The DOJ still wants Google to sell off Chrome

It's a common misconception that tons of users manually install Chrome, but Google just pays PC makers to make Chrome the default browser.

Chrome is the only browser with a business model that makes sense to do this. Microsoft just doesn't make enough money from Bing/Edge to pay PC makers to leave Edge as the default. Firefox makes no money at all, and makes 95% of its revenue from Google's payments to be the default search engine. Safari isn't even available on Windows, and even then, 99% of Safari's revenue is from Google.

(Safari was available on Windows from 2007-2012, but it never captured much market share, because Apple was never willing to pay PC makers to make Safari the default.)

Here's StatCounter's estimates of desktop browser market share. The overwhelming majority of users are using their computer's default browser.

https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl...

    Chrome: 65.55%
    Edge: 13.9%
    Safari: 8.69%
    Firefox: 6.36%
    Opera: 2.9%

The only viable business model for a web browser, the one that literally all major browsers use, is to accept money from a search engine (Google, specifically) to be make them the default. Even Kagi makes its own Orion web browser, for exactly this reason.

How could Chrome make its owner any money at all if Chrome couldn't accept money from Google to be the default search engine? How could Chrome possibly do what Firefox and Safari can't?

That’s not the issue.

The problem is that Google owns both sides of the internet - the browser on your computer and the search engine to find everything.

As a result, they control your perception of the internet.

If a site doesn’t work, you as the user thinks the site doesn’t work. You don’t think oh, my browser is broken. Also, if you don’t find a site on Google the. To you, it doesn’t exist.

As a result, you have to bend your website to satisfy both Google search and Google chrome.

That’s why this is an issue. Because of those two things, Google effectively controls the internet, and you as a user or you as a website owner have essentially zero recourse when Google does something that harms you.

The actual issue is that Google pushes Chrome on its properties “this site renders better with Chrome download here” so it’s almost impossible for users to avoid it. Same issue with Edge. Once you switch off of Safari on macOS that’s the last you hear of it. If anything should be illegal it’s using your dominant position in one market to force users into a specific position in an adjacent one. MS got busted for it previously. Google under threat now. Apple has its own issues but it isn’t currently entirely owning a market. If Ape owned the phone market and the only App Store was Apple’s, I think the court would start ruling against Apple.

There’s also a clear conflict of interest having the advertising company own the user-agent.

> If you want to switch your search engine for Safari on iOS...

I can set Kagi as the default search engine on iOS?

Because last I checked, Apple hardcoded their list of options.

In addition to bundling, Google has also been massively pushing it via ads.

As far as I know Chrome is the only thing that has been advertised on Googles famously clean "front page" before making a search.

That tells me something about how important it has been for them to push it.

There's also the way they've used deceptive ads ("download a better browser") to me and many other Firefox users over the years. (No, a browser that leaks my browsing habits to the worlds biggest advertising company while not supporting vertical tabs a decade after it entered the market certainly isn't best for me.)

Chrome had been on the biggest and most VIP billboard on the planet:

https://open.substack.com/pub/bitecode/p/web-browsers-and-ou...

Nobody can get it except chrome.

If you visit google.com, there will be a question bubble on the side asking you to download Chrome.

On Android Chrome is preinstalled and cannot be uninstalled

Chrome could probably make a huge amount of money by doing what people assume Google does but actually doesn't - selling users browsing history.

Google uses a complex anonymization/privacy framework to collect some aggregate signals from website visits, but they don't use it directly.

Regulators don't understand this, and technologists who do tend to distrust Google anyway and think they might secretly be using it.

There are all sort so other sketchy things, like what Edge does injecting itself into websites so Microsoft collects affiliate revenue.

There are countries where this wouldn't be allowed, but Google is largely self regulating in its biggest market.

All this would lose Chrome some market share but they are starting from a very dominant position, and for the general public it wouldnt be a big deal - people are already convinced that iOS and android devices are listening to them at all times for ad targeting!

> How does a non Google owned Chrome support itself and continue development?

Possibly by trying to find a business model that can support Chrome development just like all other Chromium (and non-Chromium) based browsers?

