Google Being Forced to Sell Chrome Is Not Good for the Web
73 comments
·March 15, 2025thomassmith65
int_19h
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.
matthewdgreen
Let’s not forget the “AI assistant”, which appears to lightly plagiarize the first three results on any topic, while adding some mistakes.
mixmastamyk
Nor WEI, which Ars Technica described as a "nightmare." The final solution to general purpose computing.
esalman
Defence contractor as well.
xigency
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.'
Spooky23
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
They'll demand half of Google's rare earths deposits
whatwhaaaaat
Did you have this same take when the Biden administration was paying tech companies to remove posts critical of the covid shots? Because that was proved to be true while the point you made is theoretical as of now.
Centigonal
Do you want to cite a source?
Spooky23
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.
pessimizer
> 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.
ohso4
> 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.
fiddlerwoaroof
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.
CaffeineLD50
Browsers aren't a product because massive companies give it away and destroy the market.
If any product was given away by massively rich companies there would be "no market" for it, because it was destroyed.
fiddlerwoaroof
Well, I for one don't want to pay $15/mo for my browser: I'm happy for it to be the complement of some company's product.
inetknght
> 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
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.
Georgelemental
> 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
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.
000ooo000
>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
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.
wordofx
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
You can always use Chromium or dozens of others viable Chromium derivatives.
Google at least gave you the option to do that.
glimshe
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.
streptomycin
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.
int_19h
"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...
klooney
> 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.
stemlord
>moving the web forward
What constitutes "forward" to you
zakki
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.
mixmastamyk
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
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.
paddw
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
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
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.
BrenBarn
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.
pluto_modadic
Alphabet tried to kill adblock in Chrome, so...
surajrmal
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.
tonyhart7
not good for their wallet apparently
rafram
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-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
What worries me is what's going to happen to Mozilla without those payments.
Okx
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.
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.