Google is a web business, that’s their whole thing. They made a browser to invest in the web itself because what is good for the web is good for Google, and happens to be good for all of us.
This is a panglossian take that belongs in the year 2005.
Google is less a 'web business' than it is an 'advertising business', a 'surveillance business', and a 'finance business'.
Consequently, it is false that 'what is good for the web is good for Google'. AMP, and the Ad-blocking prohibition are evidence of this.
The 'what is good for the web is good for Google' line certainly was true in 2005 when the greatest threat to the web was companies like microsoft using internet explorer to adjust the de-facto web standards and privatize it in the "EEE" fashion.
Obviously the most visited websites would maintain the web better than OS vendors, their buisness depended on it being open.
We have a similar situation now, but with google locking down the most common browser (Manifest v3) and using extensions of web standards to maintain a dominant position.
Disclaimer: I am a zoomer and not a web developer so my history may be off here.
Malicous bots are a serious issue that trouble site operators. Trying to come up with solutions to such problems doesn't mean they don't care about the web. If it allows web sites to spend less time moderating and users to spend less time reading spam that would be a win win for both parties.
Re: your first paragraph, this is exactly what Google does now. They maintain such an incredible pace of development and such a unilateral attitude that nobody can stop them from developing web standards even if they want to. When was the last time anyone said no to a Chrome feature and expected it everywhere else? Developers treat it as the go to to the extent that some don't even bother testing in other browsers. Google are showing Microsoft how it is done.
It makes you wonder if Microsoft had given developers what they wanted, i.e. modern CSS and Javascript support, more browser features, etc., would they have actually moved off of Internet Explorer?
No, we wouldn’t have moved. The two main reasons back during IE6 times were tabs, and as a web developer: debugging. Firebug was something which was way ahead of everything else.
AJAX of jQuery fame, is extremely similar to ActiveX XmlHttpRequest.
The problem isn't XmlHttpRequest, but everything else they added/removed. Same with Google. The problem isn't they made request more secure, they made ad blocking impossible.
My custom user scripts from Tampermonkey that I used to make my life as a developer easier are just gone. I can’t even access the extension to grab them, some of them are complicated workflow stuff that made my life easier in some pages that are poorly designed. Like I’m often looking at the contents of JWTs so I added a global function into my global scope to parse JWTs. There wasn’t even a “hey we’re getting rid of this extension back stuff up”, it’s just disabled.
What do you mean? I have the new version of Tampermonkey installed and after turning on developer mode in the extensions section all my scripts work perfectly.
https://www.tampermonkey.net/faq.php?locale=en#Q209
> The 'what is good for the web is good for Google' line certainly was true in 2005
...But even then, it did not follow that "what is good for Google is good for the web".
Just because 2005!Google does something that improves its situation doesn't mean that's automatically good for all of us, even if stuff that improves the web for all of us makes 2005!Google's situation better as a side effect.
And 2025!Google is definitely not in that position. At this point, what's good for the web is only good for Google if it fits with Google's own plans and enhances their control.
And that whole "war on cookies" where they keep pitching replacements that basically let Google (and only Google) do all the same things, so that they can then gatekeep it and pay others for the privilege of accessing some limited subset of that data.
Regardless of why Google made Chrome originally, today, the main reason why it exists is to enable Google to track users more efficiently. And that is a bad thing.
They will never be able to kill cookies unless they bribe the whole industry and make them believe Google's cookie replacement technology will bring them more ad money.
Tbh cookies are lesser evil than Google's make believe cookie replacement technology. And remember Google is not Netscape, Google is on whole another level of power and domination.
What do you mean? the whole industry are happy to be on Chrome. What Google does, the rest will be either praising or be doing begrudingly.
A few of us are using Firefox. The few who remember the terror that web development was when Microsoft had the monopoly. At least they were mostly ignorant, not outright hostile towards the open web.
Yes, you are right Microsoft was worse than Google but Google is constantly hypocritical....they are always twisting the narrative so it suits them whether it is open web, advertising or politics.
This is an excellent analysis. Also, Google is actually a data business, building an AI, with a long time horizon view - and always has been. Larry's initial goal was to build the AI. Impressive tho they are, current AI products are mere ripples upon the surface compared to the deep currents of Google's long term plans.
Given that, I actually don't see much resistance from Google leadership to abc.xyz divesting itself of Chrome. In fact, it's probably on some level been "worked out" - with the DOJ pushing for a meaningful, and symbolically meaningful, concession that was already negotiated as something Google could agree to, and maybe even wanted.
Getting rid of Chrome could help them refocus their efforts, and unburden themselves from something that probably comes with a lot of issues. Cue the eventual press release, letter from the leadership, looking back on the decades of Chrome, and how they ultimate believe that a Browser should be owned by the web and the people itself, not by a company.
It could be a significant, meaningful and positive pivot for the company as it faces changing situations.
Google does not want to get rid of Chrome because it is by far the best source of “signal” that they use for training their systems. For example Chrome browsing stream data is the largest signal used in ranking search results.
Google deprecated PageRank in large part because interlinking was a proxy for user interest, and now with Chrome they can measure user interest directly in real time.
The stated goal was for sites to be able to restrict access to human users instead of automated programs and "allow web servers to evaluate the authenticity of the device and honest representation of the software stack and the traffic from the device".
Which on the surface seems like a legitimate use case I have to be honest.
It's legitimate if you believe companies should have the right to provide or deny you service by arbitrary criteria and on arbitrary terms. This belief has some unfortunate real-world implications.
The most likely outcome of WEI would have been - and might still be - that users of any operating system or browser that does not comply with the Trusted Computing agenda (secure boot, verified OS, full encrypted path from company servers to the user's screen & input devices) find themselves locked out of large portions of the internet.
> "allow web servers to evaluate the authenticity of the device and honest representation of the software stack and the traffic from the device".
That's not in the purview of a web server to do that, and quickly falls into the territory of violating 'neutrality' and 'anti-compete' territory. (i.e. it should not be possible for Apple or Microsoft servers to show content only to Microsoft or Apple devices, because that violates the law, it prevents competing software vendors from being compatible with them).
It is strictly not appropriate for every single web server that my browser contacts to audit my software stack, just like if a bank phones me up randomly it's not appropriate for them to verify who I am — the burden is on the web server to validate and confirm that it's identity and software stack is correct, instead.
The job of a web server is to truthfully serve it's content and not to butcher or malform that content, just like a librarian. Imagine if you had to take your birth certificate and pictures of your flat's security system to a library every time you wanted to borrow a book!
I think what they said is not technically wrong (excluding the "happens to be good for al of us part"). What is good for the health of the web really is good for Google, since they need the web to be sustainable.
But, the problem is the opposite is not true. What is good for Google is often bad for the web as a whole. The only reason it "Works" is because of their dominance.
Google removed don’t be evil.
They created a web browser which originally was good back in the day d.g. Internet explorer was crap, Firefox was okay but very different world 2007 vs today.
Googles behavior with youtube, by adding DRM to all videos, is a clear demonstration of the abandonment of the open web. If we are not longer using open standards, and no longer allowing alternative browsers, then how is that different from the closed down platform?
Google's core competency is machine learning. So far they've most profitably applied that to search (matching web pages and ads to queries), but is also applying it to automating all human work: drivers with Waymo, knowledge work with Gemini, and manual work with Gemini robotics.
So who is going to step up and build something better than Chrome? If we knock Google out of the running 2nd place for the sort of investment they've made is pretty weak and largely only works on iPhones.
Advertising is a monetization modal. That's like saying that resteraunts are just credit card swiping businesses.
Chrome is similar to other apps like X, Instagram, or YouTube. You click on the app. You are given a way to discover content and ads are shown along side that content. When you click on a site / post there can also be ads. Maximizing engagement on the web, means people will discover more content, which means more ads can be displayed.
>AMP
Unlike the other platforms I mentioned the web hosts content using 3rd party tech stacks and server which means that the user experience can be variable. AMP allows Google to provide a more consistent experience. It was optional and served to provide a better user experience for the users of the web.
>Ad-blocking prohibition
Google Search and Chrome have not prohibited ad blockers.
Advertising accounts for 80% of AlphaGoogle's revenue. That makes them Google's monarchy.
Re: AMP. AMP is like Cloudflare. Whatever is good about it is, by definition, bad for the Web, because its model replaces the Web as-we-know-it with something closer to Compuserve.
Re: Ad-blockers. It may not be a complete prohibition, but it is a hobbling of ad-blockers. It is clearly intentional, too, as evidenced by AlphaGoogle's recent anti-adblocker initiatives at Youtube.
>its model replaces the Web as-we-know-it with something closer to Compuserve.
Companies providing web hosting is already an established part of the web for a long time. People want to dedicate their time to the problems the site has and not to the problems the infra has. Not every site is going to want to setup their own servers at hundreds of points of presence around the world. Being able to use someone else's for free allows site operators to improve the user experience of their site for users for free. Even if such a deal ends people can still connect and use the original site directly.
I'm not being sarcastic. I'm providing an example of the reductionist thinking going on. Companies can about multiple things. McDonalds still cares about getting people to eat at their resteraunt.
>Advertising is a monetization modal. That's like saying that resteraunts are just credit card swiping businesses.
Ads aren't the mechanism through which Google receives payment, they're what Google is paid for. The actual claim your analogy matches is that Google is just an online credit card processing business. But nobody makes that claim.
Arguably, Google divesting Chrome would be great for the web. This piece seems to be looking at Google at large (and I think all of Alphabet would be better scope there).
Certainly this would be unpopular here but I would be all for aggressive trust-busting beyond what the DOJ has done historically, including vertical integrations.
Right now tech is a strange feudal state with hundreds of thousands of small teams anchored to a few hydra-like super-corporations on a consuming destructive rampage. Somehow, with the most advanced computer and technological systems to ever be known by man, we're looking to increase working hours and cut benefits, for "profits" that are not quite realized by the labor class or the end users.
Gonna be interesting to see what happens. I know Wall Street will place their bets for what they want to happen right along side what's obviously going to shake out once the market becomes 'rational.'
The administration doesn’t give a shit about the web, and DOJ is a fully political entity. They’ll extort Google for whatever concession they want, and Chrome will remain.
Things are going to get more heated as the voluntary economic downturn heats up. The current protests get some coverage but we’re starting to see even the loyalists realize that they won’t be spared, and that is likely to increase protests considerably.
Well now to be fair, total surveillance and suppression of any content they don't like is worth a whole lot more than rare earth deposits to a government.
> Arguably, Google divesting Chrome would be great for the web.
Because then Chrome would slowly rot since there's no one to fund development, leading us to WebKit being the only engine, as Firefox is also defunded. I don't see how that's better.
The new owner of Chrome can sell it to the manufacturers of Android devices. Royalties.
They can even make it closed source or enforce a not for commerce license. That would make manufacturers choose between paying those royalties, installing Firefox, investing in their own browser (a fork of Chrome or their very own tech.) Some of them will pay royalties.
That’s assuming the divested Chrome would then proceed to lose its gigantic market share and thus the mind-boggling proceeds from defaulting to Google as the search engine. They might even be able to afford a bigger development team, if need be.
But what makes you think the DoJ allow Google to continue paying Chrome to have Google as default? Google is already not allowed to pay Apple to be default.
> aggressive trust-busting beyond what the DOJ has done historically, including vertical integrations.
Vertical integration was a huge part of what they went after historically, until a bunch of people "convinced" the US that the standard should be "consumer harm." The cool thing about consumer harm is that you can come up with any bullshit argument about how prices will go down and access and quality up in the future from some merger, and nobody can disprove it because it's a counterfactual (he said, she said.) And when prices go up, it's just <shrug>, who could have known?
I know what vertical integration is today, though. It's not a hypothetical, it's a selling point to investors. I can just tell you no. Any clear metrics or standards for antitrust action can't be tolerated. The goal is to force us to go on vibes. Then they say we have bad vibes.
Competition brings down prices. Laissez-faire leads to pseudo-Communism with royal families, courtiers, and technicians making up the top 10%, and everybody else gets to be a (debt) slave i.e. feudalism.
We should err towards breaking more things up than would be ideal, not less. If I make you divest from something, you sell it and get whatever future value out of it today. It's not a punishment according to SCOTUS when they're looking at TikTok (which is why they said the TikTok ban wasn't a bill of attainder.) We charter these companies, and they operate for our benefit, which is why we grant them limited liability and a whole bunch of other treats. What you divest is going to go to somebody just like you, but someone who is not financially entangled with you. The only reason you want to keep it all is to do things that I don't want you to do with it, I don't want you doing unproductive market manipulation, I want you to put that energy into competing.
> The only reason you want to keep it all is to do things that I don't want you to do with it
Surely, the reason you want to keep it is because owning and controlling thing A and thing B allows you to make more profit personally than being a controlling owner of thing A or thing B.
That said, I agree with your post and also think nations should err more on the side of breaking things up.
Concentrations of power distort markets and resist democratic control.
> Somehow, with the most advanced computer and technological systems to ever be known by man, we're looking to increase working hours and cut benefits, for "profits" that are not quite realized by the labor class
Somehow?? This is capitalism 101. Not a "strange feudal state" nor anything else.
> Users don’t pay for Chrome. There aren’t ads in Chrome. There is no direct business model for Chrome. Unlike Safari and Firefox, nobody writes checks to Chrome to make a certain search engine the default.
They track you. There IS a business model for Chrome: monetizing user data.
There isn’t a business model for a company whose product is just chrome, though. Unless it’s some kind of foundation or non-profit with a sufficient endowment to not need a business model.
I’m no fan of Google, but—unless people really want browser subscriptions—I don’t see how you can have a browser company today. They exist better as a byproduct of some other business model.
> There isn’t a business model for a company whose product is just chrome, though.
Yes there is, it is the same business model Chrome has now, but with overt pricing. In other words if you can understand why Chrome is valuable to Google now, then you can understand what Chrome-the-standalone-business would put a price tag on.
Google benefits from the data that Chrome collects. So Chrome-the-business would collect the same data and charge Google for it.
But it could also sell that data to other companies too. This would create competition which would lead to better pricing and more innovation. That is why it is a remedy for a monopoly.
The history of antitrust is full of stuff like this. Standard Oil used to own all the gas stations in the country. AT&T used to be the only company that sold telephones.
It isn’t relevant that the thing you want to split off won’t be able to stand on its own two feet? Wouldn’t it be simpler to simply require Google to burn the source code?
And what is the point of the breakup if everyone (including consumers/users) is worse off? Is the point of government to make people better off, or just to maximize the number of paperclips produced?
> And what is the point of the breakup if everyone (including consumers/users) is worse off? Is the point of government to make people better off, or just to maximize the number of paperclips produced?
