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Google Being Forced to Sell Chrome Is Not Good for the Web

205 points by OuterVale 2y ago

xigency 2y ago
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.'
- fumufumu 2y ago
  [dead]
- Spooky23 2y ago
  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.
  - g-b-r 2y ago
    They'll demand half of Google's rare earths deposits
    - tempodox 2y ago
      Or just the keys to total surveillance and suppression of web content they don't like.
      - bilbo0s 2y ago
        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.
      - fragmede 2y ago
        Why would they need to do that when they already have the formula down? How much have you been hearing about all the protests?
        bmacho 2y ago
        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?
        acdha 2y ago
        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.
  - whatwhaaaaat 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - Spooky23 2y ago
      The constitution establishes that a core role of government is to provide for the general welfare of the people, and public health is part of that. I’m generally in favor with government efforts to combat misinformation. I’m also fine with wartime propaganda within limits for similar reasons.
      - whatwhaaaaat 2y ago
        Aaaand that is why trump won.
      - LexGray 2y ago
        I am not fine with war time propaganda. I want to know what the government is choosing to do and why. I am not against war and even the occasional puff piece about how sexy the latest military tech is sexy is fine. It still is necessary in this day and age to stomp those that strip others of human rights and lives, yet I cannot think of any military action since Vietnam I have felt comfortable that I have not been outright lied to about underlying causes, methods used, and the after affects. My full adult life it has seemed the government is convinced it is the Illuminati with a mandate to gaslight the public. That bad decisions don’t matter and no one is responsible seems like a horrible status quo when lives, the environment, and our tax dollars are at stake. 9/11 turned wartime propaganda into an excuse to strip freedoms that certain parties have been lusting after and no promises were kept about timelines for them being returned. When trust is abused to that extent the government should lose any rights to do so again.
      - CaffeineLD50 2y ago
        Given the dreadful state of public health this is a total fail. Epidemic obesity alone is a nightmare: heart disease, cancer, stroke, you name it. Trump, to his credit, is taking fentanyl seriously but heart disease is a bigger killer.
  - victorbjorklund 2y ago
    You are probably right.
  - dehrmann 2y ago
    Biden or Trump administration? This remedy was originally proposed under Biden's DOJ.
    - Spooky23 2y ago
      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?
  - libertine 2y ago
    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.
- pessimizer 2y ago
  > 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.
  - crabmusket 2y ago
    > 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.
- gtsop 2y ago
  > 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.
- boxed 2y ago
  > 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.
  - quinnirill 2y ago
    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.
    - burnerthrow008 2y ago
      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.
      - wffurr 2y ago
        >> 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.
  - pmontra 2y ago
    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.
  - rishav_sharan 2y ago
    Why do you think so? Google can continue to contribute to chromium as they are doing now, alongwith other contributors like Microsoft
  - 2y ago
- thfuran 2y ago
  I think google should be forced to divest AdSense.
pluto_modadic 2y ago
Alphabet tried to kill adblock in Chrome, so...
- tonyhart7 2y ago
  not good for their wallet apparently
- surajrmal 2y ago
  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.
  - pyrale 2y ago
    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.
  - amanaplanacanal 2y ago
    Is malware in ads not a problem anymore?
    - surajrmal 2y ago
      Do you still get malware in ads when using ublock origin lite?
orionblastar 2y ago
We can always use Chromium https://www.chromium.org/chromium-projects/ 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/ https://brave.com/
- youngtaff 2y ago
  I’d pick a different Chromium based browser maybe Vivaldi if I was you
  - hoppyhoppy2 2y ago
    I personally wouldn't trust all my most valuable personal info to a small, closed-source browser like Vivaldi
    - youngtaff 2y ago
      But you’d trust it to Brave?
      - hoppyhoppy2 2y ago
        I hadn't ever really considered doing so, but probably not. (I'm not the person who mentioned Brave, btw)
- nerdix 2y ago
  I wouldn't mind Google being forced to divest in Chrome if Microsoft and Apple were forced to divest as well. OS vendors being the only "big tech" companies allowed in the browser market doesn't strike me as a good move for the free and open internet.
wordofx 2y ago
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.
- vachina 2y ago
  You can always use Chromium or dozens of others viable Chromium derivatives. Google at least gave you the option to do that.
  - koito17 2y ago
    > 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.
    - nerdix 2y ago
      Isn't most of the frontend open source? Chromium looks a lot like Chrome. I would say that they would be basically indistinguishable to the average user.
- tim333 2y ago
  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?
elif 2y ago
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?
- glenstein 2y ago
  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.
ohso4 2y ago
> 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.
- inetknght 2y ago
  > 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...
  - andrewflnr 2y ago
