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Maybe you're confusing Microsoft's old original interest in browsers - to block a competing app runtime to Windows, with their and Google's current browser inte

Maybe you're confusing Microsoft's old original interest in browsers - to block a competing app runtime to Windows, with their and Google's current browser interest - as a channel to funnel all users to their services mainly Google (search) and Bing. Now this is just a simplification and not all of how Google uses Chrome for their business interests. However for Google which is the number one search engine being able put their search engine as the default on the number one browser everyone uses as well as pay to be the default on all the others is a huge moat. Not the only moat they have by any means but it would be silly to ignore it just because dealing with it alone wouldn't solve the problem. But I'm not working for the DOJ and if I were I'd suggest splitting Google Search up into multiple branded search sites ( Atlantic Google, GoogleSouth Southwestern Google etc.) and also multiple whole sale search engines (engines that power the search sites) each would only be owned by separate companies and would be forbidden from acquiring or merging with each other.

rstuart4133 1y ago
> Maybe you're confusing Microsoft's old original interest in browsers - to block a competing app runtime to Windows, with their and Google's current browser interest - as a channel to funnel all users to their services mainly Google (search) and Bing. Your right - I hadn't considered that aspect. However, on everything bar Android users have to manually install Chrome and set it to the default. You can do that without owning the browser - just publish an extension. To say it again, even if the ban was implemented it looks like it would be ineffective. It's possibly good to remember at this point Apple does not allow Chrome on iOS. As for splitting the other bits of Google up, I suspect it's going to be so hard it will happen in name only. At the retail end, people don't choose Google products because of things like network effects, they choose it because it's the best or close to it. That's true for Search, Youtube, GMail/Contacts/Calendar, Maps and their ad platform off the top of my head. Android is the exception - it's firmly entrenched because of network effects. But for the rest, if you build a better one the people would come, eventually. The insurmountable barrier for building a competitor isn't the deep pockets needed until people discover you. People can and do build other mail clients (which is possibly the easiest to do). It's Google's engineering talent. The odds of it being substantially better for the length of time require for those people to arrive must be close to 0. As one example, Bing hasn't been able to pull it off after decades, and Outlook remains a mess. As a current example Gemini consistently ranks at the top of lmarena.ai At the infrastructure end the situation is worse. Google has built the world's best, most secure infrastructure. Their modus operandi seems to be buy stuff, transplant it their infrastructure and engineering processes, and hope the weed grows into a monster. It normally doesn't (and famously gets killed), but when it does the advantages of transplantation and googles infrastructure tend to lead to world domination. Your watching it happen again right now, as Google develops and deploys the only large scale competitor to NVidia's platform for AI. To me, a software engineer, breaking youtube, search, gmail or whatever away from Google's infrastructure (and that monorepo) would be decade long and hugely expensive project - if it's possible at all. And if you don't Google gets to charge what they want for using it, keeping most of the profits, and god help us build replacements.
- bobajeff 1y ago
  I think Google also pays some OEMs to pre-install Chrome on their PCs. Also Android is a pretty big percentage of mobile phones. Google also pays Apple, Mozilla and other browsers to be the default search. Clearly, Google believes defaults matter to their dominance in search.
  - rstuart4133 1y ago
    > Clearly, Google believes defaults matter to their dominance in search. Yes, I agree. But we are talking about the impact of Google no longer distributing Chrome on people (or organisations) who go to the trouble of manually installing Chrome themselves. If they are willing to manually install something there are no end of ways for Google to ensure a browser, or the new Chrome will use Google's preferred defaults. To put it another way, I disliked how Google drove Firefox down to it's current level or usage. It was with numerous subtle nags and breakages. They've always insisted it wasn't deliberate, and that remains plausible. If they are forced to sell Chrome, they could push their preferred extension the same way. (It would be ironic this causes them some regret in introducing Manifest V3.)

rstuart4133 1y ago

> Maybe you're confusing Microsoft's old original interest in browsers - to block a competing app runtime to Windows, with their and Google's current browser interest - as a channel to funnel all users to their services mainly Google (search) and Bing. Your right - I hadn't considered that aspect. However, on everything bar Android users have to manually install Chrome and set it to the default. You can do that without owning the browser - just publish an extension. To say it again, even if the ban was implemented it looks like it would be ineffective. It's possibly good to remember at this point Apple does not allow Chrome on iOS. As for splitting the other bits of Google up, I suspect it's going to be so hard it will happen in name only. At the retail end, people don't choose Google products because of things like network effects, they choose it because it's the best or close to it. That's true for Search, Youtube, GMail/Contacts/Calendar, Maps and their ad platform off the top of my head. Android is the exception - it's firmly entrenched because of network effects. But for the rest, if you build a better one the people would come, eventually. The insurmountable barrier for building a competitor isn't the deep pockets needed until people discover you. People can and do build other mail clients (which is possibly the easiest to do). It's Google's engineering talent. The odds of it being substantially better for the length of time require for those people to arrive must be close to 0. As one example, Bing hasn't been able to pull it off after decades, and Outlook remains a mess. As a current example Gemini consistently ranks at the top of lmarena.ai At the infrastructure end the situation is worse. Google has built the world's best, most secure infrastructure. Their modus operandi seems to be buy stuff, transplant it their infrastructure and engineering processes, and hope the weed grows into a monster. It normally doesn't (and famously gets killed), but when it does the advantages of transplantation and googles infrastructure tend to lead to world domination. Your watching it happen again right now, as Google develops and deploys the only large scale competitor to NVidia's platform for AI. To me, a software engineer, breaking youtube, search, gmail or whatever away from Google's infrastructure (and that monorepo) would be decade long and hugely expensive project - if it's possible at all. And if you don't Google gets to charge what they want for using it, keeping most of the profits, and god help us build replacements.

bobajeff 1y ago
I think Google also pays some OEMs to pre-install Chrome on their PCs. Also Android is a pretty big percentage of mobile phones. Google also pays Apple, Mozilla and other browsers to be the default search. Clearly, Google believes defaults matter to their dominance in search.
- rstuart4133 1y ago
  > Clearly, Google believes defaults matter to their dominance in search. Yes, I agree. But we are talking about the impact of Google no longer distributing Chrome on people (or organisations) who go to the trouble of manually installing Chrome themselves. If they are willing to manually install something there are no end of ways for Google to ensure a browser, or the new Chrome will use Google's preferred defaults. To put it another way, I disliked how Google drove Firefox down to it's current level or usage. It was with numerous subtle nags and breakages. They've always insisted it wasn't deliberate, and that remains plausible. If they are forced to sell Chrome, they could push their preferred extension the same way. (It would be ironic this causes them some regret in introducing Manifest V3.)