As much as I loved Chrome when it first came out, I’ve also been well aware that Google’s backing of Chrome (and Chromium) has given it undue advantages in the browser market by effectively making everyone else compete with a loss leader. If Chrome itself cannot sustain its pace of development or even stay alive without the unlimited funding by Google, then I think that is a good thing and proof that it acting as a monopoly. Forcing Chrome to balance product velocity with revenue constraints evens the field amongst all browsers.

(edit: If Google killing competition by injecting unlimited funding into a project without needing to make a profit sounds familiar, it’s because they’ve done this for a long time. The often cited example being Google Reader.)

At the same time though, being developed under a company which derives most of its revenue from ads seems to be a big conflict of interest to a free and open web. We have already seen this conflict of interest with Manifest V3, which takes away freedom from the users, and almost with remote web attestation before Google held off it's development due to the backlash (but I can see them trying to implement it again while Chrome is still under control of Google/Alphabet.) It also doesn't help that Chrome and the underlying browser engine powers just about every major browser other than Firefox, which is struggling.

So what will sustain the development of browsers like Chrome or Firefox? Well that's the big question... Maybe they will downsize and become a non-profit similar to the Linux Foundation, and receive funding similar to how they do? I can see this have the affect of greatly slowing down the development of various web standards, but would that be such a bad thing?

- Google pays Firefox ~$500M/year for 2.5% market share, 65% market share should get a healthy annual payout for default search status.

- A pure focus on web browser monetization could lead to some interesting enterprise options. Presumably there'll be a lot of attempts to leverage Chromium, and an aggressive fork at some point.

- As AI proliferates, can they pull additional revenue by getting revshare from subscription AI products, alongside SEM? Or even revshare on the SEM clicks themselves?

This could also change the calculus for Apple building a search engine. If they could get an independent Chrome to sign on, with some data sharing provisions to help with development, they'd have a huge leg-up.

Alternatively, maybe they try to create a fusion of search results and AI from a variety of providers, so they can monetize SERPs themselves.

My question would be whether they could get back to aggressive product execution, given the size of the codebase. Acquiring the Browser Company would make a lot of sense.

Get ready for having your data sold to everyone. Rather than just a few major players having access, anyone willing to pay will get the raw data rather than something obfuscated through an ads platform.

- Google pays Firefox ~$500M/year for 2.5% market share, 65% market share should get a healthy annual payout for default search status.

- A pure focus on web browser monetization could lead to some interesting enterprise options. Presumably there'll be a lot of attempts to leverage Chromium, and an aggressive fork at some point.

- As AI proliferates, can they pull additional revenue by getting revshare from subscription AI products, alongside SEM? Or even revshare?

This could also change the calculus for Apple building a search engine. If they could get an independent Chrome to sign on, with some data sharing provisions to help with development, they'd have a huge leg-up.

Alternatively, maybe they try to create a fusion of search results and AI from a variety of providers, so they can monetize SERPs themselves.

My question would be whether they could get back to aggressive product execution, given the size of the codebase. Acq

in a simple world, a web browser is a tool that is used by an end-user, and so end-users should be the ones paying for it.

whether that's directly as paid software, or indirectly as part of purchasing a device that has the software installed on it.

> what is the business model that will sustain [Chrome] development

Separate Search + Google Ads platform as company A, Android + Chrome + Gmail as company B.

It will choke the user-data flow that Google Ads platform is feeding on. This opens doors to new competing search engines!

Android + Chrome + Gmail needs to be bundled with hardware purchases, licensed by HW vendors. Like Apple does with Safari + iCloud. This will create incentive to make them actually privacy focused, and could be its selling point.

Manifest v3 is not even breaking any standards. This is like saying Google should not make any changes to their browser as any forks will not be able to maintain any divergence. All forks are free to keep manifest v2. Off course maintaining a browser is expensive, but that doesn't mean Google has to foot the bill for everyone and everything.

Can’t any motivated group of developers fork chromium and push their own agenda ?

