People here seem to be underestimating the advantages that Google gets just because of Chrome:
- When you sign in to Google, you sign in browser-wide. Google now gets all of your browsing data, perfect for advertising. (If you ever doubt it, go check out Google Takeout. You'll be shocked at the amount of data you see there.)
- They have special APIs and features that they get to use, and nobody else. Only because they own Chrome. [1]
- They get to move forward with enabling and pushing features that allow for more advertising: see Manifest v3, FLoC.
- Google specifically serves a worse version of Search on Firefox for Mobile. You have to get an extension to get the full experience.
This isn't an isolated attempt. You can see more of the same thing with Android.
- AOSP (the open source counterpart of Android) is now unusable. It doesn't ship with most essential apps, including a Phone app. In previous versions of Android, all of these were a part of AOSP.
- Most third party launchers/stores struggle to implement features because they are only available for Google themselves.
- The signing in with Google thing from above continues here too: you sign in to Google system-wide.
> This isn't an isolated attempt. You can see more of the same thing with Android.
Here are more:
- (jumping off of your second point...) Play Services does more than just handle stuff you sign into as a user -- it's also a dependency for everything from push notifications to screen casting. This actively poses issues building competing platforms, in that in order to give developers a path to shipping in your ecosystem you have to provide functioning alternatives to all of those ancillary features. The compatibility issue also impacts user adoption, and then the user adoption and the barren marketplace impact each other... Even the combined resources of Amazon and Microsoft weren't enough to overcome this. (Facebook did, but I'm also not sure forking the OS into a separate VR platform is necessarily the same thing.)
- It also comes with integrity checking, so even if you do find a good third party image, and sideload Google packages, numerous things won't work unless you take part in a dumb arms race that ironically requires you to also root your device. By which I mean a feature that was originally built for banking applications is now used everywhere from streaming services (as an additional layer of DRM) to gacha games (for anti-cheat). This is actually the entire reason I dropped Pokemon Go, personally.
> Even the combined resources of Amazon and Microsoft weren't enough to overcome this.
Pedantically, their resources were never combined. They independently tried to compete, and they independently failed.
For what it's worth though, Amazon seems to be doing tidy business with entrypoint tablets and FireOS, which is a fork of Android, but still one they own.
Microsoft's exit of mobile was a short-sighted decision IMO. They have the entire office suite. They have windows and Windows has essentially become an app store model too.
I can easily imagine a future where Microsoft leaned in hard on Microsoft Mobile-exclusives for Word/Outlook/Excel/Teams/etc., bundled it with the rest of Office/Windows subscriptions, and had every office worker in the world carrying a windows phone for their work device.
I know, I know - everyone wanted only an iPhone. But it feels to me like Microsoft didn't try very hard.
> Pedantically, their resources were never combined. They independently tried to compete, and they independently failed.
I'm talking about Windows Subsystem for Android, which leveraged Amazon's app store.
Though honestly, their application strategy since Windows 8 has been fascinating. Watching them:
- ship Linux and Android app support
- replace their first-party browser with a Chrome derivative (and inherit all the PWA support of its parent)
- ship first-party support for .NET and PowerShell on other platforms
- ship React Native builds for Windows and macOS
...all suggest they're really trying not to get into the same hole as what happened with Metro, by giving you a lot of different ways to build something that can then run on modern versions of Windows -- regardless of whether that's even necessarily your goal.
- the browser is undeniably critical as everyone's window through which they view the online world;
- the user gains a huge amount of value by a browser being integrated into the OS, webviews in other applications, etc
- browsers aren't really a self funding product
- having a single for-profit US advertising company control everyone's view of the online world, however slightly (e.g. by obstructing adblockers), is Not Good
Splitting it off solves the latter problem but immediately raises the question of how to pay for it. A very artificial arrangement where Google pay "arms length browserco" to maintain Chrome?
I feel the same. I also feel the same about a modern C library and C compiler (and C++, if you like). They are essential to build any modern system and applications. Yet, those are also (mostly) no longer self-funding products.
What do you think will happen if Google is forced to divest Chrome?
Netscape used to cost the equivalent of $100 inflation-adjusted dollars and was only forced to go free to compete with Internet Explorer. Now the genie can't be put back in the bottle, and anyone trying to sell you a browser would become irrelevant the same way Delphi's paid compiler lost out to free C compilers.
Maybe you could carve out a niche that's willing to pay, the same way C# did before dotnet core. But for a mass product the best-case scenario would be something similar to today's Opera.
However what it would do is open up the market to competition. Right now Google is spending a lot on Chrome development and Chrome advertisement. Opera and Edge both have given up on their own engines because they couldn't keep pace with Chrome development, and Firefox kept its engine but can't compete with Chrome's ad spend. If Chrome had to compete on a more even playing field there would be more room for diversity and competition. That could be a net positive, even if it makes Chrome worse.
Windows is a paid-for product; either enterprise licenses or via the manufacturer. Yet few people (mainly those who build PCs themselves) realise this.
What if the browser had a similar model? The manufacturer pays a certain 'browser development fee' into escrow, then on first boot, the copmuter shows a browser ballot, which gets set as the default, and the fee goes to the chosen browser developer? There's probably a bunch of problems with this approach, and, at least initially, wouldn't break the monoculture, but it might be a good starting point for how to fund browser development.
It was never required to pay for it. As was common with software back then, the free download was a fully featured "evaluation" version denoted by an "N" appended to the version number. That didn't last long though and it just stayed free.
There was a "Gold" version they sold at retail for some time that had a WYSIWYG editor in it, until they made it standard as part of the Communicator suite.
Oracle Chrome would remain free at first, but one year down the road all new versions would become free for home use but $50 per seat yearly for commercial use, with a clause that allows Oracle to enter your offices to audit your compliance at any time
Return to Konqueror Browser from KDE - the grandfather webkit browser.
In all seriousness, I kind of wish that someone could build a sustained non profit like apache to take over chromium - if Google or Microsoft or others want to custom roll their own flavor fine, but Google being for-profit has been making decisions against the best for everyone browsing the web (such as the new plugin stuff around adblocks) (conflict of interest)
Firefox has made Mozilla billions over its lifetime by selling the default search engine rights to Yahoo and Google. Chrome, having a much greater user base, would demand a correspondingly higher fee (probably around $10b a year). Now, the other problem is there is no other search engine to compete with Google at that level, but that might change with independence of Chrome.