In this case this is pushed by other tech companies that want to buy data from Chrome, or they want to move users from the web to their apps where they can be more user hostile.
This is what happens when the government is controlled by corporations.
I really do want a browser subscription or purchase, so that its incentives are aligned with mine and not the advertisers'.
Paid browsers used to be common in the past, and ones like Netcaptor gave us tabbed browsing, pop-up blocking, etc. Opera was great too. Netscape itself used to be paid at first. It was big companies like Microsoft and Google tyring to EEE the web by giving away free browsers that killed the thriving browser marketplace and led to monopolies like the ones we have now.
There very much can be a browser market and business model IF antitrust were actually enforced.
I'm so confused when I read takes like that. The only way advertising can be sustainable under capitalism is if every $1 spent on advertising generates >= $1 of profit for advertisers, keeping in mind that ad networks take a share of revenue, say 30%.
This means that you as a consumer have to spend at least $1 (likely more - profit not revenue) for every $0.70 of value you receive in "free" services. Being supportive of ad-supported services is therefore financially irrational.
Yet you pay for Netflix and your internet and phone bill. But these could be given away by surveillance advertising firms to snoop your watching, surfing, and calling habits.
As the saying goes, if the product is free, YOU are the product.
> Yet you pay for Netflix and your internet and phone bill. But these could be given away by surveillance advertising firms to snoop your watching, surfing, and calling habits.
You do know most of those companies do both charge you and sell your data? Almost the only companies that don't sell your data are big tech advertising companies.
"When you don't pay you are the product" doesn't mean "If you pay you aren't the product", you still are the product the company is just double dipping.
I think the saying is oversimplified (or else, chrome isn’t a product but a byproduct). It makes a company to make the complement of their product cheap or free so that people can use their product more effectively. Google Search and Ads rely on people having a browser. Similarly, Apple’s Phones and laptops are benefited by including a good first party browser. Imo, a lot of technologies are better as free byproducts of monetized technology than as being some company’s products: there are endless lists of great technologies that never found a market or disappeared post-acquisition.
My ISP is selling my data as well. Netflix is snooping on what i watch for their ads. Chrome is free. Bigger fish to fry than my web browser snooping on me like your bank selling all credit card transactions your car snooping on your driving and your mobile carrier selling your location.
The majority of Netflix users over the next few years will be advertising based users. That just doesn't bring in enough profit because people are not willing to pay enough subscription to cover what those things actually cost.
Your hypothesis has a bit of a gaping hole where "real world user behaviour" sits.
Yeah. I think that was the wrong decision. The problem was introducing features between IE and IIS and using that to extend their end user OS monopoly into a server OS monopoly. MS should have been blocked from the server OS market instead (or maybe some some of consent decree, I’m sceptical it would have been appropriately enforced though).
That's more or less also what Google does with Chrome in order to force folks to use it and only it. I know that well because I have Chromium installed for this reason alone.
If Chrome cannot succeed on its own, but under Google it is an oppressive force taking over the vast majority of web marketshare, that is a textbook case for antitrust action. That is Google using its dominance in one market (search, advertising) to expand into and dominate another market (web browsers).
If a hypothetical Chrome Corp. couldn't figure out how to use the exact same data Google is harvesting with the browser to at least move in the direction of profitability, then they're hypothetically idiots.
> If a hypothetical Chrome Corp. couldn't figure out how to use the exact same data Google is harvesting with the browser to at least move in the direction of profitability, then they're hypothetically idiots.
Selling that data to the government and other corporations is user hostile though, and that is exactly what is going to happen when Google is forced to sell.
I can see why the government would love this though so it makes sense they pursue this hard now,
I would like to point out that your perception of what a browser can/should be is based on what Google has turned browsers into.
What a browser is in 2025 is vastly different from what anyone thought they would ever be. There are major, major issues with the way web engines/web browsers function today and much of those issues stem from Google's near monopoly on browsers.
There was a lot of very interesting and good discussion around this in some of the Mozilla/Firefox threads recently. Mostly about how browsers turned into something they were never meant to be, which has changed the way the internet works and how we interact with it.
I'm not sure I get tracked that much more by Google while using Chrome than using Firefox? I still google stuff there and don't bother with privacy things because honestly in ~30 years of using the web I've yet to find a reason to care about ad tracking.
Would that be a better world than we have now, though, if Chrome was nominally separate from Google but still only exists because Google pays for it? It seems like the same thing with extra steps.
If Chrome cannot be owned by Google (nor Alphabet) then that is an important separation. It means Chrome could auction off the rights. Much as Firefox offers non-Google search in certain markets, which happened in the US at least once.
I believe the default search payments are also part of the antitrust case, so likely those payments will also become illegal, also affecting Firefox and Apple/Safari.
By their own admission, "not only does Google collect your name and email address, Google also collects your physical address, your exact location, your contacts, advertising data, product interaction, search, and browsing history." [1] And that's Chrome (a Safari wrapper at that moment) on iOS. You may assume they collect at least as much on platforms they own.
Chrome consistently pushes to make it easier for websites to track you -- by being the slowest browser to incorporate privacy protections like third-party cookie isolation, by eliminating extension APIs used by ad/tracker blockers, and by adding new features which expose more fingerprinting surface to websites. This disproportionately benefits Google because Google runs some of the largest web tracking networks (reCaptcha, Google Analytics, AdSense, etc). Even if Chrome was separate from Google, Google (along with other ad companies) could probably keep paying them to sabotage users' privacy.
Chrome also directly uploads a lot of data to Google. It's technically possible to use Chrome without syncing your browser history to your Google account, but a surprising number of people I know mysteriously managed to turn on sync without knowing it. Other Chrome data-collection initiatives, like Core Web Vitals, also provide a lot of value to Google's other businesses. Those are other products that Google could pay directly for.
Is that a distinction without a difference from an end user perspective?
Chrome’s defaults are the main reason anybody is tracked by cross-site cookies any more, and that tracking massively and directly benefits Google’s business.
I started reading this article and was immediately hit how biased it seems, like in this meme 'leave multi-bilion dollar corporation alone'.
Unfortunetelly we are in the times when any split of any of those multi-bilion dollar corp would be greatly benefiting humanity as a whole. How many people are taking their profits really?
Hundreds? Thousands maybe?
And that is it. What humanity have from existence of those? Like one thing?
Some may say that we will have an AI, self driving cars or androids pretty soon. But ask your friends, or neighbours, ordinary people that work in non-tech jobs what they need. I am 100% sure that any those things above will be not their first need.
Better heath care. Less work. More money. Less stress. Vacation to recuperate and relax. More time for hobbies. Just possibility to have relaxing walk in the woods without worry.
Does any of those companies work on any projects that will help suffice any of those needs? Author of an article mentions 'good of the web' because probably his livelihood is the web.
But regular person does not care if their banking application or Netflix app on TV dongle is written with latest CSS standards or with Jquery.
Till that point in our history all big empires fell because of buearacracy and stagnation caused by millions of people trying to retain status quo.
Momentum of conquest was not enough suply enoug resources to feed the empire.
With the tech giants this may be first time in history when one entity will rule the entire human population caused by sheer momentum of technical progression it is making.
Will this be a good thing? I am entirely sure it will not be.
Oh yeah. Definitely when we have discussions with companies to get funding we totally talk about how we're going to save the poor worker from all of these horrible jobs.
There's one end goal. Get rid of people to increase profits for management and shareholders.
People generally do not want to be "alleviated" of work, a great euphemism for being unemployed.
There's far more funding in getting rid of people than increasing their productivity 2x.
I don't get the negative comments here. It's pretty simple I think...
- Google is banned from paying Firefox to be the default search engine -> Firefox has way less money -> Firefox development massively slows
- Someone buys Chrome and needs to turn a profit from Chrome, rather than using it to indirectly profit from the web in general like Google does -> Chrome probably goes to shit and development massively slows
So what now? Safari is going to be the leading force moving the web forward? The Chromium forks that are doing basically no browser engine work are going to suddenly find billions of dollars to invest in hiring developers? Someone will buy a time machine and go 10 years into the future to get a version of Ladybird that is comparable to what we have today in Chrome/Firefox? Just because you guys hate Google doesn't make any of those scenarios remotely plausible. And if you hate Google, there are much better ways to punish it than this.
"Development slows" is not necessarily a bad thing. E.g. quite a lot of people would love development to slow wrt Manifest v3. It would also mean that web standards are less of a moving target for browsers playing catch-up (like Firefox).
People can also pay for browsers. The only reason why this isn't feasible today is because it's hard to compete with the top-of-the-line stuff that megacorps offer for free - which they do precisely so they can maintain de facto control over web standards (or force the lack thereof in areas where this is advantageous). Lest we forget, many early web browsers were paid products (not just NN, but also Opera, for example), and Microsoft's original sin as a monopoly was offering IE for free, against which NN couldn't compete. But if Google is forced to ditch Chrome, and Microsoft is forced to ditch Edge...
This is such a 'first-world' comment. A majority of the folks logging on the web in the developing and emerging world will be unable to afford paying any kind of subscription for their web browser over and above what they pay their ISPs for internet access.
Then unfortunately the internet will remain a luxury for people who aren’t able to afford the cost. The internet is a product, not a charity or human right.
The development that slows will not be parts that allow monetisation. They have a rationale. They will be things like security that have no immediate bottom line impact.
In a scenario where Google no longer control Chrome, I doubt Safari's budget is at risk, the company had nearly $400B in revenue in 2024.
Courtroom testimony implied that part of the reason Apple value(s/d) the deal with Google was a "peace deal" to prevent Google from doing what Google does and forcing Safari users on Google properties, to switch to Chrome.
Of all the browsers that would be affected by the loss of Google funding, Safari is least likely to be affected.
No, because people tend to invest in what generates revenue. If Apple no longer gets billions from Safari most people would stop investing that much in it, so that is likely what is going to happen.
> Someone buys Chrome and needs to turn a profit from Chrome, rather than using it to indirectly profit from the web in general like Google does -> Chrome probably goes to shit and development massively slows
I kinda believe Chromium is already complete enough, and government can take over it, and keep in running in maintenance mode (security fixes through possible bounties) with minimum expenses, and it will be great product: reliable, performant, secure and without corp-crap-tech.
At least Safari has better privacy concern than Chrome. Let's see if Waterfox can substitute Firefox in the long run. I believe MS Edge will happily replace Chrome.
Web browsers are probably complex enough at this point. Putting them on maintenance and letting new architectures fight it out might not be a bad outcome.
Putting hopes in someone else making an entirely new standards and protocols based hypermedia sounds outlandish. Whose going to go on a decade long quest to build something amazing to give away, again?
I for one really tire of this spiritual vandalism masquerading as a hopeful pineing ask for a new beginning. The web rocks, is amazing. Sure there's some incidental complexity that's accrued, but the versatility & wide capability from a simple core are a glorious & powerful thing that I think only a fool wouldn't celebrate.
I've brought this up before, but I never got a response and I'm really interested what people think the business case is here. I keep wondering what a buyer would actually value beyond Chrome's userbase. Chrome is just Chromium with Google integrations, similar to how Edge is Chromium with Microsoft integrations.
If a company acquires Chrome, they don't have many choices: re-establish Google integration deals (so the divestiture would be pointless), replace Google integrations with their own (becoming just another Chromium distro in a sea of Chromium distros), or just monetize the existing userbase.
A Chrome acquisition doesn't include unlimited control over Chromium. Chromium is open source, with contributions from many organizations (who retain the copyright to their contributed code). Google can only sell what it exclusively owns: the brand, infrastructure, signing keys, etc. The real force behind Chromium is having a critical mass of engineers all pushing in generally the same direction. You can't necessarily just buy that, especially when you wouldn't own exclusive rights. Any other company is free to poach engineers and fork the project.
Edited to add: if Microsoft sold VS Code to, say, Oracle... don't you think that another company would leap at the opportunity to fork the project? Would the userbase and the thin layer of closed-source Microsoft customizations really be worth that much?
Business model is the same as Firefox: Google pays to be the default search engine.
The economics are identical to Chrome being within Google. The differences are three-fold:
- Bing, DDG, OpenAI, and others can compete to pay for placement
- There can be no central directives to shove things like Manifest V3, weird data sharing, or DRM down our throats
- Google has no incentive to favor Chrome over Firefox or Edge in its web offerings
In other words, if a business is split, the same economics work, but without all the shady, anti-trusty stuff. It's an independent company, without linked chains of corporate control.
I think it most serves Google's interests to set up a second nonprofit similar to Mozilla to manage this, perhaps with more of a consortium model. Whatever Google can sell Chrome for is less in its interests than maintaining that the new Chrome will not be used against Google the way Google used Chrome against competitors.... If DDG were to end up with ownership of Chrome and switch from Google Search to DDG, I think Google would be pretty unhappy, while DDG's market cap of 75M versus Google's of $2T -- 2000 times higher -- would even out a little bit.
One of the key points is that the EXACT SAME economics and business model can be evil and anti-trusty or good and fair depending on chains of control and collusion. If there is a colluding consortium (whether by backroom deals or by having related products in the same place), new competitors won't come in since they know they'll be crushed unfairly. Same economics without backroom deals, and you've got market competition.
I truely believe there is none. There is literally nothing people would pay for. We got ourselves into a situation where browsers have become so complex that they need an incredible amount of resources to get developed but the only way to get any money with them is to either sell the data of your users or have partners that do that (Google paying Mozilla for being the Firefox default search engine).
I literally don’t see a way out of this mess. In fact if Chrome needs to be split off from google, google has no need to keep Firefox alive anymore. If they just stop paying for the search engine default, Mozilla loses 75% of their revenue.
The CLA just gives Google a license to use the code your contribute (and a license to any associated patents). You still own the copyright, and Google cannot sell the rights to your code.
Google would retain copyright to all of it's employees contributions to Chromium. Which I recall being 90%+ of contributions. The propsal PDF from justice.gov doesn't mention Chromium anywhere, so maybe Google will retain copyrights, but the sale would seem pointless if they do.
The real question is to what level Google continue investment in Chrome after the sale. Remember both Mozilla and Apple will also loose out on the search engine deal.
But that investment isn’t neutral. It’s oriented towards making the Web a better place for Google to make money—not a better place for users to avoid being tracked by Google. Chrome’s dominant position means Google can kill any new web feature that would help users, but hurt Google’s bottom line.
There's such a strong strain of dark side energy aimed at Google. It just feels so unhinged to me though.
Blink-dev is an amazing mailing list of really good improvements being built intelligently, in well declared fashion, with lots of checks via standards bodies, fully open to discussion. There's very few places on the planet where such good work is so easy to see, and no where that it's so abundant. https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev
What features has Google killed, do you think? How often has this been a problem, do you think? What other browsers have gone ahead, with Google holding out?
