4 ms·

Aren't you pointing out the exact problem with Google? If Chrome wasn't a viable business without Google's ads subsidizing it, isn't its existence in its curren

Aren't you pointing out the exact problem with Google? If Chrome wasn't a viable business without Google's ads subsidizing it, isn't its existence in its current form exactly the kind of anti-competitive outcome we would be better off without? Without Google subsidizing Chrome, a real competitive market for browsers might emerge, with more vendors investing more effort into competing for users, without having to compete against one of the richest companies in the world that sees its browser as a loss-leader for its ad business, has the ability to dump infinite money into its product, and can advertise it on the one website that 90% of people regularly visit?

sdenton4 2y ago
I dunno, man - a competitive market for browsers likely involves the browser itself inserting a bunch of ads all over the place. It becomes another axis for enshittification, rather than a mostly-neutral window into the web. It's not enough to hope that a business model appears... Ask any journalist.
abduhl 2y ago
What possible browser competition can exist? The market price for a browser from a consumer perspective is $0. I will never pay for a browser. All that will happen is new ad placements from smaller companies, directly in the browser.
- consteval 2y ago
  > All that will happen is new ad placements from smaller companies, directly in the browser. I don't think this is going to be the case. This seems like an extreme conclusion with virtually no precedent. Since an ad browser is such an important piece of software, I imagine it will receive many donations. The reason Chrome doesn't is because it doesn't need them. I think that will change. Also, I think it's possible you will pay for a browser at some point. Ultimately software costs money to make and we've become desensitized to that because we've exchanged that cost for advertising. But advertising sucks. For example, I pay double for HBO Max just so I don't see ads, and I'm not alone in that.
  - shadowgovt 2y ago
    The precedent is that every browser out there currently has one of: - integration to ad infrastructure - integration to the vendor's other service infrastructure - a cost of more than $0 Given that the market is full of people who will only bear $0, the likely conclusion is that a Chrome separated from the ability to integrate to vendor infrastructure will turn to integrating to someone's ad infrastructure (more poorly and less securely than Chrome currently integrates to Google's infra).
    - b112 2y ago
      No one pays $0. All that slurping of user data is used by other corps to maximize their profits. They're paying for that data, and then believe they're making more from consumers as a result. But no matter what, the cost of collecting that data, the infra, and then corp x or y buying it, comes out of the bottom line. It's like points credit cards. Where does that cash back come from, magical fairies? It comes from retailers' bottom lines, eg from you.
      - somastoma 2y ago
        well, I know that the free cash I get IS from fairies. Yours doesn't?
        b112 2y ago
        https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Looking at your current user's post history, you've posted gibberish as comments (just random text). You then progressed to posting a personal history multiple times, where you lambasted the users of this forum, essentially calling everyone "mean" and implying foul intent. Attacks like this are against the guidelines, and really, I cannot imagine they'd go over well anywhere. Most of your posts seem to be non-thoughtful posts (see the guidelines), which contribute little such as this one. We all go off the rails a bit from time to time, we all colour outside the lines occasionally, but it seems like most of your posts are outside of the lines. If you really want to engage in thoughtful debate, at least on HN, I suggest you read the guidelines again, and at least attempt to post in the spirit much of the time. Again, no one is going to be perfect in this, but from what I see it doesn't seem like you really want to engage thoughtfully. Good luck.
- InsideOutSanta 2y ago
  "I will never pay for a browser" ...in the current market, which was created by companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Google, who subsidized their browsers through other income.
  - shadowgovt 2y ago
    If Google is broken up, Apple will still have Safari and Microsoft will still have Edge. There is no reason to believe the market for non-$0 browsers will suddenly manifest absent a Google-integrated Chrome. The people have already spoken with their wallets on this topic.
    - achierius 2y ago
      Microsoft gave up on maintaining their own browser engine (Trident) almost a decade ago, and therefore are now dependent on Chrome's engine (Blink). Since then there have only been three independent browser engines: WebKit (Safari), Gecko (Firefox), and Blink (Chrome, Chromium, Opera, Brave, Edge, ...). Maintaining a performant + featureful + safe browser engine is a massive task, requiring many expensive engineers -- and Blink/V8 in particular has a lot of complexity (sea-of-nodes repr, their weird DSL, ...) that other engines don't. So if Google dropped Chrome, Microsoft would have a hard time picking it up, but would need to if they wanted to keep providing Edge.
      - shadowgovt 2y ago
        Good point. That suggests a significant nonzero possibility that unless MS decides it's strategically meaningful enough to them to maintain a foot in the door on the browser space (much like Google chose to do), they might abandon the project, which would severely crimp the money-faucet for maintenance of the core engine. This could, hypothetically, lead to a collapse of that ecosystem into an also-ran, in which case all Apple has to do is invest more in supporting their browser on OSs they don't own and we could end up with full browser hegemony... "If it doesn't work on Safari, it doesn't work on the Internet."
- bsder 2y ago
  > The market price for a browser from a consumer perspective is $0. The market price for search is $0. And yet we have Kagi because Google is now so ad infested. Ads are now bad enough that there is money in killing them. The market price for email is $0. And yet we have Fastmail. The problem with Google is dumping. The cross-subsidization means that YouTube, Gmail, Chrome, etc. can run at a loss indefinitely and soak up huge chunks of the consumer base. Forcing those services to stand on their own doesn't solve all the problems, but it sure makes competing with them a hell of a lot easier. (YouTube, on the other hand, should be sued into oblivion for not implementing identity checks for upload. The fact that any published video will wind up monetized on YouTube 20 seconds later is genuine theft.)
