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.