Google wants a competent capable successful healthy web. They want there to be an open, standards & protocols system out there, a connected rich hypermedia internet, because everything else humanity has done with computing is proprietary and trying to rely on someone else's platform is existentially hazardous.
Agreed, that stings. Its extremely visible & painful. I want to believe there was some intent, to make extensions that weren't such an extreme hazard, so that the Google Web Store could be better. But it's obviously just a massive regression in user agency, and miserable, and directly undoes so much of the good that was the web.
I still think this is, like, the one example. Its a bloody awful one though.
> What features has Google killed, do you think?
The problem is more like google can implement whatever feature they want and force it into web standard
> How often has this been a problem, do you think?
very often
> What other browsers have gone ahead, with Google holding out?
Google is holding out in a sense that no other people can implement a feature-complete browser. Google is killing the "open standard" web by make the standard impossible.
Sure there are a lot of people on blink-dev building good thoughtful features
But there are also plenty of people at Google etc who are convinced that advertising is the only way to fund the web and so build features to support that e.g. maintaining 3rd-party cookies, FLEDGE / Flock / Topics (and the rest of the deceptively names Privacy Sandbox)
Advertising is a massive invasion into our personal lives and via ad networks actors (sometimes hostile) can get access to data they have no rights to
I find amazing that, in today's web, the inaner a point is, the firmer is its proponent's conviction. Today's Google is the opposite of what is good for the web; it's a business led by a McKinsey bean counter and his henchmen, people who destroyed one of the most innovative companies the world has ever known and turned into a cancer who will only stop taking a cut of everything we do when it kills its host, the Internet.
If Google wasn’t such a trash company and using chrome to drive more revenue by farming data and preventing adblocks then no one would have a problem with chrome.
Not sure if Google voluntarily gave users the option. Google was forced to give users the option since Blink is a derivative of the LGPL-licensed WebKit, which is itself a derivative of the LGPL-licensed KHTML.
An argument can be made for open-sourcing the frontend of the browser. However, even the WebKit codebase has a test browser that runs on Windows (despite Safari dropping Windows support over a decade ago). This would have been present in the Blink codebase even if Google decided to keep the Chrome frontend proprietary. So people would still be able to embed "Chromium" into applications.
They aren't that bad. Out of the FAANG lot Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google they are probably the one I'm happiest with. Facebook have gone crazy with ads, Apple are expensive, Amazon and Netflix are pushy for money. Google on the other hand has provided me with a lot of services I use daily for 20 or so years without really bugging me or trying to screw me over. They are not preventing adblock, just forcing going from uBlock to uBlock lite. If Google is a trash company what is this heavenly company that does such stuff better?
Google has happily provided you with those services because they are stealing your data and invading your privacy secretly behind your back for 20 years. Everything Google does is to steal more info about you.
It’s baffling that you’re unhappy with companies wanting you to pay for their product. Yes Netflix increases their prices and wants to prevent you from sharing your account, but they’re not scanning every single email you’ve ever received or making the web worse for everyone to collect more data about you.
Well the companies can either: sell your data, or take your money and still sell your data.
Don't trust the ones that say they don't sell your data, it's only a matter of time until they get caught. Even Apple only cares as much as they need for marketing.
We need legislation that bans all types of ads except for banner style. :) I don't care if the money motivation disappears - we don't need you assholes. I was with the web when it was powered by 56k modems. Greed-assholes can leave.
You’ve got a monopoly on lemonade because you pay all the grocery stores to be the default lemonade.
So we’re going to force you sell your car.
I don't think this is an accurate anaology. It's more like, you own the vast majority of grocery stores, and you make lemonade, and you force all the other grocery stores to only sell your lemonade.
To put it another way, the problem is not so much that Google shouldn't be paying to be the default search engine, but that it shouldn't own both the browser and the search engine.
I think this harkens back to the anti-trust court case, United States v. Paramount Pictures, where the court ruled that the film studios cannot hold monopolies over the movie theatres, and that theatres must remain independent.
Similarly, browsers and search engines being independent is good for competition because the internet is too important to let a single company dictate how it is used.
> To put it another way, the problem is not so much that Google shouldn't be paying to be the default search engine, but that it shouldn't own both the browser and the search engine.
If this is the real crux of the case, then is divesting Chrome going to negatively affect DuckDuckGo and Kagi?
My hunch is “no”, and also that search+browser isn’t the crux of the case. I think the real crux is Google owning browser+ad/surveillance-network.
> I don't think this is an accurate anaology. It's more like, you own the vast majority of grocery stores, and you make lemonade, and you force all the other grocery stores to only sell your lemonade.
Yep. The rest of the article is equally disingenuous, desperately making up arguments and bad analogies.
What's unclear is who the buyer is supposed to be? Chrome's entire monetization is centered around its synergy with Google's ad business. Cutting off Chrome is so much messier, than the obvious, (although I fear it would itself have bad repercussions) decision to force them to sell Youtube.
Yeah I don't quite understand either. Once you rip Google out of Chrome, it's just chromium, I don't think there's going to be a buyer interested in buying what they can already get and build themselves for free.
A more appropriate ruling would be just force Google to stop distributing Chrome, not sell it but kill it. There's already a myriad of chromium reskins, so that wouldn't change, and that's all chrome will become if someone else buys it. Make the precedent that owners of a search engine can't also have a browser.
I think just killing chrome would do more good than selling it off to become yet another sketchy chromium reskin with questionable privacy and crypto miners.
Exactly, this is my question as well. I was just thinking about it and thought although it's kind of silly, Google paying them (the newly-divested ChromeCo) for search engine default status could be a primary source of revenue.
I'm actually kind of curious about that as an option. Right now the distortion that makes Google any 800 pound gorilla is their leveraging of Chrome to channel users into their various monetized ecosystems.
But there could conceivably be an interesting form of parity that comes from the browsers all depending on the same form of revenue, search engine placement. I haven't fully thought this through, so I welcome corrections. I suppose Google could quite easily give favorable treatment toward ChromeCo and effectively continue to flex its monopoly muscle. Google will need them just as much as before. I'm honestly just not sure.
If nobody wants Chrome, and it's only profitable use is a social negative, let it die?
A billion or two dollars would fund development indefinitely. Don't sell it to anybody, make it a nonprofit with a fat trust. I'll say the same thing about Firefox: they got plenty of money from Google. They should have been able to save enough in ten or how ever many years to fund development for all eternity. Instead they paid it to themselves.
So what happens if Google sells Chrome? Who will buy it? Will they be as advertising/tracking heavy as Google is? Is there any other reason to own Chrome?
Is it any better if Meta, Alibaba, Microsoft or any other big company with money to buy Chrome owned Chrome?
You could make the same argument for the Linux kernel. Or Postgres, or Bitcoin Core, or CPython. So many companies have a vested interest in Chromium, v8, and Blink (especially by way of Electron) that it would be wild to think some sort of foundation couldn't be pulled together.
It's wild that the author points to all the Google people writing W3C specs as if that's a positive sign. I'm not quite pessimistic enough to say all those people are 100% corporate shills, but there's no reason to expect that the stuff that gets into the W3C via Google is somehow magically detached from Google's profit motives. Google's effect on web standards is largely just another form of icky "embrace and extend" shenanigans.
This is monopolistic behaviour: it leverages a product (Workgroups) to force a minority group to switch to another product (Chrome). Most users of Workgroups don’t have an option to change, because it’s provided for them by their company.
It's conjecture at best that killing adblock was related to manifest v3. Given apple also rolled out the same sorts of restrictions years earlier, there is strong precedent for this being purely a security improvement measure. Especially when you consider how problematic and prevalent malware extensions are.
If Google has to sell Chrome what stops another buyer from being even more profit maximizing then Google. What if a private equity firm like Silver Lake buys it?
Some will say well the free market will do its thing and people will just switch. The problem is Chrome has a 60-70% market share. And like it or not anyone that is a professional developer will be at the mercy of this new buyer because like them or not they will own 60%+ browser market share overnight.
Anyone who was old enough to remember what web development was in the 2000s and early 2010s remembers that was not a smooth or enjoyable transition going from IE to Firefox to Chrome. I remember those years it was the Dark Ages of desktop internet browsing.
The DOJ's proposed remedy is structural separation, which is really the only way to prevent malicious compliance. I'm actually surprised they went for it, given how thoroughly neutered American antitrust has become under assault from the noxious Chicago School.
IMO there is likely another agenda at play. For example, perhaps they will be told later that they could earn a reprieve if they "adjust" their search algorithm to silence critics and political enemies.
I agree. If Chrome is sold off, the new owners might think its uneconomic to maintain a (desktop) Linux port, keep it open source, or they might make it even less standards based than it is now.
The way they aggressively push Chrome on Gmail users with "Google recommends using Chrome" popups is enough to make me think this is exactly what needed to happen.
Google being forced to sell would cost them billions of dollars. It makes sense that Google would spend at least tens of millions of dollars trying to convince the public at large that this is bad. I don't know the author but he's presumably a multi-millionaire and a bit entrenched in this space and has at least some connection with Google given his startup/company has partnered with them in the past. I'm not saying Chris is being dishonest, but he's probably not very unbiased in this. Combined with the many flaws in this writing, it doesn't seem very credible.
Google is emphatically not a web business. They are an advertising business. You should expect their priorities in product development to reflect that.
I think that this must be done, but will have vanishingly small effect anyway. Browsers are software monsters and making one your lap dog through non-directly-financial means is a low-brainer if you’re google.
They will likely relax firefox live support afterwards to weaken its org structure, and new-chrome will seek contracts like search/etc and they will invent something like “feature requests with benefits” which aren’t exactly illegal.
The only true way is revolution against standards and grounding the cost of a browser to viable levels. It will be pain like 2->3 or ESM, and likely much worse, but we made it through before.
My only worry is that it will become even shittier to program for, because we lost sense of that 20 years ago.
> Other remedies the government is asking the court to impose include prohibiting Google from offering money or anything of value to third parties — including Apple and other phone-makers — to make Google’s search engine the default, or to discourage them from hosting search competitors. It also wants to ban Google from preferencing its search engine on any owned-and-operated platform (like YouTube or Gemini), mandate it let rivals access its search index at “marginal cost, and on an ongoing basis,” and require Google to syndicate its search results, ranking signals, and US-originated query data for 10 years.
I don’t think they’re going to get all of that, but it’s interesting, and it definitely doesn’t line up with the “sell your car” analogy in the post.
Is there a name for this line of argumentation? The guy is obsessing over how document is articulated and disregarding how Chrome's dominance and Google owning it empowers Google to be monopolistic by, for example, having disproportionate power to drive web standards, having Google as the default search engine in its already dominant browser, having popular Google owned services not play nice with competing browsers, etc., just because the document he is quoting does not spell it out.
Side question: If hypothetically Google is forced to sell off Chrome, who would buy it?
A trouble with breaking up Google is I think from one perspective the impact it would have is not to reduce monopoly tensions but to increase them. Because now it's Apple Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, we will have gone from G.A.M.M.A. to A.M.M.A. (I no longer know what the new acronym is supposed to be, now that FAANG is gone).
And I'm not sure that I would start with Google. I'm honestly not sure how I would rank the major players in terms of antitrust concerns, but I do think there probably should be an order of operations such that you don't go after the "wrong" one first, effectively consolidating the industry further rather than balancing it.
Besides all the good points in that thread about why Google should definitely be forced to sell Chrome lets ad another one: The Google Discover Feed in Google Chrome (and Android and Google App) is by now up to 80% of the Traffic News-Sites get. Basically it is Instagram for News and massively used. So Google now controls how Users consume the News. (Also you still need AMP to perform there...)
It's interesting to see where the economics align with software. Web advertising paired with search and a browser. And it worked. I can't recall a better outcome supporting modern communication than Chrome and all it contains. The harmony between the business, software and market need was very well aligned.
That's falling apart now due to LLM's taking over much of what previously was search, and Google's innovator's dilemma between AI/LLM and traditional search. While the revenues are stronger than ever this seems unlikely to continue long term. So the dynamic is changing naturally.
Reminds me of how a strange contemporary religion where believers families take over a planet, resulted in this group building an amazing genealogy web service (familysearch.org). Or how US hegemony naturally leads to it's military, or how the theocratic monarchy of ancient Egypt was good for the masonry industry--even affecting modern tourism, or how Roman roads form the paths leading to today's major European cities.
This one struck me as a weird one as browser waves come and go and I feel like opera is the big swell rising at the moment anyway. The competitive component is there and alive and well.
What happens when this artificial friction causes chrome to lose network effect faster than natural, and we are ironically left with a different monopoly?
Will for a while now market here has been firmly going in one direction and it's that of increasing Chrome dominance. I absolutely loved the old opera team, and I loved them reconstituting themselves under Vivaldi, but I don't love that they now both depend on Chromium.
I do think the dynamics of browser market share it had in a previous time been subject to exactly the waves and frictions you mentioned, but it's too high stakes now. There's too much serious investment necessary, and so it's going to be responding to some business and economic dynamics Which will be different than the waves and frictions of yesteryear.
Could there be a better steward for Chrome in theory? Sure. My guess is that in practice the successor would be worse or about the same since it is all about money in the end.
Being forced to give away Unix was a great remedy for AT&Ts monopoly. "But that makes no sense! AT&T isn't a computer company, why should it be forced to stop making operating systems for profit?"
Microsoft welded Explorer into the guts of its OS so they could say, after forcing it to be true, that the browser was an essential part of the system. But Microsoft made business software, why should it have to change IE? That's crazy!
I wouldn't be surprised if this guy was some astroturfed paid lobbyist for Alphabet's PR firm. Would you?
This is really about paying to be the default search engine. How that goes for Google depends on the details.
If nobody can pay to be the default, then it's an absolute win for Google. This would save Google billions of dollars and many of those users will use Google anyway. Google is really paying so nobody else can.
If other companeis can pay to be the default, then it's a much more mixed bag. It'll hurt Firefox and Apple because nobody can pay what Google can and with Google out of the picture, people won't have to pay as much anyway.
Divestment of Chrome is a separate issue. I don't see how this can work as an independent business. People won't pay for a browser. Selling user data doesn't seem like a sustainable business. I know I wouldn't use that.
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It's really time for browsers to become a common good.
> Selling user data doesn't seem like a sustainable business.
Did you see Google's Q4 earnings? "Google Services revenues increased 10% to $84.1 billion, reflecting the strong momentum across Google
Search & other and YouTube ads." That's by using user data. If Chrome is split off into a new company, there will be buses full of wooers.
The article didn't really make a lot of sense to me.
But I do agree: to edict the sale of chrome won't really accomplish much.