But not everything must be for-profit. Free/Libre/Open Source Software is a prime example. Projects like GNU, Linux, GNOME, KDE, WebKitGTK, LibreOffice are sustainable for a long time.
Every browser also gets a significant amount of money from Google. Mozilla is profitable too. But when Google is forced to stop paying browsers to use their search, it'll put Apple and Microsoft at an even wider advantage since they're the ones that can afford to push their own browsers at a loss...
Vivaldi's business model is primarily revenue from deals with search providers. they don't exclusively get money from Google, they get money from all their search partners, including Google.
Brave is into crypto scams and advertising scams, so I guess you're right there. Their revenue is also tiny.
The rest aren't what I'd call "real" browsers, most don't have the same level of functionality and compatibility as Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge... Servo for example is literally just the rendering engine Firefox gave up on.
What's wrong with 2005 where desktop user experience goes? Why is the new sexy only 'let us remove all user choice and customization, throw decades of stable desktop UI features like menu bars, tooltips, keyboard shortcuts and mouse optimized icons, simply stretch a mobile touchscreen onto a widescreen display with gigantic fonts and dumbed down icons and call it a day'?
Opera is not a browser at this point but a chrome skin. Yes, there is some engineering still going on, but they don't run as much engineering as would be needed to build world-class browser software.
The way governments fuck up basically anything (with very few exceptions) IT related I would say no. Personal example: my name is Marcello and I had troubles applying for a permit online because names can't contain musical instruments (Cello in this case).
Create a consortium or interested private entities but let's not give such an important piece of technology to governments where meritocracy is non-existent (also based on personal experiences).
I generally agree, I don't want this to be government-owned but since it can't be funded privately and is of great public value an utility-like contract would be in order. I don't see it happening with at least initially a stake from the government (maybe I'm wrong, will gladly be!)
My experience is that utilities don't innovate at all. In fact, the do their best to get the government to give them funding for innovation ("you know, because we love people") and then just... don't actually do what the money was for.
> The way governments fuck up basically anything (with very few exceptions) IT related I would say no.
Just wait until you have to justify IT expenditure to a for-profit corporation that isn't solely focused on technology.
Government screws things up because it's (by design) slow. Business screws things up because f*ck your needs, we need to get a check to a retiree who never even worked here.
Free market competition sorts that out right quick.
Either your business is spending the economically optimal amount on IT or you're running at a net deficit disadvantage.
Note that the economically optimal amount may not be what people want or expect, which is why in general we rely on (mostly) free markets and not centralized human planning like the USSR.
Free market competition does not sort it out right quick, particularly in an economy where capital has consolidated as much value as they have through an oligopoly.
The problem with this is that people think that the net deficit disadvantage matters.
It doesn't. Companies are now owned by shareholders that are set up to not have to care about that company within a fairly short period of time. They're not owned by people who have any pride in "winning" that market or an existential threat to their finances if things go poorly. Most publicly-traded shares of companies on stock exchanges are owned by pension and retirement funds, and the person at the head of that fund has exactly one job: make money for the members. If that means gutting the company they hold shares in like a fish, while simultaneously setting up to exit the position, that's what that means. The company's net deficit disadvantage is not the fund's net deficit disadvantage, and that's by design.
Now, that has massive economic consequences for the people who are at the company (and, y'know, actually do the work), and for customers who relied on the product or service, but the fund has made money. Whether its members spend it on anything that will create more economic value over time is another matter. For example, fast-rising homeowners insurance rates in places in the Southeastern US that have been popular with retirees over the last few decades would indicate that they aren't spending it wisely, but, hey.
Currently, talented engineers flock to google to contribute their skills to making the best web browser. My concern for a publicly owned utility is that the top talent won't want to work there.
> Currently, talented engineers flock to google to contribute their skills to making the best web browser.
I don’t think these engineers have the right incentives, and their interest is not aligned with mine. I don’t really care what they do to Chrome and their efforts benefit me only indirectly. I am also not convinced by the "best browser" thing, even using it every day on my office computer. So, meh. I don’t care too much either way but I won’t lose anything if Google has to spin it off.
Agreed! I was on Arc for a while and really enjoyed it (obviously Chromium-based), but have found that both Orion and Safari are phenomenal choices! I don’t see any reason to switch back, although I will admit that I keep Chrome around in case I need/want to cast content to a Chromecast-enabled device (until I find an inexpensive alternative to that).
Any potential buyer will have to be looking to use Chrome to accomplish the same kinds of synergies that Google is using it for, to get ahead in some adjacent market. Depending on the buyer that could be good for competition, at least in the short term, but it's not clear that it will be better for us as users.
Hypothetically, why would some buyer using Chrome's monopoly to establish a market advantage in an adjacent domain be different than Google using Chrome's monopoly to establish a market advantage in an adjacent domain?
Because the relationship between Google and Chrome goes both ways. Chrome helps Google keep their monopoly on search and ads, and Google helps Chrome keep its monopoly via Android and its other products.
After the separation, Google won’t have an incentive to promote Chrome - so it’ll lose market share eventually, and Chrome won’t have an incentive to require things like Google accounts or use Google search by default - opening space for other companies to compete.
How does splitting off Chrome as a separate company solve anything? They would still rely on Google for funding (like Mozilla) and being close friends they would do whatever Alphabet tells them to do.
A better solution is to implement a bill like DMA in the EU to enforce competition among web browser vendors and fight monopolies.
Not that I disagree with the overall point, but this is something the DOJ does not do. They would just look at the current laws and decide who to prosecute based on their interpretation of events.
>Bing is already the default search engine on the default browser of the most used OS in the world.
It's actually more embedded in Windows than Google is in Android.
If you change your default engine in Android it changes across the OS.
In Windows, there are dialogs that say "search bing for" embedded into places like the right click menu when you have text highlighted that remain even after attempting to express a different search choice. Another example is the search bar in a new tab.
