government thinks there should be more browsers, (or mobile os's) they should tax the existing ones and pay folks to improve the open source alternatives.
You _should_ outlaw behavior that creates monopolies, like predatory pricing etc
The result is higher prices for consumers and taxpayer money flowing into zombie companies that just happen be in regions where the party in power needs votes.
> Instead of smashing up successful businesses, you should tax them, and use the tax revenue to improve deficiencies in the market.
The deficiency in the market is that laws exist that allow market concentration. Should we tax them to fund regulatory reform?
> If the government thinks there should be more browsers, (or mobile os's) they should tax the existing ones and pay folks to improve the open source alternatives.
Let's review the problem with Chrome.
Chromium is open source. Chrome is Chromium with some corporate misfeatures like DRM, but is also the thing with an advertising budget. Nobody notices that their browser quietly supports DRM, except that then more sites use it, and then open source browsers on open hardware cease to be viable because if you try to use it, it doesn't support the DRM, and then no matter how much better it is people won't use it because half the internet is broken.
If you made Chromium better, Google would just keep making Chrome based on Chromium and then Chrome would have all the improvements you made to Chromium and you've solved nothing. If you made a different open source browser under a license that didn't allow them to do that then they still have billions of dollars so if you do anything better then they can just add the same feature to Chrome. At which point people still don't use your thing because they want to watch Netflix, and Netflix continues to require windvine because the Judas browsers have the most market share so devices that support DRM are common and demanding it doesn't bankrupt them.
Or, you could fix the law that allows DRM to be used as a fig leaf for the true motivation of vendor lock-in and simply create an explicit adversarial interoperability exception to DMCA 1201, not only as a defense but as an affirmative right. Then the open source browser can legally break the DRM in order to implement an ad blocker and create a feature that Google won't put in Chrome, without giving Chrome any abilities the open alternative doesn't, allowing the alternative to gain market share.
> You _should_ outlaw behavior that creates monopolies, like predatory pricing etc
Predatory pricing isn't a cause of monopolies, it's a consequence. If it's happening, the last thing you want to do is ban it, because it's a red flag that tells you the market is broken and you need to fix it. If you leave the market broken, a company with enough market power to charge excessive margins has enough market power to screw the customer in a hundred other ways, and trying to ban every possible abuse of market power is a million times harder than smashing up monopolies.
You've twisted the argument to be about DRM. That's a completely separate issue. The only people to blame for DRM are the people who use it on their content, not the platforms that are forced to implement it.
The _cause_ of monopolies are successful businesses. I don't have a problem with successful businesses. I also don't have a problem with monopolies per se. If I invent some cool thing and I'm the only person in the world doing it, I have a monopoly - good for me. If I can deliver a product better than everybody else, and everybody else chooses to not compete with me any more, also good for me.
The crime is when you use your power "unfairly" to drive others out of business. (So that you can create or maintain a monopoly). Predatory pricing or agreements that restrict who can use your product, or what others can do.
> You've twisted the argument to be about DRM. That's a completely separate issue. The only people to blame for DRM are the people who use it on their content, not the platforms that are forced to implement it.
The people to blame for DRM are the legislators who created laws allowing DRM to be used for anti-competitive lock-in, which is its primary purpose.
> The _cause_ of monopolies are successful businesses.
That doesn't track. Costco is a successful business, does it have a monopoly? Starbucks? Honda? Dell? McDonald's? Adidas?
> If I invent some cool thing and I'm the only person in the world doing it, I have a monopoly - good for me. If I can deliver a product better than everybody else, and everybody else chooses to not compete with me any more, also good for me.
The only time this happens for a non-trivial period of time in the absence of anti-competitive practices or regulations is for so-called natural monopolies. Otherwise there would be low barriers to entry and correspondingly someone else wanting to make some money by entering the market.
And even natural monopolies are extremely narrow. They tend to get drawn with thick lines because whoever holds the natural monopoly will be trying to tie all kinds of other services to it through vertical integration, e.g. the natural monopoly is "roadside fiber conduit" rather than "internet service" no matter how much the utility company wants to insist that you should have to buy internet service from the company that digs the trench or installs the utility poles.
> Predatory pricing or agreements that restrict who can use your product, or what others can do.
Oh, you meant predatory pricing in terms of dumping rather than charging monopoly rents.
The problem is that's basically not a thing for digital goods because dumping is selling below the marginal cost and the marginal cost for digital goods is zero.
And corporations are sneaky. To reiterate the DRM point, what Google does with remote attestation is extremely nefarious, not least because it's simultaneously subtle and effective.
What they do is, provide remote attestation services to third parties for Google-approved devices. Then things like bank apps require them, even though they provide no real benefit, because they're marketed as providing "security" and risk-averse bank managers don't want to be seen not using a hypothetical security feature. But now anyone who wants to make a competing device that isn't approved by Google can't pass attestation and therefore can't get customers because customers expect their bank app to work.
Then it's the banks rather than Google requiring you to use a Google-approved Android device and Google will claim they didn't require anything even though Google providing that otherwise-useless feature has in reality created a large anti-competitive barrier for anyone trying to make a competing device without Google's approval.
>The problem is that's basically not a thing for digital goods because dumping is selling below the marginal cost and the marginal cost for digital goods is zero.