This is reminiscent of the M$ anti-trust suite in the '90s. To edict for example, the creation of an "open standard" for word documents. Which led to the creation of .docx, which has been harder for 3rd parties to functionally incorporate than the original .doc format. When the corps performs minimally compliant reforms, with continuing antagonistic behavior, there seems to be no real technically specifiable solution (sorry, I didn't go look up some obscure word to mean the same thing). That litigation also had web browsers as a central element, yet nothing was accomplished in diversifying the operating system market, or the web browser market.
To quote Cory Doctorow: capitalists hate capitalism
And so does the US government. What they both love is the unbridled concentration of wealth.
This is why similar comparisons could be made to the AT&T "break up", which was largely ineffective, with the clear oligopoly in telecommunications in existence today.
I do agree with one aspect of the article: if goggle is a monopoly (it obviously is), then don't take tangential measures, break it up, completely.
The semantic web, elimination of internet search via for-profit entities, widely applicable and enforced anti-surveillance and privacy laws. There are many approaches that could work. None of them will be applied, because they would lead to the very richest people making less money. The US will never implement any law with this consequence, period.
I think he's confused. Google has to sell Chrome for reasons unrelated to whether Google was paying to be the default on their competitors products.
Google has to sell Chrome for reasons that don't even imply fault or wrongdoing. It lowers the level of competition to an unacceptable level for Google to own Chrome; and when Google owns Chrome, the temptation to do things like pay to be the default search engine in your competitors products in order to manipulate their behavior is too high.
The fact that they were actually doing something like that is a separate problem. And it will not be fixed by punishing them, it will be fixed by telling them to stop doing it. This is a long overdue intervention, not a criminal trial.
"Not so with the web. The web is a set of protocols and languages and file formats[...] Google, by virtue of having Chrome, invests heavily in the web itself"
Without a company like Google which functions like a public steward for the web there's little reason for anyone else to drive web development. The competitive market logic doesn't incentivize an open ecosystem because by definition there's no profit to be captured in it, it exists if you will because a benevolent player maintains it and makes money elsewhere.
An analog to this would be if you'd judge Red Hat's dominance in the commercial Linux space the same way and forced them to divest from the operating system market. There would be nobody stepping in, because there's no money in linux itself. It exists by virtue of a entity making money on adjacent markets and all the linux development happens because it's beneficial for them to drive adoption.
The only real alternative you could propose is straight up public funding, but a balkanized market is by its very logic not going to maintain the web, but vertically integrated alternatives, i.e. apps. It's something you can btw see in China which due to timing happened to leap frog over the open web and search and went straight to the hyper-competitive and for that reason proprietary world of platforms.
> An analog to this would be if you'd judge Red Hat's dominance in the commercial Linux space the same way and forced them to divest from the operating system market.
But it's not at all how the linux ecosystem looks. Redhat doesn't dominate linux distributions and they can't corral everyone into using their money-making services by making them default into their distribution.
> You’ve got a monopoly on lemonade because you pay all the grocery stores to be the default lemonade.
> So we’re going to force you sell your car.
This is b*llocks. Google financed being monopolist in cars with profits from its monopoly on lemonade, which they then used to perpetuate the monopoly on lemonade. We can't solve lemonade problem for now, but we can easily fix the car monopoly problem and break the feedback loop between the two.
Developing a browser is fantastically difficult and expensive. How much of that is because of Google using Chrome's dominance to dictate web standards?
If instead web standards moved at a pace set by a standards body not incentivised to spy on users, how much more competition could exist in the browser space?
What makes you think a potential buyer would not be motivated to spy on its own users? Either it is profitable to do this (and therefore the owners will) or it is not (and therefore being forced to sell chrome won't harm googles bottom line).
Forcing Chrome to display a search engine choice doesn't even begin to solve the issue. Chrome spies on you regardless, and it also banned UBO and other ad-blocking extensions. It is a product made to deliberately spy on and harvest more data from you.
The issue with Chrome isn’t its ownership by Google. The problem lies in the fact that Google search is integrated into the very fabric of the browser at all levels. This creates an unfavorable and, frankly, unchallenged system that hinders competition. It’s the Achilles heel of unchecked capitalism.
"I’m not saying Google shouldn’t be forced to sell Chrome just because it’s only valuable to Google. But I do think Google should be allowed to have a browser."
There's a middle position here, and although Google won't like it, it may be better than Google having to sell Chrome off—that is upon first use would be to ask users if they want to disable all forms of telemetry.
Right, many would choose to disable telemetry, but then many would not do so because they either couldn't give a damn about privacy or they may want to take advantage of say targeted advertising.
Whatever happens, there's a fundamental problem that has to be addressed here and that's how to make the web a more equitable place for all players both big and small.
One of the major problems with new technologies is that shortly after their introduction those who introduced them are often overrun by more business-savvy entrepreneurs who find it dead easy to monopolize the tech (we've seen this repeatedly from say the car industry through to operating systems—like MS and Windows, etc.).
By the time government determines that a monopoly exists it's often too late as unwinding the status quo proves very difficult and disruptive (imagine Social Media if rules had been worked out before it had been introduced, if they had then the scene nowadays would be very different).
When examining what constitutes a monopoly one has to look at what's involved. For example, economies of scale enter the picture—having say only one huge producer of steel would be a monopoly as there'd be no competition and steel—a critical commodity—prices would high so a better solution would be to have two or three large producers to encourage competition. This is what's happened in say the oil and motor vehicle industries. Moreover, it'd make no sense to strangle these large industries by making them comply with regulations that would enable the smallest of small manufacturers sans adequate resources to compete on an equal footing—everyone would end up worse off.
The trouble with the web—perhaps more so than with any other tech throughout history—is that because of its intrinsic nature it's been easier for the powerful (Big Tech) to monopolize the tech. It's also meant that the monopolies that now run the web not only became so almost overnight but also they're now entrenched—set in concrete so to speak—which now make them very difficult to regulate. This all developed so very quickly that unfortunately it happened in a regulations-free environment.
What makes the web very different to other tech—to say those that use physical materials—is that it's very scalable; that is, it's possible for huge monopolies such as Google, Microsoft, etc. to coexist with smaller entities without the smaller ones being stifled. The trouble is that that's not what's happened, monopolistic practices such as Chrome and like deliberately channeling web traffic to Big Tech's sites has effectively distorted the way the web works.
One could argue that the simple solution is to use an independent browser but there are many reasons why this is solution is far from ideal. For starters, web protocols—many of which have been forced on web users by Big Tech—are now so complex and convoluted that designing a fully compatible web browser from scratch is a very difficult and challenging undertaking.
In essence, the demands of Big Tech have been such that they've raised minimal entry level for participation on the web to a point where small players have had to sacrifice both their independence and visibility if they want their presence to be viable. That is, the present state of the web is somewhat analogous to those industries that require economies of scale to function—unless one owns either a 'steel mill'-sized infrastructure or at least has access to one then one's pretty much left out in the cold. For the vast majority who want to participate the obvious solution is to gain access to Big Tech's web—and that means they can only do so on its terms—terms which are often unfair and punitive if violated.
No matter how one looks at it, the web nowadays is effectively a monopoly run by a few large players. The purpose of antitrust law is to flatten the playing field for all, so whatever regulators decide to do with Chrome they need to take these factors into account.
This blogger doesn't seem to be aware of all the privacy problems that Chrome poses by the way it was designed to track and monitor all users' history and input and feed it to Google, even in incognito mode. All the blogger had to do is open Wikipedia's article on Chrome to check the huge section on privacy. But no, apparently that is too much research to ask. In fact, the word "privacy" is featured a total of zero times in the blog post.
It's hard to believe anyone can write a wall of text with so many assertions but fails to even touch on the central topic. You need to go way out of your way to be able to miss the point this hard.
Chris is a well-known CSS expert and founder of css-tricks.com which was a respected CSS site before it was sold a couple years ago. I believe he was also working on W3C/CSS specs as invited expert (and paid by who knows)? While you could say CSS and Web journalism/advocacy sites have some inherent interest and their share in making web tech absurdly complex and out of the reach of laymen (and browser entrepreneurs), it's sure shocking to see him act as a Google mouth piece so openly and brazenly.
Most Google related threads boils down to these "woke" exaggerated cliched responses in the comments such as "evil trackers", "you are the product", etc.
Guess what, Netflix tracks your watching habits. It's called a recommendation algorithm there. Spotify tracks your listening habits and so on and so forth.
Trackers are not necessarily evil. But if you get a service in exchange for ads then yes, in this business transaction it's you who's being sold, you are the product.
Whether to see it as good or bad is up to you (after all we sell ourselves e.g. to employers), but this observation is not "childish" or "woke", it's a matter of fact.
Neither Netflix nor Spotify make market dominating utility "media players" that can be used to browse any streaming media.
What Netflix and Spotify do is akin to what YouTube or Apple Music/TV, or even online marketplaces like eBay/Amazon/etc does. Personally I'm not that keen on the "recommendations" most seem to generate but it's them analysing what you've interacted with on their platform and showing you things they think you might be interested in.
Google controls the browser, search engine and ad network - all of which interact in some way with third party sites the user actually wanted to visit.
Google is less a 'web business' than it is an 'advertising business', a 'surveillance business', and a 'finance business'.
Consequently, it is false that 'what is good for the web is good for Google'. AMP, and the Ad-blocking prohibition are evidence of this.
The 'what is good for the web is good for Google' line certainly was true in 2005 when the greatest threat to the web was companies like microsoft using internet explorer to adjust the de-facto web standards and privatize it in the "EEE" fashion.
Obviously the most visited websites would maintain the web better than OS vendors, their buisness depended on it being open.
We have a similar situation now, but with google locking down the most common browser (Manifest v3) and using extensions of web standards to maintain a dominant position.
Disclaimer: I am a zoomer and not a web developer so my history may be off here.
Let's not forget their attempt to push web attestation through WEI https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-de...
Malicous bots are a serious issue that trouble site operators. Trying to come up with solutions to such problems doesn't mean they don't care about the web. If it allows web sites to spend less time moderating and users to spend less time reading spam that would be a win win for both parties.
Attempt? Isn't that project still in full swing?
> A Web Environment Integrity prototype existed in Chromium,[2][3] but was removed in November 2023 after extensive criticism by many tech groups.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Environment_Integrity#Rece...
Re: your first paragraph, this is exactly what Google does now. They maintain such an incredible pace of development and such a unilateral attitude that nobody can stop them from developing web standards even if they want to. When was the last time anyone said no to a Chrome feature and expected it everywhere else? Developers treat it as the go to to the extent that some don't even bother testing in other browsers. Google are showing Microsoft how it is done.
It’s kind of the new Internet Explorer.
It doesn’t matter what the standard is. It has to work in chrome because of its market saturation.
That makes chrome the standard regardless of what any standards body says
It makes you wonder if Microsoft had given developers what they wanted, i.e. modern CSS and Javascript support, more browser features, etc., would they have actually moved off of Internet Explorer?
No, we wouldn’t have moved. The two main reasons back during IE6 times were tabs, and as a web developer: debugging. Firebug was something which was way ahead of everything else.
They did?
AJAX of jQuery fame, is extremely similar to ActiveX XmlHttpRequest.
The problem isn't XmlHttpRequest, but everything else they added/removed. Same with Google. The problem isn't they made request more secure, they made ad blocking impossible.
My custom user scripts from Tampermonkey that I used to make my life as a developer easier are just gone. I can’t even access the extension to grab them, some of them are complicated workflow stuff that made my life easier in some pages that are poorly designed. Like I’m often looking at the contents of JWTs so I added a global function into my global scope to parse JWTs. There wasn’t even a “hey we’re getting rid of this extension back stuff up”, it’s just disabled.
What do you mean? I have the new version of Tampermonkey installed and after turning on developer mode in the extensions section all my scripts work perfectly. https://www.tampermonkey.net/faq.php?locale=en#Q209
What do you mean? I've ported JS code from ActiveX to modern (circa 2017) browsers. It mostly works with some renames.
I'm not sure what your message is referring to.
Mobile Safari exists though. Chrome is #2 on iOS and that’s where the most valuable consumers are
> The 'what is good for the web is good for Google' line certainly was true in 2005
...But even then, it did not follow that "what is good for Google is good for the web".
Just because 2005!Google does something that improves its situation doesn't mean that's automatically good for all of us, even if stuff that improves the web for all of us makes 2005!Google's situation better as a side effect.
And 2025!Google is definitely not in that position. At this point, what's good for the web is only good for Google if it fits with Google's own plans and enhances their control.
And that whole "war on cookies" where they keep pitching replacements that basically let Google (and only Google) do all the same things, so that they can then gatekeep it and pay others for the privilege of accessing some limited subset of that data.
Regardless of why Google made Chrome originally, today, the main reason why it exists is to enable Google to track users more efficiently. And that is a bad thing.
They will never be able to kill cookies unless they bribe the whole industry and make them believe Google's cookie replacement technology will bring them more ad money.
Tbh cookies are lesser evil than Google's make believe cookie replacement technology. And remember Google is not Netscape, Google is on whole another level of power and domination.
What do you mean? the whole industry are happy to be on Chrome. What Google does, the rest will be either praising or be doing begrudingly.
A few of us are using Firefox. The few who remember the terror that web development was when Microsoft had the monopoly. At least they were mostly ignorant, not outright hostile towards the open web.
Yes, you are right Microsoft was worse than Google but Google is constantly hypocritical....they are always twisting the narrative so it suits them whether it is open web, advertising or politics.
Kinda ironic that "Don't be evil" is Google's former motto
That was before they were absorbed by Doubleclick.
> Panglossian
I had to look it up, but what a fantastic word which applies perfectly to this context:
"Panglossian" describes something or someone characterized by extreme and often naive optimism, especially in the face of adversity
Panglossian • \pan-GLAH-see-un\ • adjective. : marked by the view that all is for the best in this best of possible worlds : excessively optimistic.
Example: Even the most Panglossian temperament would have had trouble finding the good in this situation.
Thank you!
It comes from a character named pangloss in Voltaire's Candide who takes the view that we must live in the best of all possible worlds.
This is an excellent analysis. Also, Google is actually a data business, building an AI, with a long time horizon view - and always has been. Larry's initial goal was to build the AI. Impressive tho they are, current AI products are mere ripples upon the surface compared to the deep currents of Google's long term plans.
Given that, I actually don't see much resistance from Google leadership to abc.xyz divesting itself of Chrome. In fact, it's probably on some level been "worked out" - with the DOJ pushing for a meaningful, and symbolically meaningful, concession that was already negotiated as something Google could agree to, and maybe even wanted.