I don’t think Bing is the default search engine for Android’s browser. I could be wrong though. Is it? That would be a surprisingly fair-minded move of Google.
By context I’m pretty sure they mean Windows OS and not android, sometimes you have to take things in context. Depending on context one could easily argue that linux is the most common operating system depending on where you draw the line on operating system
I am pointing out that Windows is not the most common OS, and Android is.
The original comment was saying that Google is able to perform anti-competitively because they control the most popular browser.
The followup (which I responded to) is saying that the existence of Windows as the most popular OS, and Microsoft’s control over the default browser there, mitigates this anti-competitive potential.
The fact that Windows is not the most popular OS (and that, in fact, the most popular OS is controlled by Google) undermines that argument.
Linux is not the most popular OS in any context that includes doing searches with the thing, unless you include Android, but Android just uses Linux for the kernel mostly, and an OS is more than a kernel.
It's the most common desktop OS. No one was confused by what the parent meant since Windows is not a mobile operating system and doesn't compete in that market.
I think it's fair for them to point out (however snarkily) that Windows is not the most popular OS. In the context of the discussion, I think it matters that there is another OS, Android, that is more popular.
I think their point is that you can't just say "most popular" without more context because not only is it often subjective, but it can also be interpreted in different ways. Most popular by type of device? number of total users worldwide? etc.
Every Linux distro just uses Linux for the kernel, right? What else is there? Init system and user space stuff isn’t Linux in any Linux distro either, because Linux is a kernel. The real thing that might make Android not a normal Linux distro is the heavy modification of the Kernel.
A Linux distro uses the Linux kernel by definition, I guess, so I think you are right about that. We could talk about distros in general, maybe Homebrew and Cygwin, if we didn’t want to define a distro as being a Linux distro. But I’m not sure what the point is.
I’m not clear on what they meant by Linux. But if we use a definition of “Linux OS” that includes Android and is restricted to devices which people typically use to perform searches (aka consumer devices) (since that was the original topic), then Linux is mostly Android and it is a kind of pointless distinction to make.
If we want to use some definition of Linux that precludes Android, and covers all devices that use the Linux kernel, then we have a bunch of servers, streaming boxes, smart lightbulbs, whatever.
If we want to use a definition which is, like, what I think everyone means when they say Linux in the context of market share: GNU/Linux or BusyBox/other/Linux (I was hoping to avoid the GNU/Linux meme, but here we are), then that doesn’t have much market share.
There is much more Android phones, tablets, TVs, Linux routers and other gear sold every year than Intel-based PCs with ME, so the articles' claim may need narrowing to "OS used in PCs" and even that has a chance of being wrong, given how AMD is doing these years.
I expect there will be some material constraints that emerge in what browser features they're actually allowed to ship as shipping without a browser also seems to be anti-consumer.
Almost certainly that would be part of a consent decree, which would prohibit Google from creating or controlling a browser for some period of time, and would include court supervision.
Yes because government regulation of tech has been so successful in the past. Just look at how well the anti trust lawsuit against IBM went - that they later just dropped because it wasn’t relevant anymore - or the Microsoft lawsuit in 2000.
No there was never a browser choice mandate in the US
> Yes because government regulation of tech has been so successful in the past. Just look at how well the anti trust lawsuit against IBM went - that they later just dropped because it wasn’t relevant anymore - or the Microsoft lawsuit in 2000.
You can surely do better than these examples. Nobody would be better for lack of action against IBM, and lack of serious action against microsoft continues to hurt us today. C'mon. Break these useless, unproductive fuckers up.
Selling devices with a browser installed or available for installation is completely tangential to creating and/or controlling the development of said browser.
Yes, in the sense that me putting a gun to your head and ordering you to stay still isn't the same as me handcuffing you, because you can still physically move.
Firefox lost too much market share. And while some of that is due to bad leadership at Mozilla, Chrome running big advertising campaigns and Google advertising Chrome on their own properties (hints to download Chrome on Google Search, Drive, etc. when you visit with other browsers) were also a big driver. Google flew too close to the sun.
I would say almost 100% of it is due to bad leadership at Mozilla. They seem to have zero interest in improving Firefox, and lots of interest in all sorts of random... stuff, like decolonial climate justice using AI in Zambia.
I wish the result of the case was just “you can’t pester users to switch browsers. Unless the browser they’re using isn’t meeting an open standard that’s necessary to the proper function of the site you’re pestering them on.”
If another entity buys Chrome, they’re only doing so based on the belief of increased future value/revenue from it. Google doesn’t want to sell it because they see more future value in it. If Chrome sucked, there’d be no antitrust case. So this is all a “you’ve done too good a job, now give it all up.”
I don’t use Chrome or Chromium based browsers because Safari works well for all of my use cases. But I want to see alternatives prosper. I don’t think needing Chrome gets anyone there.
The issue is who controls Chromium. I would create a non profit and staff it with a handful of maintainers. Their primary job would be to ensure safety and squash exploits. Their other job is to curate and approve pull requests from volunteers for enhancements. They should make it open source with the caveat if it is used for commercial purposes, there will be a licensing fee to pay for security enhancements, bug bounties, and the like.
If 90% of the contributors were non-Google, then it would effectively be controlled by non-Google, because they could fork it and their fork would still get 90% of development.
See Terraform for a live example.
The only reason Google "controls" Chromium is because Google funds almost, but not quite, 100% of its development.
On a similar note, there's nothing stopping Microsoft from investing equal or greater amounts and forking Chromium (well, arguably they might already have with Edge). Except that they're benefiting from all of Google's investment, for free. Why turn down a massive developer investment from your competitor with no strings attached?
Do you think Google will continue to invest money and resources into the development of Chromium if they were forced to sell Chrome? I don't. The first thing I would do is close source the Chromium project and work on a new closed source browser to compete with Chrome. I also don't see Chrome surviving when all of the Google/Chromium developers have left.
They could sell a lot of the data that Google now gets for free and uses for its ranking algorithms, like Clickstream sells data to SEO tools like AHrefs and SemRush.
Google doesn't use Chrome data for Ads or Search. They're not allowed to based on the TOS, and also they have government regulators watching carefully to make sure they don't make a mistake like that.