  - shadowgovt 2y ago
    But do we have any reason to believe that in the absence of Google, the next dumper won't just come along and take their place? The government isn't exactly signaling a willingness to change the fundamentals of the market here. > YouTube, on the other hand, should be sued into oblivion for not implementing identity checks for upload YouTube is probably actually too big to fail at this point. Breaking YouTube video links would have a massive impact on video on the Internet as a whole. Hosting video (efficiently and performantly) is still actually expensive, and YouTube is eating the cost of subsidizing most of the Internet's archive of videos.
    - bsder 2y ago
      > But do we have any reason to believe that in the absence of Google, the next dumper won't just come along and take their place? A new dumper would have to compete with the split out Google Ad Company for ad resources in order to have enough money to cross subsidize. The Baby Bells reformed, but they never again reached "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company." levels (other companies took on that mantle). > Hosting video (efficiently and performantly) is still actually expensive, and YouTube is eating the cost of subsidizing most of the Internet's archive of videos. That's even more reason to crack them up immediately. Did Google not just shut down the DejaNews Usenet archive--something that had negligible storage cost?
- cardanome 2y ago
  I absolutely would have donated large sums of money to Firefox development if they had allowed me to do so. Sadly you can only donate to the Mozilla Foundation which does a lot of other stuff. Wikipedia shows that projects can get very stable funding through donations. Browsers offer incredible value. If there is need people will pony up the money. Many corporations have an business interest in keeping the web free and easily accessible so could serve as potential sponsors. Just like some newer programming language get baking from different companies and manage to stay independent. You just don't want to have one company having total influence.
  - throwaway87483 2y ago
    AFAIK, the foundation only does "other stuff", and the development is fully funded by the corporation (i.e. Google), so you can't really sponsor Firefox development at all, except by buying unrelated services like Pocket and the VPN (and who knows where your money goes then).
Chabsff 2y ago
The original value-proposal for Chrome was: The more people browse the web in general, the more Google profits. So the mere existence of a good free, fast, and safe browser would inherently benefit Google at large in general. And that rationale is why we get to have Chromium at all. Obviously things have evolved quite a bit since then, but I think the general pitch that Chrome is primarily a value-multiplier for the org at large, rather than a direct value generator is still broadly the case, and it's really not clear to me that it can exist as anything else without a fundamental reassessment of what it's trying to accomplish.
- graeme 2y ago
  That's likely not the real rationale. If people browse with Chrome, then google is the default. That is immensely valuable to google, as google's payments to apple, mozilla and android manufacturer's show. In theory Chrome could exist as an independent business if it were allowed to take bids for search default from google. But if the US govt broke up google they would likely also ban the sort of deal that would let Chrome be a viable business on its own.
  - hbn 2y ago
    By the time Chrome came out Google already was in the position where everyone knew to set their default homepage to Google in IE in the same way they automatically go to install Chrome now. I'm surprised no one has mentioned the pseudo-control Chrome gives them over web standards. They can implement experimental APIs in Chrome and immediately use them in their webapps.
    - shadowgovt 2y ago
      Correct. Google's real concern was not that people wouldn't use them as their favorite search engine; it was that relying on Apple and Microsoft to be stewards of access to the web was a huge business risk because, hypothetically, if Apple or Microsoft decided to block google.com at the browser level (or pick your favorite equivalent scenario, like failing to implement a standard that Google absolutely was going to be relying upon to provide service), Google was screwed. Chrome was a business risk mitigation move.
nox101 2y ago
> Without Google subsidizing Chrome, a real competitive market for browsers might emerge Without Chrome there will be only be Safari and Edge
- MrDrMcCoy 2y ago
  I don't that Edge would survive without Chrome. I think it would be more fair to say that without Chrome, there will only be Safari, Firefox, Ladybird, and Verso. Yes, the latter two aren't ready yet, but I get they would gain fast traction in Chrome's absence.
  - shadowgovt 2y ago
    An unfortunate additional consequence of this antitrust lawsuit is that it is likely it will end The Google payments to Mozilla every year. That's 80% of the revenue, so the odds of them being a viable business afterwards are low. So I think we can cross that off the list as well and conclude that in the short to medium term, if Chrome went away it would mean simple web hegemony for Apple.
    - MrDrMcCoy 2y ago
      I'm a bit more hopeful about Mozilla. I think there would be a collapse of the business without the Google cash flow, but expect the browser itself would be continued by the community for its importance.
      - shadowgovt 2y ago
        I have about as much faith in the open source community maintaining a machine as complicated as a full browser without significant corporate backing as I have in OpenOffice displacing Microsoft Office in my lifetime, but hope springs eternal.
        MrDrMcCoy 2y ago
        Consider that KHTML, the grandfather of just about every modern engine that isn't Gecko, was a fairly small open source project. Ladybird is open source and surprisingly usable for its youth and single developer. Speaking from personal experience, I write my best code when I'm frustrated by the absence of something I need. I'm sure many others here are the same way. If a sufficient fire is lit under the community to make the web continue to work in the absence of the old guard, I'm pretty sure it'll happen.