Getting rid of Chrome could help them refocus their efforts, and unburden themselves from something that probably comes with a lot of issues. Cue the eventual press release, letter from the leadership, looking back on the decades of Chrome, and how they ultimate believe that a Browser should be owned by the web and the people itself, not by a company.
It could be a significant, meaningful and positive pivot for the company as it faces changing situations.
Google does not want to get rid of Chrome because it is by far the best source of “signal” that they use for training their systems. For example Chrome browsing stream data is the largest signal used in ranking search results.
Google deprecated PageRank in large part because interlinking was a proxy for user interest, and now with Chrome they can measure user interest directly in real time.
Let’s not forget the “AI assistant”, which appears to lightly plagiarize the first three results on any topic, while adding some mistakes.
Nor WEI, which Ars Technica described as a "nightmare." The final solution to general purpose computing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Environment_Integrity
Quoting from Wikipedia here:
The stated goal was for sites to be able to restrict access to human users instead of automated programs and "allow web servers to evaluate the authenticity of the device and honest representation of the software stack and the traffic from the device".
Which on the surface seems like a legitimate use case I have to be honest.
It's legitimate if you believe companies should have the right to provide or deny you service by arbitrary criteria and on arbitrary terms. This belief has some unfortunate real-world implications.
The most likely outcome of WEI would have been - and might still be - that users of any operating system or browser that does not comply with the Trusted Computing agenda (secure boot, verified OS, full encrypted path from company servers to the user's screen & input devices) find themselves locked out of large portions of the internet.
It is, just like having an armed policeman permanently stationed in your living room to protect you is a legitimate use case.
> "allow web servers to evaluate the authenticity of the device and honest representation of the software stack and the traffic from the device".
That's not in the purview of a web server to do that, and quickly falls into the territory of violating 'neutrality' and 'anti-compete' territory. (i.e. it should not be possible for Apple or Microsoft servers to show content only to Microsoft or Apple devices, because that violates the law, it prevents competing software vendors from being compatible with them).
It is strictly not appropriate for every single web server that my browser contacts to audit my software stack, just like if a bank phones me up randomly it's not appropriate for them to verify who I am — the burden is on the web server to validate and confirm that it's identity and software stack is correct, instead.
The job of a web server is to truthfully serve it's content and not to butcher or malform that content, just like a librarian. Imagine if you had to take your birth certificate and pictures of your flat's security system to a library every time you wanted to borrow a book!
Absolutely agree 100% with this. I would argue that Google is TERRIBLE for the web.
I think what they said is not technically wrong (excluding the "happens to be good for al of us part"). What is good for the health of the web really is good for Google, since they need the web to be sustainable.
But, the problem is the opposite is not true. What is good for Google is often bad for the web as a whole. The only reason it "Works" is because of their dominance.
Exactly this.
Google removed don’t be evil. They created a web browser which originally was good back in the day d.g. Internet explorer was crap, Firefox was okay but very different world 2007 vs today.
Googles behavior with youtube, by adding DRM to all videos, is a clear demonstration of the abandonment of the open web. If we are not longer using open standards, and no longer allowing alternative browsers, then how is that different from the closed down platform?
Google's core competency is machine learning. So far they've most profitably applied that to search (matching web pages and ads to queries), but is also applying it to automating all human work: drivers with Waymo, knowledge work with Gemini, and manual work with Gemini robotics.
Defence contractor as well.
So who is going to step up and build something better than Chrome? If we knock Google out of the running 2nd place for the sort of investment they've made is pretty weak and largely only works on iPhones.
> AMP, and the Ad-blocking prohibition are evidence of this.
That's the crux of the argument. I don't need any further evidence.
Advertising is a monetization modal. That's like saying that resteraunts are just credit card swiping businesses.
Chrome is similar to other apps like X, Instagram, or YouTube. You click on the app. You are given a way to discover content and ads are shown along side that content. When you click on a site / post there can also be ads. Maximizing engagement on the web, means people will discover more content, which means more ads can be displayed.
>AMP
Unlike the other platforms I mentioned the web hosts content using 3rd party tech stacks and server which means that the user experience can be variable. AMP allows Google to provide a more consistent experience. It was optional and served to provide a better user experience for the users of the web.
>Ad-blocking prohibition
Google Search and Chrome have not prohibited ad blockers.
Advertising accounts for 80% of AlphaGoogle's revenue. That makes them Google's monarchy.
Re: AMP. AMP is like Cloudflare. Whatever is good about it is, by definition, bad for the Web, because its model replaces the Web as-we-know-it with something closer to Compuserve.
Re: Ad-blockers. It may not be a complete prohibition, but it is a hobbling of ad-blockers. It is clearly intentional, too, as evidenced by AlphaGoogle's recent anti-adblocker initiatives at Youtube.
>its model replaces the Web as-we-know-it with something closer to Compuserve.
Companies providing web hosting is already an established part of the web for a long time. People want to dedicate their time to the problems the site has and not to the problems the infra has. Not every site is going to want to setup their own servers at hundreds of points of presence around the world. Being able to use someone else's for free allows site operators to improve the user experience of their site for users for free. Even if such a deal ends people can still connect and use the original site directly.
> That's like saying that resteraunts are just credit card swiping businesses.
You are being sarcastic here, but ironically you are not far from the truth. The core financial model of a businesses is not always obvious.
McDonald’s is a real-estate business. Costco is a subscription business.
I'm not being sarcastic. I'm providing an example of the reductionist thinking going on. Companies can about multiple things. McDonalds still cares about getting people to eat at their resteraunt.
>Advertising is a monetization modal. That's like saying that resteraunts are just credit card swiping businesses.
Ads aren't the mechanism through which Google receives payment, they're what Google is paid for. The actual claim your analogy matches is that Google is just an online credit card processing business. But nobody makes that claim.
Arguably, Google divesting Chrome would be great for the web. This piece seems to be looking at Google at large (and I think all of Alphabet would be better scope there).
Certainly this would be unpopular here but I would be all for aggressive trust-busting beyond what the DOJ has done historically, including vertical integrations.
Right now tech is a strange feudal state with hundreds of thousands of small teams anchored to a few hydra-like super-corporations on a consuming destructive rampage. Somehow, with the most advanced computer and technological systems to ever be known by man, we're looking to increase working hours and cut benefits, for "profits" that are not quite realized by the labor class or the end users.
Gonna be interesting to see what happens. I know Wall Street will place their bets for what they want to happen right along side what's obviously going to shake out once the market becomes 'rational.'
The administration doesn’t give a shit about the web, and DOJ is a fully political entity. They’ll extort Google for whatever concession they want, and Chrome will remain.
They'll demand half of Google's rare earths deposits
Or just the keys to total surveillance and suppression of web content they don't like.
Why would they need to do that when they already have the formula down? How much have you been hearing about all the protests?
Things are going to get more heated as the voluntary economic downturn heats up. The current protests get some coverage but we’re starting to see even the loyalists realize that they won’t be spared, and that is likely to increase protests considerably.
Why wouldn't they?
Also they have the have the formula because they've already done it. And it works, why wouldn't they want to keep doing it, but more?
Well now to be fair, total surveillance and suppression of any content they don't like is worth a whole lot more than rare earth deposits to a government.
Google would just need to buy many Trump coins on the next drop. If he ever got Russian money, that was a great opportunity for it.
Biden or Trump administration? This remedy was originally proposed under Biden's DOJ.
It’s still around and the admin continued it.
Biden’s DOJ was slooooooowly pursuing anti-trust more seriously. That’s not a Trump priority. So what’s the reason?
You are probably right.
> Arguably, Google divesting Chrome would be great for the web.
Because then Chrome would slowly rot since there's no one to fund development, leading us to WebKit being the only engine, as Firefox is also defunded. I don't see how that's better.
The new owner of Chrome can sell it to the manufacturers of Android devices. Royalties.
They can even make it closed source or enforce a not for commerce license. That would make manufacturers choose between paying those royalties, installing Firefox, investing in their own browser (a fork of Chrome or their very own tech.) Some of them will pay royalties.
Why do you think so? Google can continue to contribute to chromium as they are doing now, alongwith other contributors like Microsoft
That’s assuming the divested Chrome would then proceed to lose its gigantic market share and thus the mind-boggling proceeds from defaulting to Google as the search engine. They might even be able to afford a bigger development team, if need be.
But what makes you think the DoJ allow Google to continue paying Chrome to have Google as default? Google is already not allowed to pay Apple to be default.
>> Google is already not allowed to pay Apple to be default
The antitrust remedy isn’t set until the September hearings and won’t take effect until after years of appeals hearings.
Why do browsers need to be free?
> aggressive trust-busting beyond what the DOJ has done historically, including vertical integrations.
Vertical integration was a huge part of what they went after historically, until a bunch of people "convinced" the US that the standard should be "consumer harm." The cool thing about consumer harm is that you can come up with any bullshit argument about how prices will go down and access and quality up in the future from some merger, and nobody can disprove it because it's a counterfactual (he said, she said.) And when prices go up, it's just <shrug>, who could have known?
I know what vertical integration is today, though. It's not a hypothetical, it's a selling point to investors. I can just tell you no. Any clear metrics or standards for antitrust action can't be tolerated. The goal is to force us to go on vibes. Then they say we have bad vibes.
Competition brings down prices. Laissez-faire leads to pseudo-Communism with royal families, courtiers, and technicians making up the top 10%, and everybody else gets to be a (debt) slave i.e. feudalism.
We should err towards breaking more things up than would be ideal, not less. If I make you divest from something, you sell it and get whatever future value out of it today. It's not a punishment according to SCOTUS when they're looking at TikTok (which is why they said the TikTok ban wasn't a bill of attainder.) We charter these companies, and they operate for our benefit, which is why we grant them limited liability and a whole bunch of other treats. What you divest is going to go to somebody just like you, but someone who is not financially entangled with you. The only reason you want to keep it all is to do things that I don't want you to do with it, I don't want you doing unproductive market manipulation, I want you to put that energy into competing.
> The only reason you want to keep it all is to do things that I don't want you to do with it
Surely, the reason you want to keep it is because owning and controlling thing A and thing B allows you to make more profit personally than being a controlling owner of thing A or thing B.
That said, I agree with your post and also think nations should err more on the side of breaking things up.
Concentrations of power distort markets and resist democratic control.
> Somehow, with the most advanced computer and technological systems to ever be known by man, we're looking to increase working hours and cut benefits, for "profits" that are not quite realized by the labor class
Somehow?? This is capitalism 101. Not a "strange feudal state" nor anything else.
> Users don’t pay for Chrome. There aren’t ads in Chrome. There is no direct business model for Chrome. Unlike Safari and Firefox, nobody writes checks to Chrome to make a certain search engine the default.
They track you. There IS a business model for Chrome: monetizing user data.
There isn’t a business model for a company whose product is just chrome, though. Unless it’s some kind of foundation or non-profit with a sufficient endowment to not need a business model.
I’m no fan of Google, but—unless people really want browser subscriptions—I don’t see how you can have a browser company today. They exist better as a byproduct of some other business model.
> There isn’t a business model for a company whose product is just chrome, though.
Yes there is, it is the same business model Chrome has now, but with overt pricing. In other words if you can understand why Chrome is valuable to Google now, then you can understand what Chrome-the-standalone-business would put a price tag on.
Google benefits from the data that Chrome collects. So Chrome-the-business would collect the same data and charge Google for it.
But it could also sell that data to other companies too. This would create competition which would lead to better pricing and more innovation. That is why it is a remedy for a monopoly.
The history of antitrust is full of stuff like this. Standard Oil used to own all the gas stations in the country. AT&T used to be the only company that sold telephones.
> There isn’t a business model for a company whose product is just chrome, though.
This isn’t relevant, from the perspective of the ruling.
It might be relevant from the perspective of Chrome-the-business and from Chrome-users’ perspectives.
It isn’t relevant that the thing you want to split off won’t be able to stand on its own two feet? Wouldn’t it be simpler to simply require Google to burn the source code?
And what is the point of the breakup if everyone (including consumers/users) is worse off? Is the point of government to make people better off, or just to maximize the number of paperclips produced?
> And what is the point of the breakup if everyone (including consumers/users) is worse off? Is the point of government to make people better off, or just to maximize the number of paperclips produced?
In this case this is pushed by other tech companies that want to buy data from Chrome, or they want to move users from the web to their apps where they can be more user hostile.
This is what happens when the government is controlled by corporations.
I really do want a browser subscription or purchase, so that its incentives are aligned with mine and not the advertisers'.
Paid browsers used to be common in the past, and ones like Netcaptor gave us tabbed browsing, pop-up blocking, etc. Opera was great too. Netscape itself used to be paid at first. It was big companies like Microsoft and Google tyring to EEE the web by giving away free browsers that killed the thriving browser marketplace and led to monopolies like the ones we have now.
There very much can be a browser market and business model IF antitrust were actually enforced.
Divest that shit yesterday.
Browsers aren't a product because massive companies give it away and destroy the market.
If any product was given away by massively rich companies there would be "no market" for it, because it was destroyed.
Massive companies give away operating systems, but there seems to still be a market for them, so I don't think this statement is universally true.
Well, I for one don't want to pay $15/mo for my browser: I'm happy for it to be the complement of some company's product.
I'm so confused when I read takes like that. The only way advertising can be sustainable under capitalism is if every $1 spent on advertising generates >= $1 of profit for advertisers, keeping in mind that ad networks take a share of revenue, say 30%.
This means that you as a consumer have to spend at least $1 (likely more - profit not revenue) for every $0.70 of value you receive in "free" services. Being supportive of ad-supported services is therefore financially irrational.
They only need to make money in aggregate, they might make $0 out of you, but $2 out of someone else.
Yet you pay for Netflix and your internet and phone bill. But these could be given away by surveillance advertising firms to snoop your watching, surfing, and calling habits.
As the saying goes, if the product is free, YOU are the product.
> Yet you pay for Netflix and your internet and phone bill. But these could be given away by surveillance advertising firms to snoop your watching, surfing, and calling habits.
You do know most of those companies do both charge you and sell your data? Almost the only companies that don't sell your data are big tech advertising companies.
"When you don't pay you are the product" doesn't mean "If you pay you aren't the product", you still are the product the company is just double dipping.
I think the saying is oversimplified (or else, chrome isn’t a product but a byproduct). It makes a company to make the complement of their product cheap or free so that people can use their product more effectively. Google Search and Ads rely on people having a browser. Similarly, Apple’s Phones and laptops are benefited by including a good first party browser. Imo, a lot of technologies are better as free byproducts of monetized technology than as being some company’s products: there are endless lists of great technologies that never found a market or disappeared post-acquisition.
I don't pay for Netflix and a rival good (like ISP infra) is completely different from some compiled computer code (like a browser).