The regulators in question are pushing for divestiture of Chrome because they don’t believe that the current structure prevents using Chrome data, so it seems that Google did “make a mistake like that”.
They are, see how both Safari and Firefox, the 2nd and 3rd most popular browsers, have brought in tens of billions of revenue per year. Safari is immensely profitable, Firefox too would be if Mozilla wouldn't be run in an absurdly poor manner.
> the user gains a huge amount of value by a browser being integrated into the OS, webviews in other applications, etc
What is the huge value gain that e.g. Safari being integrated into MacOS is bringing me? Why couldn't webviews be backed by a browser of my choice?
Mozilla literally gets paid by Google, and not sure how you can quantify Safari as being profitable on its own when it's the default for all Apple products and realistically, the only browser on iOS.
This DOJ case isn't looking to ban payments for default search engines in browsers. It is very unlikely that this entire practice will be outlawed/stopped as a result of this DOJ case.
> As set forth in Section IV, the PFJ prohibits Google from offering Apple anything of value for any form of default, placement, or preinstallation distribution (including choice screens) related to general search or a search access point.
In what way is Safari profitable? How is that even measured? Has any consumer in the last 10 years ever specifically paid for safari? Or do you mean the payments by google to be the default search engine?
Why not though? Apple could still install Firefox and set Bing as the default search engine. Or even just Chrome, without selecting google. They don’t get the money for making a browser but configuring their browser in a specific way. That would work with any browser.
No? But why does it matter? They can include Firefox in their OS and set the default search engine to anything they want.
The point was that developing Safari isn't what makes apple the money, it's setting Google as the default search engine of the default browser. So if Apple would stop maintaining safari tomorrow and would switch to preinstalling Firefox, they would still get the Google money (for setting Google as the default search engine of their Firefox installation). So Safari isn't profitable for Apple, as was claimed before.
Yeah... Because massive companies use them anti-competitively as a moat against other companies, and as a loss leader to enable massive data collection and vendor lock in.
"browsers aren't really a self funding product" is a symptom of dysfunction, not the inevitable conclusion of a fair market.
I'm not sure that software entirely obeys normal market theory. So much of it is zero-cost free.
The synergistic effects are so strong that most users would prefer there to be The System, in which everything works together and there's no risk of incompatible choices. They don't necessarily care which system.
The market in things like, say, file explorers is tiny. There's a few shell replacements (free), Midnight Commander and clones, and maybe over in the corner someone making a few thousand dollars a year from an Explorer replacement.
You might have missed recent news about Linux maintainers being kicked off for reasons having nothing to do with Linux. This will not work across "political borders" because psychologically we're all still cavemen in need of a tribe to stick to, and a group of "them" to hate on.
> psychologically we're all still cavemen in need of a tribe to stick to, and a group of "them" to hate on.
I'm not sure this is fundamentally true, but regardless of whether it is or not, our political systems have followed an historical path of development such that it behooves political leaders to think like this, and encourage their followers to.
At the end of the day every employee is the most granular bit of profit-making - I trade my time and zero money for money. 100% profit.
If you removed the money you paid me could say you're being more efficient, but I don't know if that's a useful definition of efficient. Just as you could steal some raw materials and say you're being efficient.
Well yes, if you find a way to generate value with no input costs, anything you charge people will be pure inefficiency and you'll be put out of "business" by the first person who gives this idea away for free. I'm not sure what sort of insight you can glean from this.
In this specific case I'd be willing to bet that Firefox 3 probably doesn't handle current HTTPS/TLS standards and might not be able to browser the modern Internet at all (let alone display modern webpages, HTML5 video players, single-page web apps, WebRTC live calls, etc.)
Firefox 3.5 was actually the first browser to support HTML5 video and audio. In general for old browsers TLS is the main issue. Most websites that don't rely on JavaScript or newer CSS still render well enough or "fail gracefully" but are still readable.
Google realized if they don't control the search distribution they gonna lose out sooner or later; which is kinda contradictory for them if they claim Google is the best search out there and that they are constantly improving it and that's why(they say), people choose it over other alternatives. But tbh distribution of your product/s is crucial.
Just look at Microsoft and their internet strategy, they chose the other route; push their internet browser(IE) down their massive distribution pipe called Windows and then introducing their search engine to this massive userbase. Fortunately this didn't work out for them but unfortunately that worked out for Google. And now Google essentially controls the Web in the more than half of the world.
> Fortunately this didn't work out for them but unfortunately that worked out for Google.
No, Google was better, then they used Chrome as an extremely powerful moat to protect their situation. Google at first was like magic compared to the Altavista of the time.
Google won the search market on merit but they've maintained it with Chrome. Google search has been garbage for a long time and in the last few years it's gotten bad enough that even laymen are noticing it.
Surely making deals with companies like Apple and Mozilla to be the default search engine was a big part of building that market share. How many iPhone users bother to set a different search engine in Safari?
We all agree Google-the-search-engine is losing relevance (literally). So they should also lose their distribution channel, Chrome, because being nagged until you synchronize your Chrome profile and use their search engine is anti-competitive, on top of being pretentious from a less-relevant search engine.
I don't disagree, but I'm also not sure what the alternative is.
Who's going to buy Chrome that also doesn't suffer from the same anti-trust problems? Who would want to buy Chrome? Who would want to fund Chrome?
What browser would Android ship? In one view I kind of like the idea that Google would have to shop around and 'buy' a browser for its OS (competition good!), but also that seems ridiculous and easy to fall right back into the same trap.
> Who's going to buy Chrome that also doesn't suffer from the same anti-trust problems? Who would want to buy Chrome? Who would want to fund Chrome?
Hmm. It's a good question, and I don't know the answer. I think there's a compelling argument that the problem is the scale of the harm. That is, even if the new owner has the same problems, the new owner won't also be the largest web company. So the problem still exists, yes, but becomes smaller. In particular having the #1 web browser strongly tied to the #1 web company has a lot of problematic dynamics that the #1 web browser being owned by the #25 web company doesn't. Maybe that company would be more open to forming beneficial relationships with the #2 and #3 web companies, for example.