sdenton4 2y ago

I dunno, man - a competitive market for browsers likely involves the browser itself inserting a bunch of ads all over the place. It becomes another axis for enshittification, rather than a mostly-neutral window into the web. It's not enough to hope that a business model appears... Ask any journalist.

abduhl 2y ago

What possible browser competition can exist? The market price for a browser from a consumer perspective is $0. I will never pay for a browser. All that will happen is new ad placements from smaller companies, directly in the browser.

consteval 2y ago
> All that will happen is new ad placements from smaller companies, directly in the browser. I don't think this is going to be the case. This seems like an extreme conclusion with virtually no precedent. Since an ad browser is such an important piece of software, I imagine it will receive many donations. The reason Chrome doesn't is because it doesn't need them. I think that will change. Also, I think it's possible you will pay for a browser at some point. Ultimately software costs money to make and we've become desensitized to that because we've exchanged that cost for advertising. But advertising sucks. For example, I pay double for HBO Max just so I don't see ads, and I'm not alone in that.
- shadowgovt 2y ago
  The precedent is that every browser out there currently has one of: - integration to ad infrastructure - integration to the vendor's other service infrastructure - a cost of more than $0 Given that the market is full of people who will only bear $0, the likely conclusion is that a Chrome separated from the ability to integrate to vendor infrastructure will turn to integrating to someone's ad infrastructure (more poorly and less securely than Chrome currently integrates to Google's infra).
  - b112 2y ago
    No one pays $0. All that slurping of user data is used by other corps to maximize their profits. They're paying for that data, and then believe they're making more from consumers as a result. But no matter what, the cost of collecting that data, the infra, and then corp x or y buying it, comes out of the bottom line. It's like points credit cards. Where does that cash back come from, magical fairies? It comes from retailers' bottom lines, eg from you.
    - somastoma 2y ago
      well, I know that the free cash I get IS from fairies. Yours doesn't?
      - b112 2y ago
        https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Looking at your current user's post history, you've posted gibberish as comments (just random text). You then progressed to posting a personal history multiple times, where you lambasted the users of this forum, essentially calling everyone "mean" and implying foul intent. Attacks like this are against the guidelines, and really, I cannot imagine they'd go over well anywhere. Most of your posts seem to be non-thoughtful posts (see the guidelines), which contribute little such as this one. We all go off the rails a bit from time to time, we all colour outside the lines occasionally, but it seems like most of your posts are outside of the lines. If you really want to engage in thoughtful debate, at least on HN, I suggest you read the guidelines again, and at least attempt to post in the spirit much of the time. Again, no one is going to be perfect in this, but from what I see it doesn't seem like you really want to engage thoughtfully. Good luck.
InsideOutSanta 2y ago
"I will never pay for a browser" ...in the current market, which was created by companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Google, who subsidized their browsers through other income.
- shadowgovt 2y ago
  If Google is broken up, Apple will still have Safari and Microsoft will still have Edge. There is no reason to believe the market for non-$0 browsers will suddenly manifest absent a Google-integrated Chrome. The people have already spoken with their wallets on this topic.
  - achierius 2y ago