My ISP is selling my data as well. Netflix is snooping on what i watch for their ads. Chrome is free. Bigger fish to fry than my web browser snooping on me like your bank selling all credit card transactions your car snooping on your driving and your mobile carrier selling your location.
Your phone provider does sell your information.
The majority of Netflix users over the next few years will be advertising based users. That just doesn't bring in enough profit because people are not willing to pay enough subscription to cover what those things actually cost.
Your hypothesis has a bit of a gaping hole where "real world user behaviour" sits.
Browsers shouldn’t be a product because any modern operating system that doesn’t come with a web browser is defective.
A browser is an operating system feature.
I mean, you can get alternative file manager programs. Pay for them, even. But most people will never bother.
> A browser is an operating system feature.
Microsoft fought and (largely speaking) lost an entire case about that assertion [1].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
Yeah. I think that was the wrong decision. The problem was introducing features between IE and IIS and using that to extend their end user OS monopoly into a server OS monopoly. MS should have been blocked from the server OS market instead (or maybe some some of consent decree, I’m sceptical it would have been appropriately enforced though).
That's more or less also what Google does with Chrome in order to force folks to use it and only it. I know that well because I have Chromium installed for this reason alone.
If Chrome cannot succeed on its own, but under Google it is an oppressive force taking over the vast majority of web marketshare, that is a textbook case for antitrust action. That is Google using its dominance in one market (search, advertising) to expand into and dominate another market (web browsers).
If a hypothetical Chrome Corp. couldn't figure out how to use the exact same data Google is harvesting with the browser to at least move in the direction of profitability, then they're hypothetically idiots.
> If a hypothetical Chrome Corp. couldn't figure out how to use the exact same data Google is harvesting with the browser to at least move in the direction of profitability, then they're hypothetically idiots.
Selling that data to the government and other corporations is user hostile though, and that is exactly what is going to happen when Google is forced to sell.
I can see why the government would love this though so it makes sense they pursue this hard now,
I would like to point out that your perception of what a browser can/should be is based on what Google has turned browsers into.
What a browser is in 2025 is vastly different from what anyone thought they would ever be. There are major, major issues with the way web engines/web browsers function today and much of those issues stem from Google's near monopoly on browsers.
There was a lot of very interesting and good discussion around this in some of the Mozilla/Firefox threads recently. Mostly about how browsers turned into something they were never meant to be, which has changed the way the internet works and how we interact with it.
What do browsers do that they weren’t meant to?
The only thing that comes to mind is password management. But I would also argue that’s a boon for normal users and trust in the web.
> What do browsers do that they weren’t meant to?
For example, asking you straight on first launch to log into your Google account, for your "benefit".
In a multi device world that makes sense though. If you save your passwords on your phone, you don’t want to lose them all if that phone breaks.
Restrict extensions for "security" reasons. Which just killed most ad blockers in Chrome.
Speed up the web with AMP that gives one company control over everything.
I'm not sure I get tracked that much more by Google while using Chrome than using Firefox? I still google stuff there and don't bother with privacy things because honestly in ~30 years of using the web I've yet to find a reason to care about ad tracking.
> nobody writes checks to Chrome to make a certain search engine the default
And some people wonder how Chrome could ever make money if it were divested from Google...
Would that be a better world than we have now, though, if Chrome was nominally separate from Google but still only exists because Google pays for it? It seems like the same thing with extra steps.
If Chrome cannot be owned by Google (nor Alphabet) then that is an important separation. It means Chrome could auction off the rights. Much as Firefox offers non-Google search in certain markets, which happened in the US at least once.
I believe the default search payments are also part of the antitrust case, so likely those payments will also become illegal, also affecting Firefox and Apple/Safari.
I don't think it's illegal for anyone to buy defaults. Rather, just for large players with outsized market share.
Can you clarify? Does Chrome track you, or do websites track you using cookies stored in Chrome?
By their own admission, "not only does Google collect your name and email address, Google also collects your physical address, your exact location, your contacts, advertising data, product interaction, search, and browsing history." [1] And that's Chrome (a Safari wrapper at that moment) on iOS. You may assume they collect at least as much on platforms they own.
[1] https://techstartups.com/2021/03/18/google-finally-revealed-...
Why not both?
Chrome consistently pushes to make it easier for websites to track you -- by being the slowest browser to incorporate privacy protections like third-party cookie isolation, by eliminating extension APIs used by ad/tracker blockers, and by adding new features which expose more fingerprinting surface to websites. This disproportionately benefits Google because Google runs some of the largest web tracking networks (reCaptcha, Google Analytics, AdSense, etc). Even if Chrome was separate from Google, Google (along with other ad companies) could probably keep paying them to sabotage users' privacy.
Chrome also directly uploads a lot of data to Google. It's technically possible to use Chrome without syncing your browser history to your Google account, but a surprising number of people I know mysteriously managed to turn on sync without knowing it. Other Chrome data-collection initiatives, like Core Web Vitals, also provide a lot of value to Google's other businesses. Those are other products that Google could pay directly for.
Is that a distinction without a difference from an end user perspective?
Chrome’s defaults are the main reason anybody is tracked by cross-site cookies any more, and that tracking massively and directly benefits Google’s business.
I started reading this article and was immediately hit how biased it seems, like in this meme 'leave multi-bilion dollar corporation alone'.
Unfortunetelly we are in the times when any split of any of those multi-bilion dollar corp would be greatly benefiting humanity as a whole. How many people are taking their profits really? Hundreds? Thousands maybe?
And that is it. What humanity have from existence of those? Like one thing?
Some may say that we will have an AI, self driving cars or androids pretty soon. But ask your friends, or neighbours, ordinary people that work in non-tech jobs what they need. I am 100% sure that any those things above will be not their first need.
Better heath care. Less work. More money. Less stress. Vacation to recuperate and relax. More time for hobbies. Just possibility to have relaxing walk in the woods without worry.
Does any of those companies work on any projects that will help suffice any of those needs? Author of an article mentions 'good of the web' because probably his livelihood is the web.
But regular person does not care if their banking application or Netflix app on TV dongle is written with latest CSS standards or with Jquery.
Till that point in our history all big empires fell because of buearacracy and stagnation caused by millions of people trying to retain status quo. Momentum of conquest was not enough suply enoug resources to feed the empire. With the tech giants this may be first time in history when one entity will rule the entire human population caused by sheer momentum of technical progression it is making.
Will this be a good thing? I am entirely sure it will not be.
I'm not sure about having them "pretty soon", but what do you think AI, self driving cars and androids are for if not to alleviate people of work?
Better health care is a tough one, I'll give you that.
That's funny.
As a disclaimer I work on AI research.
Oh yeah. Definitely when we have discussions with companies to get funding we totally talk about how we're going to save the poor worker from all of these horrible jobs.
There's one end goal. Get rid of people to increase profits for management and shareholders.
People generally do not want to be "alleviated" of work, a great euphemism for being unemployed.
There's far more funding in getting rid of people than increasing their productivity 2x.
I don't get the negative comments here. It's pretty simple I think...
- Google is banned from paying Firefox to be the default search engine -> Firefox has way less money -> Firefox development massively slows
- Someone buys Chrome and needs to turn a profit from Chrome, rather than using it to indirectly profit from the web in general like Google does -> Chrome probably goes to shit and development massively slows
So what now? Safari is going to be the leading force moving the web forward? The Chromium forks that are doing basically no browser engine work are going to suddenly find billions of dollars to invest in hiring developers? Someone will buy a time machine and go 10 years into the future to get a version of Ladybird that is comparable to what we have today in Chrome/Firefox? Just because you guys hate Google doesn't make any of those scenarios remotely plausible. And if you hate Google, there are much better ways to punish it than this.
"Development slows" is not necessarily a bad thing. E.g. quite a lot of people would love development to slow wrt Manifest v3. It would also mean that web standards are less of a moving target for browsers playing catch-up (like Firefox).
People can also pay for browsers. The only reason why this isn't feasible today is because it's hard to compete with the top-of-the-line stuff that megacorps offer for free - which they do precisely so they can maintain de facto control over web standards (or force the lack thereof in areas where this is advantageous). Lest we forget, many early web browsers were paid products (not just NN, but also Opera, for example), and Microsoft's original sin as a monopoly was offering IE for free, against which NN couldn't compete. But if Google is forced to ditch Chrome, and Microsoft is forced to ditch Edge...
This is such a 'first-world' comment. A majority of the folks logging on the web in the developing and emerging world will be unable to afford paying any kind of subscription for their web browser over and above what they pay their ISPs for internet access.
Then unfortunately the internet will remain a luxury for people who aren’t able to afford the cost. The internet is a product, not a charity or human right.
The development that slows will not be parts that allow monetisation. They have a rationale. They will be things like security that have no immediate bottom line impact.
> Someone buys Chrome and needs to turn a profit from Chrome
Who would this be and how would they turn a profit from it?
> So what now? Safari is going to be the leading force moving the web forward?
Even Safari is massively subsidized by Google paying to be the default browser. If those billions go away, engineering investment will be cut.
In a scenario where Google no longer control Chrome, I doubt Safari's budget is at risk, the company had nearly $400B in revenue in 2024.
Courtroom testimony implied that part of the reason Apple value(s/d) the deal with Google was a "peace deal" to prevent Google from doing what Google does and forcing Safari users on Google properties, to switch to Chrome.
Of all the browsers that would be affected by the loss of Google funding, Safari is least likely to be affected.
The 400B in revenue is there to be paid out to shareholders not to pay for browser development when not needed.
Apple only has a browser team because they need to keep up with parity for their OS.
That logic could be applied to every app team at Apple, or indeed every other publicly traded software company
No, because people tend to invest in what generates revenue. If Apple no longer gets billions from Safari most people would stop investing that much in it, so that is likely what is going to happen.
>moving the web forward
What constitutes "forward" to you
Wasm? It may seem like it’s still just a browser but I’m very grateful that bad ass people have been working on it
> Someone buys Chrome and needs to turn a profit from Chrome, rather than using it to indirectly profit from the web in general like Google does -> Chrome probably goes to shit and development massively slows
I kinda believe Chromium is already complete enough, and government can take over it, and keep in running in maintenance mode (security fixes through possible bounties) with minimum expenses, and it will be great product: reliable, performant, secure and without corp-crap-tech.
At least Safari has better privacy concern than Chrome. Let's see if Waterfox can substitute Firefox in the long run. I believe MS Edge will happily replace Chrome.
How can Waterfox substitute for Firefox when 99% of the work that goes into Waterfox is actually done by Firefox developers?
Almost the same argument applies to Edge and Chrome.
> Safari
This is a better answer than Waterfox or Edge. Like you said, at least Apple cares about privacy enough to defend it in court.
Waterfox is dependent on Mozilla, which admitted to selling its users’ data.
Edge is an answer just for Windows, and the primary benefit to MS is getting people to use Bing, to sell ads.
Web browsers are probably complex enough at this point. Putting them on maintenance and letting new architectures fight it out might not be a bad outcome.
Putting hopes in someone else making an entirely new standards and protocols based hypermedia sounds outlandish. Whose going to go on a decade long quest to build something amazing to give away, again?
I for one really tire of this spiritual vandalism masquerading as a hopeful pineing ask for a new beginning. The web rocks, is amazing. Sure there's some incidental complexity that's accrued, but the versatility & wide capability from a simple core are a glorious & powerful thing that I think only a fool wouldn't celebrate.
Silly, it’s already started. An obstacle would give impetus to new solutions,
I don't know specifically what you are referring to and I doubt many other folks have any idea other.
I've brought this up before, but I never got a response and I'm really interested what people think the business case is here. I keep wondering what a buyer would actually value beyond Chrome's userbase. Chrome is just Chromium with Google integrations, similar to how Edge is Chromium with Microsoft integrations.
If a company acquires Chrome, they don't have many choices: re-establish Google integration deals (so the divestiture would be pointless), replace Google integrations with their own (becoming just another Chromium distro in a sea of Chromium distros), or just monetize the existing userbase.
A Chrome acquisition doesn't include unlimited control over Chromium. Chromium is open source, with contributions from many organizations (who retain the copyright to their contributed code). Google can only sell what it exclusively owns: the brand, infrastructure, signing keys, etc. The real force behind Chromium is having a critical mass of engineers all pushing in generally the same direction. You can't necessarily just buy that, especially when you wouldn't own exclusive rights. Any other company is free to poach engineers and fork the project.
Edited to add: if Microsoft sold VS Code to, say, Oracle... don't you think that another company would leap at the opportunity to fork the project? Would the userbase and the thin layer of closed-source Microsoft customizations really be worth that much?
Business model is the same as Firefox: Google pays to be the default search engine.
The economics are identical to Chrome being within Google. The differences are three-fold:
- Bing, DDG, OpenAI, and others can compete to pay for placement
- There can be no central directives to shove things like Manifest V3, weird data sharing, or DRM down our throats
- Google has no incentive to favor Chrome over Firefox or Edge in its web offerings
In other words, if a business is split, the same economics work, but without all the shady, anti-trusty stuff. It's an independent company, without linked chains of corporate control.
I think it most serves Google's interests to set up a second nonprofit similar to Mozilla to manage this, perhaps with more of a consortium model. Whatever Google can sell Chrome for is less in its interests than maintaining that the new Chrome will not be used against Google the way Google used Chrome against competitors.... If DDG were to end up with ownership of Chrome and switch from Google Search to DDG, I think Google would be pretty unhappy, while DDG's market cap of 75M versus Google's of $2T -- 2000 times higher -- would even out a little bit.
One of the key points is that the EXACT SAME economics and business model can be evil and anti-trusty or good and fair depending on chains of control and collusion. If there is a colluding consortium (whether by backroom deals or by having related products in the same place), new competitors won't come in since they know they'll be crushed unfairly. Same economics without backroom deals, and you've got market competition.
> Business model is the same as Firefox: Google pays to be the default search engine.
How do you image that working? Google is already banned from paying Apple to be the default search engine, so why would they be allowed to pay Chrome?
If Meta buys Chrome (which is a real possibility) why do you think they will not try to push similar stuff like ManifestV3 ?
I truely believe there is none. There is literally nothing people would pay for. We got ourselves into a situation where browsers have become so complex that they need an incredible amount of resources to get developed but the only way to get any money with them is to either sell the data of your users or have partners that do that (Google paying Mozilla for being the Firefox default search engine).
I literally don’t see a way out of this mess. In fact if Chrome needs to be split off from google, google has no need to keep Firefox alive anymore. If they just stop paying for the search engine default, Mozilla loses 75% of their revenue.
> Chromium is open source, with contributions from many organizations (who retain the copyright to their contributed code).
To contribute anything to Chromium or V8 you need to sign a CLA, afterwards there are very little rights you retain.