Google already funds Firefox and makes Chromium[0] as well, which seems like quite a lot of effort to go to as a single company in funding/enabling competition. Microsoft had to do far less to resolve their EU dispute: just give users other options for browsers on install of their OS.
[0] Unless if today you take Chromium and make your own browser, and it still has all the stuff in about logins and tracking.
> Who would want to buy Chrome? Who would want to fund Chrome?
This is interesting question especially when companies are usually just use Chromium instead of creating new browser (not even making hard fork of Chromium).
Before a couple of weeks ago where a Google Play Services update changed the first set-up process, almost all global (non-CN market) devices forced Chrome as default: Xiaomi, OnePlus, Realme, Motorola, Oukitel and whatever other weird brands there are left in the Android world. AKA anything other than Samsung
How about this: sell the browser to the entreprise [1] and use the profit to offer the browser to the public for free, which in turns helps you secure a user base.
You raise an interesting point. Every job that I worked in the last 10 years offers "real" Google Chrome on a Windows PC. I never considered that they would pay Google for it, but I guess Google could add a bunch of nice admin and security features that would be useful to mega-corps but retail normies don't care about. That is probably well-worth the 6 USD per month per user. In a modern corporate workplace, a huge amount of your day is spent using web apps... running in Google Chrome (or Electron!). It like a WebVM that runs inside of Microsoft Windows (from the perspective of corporate IT folks).
An independent Chrome company will start with an established & proven product, huge userbase and a marketplace for extensions. That's a huge advantage (and liability too).
If FF can get millions for its default search option, Chrome can easily command more and if Mozilla can afford to venture into other product areas with their budget, it doesn't sound impossible to have a self-sustained chrome development once you eliminate all the non-essential feature work that helps only Google.
FF can't get millions for its default search option. Where's the other sellers lining up to give FF millions of dollars? Google gives it to Firefox out of "pity" and in an (unsuccessful) attempt to ward off anti-trust claims.
> If you ever doubt it, go check out Google Takeout. You'll be shocked at the amount of data you see there.
I sign in browser-wide and I do takeouts regularly. I don't see my browsing data.
> It doesn't ship with most essential apps, including a Phone app. In previous versions of Android, all of these were a part of AOSP.
And back when they were part of AOSP I never saw these example apps in the wild. Every vendor ships their own phone app. Every single one.
There's some "hey we compile a extremely old and vulnerable version of AOSP"-style Android distributions, mainly advertised for builtin su/Magisk or "degoogle", which did use these example apps, though.
That's unfalsifiable conjecture. I could just as easily assert that dang is building secret dossiers on all of us from our IP-request logs - we just can't see it
> - When you sign in to Google, you sign in browser-wide. Google now gets all of your browsing data, perfect for advertising. (If you ever doubt it, go check out Google Takeout. You'll be shocked at the amount of data you see there.)
I have yet to see evidence that Google uses browser sync data for advertising.
Go do something in chrome (look for cruises maybe), then delete the activity from myactivity.google.com, then wipe and reinstall chrome. You will see that you aren’t advertised based on that activity yet it’s still in your chrome history.
Another major point highlighted by Fishkin and King relates to how Google may use Chrome data in its search rankings. Google Search representatives have said that they don’t use anything from Chrome for ranking, but the leaked documents suggest that may not be true. One section, for example, lists “chrome_trans_clicks” as informing which links from a domain appear below the main webpage in search results. Fishkin interprets it as meaning Google “uses the number of clicks on pages in Chrome browsers and uses that to determine the most popular/important URLs on a site, which go into the calculation of which to include in the sitelinks feature.”
It could be marked as chrome because Firefox doesn’t support it (without a default-off config value) and Safari technically implemented it at a later date than Chrome, with non-chromium Edge supporting it years after chrome.
This would indicate Google is using chrome to tell it when (via its support of the ping property) but wouldn’t indicate they are decrypting and analyzing chrome sync data.
> - AOSP (the open source counterpart of Android) is now unusable. It doesn't ship with most essential apps, including a Phone app. In previous versions of Android, all of these were a part of AOSP.
Your comment unfortunately implies that Google still maintains them, which is farthest from the truth (as this document shows, it is only maintained for automotive use - it is not usable on a regular phone).
I know this is anecdotal and that I should look further into this but I recently had to switch to chromium because google suite products were slightly unusable in firefox: youtube used way more CPU than it should’ve (maybe this is due to codecs but I was not able to solve it), google sheets crashed constantly, google meet slowed my laptop to a halt and I couldn’t even share my screen, and for some reason google calendar would suddenly start to hog CPU and RAM randomly. Since I switched to chromium everything is smoother and I just can’t believe chromium per se is just this better than Firefox.
I'll ask what extensions you use on your Firefox, because I regularly use Google Meet on an 2014 MacBook Pro with latest Firefox, and it doesn't even make the fans spin, plus all the goodies like environmental noise cancellation is there. Meet team also recently ported some of the Chrome only features back to Firefox, due to some fear, I guess...
The YouTube videos in higher bitrates (like 4K) is generally due to Firefox's ability to hardware accelerate things, and there's a bit of difference there, yes. But on Linux and macOS (moreso in sequoia), I see no extreme CPU use. Just testing it on Firefox 132.02 on Debian Testing with Radeon 550 with open drivers, While I see a spike in CPU load, there's definitely some GPU load is also being produced, pointing to at least some GPU acceleration.
On the other hand, Intel N100 with on board graphics can visibly struggle at 4K as far as I can tell. That one runs Firefox ESR though, I need to retest.
I don't use WASM based Google Workspace tools (docs, sheets, etc.) heavily, but they don't crash when we use it on other pepople's documents that we collaborate on.
That's strange; I use all of those Google products (except Meet, I can't speak to that one) on a daily basis on Firefox (on Linux) and they all work just fine. YouTube in particular works very well, perhaps because I have the "Enhancer for YouTube" extension installed, plus uBlock Origin.
Teams was acting up on Firefox the other day, too. It wouldn't have Q&A and whatever button is to the left of it enabled. "Not supported in your browser", or something.
> Google specifically serves a worse version of Search on Firefox for Mobile.
I don't think Google owning Chrome is really a factor here, but just a raw traffic question where FF Mobile has basically zero uptake. The experience they serve on FF Mobile is just the "we arent subscribed to validating that all of our shiniest JS works with this version of this browser".