Gmail is free, Docs is free, Maps is free, lots of google apps are free. This makes it very difficult few a new player to enter the market. This is predatory pricing.
Nothing else you said is really relevant to the forced sale of Chrome.
> Gmail is free, Docs is free, Maps is free, lots of google apps are free. This makes it very difficult few a new player to enter the market. This is predatory pricing.
It isn't. Things with ~0 marginal cost end up being free or free-with-ads. Webmail was free before Gmail, OpenOffice was free before Google Docs, MapQuest was free before Google Maps, because that's the market price for those things.
> Nothing else you said is really relevant to the forced sale of Chrome.
Because we're talking about the forced sale of Android. The title of the article is:
> DOJ: Google must sell Chrome, Android could be next
But exactly the same argument applies to Chrome anyway. Google puts DRM in Chrome, allowing third party sites to take a dependency on DRM, and then competing browsers/devices without Google's approval get locked out because users want a browser and device that works with the whole web.
Not to mention the obvious conflict of interest that DRM is used to prevent ad blocking.
There has never been a problem with having a monopoly because your product is so good that everyone wants it. There's also no problem with natural monopolies, for example there's no sense in having a competitive market for utilities.
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.
> Both of those countries dislike powerful, large corporations because they are a base of power that could compete with the state or party.
These countries are not different from any other in the world. The US also has anti-monopoly laws exactly for this reason: nobody wants a corporation that can compete with the government, be it democratic or not.
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.
Why wouldn't antitrust laws apply to companies from other countries? If you ban tying app stores to phone platforms and then China creates a phone platform and wants to tie an app store to it, they're not any less banned from selling that into your market than a domestic company.
A market the size of the US or the EU is large enough to sustain a domestic industry. Competing suppliers can then recover their fixed costs from the markets where they're protected against monopolistic practices, which sustains their existence, and then sell into the other markets with the backing of a stable competitive domestic supply chain that can't be degraded by anti-competitive practices.
Example: Right now if you want to create a competing phone without Google, you lose most of the apps in the Play Store because they're encouraged to have dependencies on Google services. If that was prohibited in a large market then app developers couldn't assume those dependencies are available and the APIs would either have to become an open source part of stock Android or developers would use platform-independent third party libraries. Then the apps made for that market could run on a third party device -- but developers aren't going to make separate apps for different markets, they're just going to avoid the proprietary APIs that aren't available in a major market, and then those apps don't have those proprietary dependencies in the other markets either and your domestic competitor can compete there too.
Also, the whole world outside the US and China wouldn't even have the excuse of protecting domestic megacorps as a reason not to have strong antitrust laws themselves.
For AWS we should split the platform and the managed services (no one should have to compete with "the platform". See elasticsearch, redis).
This also works for Amazon retail, they should not be allowed to sell on their own marketplace (they have to choose, they are either a marketplace or a seller)
I've always thought is should be Azure, Office and XBox, and each should get their own copy of Windows that they could focus on different things while still being largely compatible. Don't know if XBox could survive on it's own.
Xbox has been nothing more than a budget, low-spec, walled in gaming PC for about 1.5 console generations. It no longer has exclusive games, and the hardware (console and peripherals) are mediocre.
(PlayStation is almost in the same boat, except they have significant sales in regions where PC gaming is much smaller than in the US.)
Huh, why? Xbox is a great example of a business unit that should be self-sustainable.
Not that it matters.,Microsoft has done a spectacular job of killing Xbox even with its ability to sustain setting money on fire for the past decade. Xbox has been an unmitigated disaster since Xbox One.
And? We were talking about other businesses that should be split up in addition to Google. It would be weird if the only answers were Google-owned ventures...
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.
It really doesnt. The current pace of new web standards and browser features mean frameworks and code need to constantly be checking if each browser supports the new thing, and not releasing said feature until enough versions of browsers support the thing to make it widespread enough to use. Even then, people in lesser developed countries that are using older devices with older versions of browsers on them are seeing broken and unuseable versions of the web, just because big companies are racing to 'push the web forward'.
As a web developer who wants to see the rate of new standards and features slow down so that all browsers can adopt them safely at a sensible pace without needing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on development, I really hope for this outcome.
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.
Trump has a meme coin used to grift the entire country. I'm surprised this potential conflict of interest is what is causing you to throw your hands up.
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.
> 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.
So... you're saying the presence in the market of a viable competitor improved the value provided to consumers? Who knew!
No Im saying that a big company decided to piss off another big company by offering their main product for free, just because they had infinite money and could. Thats disruption not competition, and you can be sure if Chrome is taken away, the price for Google office apps will increase.
>> 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.
> The big selling point of Google Chrome is the seamless integration with all the other Google services.
People keep saying this, but everybody I have spoken to dont care about that. They are just used to pressing the coloured circle icon to get on the internet. That muscle memory and brand recognition will be around for many years to come.
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.
People only know the name and logo, they dont care whos behind it.
99% of users just click that little coloured circle to open 'the internet', they know nothing past that. They will continue to download Chrome for many years to come.
The market share will drop, but slowly and over decades. That will give some greedy company plenty of time to milk it for all its worth.
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.