The CLA just gives Google a license to use the code your contribute (and a license to any associated patents). You still own the copyright, and Google cannot sell the rights to your code.
https://cla.developers.google.com/about/google-individual
Google would retain copyright to all of it's employees contributions to Chromium. Which I recall being 90%+ of contributions. The propsal PDF from justice.gov doesn't mention Chromium anywhere, so maybe Google will retain copyrights, but the sale would seem pointless if they do.
The real question is to what level Google continue investment in Chrome after the sale. Remember both Mozilla and Apple will also loose out on the search engine deal.
> They made a browser to invest in the web itself
But that investment isn’t neutral. It’s oriented towards making the Web a better place for Google to make money—not a better place for users to avoid being tracked by Google. Chrome’s dominant position means Google can kill any new web feature that would help users, but hurt Google’s bottom line.
There's such a strong strain of dark side energy aimed at Google. It just feels so unhinged to me though.
Blink-dev is an amazing mailing list of really good improvements being built intelligently, in well declared fashion, with lots of checks via standards bodies, fully open to discussion. There's very few places on the planet where such good work is so easy to see, and no where that it's so abundant. https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev
What features has Google killed, do you think? How often has this been a problem, do you think? What other browsers have gone ahead, with Google holding out?
Google wants a competent capable successful healthy web. They want there to be an open, standards & protocols system out there, a connected rich hypermedia internet, because everything else humanity has done with computing is proprietary and trying to rely on someone else's platform is existentially hazardous.
>What features has Google killed, do you think? How often has this been a problem, do you think?
Unless you've been living under a rock, it's hard to miss manifest v2 vs v3.
Agreed, that stings. Its extremely visible & painful. I want to believe there was some intent, to make extensions that weren't such an extreme hazard, so that the Google Web Store could be better. But it's obviously just a massive regression in user agency, and miserable, and directly undoes so much of the good that was the web.
I still think this is, like, the one example. Its a bloody awful one though.
Chrome was never about user agency though. The ideal Chrome is to be an un-configurable window to the Web, hence the name (it is the window chrome).
> What features has Google killed, do you think?
JPEG-XL pops to mind.
it was never alive enough to be killed
> What features has Google killed, do you think? The problem is more like google can implement whatever feature they want and force it into web standard
> How often has this been a problem, do you think? very often
> What other browsers have gone ahead, with Google holding out? Google is holding out in a sense that no other people can implement a feature-complete browser. Google is killing the "open standard" web by make the standard impossible.
Sure there are a lot of people on blink-dev building good thoughtful features
But there are also plenty of people at Google etc who are convinced that advertising is the only way to fund the web and so build features to support that e.g. maintaining 3rd-party cookies, FLEDGE / Flock / Topics (and the rest of the deceptively names Privacy Sandbox)
Advertising is a massive invasion into our personal lives and via ad networks actors (sometimes hostile) can get access to data they have no rights to
I find amazing that, in today's web, the inaner a point is, the firmer is its proponent's conviction. Today's Google is the opposite of what is good for the web; it's a business led by a McKinsey bean counter and his henchmen, people who destroyed one of the most innovative companies the world has ever known and turned into a cancer who will only stop taking a cut of everything we do when it kills its host, the Internet.
If Google wasn’t such a trash company and using chrome to drive more revenue by farming data and preventing adblocks then no one would have a problem with chrome.
You can always use Chromium or dozens of others viable Chromium derivatives.
Google at least gave you the option to do that.
> Google at least gave you the option ...
Not sure if Google voluntarily gave users the option. Google was forced to give users the option since Blink is a derivative of the LGPL-licensed WebKit, which is itself a derivative of the LGPL-licensed KHTML.
An argument can be made for open-sourcing the frontend of the browser. However, even the WebKit codebase has a test browser that runs on Windows (despite Safari dropping Windows support over a decade ago). This would have been present in the Blink codebase even if Google decided to keep the Chrome frontend proprietary. So people would still be able to embed "Chromium" into applications.
They aren't that bad. Out of the FAANG lot Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google they are probably the one I'm happiest with. Facebook have gone crazy with ads, Apple are expensive, Amazon and Netflix are pushy for money. Google on the other hand has provided me with a lot of services I use daily for 20 or so years without really bugging me or trying to screw me over. They are not preventing adblock, just forcing going from uBlock to uBlock lite. If Google is a trash company what is this heavenly company that does such stuff better?
Google has happily provided you with those services because they are stealing your data and invading your privacy secretly behind your back for 20 years. Everything Google does is to steal more info about you.
It’s baffling that you’re unhappy with companies wanting you to pay for their product. Yes Netflix increases their prices and wants to prevent you from sharing your account, but they’re not scanning every single email you’ve ever received or making the web worse for everyone to collect more data about you.
Well the companies can either: sell your data, or take your money and still sell your data. Don't trust the ones that say they don't sell your data, it's only a matter of time until they get caught. Even Apple only cares as much as they need for marketing.
We need legislation that bans all types of ads except for banner style. :) I don't care if the money motivation disappears - we don't need you assholes. I was with the web when it was powered by 56k modems. Greed-assholes can leave.
> we don't need you assholes
You really need it. Food chain of your own paycheck likely rely on efficient ads at many points.
To put it another way, the problem is not so much that Google shouldn't be paying to be the default search engine, but that it shouldn't own both the browser and the search engine.
I think this harkens back to the anti-trust court case, United States v. Paramount Pictures, where the court ruled that the film studios cannot hold monopolies over the movie theatres, and that theatres must remain independent.
Similarly, browsers and search engines being independent is good for competition because the internet is too important to let a single company dictate how it is used.
> To put it another way, the problem is not so much that Google shouldn't be paying to be the default search engine, but that it shouldn't own both the browser and the search engine.
If this is the real crux of the case, then is divesting Chrome going to negatively affect DuckDuckGo and Kagi?
My hunch is “no”, and also that search+browser isn’t the crux of the case. I think the real crux is Google owning browser+ad/surveillance-network.
> I don't think this is an accurate anaology. It's more like, you own the vast majority of grocery stores, and you make lemonade, and you force all the other grocery stores to only sell your lemonade.
Yep. The rest of the article is equally disingenuous, desperately making up arguments and bad analogies.
What's unclear is who the buyer is supposed to be? Chrome's entire monetization is centered around its synergy with Google's ad business. Cutting off Chrome is so much messier, than the obvious, (although I fear it would itself have bad repercussions) decision to force them to sell Youtube.
Yeah I don't quite understand either. Once you rip Google out of Chrome, it's just chromium, I don't think there's going to be a buyer interested in buying what they can already get and build themselves for free.
A more appropriate ruling would be just force Google to stop distributing Chrome, not sell it but kill it. There's already a myriad of chromium reskins, so that wouldn't change, and that's all chrome will become if someone else buys it. Make the precedent that owners of a search engine can't also have a browser.
I think just killing chrome would do more good than selling it off to become yet another sketchy chromium reskin with questionable privacy and crypto miners.
Exactly, this is my question as well. I was just thinking about it and thought although it's kind of silly, Google paying them (the newly-divested ChromeCo) for search engine default status could be a primary source of revenue.
I'm actually kind of curious about that as an option. Right now the distortion that makes Google any 800 pound gorilla is their leveraging of Chrome to channel users into their various monetized ecosystems.
But there could conceivably be an interesting form of parity that comes from the browsers all depending on the same form of revenue, search engine placement. I haven't fully thought this through, so I welcome corrections. I suppose Google could quite easily give favorable treatment toward ChromeCo and effectively continue to flex its monopoly muscle. Google will need them just as much as before. I'm honestly just not sure.
If nobody wants Chrome, and it's only profitable use is a social negative, let it die?
A billion or two dollars would fund development indefinitely. Don't sell it to anybody, make it a nonprofit with a fat trust. I'll say the same thing about Firefox: they got plenty of money from Google. They should have been able to save enough in ten or how ever many years to fund development for all eternity. Instead they paid it to themselves.
> If nobody wants Chrome, and it's only profitable use is a social negative, let it die?
Its just going to get more user hostile, that is the point. Google has a reason not to sell that data, Chrome company does not.
So many flawed assumptions in this article
How about Google making flutter? How is that not an awesome attempt to make mobile app development unified and easier for developers?
Also, selling your car? No a more apt metaphor would be selling the lemonade squeezing equipment business that you also hold a monopoly in.
I’m not arguing for the merits of forcing Google to sell chrome, but I think the articles points are off based either way.
The author raises a good point, but tangentially:
"if google doesn't pay for chrome, who will make it better? and who will make it secure"
This is a valid concern.
However, for those of us who remember the time before chrome, the web was dominated by IE, which kneecapped security and innovation.
Its the same with mobile safari, a lack of competitors is bad for health.
The issue is, google has embedded a shit ton of metrics gathering into chrome, which is hugely anti competitive.
So what happens if Google sells Chrome? Who will buy it? Will they be as advertising/tracking heavy as Google is? Is there any other reason to own Chrome?
Is it any better if Meta, Alibaba, Microsoft or any other big company with money to buy Chrome owned Chrome?
Who would even have the money, technical know how, and business acumen to buy, maintain, and make money with Chrome?
You could make the same argument for the Linux kernel. Or Postgres, or Bitcoin Core, or CPython. So many companies have a vested interest in Chromium, v8, and Blink (especially by way of Electron) that it would be wild to think some sort of foundation couldn't be pulled together.
It's wild that the author points to all the Google people writing W3C specs as if that's a positive sign. I'm not quite pessimistic enough to say all those people are 100% corporate shills, but there's no reason to expect that the stuff that gets into the W3C via Google is somehow magically detached from Google's profit motives. Google's effect on web standards is largely just another form of icky "embrace and extend" shenanigans.
Yeah, couldn't believe what I was reading. The author was already being charitable to Google, but that part was a big shot to their credibility.
I just discovered that Google refuses to support any assistive tech on Workspaces unless the user is using Chrome: https://support.google.com/a/answer/33864
They can’t be forced to sell soon enough.
Would selling change anything? There are a lot of sites and apps that only work in Chrome that Google didn’t make.
This is monopolistic behaviour: it leverages a product (Workgroups) to force a minority group to switch to another product (Chrome). Most users of Workgroups don’t have an option to change, because it’s provided for them by their company.
Solidly enforcing citizens' constitutional right to privacy seems a far better approach to addressing the problem of Google at its root cause.
Alphabet tried to kill adblock in Chrome, so...
It's conjecture at best that killing adblock was related to manifest v3. Given apple also rolled out the same sorts of restrictions years earlier, there is strong precedent for this being purely a security improvement measure. Especially when you consider how problematic and prevalent malware extensions are.
Is malware in ads not a problem anymore?
I’m not sure Apple’s monopolistic behaviour is a good excuse to claim that Google is not abusing its monopoly.
As for malware ; sure, but the alternative is not allowing people to run the software they want on the machine they own.
not good for their wallet apparently
If Google has to sell Chrome what stops another buyer from being even more profit maximizing then Google. What if a private equity firm like Silver Lake buys it?
Some will say well the free market will do its thing and people will just switch. The problem is Chrome has a 60-70% market share. And like it or not anyone that is a professional developer will be at the mercy of this new buyer because like them or not they will own 60%+ browser market share overnight.
Anyone who was old enough to remember what web development was in the 2000s and early 2010s remembers that was not a smooth or enjoyable transition going from IE to Firefox to Chrome. I remember those years it was the Dark Ages of desktop internet browsing.
There is no Web any longer, saying otherwise is wishful thinking.
Everyone pushing for Chrome forks, and Electron garbage has effectively turned the Web into ChromeOS for all practical purposes.
Firefox is no longer relevant, and Safari only resists thanks to Apple stance on iDevices.
The DOJ's proposed remedy is structural separation, which is really the only way to prevent malicious compliance. I'm actually surprised they went for it, given how thoroughly neutered American antitrust has become under assault from the noxious Chicago School.
IMO there is likely another agenda at play. For example, perhaps they will be told later that they could earn a reprieve if they "adjust" their search algorithm to silence critics and political enemies.
I agree. If Chrome is sold off, the new owners might think its uneconomic to maintain a (desktop) Linux port, keep it open source, or they might make it even less standards based than it is now.
The way they aggressively push Chrome on Gmail users with "Google recommends using Chrome" popups is enough to make me think this is exactly what needed to happen.
Google being forced to sell would cost them billions of dollars. It makes sense that Google would spend at least tens of millions of dollars trying to convince the public at large that this is bad. I don't know the author but he's presumably a multi-millionaire and a bit entrenched in this space and has at least some connection with Google given his startup/company has partnered with them in the past. I'm not saying Chris is being dishonest, but he's probably not very unbiased in this. Combined with the many flaws in this writing, it doesn't seem very credible.
Google is emphatically not a web business. They are an advertising business. You should expect their priorities in product development to reflect that.
I think that this must be done, but will have vanishingly small effect anyway. Browsers are software monsters and making one your lap dog through non-directly-financial means is a low-brainer if you’re google.
They will likely relax firefox live support afterwards to weaken its org structure, and new-chrome will seek contracts like search/etc and they will invent something like “feature requests with benefits” which aren’t exactly illegal.
The only true way is revolution against standards and grounding the cost of a browser to viable levels. It will be pain like 2->3 or ESM, and likely much worse, but we made it through before.
My only worry is that it will become even shittier to program for, because we lost sense of that 20 years ago.
The premise of this post is flawed. The government is trying to bar Google from paying browser vendors to make them the default: https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/20/24300617/doj-google-sear...
> Other remedies the government is asking the court to impose include prohibiting Google from offering money or anything of value to third parties — including Apple and other phone-makers — to make Google’s search engine the default, or to discourage them from hosting search competitors. It also wants to ban Google from preferencing its search engine on any owned-and-operated platform (like YouTube or Gemini), mandate it let rivals access its search index at “marginal cost, and on an ongoing basis,” and require Google to syndicate its search results, ranking signals, and US-originated query data for 10 years.
I don’t think they’re going to get all of that, but it’s interesting, and it definitely doesn’t line up with the “sell your car” analogy in the post.
What worries me is what's going to happen to Mozilla without those payments.
Is there a name for this line of argumentation? The guy is obsessing over how document is articulated and disregarding how Chrome's dominance and Google owning it empowers Google to be monopolistic by, for example, having disproportionate power to drive web standards, having Google as the default search engine in its already dominant browser, having popular Google owned services not play nice with competing browsers, etc., just because the document he is quoting does not spell it out.
Side question: If hypothetically Google is forced to sell off Chrome, who would buy it?
A trouble with breaking up Google is I think from one perspective the impact it would have is not to reduce monopoly tensions but to increase them. Because now it's Apple Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, we will have gone from G.A.M.M.A. to A.M.M.A. (I no longer know what the new acronym is supposed to be, now that FAANG is gone).