The extension spoofs the user agent and arbitrary obscure features that only trigger on specific queries may be broken.
Google does do the effort of validating on other browsers where the traffic threshold is higher, including Firefox on Desktop. If they didn't own Chrome nor Firefox they still wouldn't really have incentive to spend more time supporting the tiny fraction of users.
A browser with a huge userbase would be extremely lucrative for an unscrupulous owner. A new owner could sell full and identifiable clickstream data for all browser activity. A new owner could siphon information from the non-public web for AI training, corporate espionage, or any other purpose.
The APIs thing: it's not just Chrome, but Chromium too. I first noticed this when trying to replicate some of the screen sharing UI (buttons to share different things) from Google Meet, only to find that no non-Google domains have access to those APIs in the Chromium source code. Made a huge deal about it but nobody seemed to care.
Yes, Google gains advantages through the Chrome browser so do we as consumers. The competition for Chrome should come from a better Browser not by being forced to sell it. DOJ is wasting time and taxes on this pointless verdict. Even more economic wastes are coming when the selling happens.
Everything here you accuse Google of doing, Apple is running circles on. Ultimately, if this case goes through Google are right about one thing. The UX on Chrome is going to take a steep nose dive.
Apple does not run the largest advertising network on the planet. As simple as that.
Even for the matter of the browser, Apple does not have the same push as Google does. Yes, Safari is the default browser on a phone. But outside of the mobile world, Safari is a rounding error.
There's nothing inherently illegal about monopolies, just anti-competitive behavior. While Apple is engaging in clear anti-competitive behavior (eg shoving the app store down customers throats), they've reined in restrictions of competing browsers so that they're actually worth using now.
Before Google, there were multiple competing browsers based on different technology, all of which were either offered for free or explicitly licensed as FOSS. Google used Chrome to put the web on an upgrade treadmill. The only way to keep your own code up-to-date with what websites expected was to either commit unending amounts of resources to the problem (Google), do the bare minimum to keep websites working as your resources are stretched thin (Safari, arguably Firefox), or just ship modified versions of Chrome so that it's easier to merge in new features (Edge, Opera, Brave, Vivaldi, etc).
Before Google, all of those options sucked. Chrome was a breath of fresh air, which was why it exploded in popularity.
I don't do web dev, but from what I've heard, web devs also suffered trying to support multiple conflicting browsers, and Chrome's dominance actually makes life much easier.
To add: Google uses Chrome's established user base to bundle other products in the same way Microsoft uses Office subscriptions to push Teams.
The most recent example being Gemini now deeply integrated into Chrome. Had Gemini been a stand-alone product, it would have to fight for every user. Now billions of users have it at their fingertips.
No, they just corrected the punctuation. It's now "Don't. Be evil!" Reflecting their inability to do almost anything, and their lack of morals when they do.
I'm happy to give all this to a cohesive experience google provides. There are competitors in this market too, but google was the first and best not sure why they deserve this blatant overstep in abuse of power
What other solution do you have in mind? Legislation about architecture decisions taken in software products seems preferable?
In principle there is nothing wrong for example with a shared account for multiple products from the same company, many even prefer it. The problem only appears when this gets concentrated into too much power and can be leveraged in ways that distort the market and hurt consumers.
> Legislation about architecture decisions taken in software products seems preferable?
To me this option seems more practical. And we already have some precedence for this kind of solution.
For aviation we have entities like EASA issuing standards like ED-109 and for healthcare we have the HL7 organization issuing the HL7 standard. Another example in the healthcare industry is the DICOM standard created by the NEMA organization. This is not a new idea.
I'm not arguing this approach is without problems. But we are already doing this for some pretty important topics, and I don't see why we couldn't use the same strategy for an "open web standard" that all browsers have to implement.
Yes, Chrome is the de facto standard for the open web. And everyone agrees this is too much power for a single company to have.
But most people seem to think that just removing Chrome from Google would fix this issue. People seem to forget that Chrome isn't the only tool Google can use to steer the web standard in a particular way.
The Google crawler is probably an even more effective tool in shaping the web standard. "To be indexed by Google your page needs to comply with these requirements" puts A LOT of pressure in everyone working in the web.
This is why I think creating and enforcing a web standard is the only practical solution to this problem.
> The UNIX standard was made in part because the government
> wanted an operating system standard, right?
Wrong? Or at least where's the citation to back this up?
"UNIX Standard" presumably means POSIX which was a work of the IEEE, not a government body. If some government had something to do with making it happen, I'm not aware of that. At the time (1988) UNIX wasn't used much outside of academia and niche industries.
There was a point in time where the US government was considering mandating POSIX compatibility in everything. It's why Windows NT shipped with a comically barebones POSIX subsystem and why A/UX (an Apple port of Unix to the Macintosh, years before they bought NeXT) existed.
> Google specifically serves a worse version of Search on Firefox for Mobile. You have to get an extension to get the full experience.
Huh, I wonder if this is why I have perceived a drop in quality from Google Search. What a stupid move from them -- not only have I stopped using Google Search and now pay Kagi (yes I know money still flows from Kagi to Google but even still) and have been evangelizing Kagi as well as taking every opportunity to shit on Google Search.
Great job G, you made the product worse and made me a customer of someone else
- They get to move forward with enabling and pushing features that allow for more hardware and software lockin to their platform: see unexportable passkeys
I'm all for competition and increasing consumer choices, but the government is really not making a case that this is supposed to help consumers.
The only reason I still use Chrome is because I already use other Google products and they integrate well together. There are many other better options out there otherwise, and they are all free. Breaking out Chrome from Google will not in any way benefit me as a consumer.
> The agency and the states have settled on recommending that Google be required to license the results and data from its popular search engine
> They are also prepared to seek a requirement that Google share more information with advertisers and give them more control over where their ads appear.
It sounds like the end goal of this is to enrich other companies, not customers. And if the DOJ has their way, they want to crack open Google's vault of customer data and propagate it across the internet.
Not only does this sound extremely bad for consumers, the DOJ is trying to completely change Google's business model and dictate how they are supposed to make money. Regardless of how you feel about Google, this seems like a far overreach from the DOJ on finding and fixing market manipulation.