    Microsoft gave up on maintaining their own browser engine (Trident) almost a decade ago, and therefore are now dependent on Chrome's engine (Blink). Since then there have only been three independent browser engines: WebKit (Safari), Gecko (Firefox), and Blink (Chrome, Chromium, Opera, Brave, Edge, ...). Maintaining a performant + featureful + safe browser engine is a massive task, requiring many expensive engineers -- and Blink/V8 in particular has a lot of complexity (sea-of-nodes repr, their weird DSL, ...) that other engines don't. So if Google dropped Chrome, Microsoft would have a hard time picking it up, but would need to if they wanted to keep providing Edge.
    - shadowgovt 2y ago
      Good point. That suggests a significant nonzero possibility that unless MS decides it's strategically meaningful enough to them to maintain a foot in the door on the browser space (much like Google chose to do), they might abandon the project, which would severely crimp the money-faucet for maintenance of the core engine. This could, hypothetically, lead to a collapse of that ecosystem into an also-ran, in which case all Apple has to do is invest more in supporting their browser on OSs they don't own and we could end up with full browser hegemony... "If it doesn't work on Safari, it doesn't work on the Internet."
bsder 2y ago
> The market price for a browser from a consumer perspective is $0. The market price for search is $0. And yet we have Kagi because Google is now so ad infested. Ads are now bad enough that there is money in killing them. The market price for email is $0. And yet we have Fastmail. The problem with Google is dumping. The cross-subsidization means that YouTube, Gmail, Chrome, etc. can run at a loss indefinitely and soak up huge chunks of the consumer base. Forcing those services to stand on their own doesn't solve all the problems, but it sure makes competing with them a hell of a lot easier. (YouTube, on the other hand, should be sued into oblivion for not implementing identity checks for upload. The fact that any published video will wind up monetized on YouTube 20 seconds later is genuine theft.)
- shadowgovt 2y ago
  But do we have any reason to believe that in the absence of Google, the next dumper won't just come along and take their place? The government isn't exactly signaling a willingness to change the fundamentals of the market here. > YouTube, on the other hand, should be sued into oblivion for not implementing identity checks for upload YouTube is probably actually too big to fail at this point. Breaking YouTube video links would have a massive impact on video on the Internet as a whole. Hosting video (efficiently and performantly) is still actually expensive, and YouTube is eating the cost of subsidizing most of the Internet's archive of videos.
  - bsder 2y ago
    > But do we have any reason to believe that in the absence of Google, the next dumper won't just come along and take their place? A new dumper would have to compete with the split out Google Ad Company for ad resources in order to have enough money to cross subsidize. The Baby Bells reformed, but they never again reached "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company." levels (other companies took on that mantle). > Hosting video (efficiently and performantly) is still actually expensive, and YouTube is eating the cost of subsidizing most of the Internet's archive of videos. That's even more reason to crack them up immediately. Did Google not just shut down the DejaNews Usenet archive--something that had negligible storage cost?
cardanome 2y ago
I absolutely would have donated large sums of money to Firefox development if they had allowed me to do so. Sadly you can only donate to the Mozilla Foundation which does a lot of other stuff. Wikipedia shows that projects can get very stable funding through donations. Browsers offer incredible value. If there is need people will pony up the money. Many corporations have an business interest in keeping the web free and easily accessible so could serve as potential sponsors. Just like some newer programming language get baking from different companies and manage to stay independent. You just don't want to have one company having total influence.
- throwaway87483 2y ago
  AFAIK, the foundation only does "other stuff", and the development is fully funded by the corporation (i.e. Google), so you can't really sponsor Firefox development at all, except by buying unrelated services like Pocket and the VPN (and who knows where your money goes then).