    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.
    - thewebguyd 2y ago
      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.
      - paulryanrogers 2y ago
        I don't think it's illegal for anyone to buy defaults. Rather, just for large players with outsized market share.
    - paulryanrogers 2y ago
      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.
- fiddlerwoaroof 2y ago
thomassmith65 2y ago
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.
- matthewdgreen 2y ago
  Let’s not forget the “AI assistant”, which appears to lightly plagiarize the first three results on any topic, while adding some mistakes.
  - mixmastamyk 2y ago
    Nor WEI, which Ars Technica described as a "nightmare." The final solution to general purpose computing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Environment_Integrity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Environment_Integrity
    - mdhb 2y ago
      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.
      - user3939382 2y ago
        It is, just like having an armed policeman permanently stationed in your living room to protect you is a legitimate use case.
        2y ago
Georgelemental 2y ago
> 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.
- jauntywundrkind 2y ago
  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 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.
  - 000ooo000 2y ago
    >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.
    - jauntywundrkind 2y ago
      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.
NotYourLawyer 2y ago
This is a laughably bad take.
motorest 2y ago
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.
- tannhaeuser 2y ago
  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.
sheepscreek 2y ago
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.
paddw 2y ago
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.
- glenstein 2y ago
  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.
- pessimizer 2y ago
  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.
  - Jensson 2y ago
    > 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.
- thewebguyd 2y ago
  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.
est31 2y ago
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.
- asadotzler 2y ago
  And those users can then move to a browser that isn't screwing them over, that does support Linux and open source and web standards. Google Chrome is not the only browser possible except to Google shills and sycophants.
  - nerdix 2y ago
    They can do that now. I don't think Chrome is a very popular browser for desktop Linux users. Or, at the very least, it is definitely not as dominate as it is on Windows and macOS.
    - est31 2y ago
      There is alternatives for now. But if Google has to sell off Chrome, they will also be less motivated to pay as much for Firefox as they do now. Then what is remaining for Linux if the Chromium reskins are gone? Webkit builds?
streptomycin 2y ago
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.
- mixmastamyk 2y ago
  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.
  - jauntywundrkind 2y ago
    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.
    - mixmastamyk 2y ago
      Silly, it’s already started. An obstacle would give impetus to new solutions,
      - 2y ago
glenstein 2y ago
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.
- mixmastamyk 2y ago
  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.
DavidManningCA 2y ago
NotGoogleLobbiests.com? Great source.
ForTheKidz 2y ago
> because what is good for the web is good for Google Counterpoint: funding via advertisement
rafram 2y 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-search-antitrust-chrome-breakup 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.
- duskwuff 2y ago
  What worries me is what's going to happen to Mozilla without those payments.
juunpp 2y ago
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.
Barrin92 2y ago
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.
- alexey-salmin 2y ago
  > 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.
Okx 2y ago
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.
- the_other 2y ago
  > 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.
  - asadotzler 2y ago
    It's the scale. You can do all kinds of integrations at tiny scale that are not permissible at grand scale. I can own my store and sell my own-brand products in it but if I own most of the stores and use that leverage to force other stores to sell my own-brand products, that's a concern for competition and an opportunity for anti-trust regulation to step in and attempt to fix things.
- alexey-salmin 2y ago
  > 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.
willtemperley 2y ago
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.
mystified5016 2y ago
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?
- pfooti 2y ago
  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).
franze 2y ago
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...)
glimshe 2y ago
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.
pessimizer 2y ago
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.
RajT88 2y ago
> 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.
CaffeineLD50 2y ago
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?
BrenBarn 2y ago
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.
- 000ooo000 2y ago
  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.
- nerdix 2y ago
  The alternative is employees of OS vendors writing the specs. And they would intentionally drag their feet or even outright refuse to standardize features that encroached on native apps in order to maintain their walled gardens. Apple did good things for the web with WebKit before iOS because it was in their interest to break the Windows desktop monopoly (and I'd argue that macOS has been a huge benefactor of Chrome taking down IE). They've been less than stellar post iOS now that they have a rent seeking business predicated on native apps locked away behind their app store.