Google is just incompetent at PR and legal. That is how Epic won against Google and lost against Apple, even though Android is far far more open than iOS.

The iOS app store monopoly is unreal. Epic's case should have been a slam dunk, they got removed from the app store by offering a discount if people went through their processor instead of Apple's, proving harm to the consumer by simply expecting less than 30% for simply processing a payment.

People complain about whataboutism, but the Apple versus almost any other 'monopoly' is insane. You can switch browsers within the next 30s, you can't install an app from a third party vendor ever on iOS. [1]

[1] Yes I know you can pay $100 a year, and then compile your own/open source apps weekly and move them to your device. No this is not a reasonable solution.

Instant, universal, and immaculately-fair is the real impossible standard. Your line of thought has long been in the arsenal in defense of inaction

let's permit the firefighters to leave the firehouse even though they can't tend to all the fires simultaneously

Perhaps Apple is next?

You're ignoring the antitrust cases against Apple which may seek similar remedies.

The difference is pretty obvious, no? Google search and Chrome are genuine monopolies: they complete dominate their respective markets. Chrome decides which JS APIs and which other HTML extensions are available in all browsers. If Chrome implements it, all others follow or it is IE6-style "this only works in Chrome" for everyone. Notice that every browser's UI has followed Chrome. Every browser offers identical webextensions. Etc.

For Google search, the quality has gone down enormously and yet it has lost approximately 0 market share. It is still utterly dominant. This was used to push people to Chrome, and still is. It was used to dominate the web ads market. And so on: market power used to increase market power in other markets. Classic anticompetitive behaviour.

Apple doesn't have anything like a monopoly in any market. Even in the US, where their position is strongest relative to Android, it still isnt even close to a monopoly.

iOS isn't a monopoly so there is nothing wrong with it being locked down. It doesn't pressure "teens" into anything. Teenagers will pick up on anything they can to create peer pressure themselves. They would just say "lol nice loser android phone" when they saw the phone in person anyway lol.

The problem is an ads company owning a web browser, OS, and search engine, and using that control over how users interact with the internet to outcompete everyone else. You left out Google's raison d'etre from your statement.

Bingo, time and time again people miss this.

It's already bad enough they are removing ad block functionality and then a day later rolling out new ad-free plans for YouTube, what a cawinky dink

> A company owning a web browser, OS and search engine shouldn't be a problem either

It is when Google compromises the privacy/security of Chrome because of their Ads/OS business.

For example, allowing first party cookies to be a maximum of 400 days versus Safari and Firefox where it is 7 days. These cookies are required by ads retargeting which is critical to effective ecommerce campaigns.

It also supports browser fingerprinting by advertisers which means that every random API Chrome adds (and they add a lot) directly improves their Ads revenue.

you didn't state what the actual problem is...

There are certainly some short term consumer gains to be made in decoupling the oppressive monopoly of android, payments, chromium, search, and ads. If Google wants to send their search experience to shit that should probably be their right to mismanage, but the ramming home of Manifest v3 and Google Play Protect in the interest of nobody is beyond the pale.

Monopolies lead to no competition, leading to reduced innovation, economic stagnation, consolidation of wealth and power. That directly harms the American people and if left unchecked other countries may actually start to get ahead, especially if they maintain a fair market environment within their own country and ban American monopolies.

If the concern is that people will start using Baidu search, then the solution should be to ban Baidu search. It shouldn't be to let some monopolies run rampant with the hopes that other countries will never be able to compete, while forgetting that free market economy is what made America

The main benefit of having US monopolies is the spying capabilities that it enables. No other country ever had such a global surveillance network.

For the average American, both the efficient parts of monopolies (reduced redundancy which means fewer well-paying jobs) as well as the inefficient parts (reduced competition, higher prices, reduced standards of living) are net negatives. The political influence inherent to monopolies are also a negative effect on democracy, whereas foreign monopolies tend to have a harder time maintaining political influence.

This is the same commentary we had around the time of the ATT break up, and it all worked out fine.

I care more about how it affects consumers.