I'm failing to see why "this product we built from the ground up integrates better with our other tools" is an anti trust problem
Isn't that what we want companies to do?
I have two frustrations with this kind of decision:
1. It's not clear to me that the judge has any interest in creating value.
2. It does feel a bit like being punished for success.
It's one thing when it's ill-gotten success, eg via coercive contracts (like Android has with play services), and we should aggressively deal with that sort of contract! However, what often seems to happen in these types of cases is the judge identifies a behavior they dislike and bans it without really considering more targeting / surgical treatments
What business model do we expect chrome to have? The same DOJ doesn't like Google giving Apple money for traffic acquisition. Why would that be allowed for spun-out chrome?
Why do we expect the rest of the ecosystem to remain static? What do you think Google's next move is if they sell chrome?
Who do you expect to buy Chrome? Not Facebook. Who else could and would want to?
This is a solution that has been proposed without really considering any second order effects. Or if they were considered, it was done badly (it would be easy to prove me wrong: they could just write up what they expect to happen, and it would have to be even mildly believable)
I would assume they would not want Facebook to buy it, obviously. Microsoft neither.
I do not have a solution for the business case I have to admit, but it has 60%+ market share I believe, I’m sure someone will figure out something to monetize this.
It might end up with chrome becoming a worse browser though, that’s not an unlikely outcome at all. But Internet as a whole would be better for it in my view, if google‘s grip got loosened a bit…
This is funny to me. I don't really trust Google's incentives in general, but unlike all of the social networks, Google benefits from a more open internet.
Sure, this has gotten worse over time (if Reddit is closed, goog can pay for access), but they've been a reasonable steward of the web. Chrome is good. I use it intentionally. (Generally, my devices do not come with it installed and I choose to install it)
There are lots of reasonable pieces of anti competitive behavior that we should be punishing. This one will make the internet worse for consumers
I think websites only working with chromium browsers is not making the internet better and is definitely not a more open internet.
I’m not saying they are the worse monopolists out there though, just that I find the logic of splitting chrome sound, in the interest of a more open internet.
I tend to agree. I struggle to understand how a company runs a browser product without being eventually seen as a monopoly. They’re making a unique product ecosystem of browser and apps, just like everyone else, no need to keep coming down on whoever is successful at it. People can vote with their feet and use a dozen other options.
> I struggle to understand how a company runs a browser product without being eventually seen as a monopoly.
Just like for example how a car company can make cars without being a monopoly. Not the best example, but we’re so used to a monopoly it’s tough to imagine what a competitive browser market would look like.
Browsers have never generated enough revenue directly to be competitive. Indirectly they help companies build platforms. When done well enough, we call it a monopoly. I’m actually in favor of restricting their use of tracking but I also think forcing them to divest from the browser business seems heavy handed.
> 1) does it though? It seems like the Google-specific parts of it are pretty ancillary to the whole experience
You're unwittingly describing the textbook definition of anticompetitive practices only made possible by abusing a dominant position.
> 2) how is it different to Apples integration with Safari?
Safari does not represent >65% of all web traffic. Also, there's the major liability of having a single ad company controlling the browser that the average internet user uses to browse the web.
As a firefox user, that copy/paste drives me insane, but I think you're making a logic leap here along with assuming the worst. It's very possible (and likely) that there are API deficiencies that break their ability to offer this when overriding the right-click menu. For example, Firefox not allowing javascript in random tabs from writing to the system clipboard.
You can still use Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V (and in fact the UI will (or at least used to) tell you that).
JupyterLab also doesn't have copy paste in right click menu. I figured it's probably a security feature (preventing malicious JavaScript from harvesting clipboard content).
> how is it different to Apples integration with Safari?
It’s not, other than Google has a way larger market share (especially if you count Edge/Opera/Brave/etc.) and has been (ab)using that position to push web standards in a direction that favors their business and that other browser vendors have to follow to keep up.
If Safari had Chrome’s market share and was throwing their weight around like Google does and Microsoft did with IE, it’d be the same argument and I’d also personally support forcing them to divest it.
I think you mean order of magnitude, which means 10x. Magnitude just means size. Chrome's market share is not an order of magnitude higher than Safari.
In the business world it is, because going from 18% to 65% market share is much more than a 4X improvement. Market share progress is highly non-linear in cost/investment/strategy. There are network effects at play favoring a winner-takes-all.
A (truly) clever argument! Def seems like a stretch though, especially if you're hoping to save GP's comment by suggesting that this is what they had in mind :-)
No, that might be the word origin but not how it is actually used. Just like "decimate" nowadays does not require a factor 10.
So instead of "10x" substitute "by a large enough factor or margin to make a significant difference". That is totally true globally speaking. Locally, in the US, you could however argue that apple abuses it's iPhone market share to sabotage competition (e.g. streaming, webstandards,etc). That just means you should sue both not neither.
So why are those standards impossible to keep up with and we already see plenty of sites break under Firefox? Which by the way is the only independent browser remaining in game, even goddamn Microsoft leaving the domain behind?
Because development costs money. Your "impossible to keep up" here is easily explained by Google simply investing more money in development and thus being able to "innovate" faster. The only way to compete is to invest more, but where do you get that money from?
The easy fix is to make them slow down development, but I fail to see how that's a good thing.
Sure. Continuing my analogy to the British empire's rule over the seas has also surely resulted in technological improvements, but that is not the only way to achieve that.
For a more practical example, Linux is also developed mostly by paid employees, but they are from many different companies and thus improvements can't be weaponized as easily.
Maybe if Mozilla spent more money on development and less money trying to be an NGO they could keep up... Mozilla gets more than enough revenue (from Google ironically), they just spend it poorly.
Or they could do what Brave, Vivaldi and others do and simply use Chromium as a base.
Again, how can it be a proprietary web if everything is open source and available to every other vendor?
Not sure if you remember all the "native" applets that actually were proprietary before Chrome came on the scene and made JS fast enough to kill them... ActiveX, Flash, Java... Those were the dark ages, because of Google the web is more open and better than ever...
More like there were actually multiple vendors that would have to agree on a common thing, but they died out so the single leftover can do whatever it wants...