aktuel 2y ago
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.
hilbert42 2y ago
"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.
jimmont 2y ago
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.
throw_a_grenade 2y ago
> 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.
jmyeet 2y ago
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.
- tgv 2y ago
  > 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.
arcmechanica 2y ago
Better idea than v3
DeathArrow 2y ago
Forcing Google to sell Chrome isn't enough. We need healthy alternatives to Chrome.
jsmo 2y ago
Paid for by Google?!
kweingar 2y ago
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?
- asyx 2y ago
  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.
- dither8 2y ago
  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.
gerash 2y ago
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- stephenr 2y ago
  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.
- alexey-salmin 2y ago
  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.
- deleted 2y ago
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ksynwa 2y ago
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?
celdon25 2y ago
I’m going to laugh if Elon buys it.
robin_reala 2y ago
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 https://support.google.com/a/answer/33864 They can’t be forced to sell soon enough.
- snackernews 2y ago
  Would selling change anything? There are a lot of sites and apps that only work in Chrome that Google didn’t make.
  - robin_reala 2y ago
    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.
    - snackernews 2y ago
      What does selling Chrome practically change? Workspaces can still force that group to use the browser that Google deems friendliest to its business practices, including a sold Chrome.
maxglute 2y ago
What else has Google sold and how did they end up? SketchUp dodged a bullet.
renegat0x0 2y ago
To be honest I think it does not matter. I wish they split search from Google. Either you are search business, or ad business.
wruza 2y ago
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.
pjmlp 2y ago
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.
snackernews 2y ago
If Google sells are they also barred from making open source contributions to Chromium? From being the primary direction setter?
wolvesechoes 2y ago
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bmacho 2y ago
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- mariusor 2y ago
  Maybe it would help if you'd tell us why they're nonsensical. By the engagement these submissions get it looks like most people at least entertain, if not support them.
KaiserPro 2y ago
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.
- asadotzler 2y ago
  They have also precluded Apple and Microsoft and Mozilla from improving their browsers in critical ways by spiking good initiatives and forcing the other browsers through sheer power of numbers to add garbage to the browser. DRM, wanna know who spearheaded that? and who fought against that-- and who won. and who all were then forced to go along with it. This isn't rocket science.
ripped_britches 2y ago
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.
metalrain 2y ago
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?
youngtaff 2y ago
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
fmajid 2y ago
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.
- zitsarethecure 2y ago
  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.
Apreche 2y ago
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.
alangibson 2y ago
Google is emphatically not a web business. They are an advertising business. You should expect their priorities in product development to reflect that.
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npodbielski 2y ago
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.
- bloppe 2y ago
  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.
  - light_hue_1 2y ago
    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.
hackerbob 2y ago
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.
- asadotzler 2y ago
  Nothing, but at least they won't have the largest web properties and the most sprawling ad surveillance network to combine with that browser in ways that are evil and anti-competetive. Silver Lake won't knowingly ship a bug in Google Search or Gmail that breaks Firefox or Safari for a month, peeling off millions more of those users to Chrome which magically works despite the other-browser breaking bug, then rinse and repeat once every 3-6 months for a decade until the competition has no users any more.
yapyap 2y ago
Hard disagree, just look at the manifest v3 fuckery.
tensility 2y ago
Solidly enforcing citizens' constitutional right to privacy seems a far better approach to addressing the problem of Google at its root cause.
7bit 2y ago
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.
almosthere 2y ago
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.
- riku_iki 2y ago
  > we don't need you assholes You really need it. Food chain of your own paycheck likely rely on efficient ads at many points.
andsoitis 2y ago
Who would even have the money, technical know how, and business acumen to buy, maintain, and make money with Chrome?
- bastawhiz 2y ago
  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.
johnea 2y ago
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.
- dragonwriter 2y ago
  > 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.
93po 2y ago
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.
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newuser94303 2y ago
I love Chromebooks. Windows is tras. Even if you buy a MacBook, Apple is able to reconfigure your machine at will.
TheAdamist 2y ago
I don't understand why the remedies on google can basically be summarized as "apple wins, its the only viable smartphone left".
mediumsmart 2y ago
the Web? Really?
Yeul 2y ago
Attributing morality to corporations is such a cute naive thing and dare I say it very American.