Does upholding monopolies help Americans at all? Do not conflate the ballooning wealth of billionaires with any kind of improvement in your material conditions.

who care, corporations are not national, they will discard their host when they find it convenient

As an American there is nothing I would love to see more than Google broken up into a thousand pieces and their stock reduced to negative amounts to atone for all the damage wrought upon the web in the past two decades.

No one's building new browsers

Ladybird, servo, and Flow are new browsers currently being built. These new browsers are not derived from any of the big three browser engines: Google Chromium, Apple WebKit, and Mozilla Gecko. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_browser_engines

No one.

It will be a be new Chrome entity I guess, spun off the Google mothership. However, how does it make money is very unclear to me, like how? Selling the search bar to highest bidder, a.k.a Google still?

> Who would even buy Chrome?

You mean.. who would want to buy an app that has 65% marketshare?

I just imagine some shady company (shadier than google at least) buying it to slap ads all over inside the browser itself.

I can see a billionaire like Musk wasting some of their net worth to play some stupid political theatre.

[flagged]

But we are not discussing Chromium. Google’s browser is Chrome, and that product has search exclusivity deals that have been deemed monopolistic.

Google could divest the Chrome product and keep contributing to Chromium, but the value proposition is really unclear when that OSS investment doesn’t buy you billions of dollars of browser lock-in value.

Same way it worked in the past with monopolies like Ma Bell?

Those teams can keep working on Chrome, they'll just have to fall under some new kind of separate Chrome Inc. structure instead of under Google Inc., and Google will have to sell most of its shares of Chrome Inc. to third parties.

Splitting off Chrome really isn't the problem. Making the new Chrome Inc. profitable without accepting bribes from big tech, on the other hand...

Think about difference between Brave and Chrome. Both Chromium browsers but Brave is much less intrusive and exploitative of user data. More Brave and less Chrome would allow average user greater privacy and less reliance on large corporations perhaps

> Presumably they have the best qualifications to be on those teams.

What exactly are "best qualifications?" More simply are you assuming that myself and Google share a definition of "best qualified?" I genuinely don't believe that we do.

> And then who would replace them?

People working for a different company. Is your case that without Google no one would make web browsers?

All the people who work on Chrome would go with it.

I am not sure why you are being downvoted. This just means existing OS monopolies of Apple and Microsoft are given entire control of their kingdoms with no web landscape to challenge them a teeny tiny bit.

Firefox seems to do fine without Google employees.

Your employer is constantly adding non-standard shit to their browser so instead of making competitive browsers others have to either burn cycles on demolishing that bs, or catch up with you. You want an example? That command and commandFor bs from a couple of days ago.

I’m confused, as a firefox daily driver, why is firefox not a good browser? Or are we discounting it because it is funded by Google?

I am sure folks at Microsoft were saying the same of IE 5 and 6, as I was around when it took over.

> But just survey the actual browser market in the last 10 years to understand Chrome's dominance

I feel like most people here wouldn't understand that to inherently indicate superior quality. I'd argue that the absolute dominance of Chrome is mostly evidence of the monopoly power that Google yields. It got on top via search, becomes the gateway to the web for people, leverages that to sell advertisement and also convince tons of people to use the browser. It's been all leverage.

I'd also disagree on it even being a better browser. Firefox has issues, but on actual usability and feeling like a user agent, it's head and shoulders above Chrome. It is more flexible, more customizable, and I find that it runs significantly better on every website that isn't owned by Google. If Chrome was a better browser, they wouldn't have had to sabotage Firefox on their sites for years (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38349357).

It's Google that can't compete, if they have to use back-channels and leverage their other powers to maintain dominance. They aren't competing with the product alone.

The fact that has already been normalized is so fucking wild

> Firefox and Safari Exempted

It's been long enough now that there are significant differences, but Chrome started from the same base as Safari. The teams had different perspectives, so Chrome forked Safari's internals and called the result Blink.

Honestly, I think in your scenario Bing would end up as the top search engine. I've noticed lately that when I'm using a browser with Bing in the search bar, I just use Bing and don't bother using Google. Honestly, the two feel pretty similar to me at the moment.