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

And that whole "war on cookies" where they keep pitching replacements that basically let Google (and only Google) do all the same things, so that they can then gatekeep it and pay others for the privilege of accessing some limited subset of that data.

Regardless of why Google made Chrome originally, today, the main reason why it exists is to enable Google to track users more efficiently. And that is a bad thing.

Let’s not forget the “AI assistant”, which appears to lightly plagiarize the first three results on any topic, while adding some mistakes.

Defence contractor as well.

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.

> 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.

There isn’t a business model for a company whose product is just chrome, though. Unless it’s some kind of foundation or non-profit with a sufficient endowment to not need a business model.

I’m no fan of Google, but—unless people really want browser subscriptions—I don’t see how you can have a browser company today. They exist better as a byproduct of some other business model.

> 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...

There's such a strong strain of dark side energy aimed at Google. It just feels so unhinged to me though.

Blink-dev is an amazing mailing list of really good improvements being built intelligently, in well declared fashion, with lots of checks via standards bodies, fully open to discussion. There's very few places on the planet where such good work is so easy to see, and no where that it's so abundant. https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev

What features has Google killed, do you think? How often has this been a problem, do you think? What other browsers have gone ahead, with Google holding out?

Google wants a competent capable successful healthy web. They want there to be an open, standards & protocols system out there, a connected rich hypermedia internet, because everything else humanity has done with computing is proprietary and trying to rely on someone else's platform is existentially hazardous.

You can always use Chromium or dozens of others viable Chromium derivatives.

Google at least gave you the option to do that.

"Development slows" is not necessarily a bad thing. E.g. quite a lot of people would love development to slow wrt Manifest v3. It would also mean that web standards are less of a moving target for browsers playing catch-up (like Firefox).

People can also pay for browsers. The only reason why this isn't feasible today is because it's hard to compete with the top-of-the-line stuff that megacorps offer for free - which they do precisely so they can maintain de facto control over web standards (or force the lack thereof in areas where this is advantageous). Lest we forget, many early web browsers were paid products (not just NN, but also Opera, for example), and Microsoft's original sin as a monopoly was offering IE for free, against which NN couldn't compete. But if Google is forced to ditch Chrome, and Microsoft is forced to ditch Edge...

> So what now? Safari is going to be the leading force moving the web forward?

Even Safari is massively subsidized by Google paying to be the default browser. If those billions go away, engineering investment will be cut.

>moving the web forward

What constitutes "forward" to you

At least Safari has better privacy concern than Chrome. Let's see if Waterfox can substitute Firefox in the long run. I believe MS Edge will happily replace Chrome.

Web browsers are probably complex enough at this point. Putting them on maintenance and letting new architectures fight it out might not be a bad outcome.

Exactly, this is my question as well. I was just thinking about it and thought although it's kind of silly, Google paying them (the newly-divested ChromeCo) for search engine default status could be a primary source of revenue.

I'm actually kind of curious about that as an option. Right now the distortion that makes Google any 800 pound gorilla is their leveraging of Chrome to channel users into their various monetized ecosystems.

But there could conceivably be an interesting form of parity that comes from the browsers all depending on the same form of revenue, search engine placement. I haven't fully thought this through, so I welcome corrections. I suppose Google could quite easily give favorable treatment toward ChromeCo and effectively continue to flex its monopoly muscle. Google will need them just as much as before. I'm honestly just not sure.

If nobody wants Chrome, and it's only profitable use is a social negative, let it die?

A billion or two dollars would fund development indefinitely. Don't sell it to anybody, make it a nonprofit with a fat trust. I'll say the same thing about Firefox: they got plenty of money from Google. They should have been able to save enough in ten or how ever many years to fund development for all eternity. Instead they paid it to themselves.

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.

not good for their wallet apparently

What worries me is what's going to happen to Mozilla without those payments.