205 points by OuterVale 2y ago

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.'

fumufumu 2y ago
[dead]
Spooky23 2y ago
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.
- g-b-r 2y ago
  They'll demand half of Google's rare earths deposits
  - tempodox 2y ago
    Or just the keys to total surveillance and suppression of web content they don't like.
    - bilbo0s 2y ago
      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.
    - fragmede 2y ago
      Why would they need to do that when they already have the formula down? How much have you been hearing about all the protests?
      - bmacho 2y ago
        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?
      - acdha 2y ago
        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.
- whatwhaaaaat 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - Spooky23 2y ago
    The constitution establishes that a core role of government is to provide for the general welfare of the people, and public health is part of that. I’m generally in favor with government efforts to combat misinformation. I’m also fine with wartime propaganda within limits for similar reasons.
    - whatwhaaaaat 2y ago
      Aaaand that is why trump won.
    - LexGray 2y ago
      I am not fine with war time propaganda. I want to know what the government is choosing to do and why. I am not against war and even the occasional puff piece about how sexy the latest military tech is sexy is fine. It still is necessary in this day and age to stomp those that strip others of human rights and lives, yet I cannot think of any military action since Vietnam I have felt comfortable that I have not been outright lied to about underlying causes, methods used, and the after affects. My full adult life it has seemed the government is convinced it is the Illuminati with a mandate to gaslight the public. That bad decisions don’t matter and no one is responsible seems like a horrible status quo when lives, the environment, and our tax dollars are at stake. 9/11 turned wartime propaganda into an excuse to strip freedoms that certain parties have been lusting after and no promises were kept about timelines for them being returned. When trust is abused to that extent the government should lose any rights to do so again.
    - CaffeineLD50 2y ago
      Given the dreadful state of public health this is a total fail. Epidemic obesity alone is a nightmare: heart disease, cancer, stroke, you name it. Trump, to his credit, is taking fentanyl seriously but heart disease is a bigger killer.
- victorbjorklund 2y ago
  You are probably right.
- dehrmann 2y ago
  Biden or Trump administration? This remedy was originally proposed under Biden's DOJ.
  - Spooky23 2y ago
    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?
- libertine 2y ago
  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.
pessimizer 2y ago
> 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.
- crabmusket 2y ago
  > 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.
gtsop 2y ago
> 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.
boxed 2y ago
> 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.
- quinnirill 2y ago
  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.
  - burnerthrow008 2y ago
    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.
    - wffurr 2y ago
      >> 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.
- pmontra 2y ago
  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.
- rishav_sharan 2y ago
  Why do you think so? Google can continue to contribute to chromium as they are doing now, alongwith other contributors like Microsoft
- 2y ago
thfuran 2y ago
I think google should be forced to divest AdSense.

pluto_modadic 2y ago

Alphabet tried to kill adblock in Chrome, so...

tonyhart7 2y ago
not good for their wallet apparently
surajrmal 2y ago
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.
- pyrale 2y ago
  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.
- amanaplanacanal 2y ago
  Is malware in ads not a problem anymore?
  - surajrmal 2y ago
    Do you still get malware in ads when using ublock origin lite?

orionblastar 2y ago

We can always use Chromium https://www.chromium.org/chromium-projects/ 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/ https://brave.com/

youngtaff 2y ago
I’d pick a different Chromium based browser maybe Vivaldi if I was you
- hoppyhoppy2 2y ago
  I personally wouldn't trust all my most valuable personal info to a small, closed-source browser like Vivaldi
  - youngtaff 2y ago
    But you’d trust it to Brave?
    - hoppyhoppy2 2y ago
      I hadn't ever really considered doing so, but probably not. (I'm not the person who mentioned Brave, btw)
nerdix 2y ago
I wouldn't mind Google being forced to divest in Chrome if Microsoft and Apple were forced to divest as well. OS vendors being the only "big tech" companies allowed in the browser market doesn't strike me as a good move for the free and open internet.

wordofx 2y ago

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.