And I'm not sure that I would start with Google. I'm honestly not sure how I would rank the major players in terms of antitrust concerns, but I do think there probably should be an order of operations such that you don't go after the "wrong" one first, effectively consolidating the industry further rather than balancing it.
The acronym is done, BigTech has been easier to use for a while.
I would rank MS the worst with Google in second place. But the advertising company currently has a lock on our schools, which I find unacceptable.
> because what is good for the web is good for Google
Counterpoint: funding via advertisement
To be honest I think it does not matter.
I wish they split search from Google. Either you are search business, or ad business.
Depends who it is sold to.
If it goes to a terrible company like Oracle or Meta, then yeah, it will be bad.
If it goes to say, the Apache Software Foundation, that could be fantastic.
Besides all the good points in that thread about why Google should definitely be forced to sell Chrome lets ad another one: The Google Discover Feed in Google Chrome (and Android and Google App) is by now up to 80% of the Traffic News-Sites get. Basically it is Instagram for News and massively used. So Google now controls how Users consume the News. (Also you still need AMP to perform there...)
It's interesting to see where the economics align with software. Web advertising paired with search and a browser. And it worked. I can't recall a better outcome supporting modern communication than Chrome and all it contains. The harmony between the business, software and market need was very well aligned. That's falling apart now due to LLM's taking over much of what previously was search, and Google's innovator's dilemma between AI/LLM and traditional search. While the revenues are stronger than ever this seems unlikely to continue long term. So the dynamic is changing naturally. Reminds me of how a strange contemporary religion where believers families take over a planet, resulted in this group building an amazing genealogy web service (familysearch.org). Or how US hegemony naturally leads to it's military, or how the theocratic monarchy of ancient Egypt was good for the masonry industry--even affecting modern tourism, or how Roman roads form the paths leading to today's major European cities.
This one struck me as a weird one as browser waves come and go and I feel like opera is the big swell rising at the moment anyway. The competitive component is there and alive and well.
What happens when this artificial friction causes chrome to lose network effect faster than natural, and we are ironically left with a different monopoly?
Will for a while now market here has been firmly going in one direction and it's that of increasing Chrome dominance. I absolutely loved the old opera team, and I loved them reconstituting themselves under Vivaldi, but I don't love that they now both depend on Chromium.
I do think the dynamics of browser market share it had in a previous time been subject to exactly the waves and frictions you mentioned, but it's too high stakes now. There's too much serious investment necessary, and so it's going to be responding to some business and economic dynamics Which will be different than the waves and frictions of yesteryear.
Forcing Google to sell Chrome isn't enough.
We need healthy alternatives to Chrome.
If Google sells are they also barred from making open source contributions to Chromium? From being the primary direction setter?
Could there be a better steward for Chrome in theory? Sure. My guess is that in practice the successor would be worse or about the same since it is all about money in the end.
NotGoogleLobbiests.com?
Great source.
Has this man done ANY research before writing that article? Either he didn't, or he did an extremely poor job. I need to know which.
What else has Google sold and how did they end up? SketchUp dodged a bullet.
Being forced to give away Unix was a great remedy for AT&Ts monopoly. "But that makes no sense! AT&T isn't a computer company, why should it be forced to stop making operating systems for profit?"
Microsoft welded Explorer into the guts of its OS so they could say, after forcing it to be true, that the browser was an essential part of the system. But Microsoft made business software, why should it have to change IE? That's crazy!
I wouldn't be surprised if this guy was some astroturfed paid lobbyist for Alphabet's PR firm. Would you?
Hard disagree, just look at the manifest v3 fuckery.
I’m going to laugh if Elon buys it.
This is really about paying to be the default search engine. How that goes for Google depends on the details.
If nobody can pay to be the default, then it's an absolute win for Google. This would save Google billions of dollars and many of those users will use Google anyway. Google is really paying so nobody else can.
If other companeis can pay to be the default, then it's a much more mixed bag. It'll hurt Firefox and Apple because nobody can pay what Google can and with Google out of the picture, people won't have to pay as much anyway.
Divestment of Chrome is a separate issue. I don't see how this can work as an independent business. People won't pay for a browser. Selling user data doesn't seem like a sustainable business. I know I wouldn't use that. t It's really time for browsers to become a common good.
> Selling user data doesn't seem like a sustainable business.
Did you see Google's Q4 earnings? "Google Services revenues increased 10% to $84.1 billion, reflecting the strong momentum across Google Search & other and YouTube ads." That's by using user data. If Chrome is split off into a new company, there will be buses full of wooers.
Paid for by Google?!
The article didn't really make a lot of sense to me.
But I do agree: to edict the sale of chrome won't really accomplish much.
This is reminiscent of the M$ anti-trust suite in the '90s. To edict for example, the creation of an "open standard" for word documents. Which led to the creation of .docx, which has been harder for 3rd parties to functionally incorporate than the original .doc format. When the corps performs minimally compliant reforms, with continuing antagonistic behavior, there seems to be no real technically specifiable solution (sorry, I didn't go look up some obscure word to mean the same thing). That litigation also had web browsers as a central element, yet nothing was accomplished in diversifying the operating system market, or the web browser market.
To quote Cory Doctorow: capitalists hate capitalism
And so does the US government. What they both love is the unbridled concentration of wealth.
This is why similar comparisons could be made to the AT&T "break up", which was largely ineffective, with the clear oligopoly in telecommunications in existence today.
I do agree with one aspect of the article: if goggle is a monopoly (it obviously is), then don't take tangential measures, break it up, completely.
The semantic web, elimination of internet search via for-profit entities, widely applicable and enforced anti-surveillance and privacy laws. There are many approaches that could work. None of them will be applied, because they would lead to the very richest people making less money. The US will never implement any law with this consequence, period.
> This is reminiscent of the M$ anti-trust suite in the '90s. To edict for example, the creation of an "open standard" for word documents.
That was not an outcome of the 1990 anti-trust suit, or any other anti-trust case against Microsoft.
I think he's confused. Google has to sell Chrome for reasons unrelated to whether Google was paying to be the default on their competitors products.
Google has to sell Chrome for reasons that don't even imply fault or wrongdoing. It lowers the level of competition to an unacceptable level for Google to own Chrome; and when Google owns Chrome, the temptation to do things like pay to be the default search engine in your competitors products in order to manipulate their behavior is too high.
The fact that they were actually doing something like that is a separate problem. And it will not be fixed by punishing them, it will be fixed by telling them to stop doing it. This is a long overdue intervention, not a criminal trial.
Better idea than v3
The author is correct on this:
"Not so with the web. The web is a set of protocols and languages and file formats[...] Google, by virtue of having Chrome, invests heavily in the web itself"
Without a company like Google which functions like a public steward for the web there's little reason for anyone else to drive web development. The competitive market logic doesn't incentivize an open ecosystem because by definition there's no profit to be captured in it, it exists if you will because a benevolent player maintains it and makes money elsewhere.
An analog to this would be if you'd judge Red Hat's dominance in the commercial Linux space the same way and forced them to divest from the operating system market. There would be nobody stepping in, because there's no money in linux itself. It exists by virtue of a entity making money on adjacent markets and all the linux development happens because it's beneficial for them to drive adoption.
The only real alternative you could propose is straight up public funding, but a balkanized market is by its very logic not going to maintain the web, but vertically integrated alternatives, i.e. apps. It's something you can btw see in China which due to timing happened to leap frog over the open web and search and went straight to the hyper-competitive and for that reason proprietary world of platforms.
> An analog to this would be if you'd judge Red Hat's dominance in the commercial Linux space the same way and forced them to divest from the operating system market.
But it's not at all how the linux ecosystem looks. Redhat doesn't dominate linux distributions and they can't corral everyone into using their money-making services by making them default into their distribution.
I actually think they should be made to divest YouTube and non search based ads businesses (what was DoubleClick etc.) along with GTM and GA
> They have the right to do that, but that operating system exists to serve that company only and entirely.
See, here and I thought the primary purpose of software was to benefit the users.
About what you would expect from an article which sounds like it is going to play apologist to big tech monopolies.
> You’ve got a monopoly on lemonade because you pay all the grocery stores to be the default lemonade.
> So we’re going to force you sell your car.
This is b*llocks. Google financed being monopolist in cars with profits from its monopoly on lemonade, which they then used to perpetuate the monopoly on lemonade. We can't solve lemonade problem for now, but we can easily fix the car monopoly problem and break the feedback loop between the two.
Developing a browser is fantastically difficult and expensive. How much of that is because of Google using Chrome's dominance to dictate web standards?
If instead web standards moved at a pace set by a standards body not incentivised to spy on users, how much more competition could exist in the browser space?
What makes you think a potential buyer would not be motivated to spy on its own users? Either it is profitable to do this (and therefore the owners will) or it is not (and therefore being forced to sell chrome won't harm googles bottom line).
This is a laughably bad take.
Investment disclosure?
Forcing Chrome to display a search engine choice doesn't even begin to solve the issue. Chrome spies on you regardless, and it also banned UBO and other ad-blocking extensions. It is a product made to deliberately spy on and harvest more data from you.
We can always use Chromium https://www.chromium.org/chromium-projects/
This is like if Microsoft was forced to sell Edge or Apple sold Safari.
I am thinking of switching from Chrome to Brave https://brave.com/
I’d pick a different Chromium based browser maybe Vivaldi if I was you
I personally wouldn't trust all my most valuable personal info to a small, closed-source browser like Vivaldi
The issue with Chrome isn’t its ownership by Google. The problem lies in the fact that Google search is integrated into the very fabric of the browser at all levels. This creates an unfavorable and, frankly, unchallenged system that hinders competition. It’s the Achilles heel of unchecked capitalism.
"I’m not saying Google shouldn’t be forced to sell Chrome just because it’s only valuable to Google. But I do think Google should be allowed to have a browser."
There's a middle position here, and although Google won't like it, it may be better than Google having to sell Chrome off—that is upon first use would be to ask users if they want to disable all forms of telemetry.
Right, many would choose to disable telemetry, but then many would not do so because they either couldn't give a damn about privacy or they may want to take advantage of say targeted advertising.
Whatever happens, there's a fundamental problem that has to be addressed here and that's how to make the web a more equitable place for all players both big and small.
One of the major problems with new technologies is that shortly after their introduction those who introduced them are often overrun by more business-savvy entrepreneurs who find it dead easy to monopolize the tech (we've seen this repeatedly from say the car industry through to operating systems—like MS and Windows, etc.).
By the time government determines that a monopoly exists it's often too late as unwinding the status quo proves very difficult and disruptive (imagine Social Media if rules had been worked out before it had been introduced, if they had then the scene nowadays would be very different).
When examining what constitutes a monopoly one has to look at what's involved. For example, economies of scale enter the picture—having say only one huge producer of steel would be a monopoly as there'd be no competition and steel—a critical commodity—prices would high so a better solution would be to have two or three large producers to encourage competition. This is what's happened in say the oil and motor vehicle industries. Moreover, it'd make no sense to strangle these large industries by making them comply with regulations that would enable the smallest of small manufacturers sans adequate resources to compete on an equal footing—everyone would end up worse off.
The trouble with the web—perhaps more so than with any other tech throughout history—is that because of its intrinsic nature it's been easier for the powerful (Big Tech) to monopolize the tech. It's also meant that the monopolies that now run the web not only became so almost overnight but also they're now entrenched—set in concrete so to speak—which now make them very difficult to regulate. This all developed so very quickly that unfortunately it happened in a regulations-free environment.
What makes the web very different to other tech—to say those that use physical materials—is that it's very scalable; that is, it's possible for huge monopolies such as Google, Microsoft, etc. to coexist with smaller entities without the smaller ones being stifled. The trouble is that that's not what's happened, monopolistic practices such as Chrome and like deliberately channeling web traffic to Big Tech's sites has effectively distorted the way the web works.
One could argue that the simple solution is to use an independent browser but there are many reasons why this is solution is far from ideal. For starters, web protocols—many of which have been forced on web users by Big Tech—are now so complex and convoluted that designing a fully compatible web browser from scratch is a very difficult and challenging undertaking.
In essence, the demands of Big Tech have been such that they've raised minimal entry level for participation on the web to a point where small players have had to sacrifice both their independence and visibility if they want their presence to be viable. That is, the present state of the web is somewhat analogous to those industries that require economies of scale to function—unless one owns either a 'steel mill'-sized infrastructure or at least has access to one then one's pretty much left out in the cold. For the vast majority who want to participate the obvious solution is to gain access to Big Tech's web—and that means they can only do so on its terms—terms which are often unfair and punitive if violated.
No matter how one looks at it, the web nowadays is effectively a monopoly run by a few large players. The purpose of antitrust law is to flatten the playing field for all, so whatever regulators decide to do with Chrome they need to take these factors into account.
Imagine being such a bootlicker.
This blogger doesn't seem to be aware of all the privacy problems that Chrome poses by the way it was designed to track and monitor all users' history and input and feed it to Google, even in incognito mode. All the blogger had to do is open Wikipedia's article on Chrome to check the huge section on privacy. But no, apparently that is too much research to ask. In fact, the word "privacy" is featured a total of zero times in the blog post.
It's hard to believe anyone can write a wall of text with so many assertions but fails to even touch on the central topic. You need to go way out of your way to be able to miss the point this hard.
Chris is a well-known CSS expert and founder of css-tricks.com which was a respected CSS site before it was sold a couple years ago. I believe he was also working on W3C/CSS specs as invited expert (and paid by who knows)? While you could say CSS and Web journalism/advocacy sites have some inherent interest and their share in making web tech absurdly complex and out of the reach of laymen (and browser entrepreneurs), it's sure shocking to see him act as a Google mouth piece so openly and brazenly.
Most Google related threads boils down to these "woke" exaggerated cliched responses in the comments such as "evil trackers", "you are the product", etc.
Guess what, Netflix tracks your watching habits. It's called a recommendation algorithm there. Spotify tracks your listening habits and so on and so forth.
Trackers are not necessarily evil. But if you get a service in exchange for ads then yes, in this business transaction it's you who's being sold, you are the product.
Whether to see it as good or bad is up to you (after all we sell ourselves e.g. to employers), but this observation is not "childish" or "woke", it's a matter of fact.
Neither Netflix nor Spotify make market dominating utility "media players" that can be used to browse any streaming media.
What Netflix and Spotify do is akin to what YouTube or Apple Music/TV, or even online marketplaces like eBay/Amazon/etc does. Personally I'm not that keen on the "recommendations" most seem to generate but it's them analysing what you've interacted with on their platform and showing you things they think you might be interested in.
Google controls the browser, search engine and ad network - all of which interact in some way with third party sites the user actually wanted to visit.