Chabsff 2y ago

The original value-proposal for Chrome was: The more people browse the web in general, the more Google profits. So the mere existence of a good free, fast, and safe browser would inherently benefit Google at large in general. And that rationale is why we get to have Chromium at all. Obviously things have evolved quite a bit since then, but I think the general pitch that Chrome is primarily a value-multiplier for the org at large, rather than a direct value generator is still broadly the case, and it's really not clear to me that it can exist as anything else without a fundamental reassessment of what it's trying to accomplish.

graeme 2y ago
That's likely not the real rationale. If people browse with Chrome, then google is the default. That is immensely valuable to google, as google's payments to apple, mozilla and android manufacturer's show. In theory Chrome could exist as an independent business if it were allowed to take bids for search default from google. But if the US govt broke up google they would likely also ban the sort of deal that would let Chrome be a viable business on its own.
- hbn 2y ago
  By the time Chrome came out Google already was in the position where everyone knew to set their default homepage to Google in IE in the same way they automatically go to install Chrome now. I'm surprised no one has mentioned the pseudo-control Chrome gives them over web standards. They can implement experimental APIs in Chrome and immediately use them in their webapps.
  - shadowgovt 2y ago
    Correct. Google's real concern was not that people wouldn't use them as their favorite search engine; it was that relying on Apple and Microsoft to be stewards of access to the web was a huge business risk because, hypothetically, if Apple or Microsoft decided to block google.com at the browser level (or pick your favorite equivalent scenario, like failing to implement a standard that Google absolutely was going to be relying upon to provide service), Google was screwed. Chrome was a business risk mitigation move.

nox101 2y ago

> Without Google subsidizing Chrome, a real competitive market for browsers might emerge Without Chrome there will be only be Safari and Edge

MrDrMcCoy 2y ago
I don't that Edge would survive without Chrome. I think it would be more fair to say that without Chrome, there will only be Safari, Firefox, Ladybird, and Verso. Yes, the latter two aren't ready yet, but I get they would gain fast traction in Chrome's absence.
- shadowgovt 2y ago
  An unfortunate additional consequence of this antitrust lawsuit is that it is likely it will end The Google payments to Mozilla every year. That's 80% of the revenue, so the odds of them being a viable business afterwards are low. So I think we can cross that off the list as well and conclude that in the short to medium term, if Chrome went away it would mean simple web hegemony for Apple.
  - MrDrMcCoy 2y ago
    I'm a bit more hopeful about Mozilla. I think there would be a collapse of the business without the Google cash flow, but expect the browser itself would be continued by the community for its importance.
    - shadowgovt 2y ago
      I have about as much faith in the open source community maintaining a machine as complicated as a full browser without significant corporate backing as I have in OpenOffice displacing Microsoft Office in my lifetime, but hope springs eternal.
      - MrDrMcCoy 2y ago
        Consider that KHTML, the grandfather of just about every modern engine that isn't Gecko, was a fairly small open source project. Ladybird is open source and surprisingly usable for its youth and single developer. Speaking from personal experience, I write my best code when I'm frustrated by the absence of something I need. I'm sure many others here are the same way. If a sufficient fire is lit under the community to make the web continue to work in the absence of the old guard, I'm pretty sure it'll happen.