vachina 2y ago
You can always use Chromium or dozens of others viable Chromium derivatives. Google at least gave you the option to do that.
- koito17 2y ago
  > 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.
  - nerdix 2y ago
    Isn't most of the frontend open source? Chromium looks a lot like Chrome. I would say that they would be basically indistinguishable to the average user.
tim333 2y ago
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?

elif 2y ago

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?

glenstein 2y ago
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.

ohso4 2y ago

> 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.

inetknght 2y ago
> 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...
- andrewflnr 2y ago
  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.
  - thewebguyd 2y ago
    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.
    - paulryanrogers 2y ago
      I don't think it's illegal for anyone to buy defaults. Rather, just for large players with outsized market share.
  - paulryanrogers 2y ago
    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.
fiddlerwoaroof 2y ago

thomassmith65 2y ago

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.

matthewdgreen 2y ago
Let’s not forget the “AI assistant”, which appears to lightly plagiarize the first three results on any topic, while adding some mistakes.
- mixmastamyk 2y ago
  Nor WEI, which Ars Technica described as a "nightmare." The final solution to general purpose computing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Environment_Integrity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Environment_Integrity
  - mdhb 2y ago
    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.
    - user3939382 2y ago
      It is, just like having an armed policeman permanently stationed in your living room to protect you is a legitimate use case.
      - 2y ago

Georgelemental 2y ago

> 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.

jauntywundrkind 2y ago
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 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.
- 000ooo000 2y ago
  >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.
  - jauntywundrkind 2y ago
    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.

NotYourLawyer 2y ago

This is a laughably bad take.

motorest 2y ago

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.

tannhaeuser 2y ago
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.

sheepscreek 2y ago

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.

paddw 2y ago

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.

glenstein 2y ago
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.
pessimizer 2y ago
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.
- Jensson 2y ago
  > 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.
thewebguyd 2y ago
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.

est31 2y ago

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.

asadotzler 2y ago
And those users can then move to a browser that isn't screwing them over, that does support Linux and open source and web standards. Google Chrome is not the only browser possible except to Google shills and sycophants.
- nerdix 2y ago
  They can do that now. I don't think Chrome is a very popular browser for desktop Linux users. Or, at the very least, it is definitely not as dominate as it is on Windows and macOS.
  - est31 2y ago
    There is alternatives for now. But if Google has to sell off Chrome, they will also be less motivated to pay as much for Firefox as they do now. Then what is remaining for Linux if the Chromium reskins are gone? Webkit builds?

streptomycin 2y ago

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.

mixmastamyk 2y ago
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.
- jauntywundrkind 2y ago
  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.
  - mixmastamyk 2y ago
    Silly, it’s already started. An obstacle would give impetus to new solutions,
    - 2y ago

glenstein 2y ago

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.

mixmastamyk 2y ago
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.

DavidManningCA 2y ago

NotGoogleLobbiests.com? Great source.

ForTheKidz 2y ago

> because what is good for the web is good for Google Counterpoint: funding via advertisement

rafram 2y 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-search-antitrust-chrome-breakup 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.

duskwuff 2y ago
What worries me is what's going to happen to Mozilla without those payments.

juunpp 2y ago

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.

Barrin92 2y ago

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.

alexey-salmin 2y ago
> 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.

Okx 2y ago

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.

the_other 2y ago
> 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.
- asadotzler 2y ago
  It's the scale. You can do all kinds of integrations at tiny scale that are not permissible at grand scale. I can own my store and sell my own-brand products in it but if I own most of the stores and use that leverage to force other stores to sell my own-brand products, that's a concern for competition and an opportunity for anti-trust regulation to step in and attempt to fix things.
alexey-salmin 2y ago
> 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.

willtemperley 2y ago

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.

mystified5016 2y ago

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?

pfooti 2y ago
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).

franze 2y ago

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...)

glimshe 2y ago

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.

pessimizer 2y ago

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.

RajT88 2y ago

> 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.

CaffeineLD50 2y ago

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?

BrenBarn 2y ago

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.

000ooo000 2y ago
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.
nerdix 2y ago
The alternative is employees of OS vendors writing the specs. And they would intentionally drag their feet or even outright refuse to standardize features that encroached on native apps in order to maintain their walled gardens. Apple did good things for the web with WebKit before iOS because it was in their interest to break the Windows desktop monopoly (and I'd argue that macOS has been a huge benefactor of Chrome taking down IE). They've been less than stellar post iOS now that they have a rent seeking business predicated on native apps locked away behind their app store.

aktuel 2y ago

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.

hilbert42 2y ago

"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.

jimmont 2y ago

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.

throw_a_grenade 2y ago

> 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.

jmyeet 2y ago

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.

tgv 2y ago
> 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.

arcmechanica 2y ago

Better idea than v3

DeathArrow 2y ago

Forcing Google to sell Chrome isn't enough. We need healthy alternatives to Chrome.

jsmo 2y ago

Paid for by Google?!

kweingar 2y ago

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?

asyx 2y ago
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.
dither8 2y ago
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.

gerash 2y ago

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stephenr 2y ago
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.
alexey-salmin 2y ago
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.
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ksynwa 2y ago

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?

celdon25 2y ago

I’m going to laugh if Elon buys it.

robin_reala 2y ago

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 https://support.google.com/a/answer/33864 They can’t be forced to sell soon enough.

snackernews 2y ago
Would selling change anything? There are a lot of sites and apps that only work in Chrome that Google didn’t make.
- robin_reala 2y ago
  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.
  - snackernews 2y ago
    What does selling Chrome practically change? Workspaces can still force that group to use the browser that Google deems friendliest to its business practices, including a sold Chrome.

maxglute 2y ago

What else has Google sold and how did they end up? SketchUp dodged a bullet.

renegat0x0 2y ago

To be honest I think it does not matter. I wish they split search from Google. Either you are search business, or ad business.

wruza 2y ago

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.

pjmlp 2y ago

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.

snackernews 2y ago

If Google sells are they also barred from making open source contributions to Chromium? From being the primary direction setter?

wolvesechoes 2y ago

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bmacho 2y ago

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mariusor 2y ago
Maybe it would help if you'd tell us why they're nonsensical. By the engagement these submissions get it looks like most people at least entertain, if not support them.

KaiserPro 2y ago

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.

asadotzler 2y ago
They have also precluded Apple and Microsoft and Mozilla from improving their browsers in critical ways by spiking good initiatives and forcing the other browsers through sheer power of numbers to add garbage to the browser. DRM, wanna know who spearheaded that? and who fought against that-- and who won. and who all were then forced to go along with it. This isn't rocket science.

ripped_britches 2y ago

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.

metalrain 2y ago

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?

youngtaff 2y ago

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

fmajid 2y ago

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.

zitsarethecure 2y ago
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.

Apreche 2y ago

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.

alangibson 2y ago

Google is emphatically not a web business. They are an advertising business. You should expect their priorities in product development to reflect that.

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npodbielski 2y ago

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.

bloppe 2y ago
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.
- light_hue_1 2y ago
  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.

hackerbob 2y ago

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.

asadotzler 2y ago
Nothing, but at least they won't have the largest web properties and the most sprawling ad surveillance network to combine with that browser in ways that are evil and anti-competetive. Silver Lake won't knowingly ship a bug in Google Search or Gmail that breaks Firefox or Safari for a month, peeling off millions more of those users to Chrome which magically works despite the other-browser breaking bug, then rinse and repeat once every 3-6 months for a decade until the competition has no users any more.

yapyap 2y ago

Hard disagree, just look at the manifest v3 fuckery.

tensility 2y ago

Solidly enforcing citizens' constitutional right to privacy seems a far better approach to addressing the problem of Google at its root cause.

7bit 2y ago

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.

almosthere 2y ago

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.

riku_iki 2y ago
> we don't need you assholes You really need it. Food chain of your own paycheck likely rely on efficient ads at many points.

andsoitis 2y ago

Who would even have the money, technical know how, and business acumen to buy, maintain, and make money with Chrome?

bastawhiz 2y ago
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.

johnea 2y ago

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.

dragonwriter 2y ago
> 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.

93po 2y ago

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.

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newuser94303 2y ago

I love Chromebooks. Windows is tras. Even if you buy a MacBook, Apple is able to reconfigure your machine at will.

TheAdamist 2y ago

I don't understand why the remedies on google can basically be summarized as "apple wins, its the only viable smartphone left".

mediumsmart 2y ago

the Web? Really?

Yeul 2y ago

Attributing morality to corporations is such a cute naive thing and dare I say it very American.