Miro board is simply unusably slow, but plenty of other commonly used websites have annoying breakages, like login screen not actually logging in and the others.
The DOJ is weird. They're so concerned with whether or not a company is a monopoly, not whether or not they're abusing their power.
Look at the EU, levying multiple billion dollar fines against Apple. But in the US, Apple is free to abuse customers since their market share is a few % short of a monopoly...
I mentioned elsewhere, but the EU wrote an entirely new law to designate some companies as 'gate keepers'. A company no longer has to be a monopoly in the EU to fall under the new law. The DoJ is operating under US law where Apple has largely come out unscathed in any cases brought so far (like Epic).
So far the US has had little desire to regulate big tech in any significant manner.
The EU laws make sense. If you buy something in the EU, you own it. You should be able to do what you want with it. They also have great laws to protect consumers WRT warranties and service and even their AI law is pretty good.
2) consumers cannot use products like Safari as their exclusive web browser. The web has decided that Chrome is the only browser worth supporting and the world needs to keep Chrome at-the-ready for when the alternative browser eventually breaks.
For example, Chrome has replaced IE as the corporate browser, due to the integrations with Workspace accounts and Authentication mechanisms. In order to use the fingerID on my/employer's macbook pro, I have to give my employer root/sync access to Google Chrome.
"The web has decided that Chrome is the only browser worth supporting…"
That only tells me that governments can no longer leave technical aspects of the internet (standards/APIs, etc.) to market forces. There are many historical precedents for such action such as flight/aircraft, RF spectrum management, road and maritime regulations, health/food standards, etc. There's a myriad of them.
Regulations would enforce interoperability and uniformity. To say this would stifle innovation is nonsense, it would be like saying that road rules and maritime law have stifled the development of motor vehicles and shipbuilding.
Try using a miro board. Unfortunately many sites have started breaking under Firefox, and it's a shame that web devs don't test under the 3 remaining browser, at least on a surface-level, before release.
It's not like supporting a completely different OS..
> 2) how is it different to Apples integration with Safari?
It's only different in the share of the overall market they hold - and it's notable that the EU has already acted to break Apple's monopoly over specifically the iOS browser market.
Yeah, and the effectiveness of the enforcement still remains to be seen - Apple is sure making every effort possible to adhere to the letter rather than the spirit of the law, and to isolate any changes they make exclusively to the EU. But I think it's a positive signal that we might see the decline of the big platform monopolies in our lifetime.
If Apple can do that then it's a problem with the law. You can't really make a law and then argue "we're angry that people are complying with what we said, not what we meant to say".
But then again, I wonder if part of the reason is that they can't make the law too prescriptive because that would create other problems politically (especially if it ever got pointed towards European companies)...
Well, it's also not generally very clear whether a geographical political entity like the EU actually has the ability to legislate what occurs outside its borders
re: 1) logging into a Google domain in a chrome browser, logs the browser into the Google account [auto-profile-login] [gSignin], and by default, syncs browser history to the cloud, cloud-readable [gSync]. Google's own docs describe that you can add a passphrase "so Google can't read it". While Google can read it, they have an arguable duty to shareholders to read it.
> Keep your info private with a passphrase
With a passphrase, you can use Google's cloud to store and sync your Chrome data without letting Google read it.
Thank you appealing to reasonable expectations, but Google, as their own docs make clear, ties uses together quite aggressively^W conveniently.
2) Whatabout Apple and Safari? Apple doesn't offer an email service supported in part by scanning email content for ads.
Apple has gone to some lengths to engineer a system where they can credibly(-ish) claim to "protect your privacy when you browse the web in Safari," [Apple private relay].
There's really no rational reason for third-party cookies to still exist. The only reason they're still around is because an advertising company's browser has like 97% market share.
It would be nice to have a completely open source browser that can be built with a simple one liner from cargo.
Having several thousands of eyes on the code daily to check for telemetry violations, privacy issues, security, and performance daily in mostly a single language, small, and well structured browser repo would be phenomenal compared to the disjoint jumbled messes we have today.
As indicated by the explanation, better for people who believe in FOSS rather than closed corporate software.
Most developers work with a Unix mindset (do one thing well, with focus on simple and easily managed code), which tyically means telemetry is _wildly_ out of line (offers no real benefit for the basics while adding huge complexity), so privacy and security are naturally far better.
Lynx like TUI browsers are a nice idea, but unfortunately sometimes an image is desired to be manually viewed, or javascript is required. It would be wonderful if javascript were simply dropped from most websites, but we don't live in that world, so we're stuck with the next best thing (disabling all js until explicitly allowed by the user).
These are the types of things people in software devs typically care about, which there are many in HN.
Wouldn't consumer like it if they could use Google services on any browser with the same experience without having to give up other browsers? I use firefox mainly but I have to use Chrome when I use Google Meet because Google provide more features and better performance when you are on Chrome (intentionally, not because of other browsers limitations)
This is from the DOJ's page on the Clayton Act, where they give two statements of purpose for the antitrust law.
>This law aims to promote fair competition and prevent unfair business practices that could harm consumers. It prohibits certain actions that might restrict competition, like tying agreements, predatory pricing, and mergers that could lessen competition.
>The Antitrust Division enforces federal antitrust and competition laws. These laws prohibit anticompetitive conduct and mergers that deprive American consumers, taxpayers, and workers of the benefits of competition.
Both are aimed squarely at consumer benefit. Restrictions on anticompetitive behaviour and mergers *where those things impact consumer benefit.*.
Mergers and actions against competitors are obviously allowed in the normal course of business.
Lots of people have other ideas about what kind of antitrust law they'd like to see, but such a law has not passed the US Congress.
> prevent unfair business practices that could harm consumers. It prohibits certain actions that might restrict competition, like tying agreements
So, it's plainly written - ations don't have to actually harm consumers, the fact they could do so is enough - and the key criteria is that they might restrict competition.
> Restrictions on anticompetitive behaviour and mergers where those things impact consumer benefit..
You paraphrased incorrectly. The correct paraphrasing would be, “Restrictions on anticompetitive behaviour and mergers where those things deprive consumers of the benefits of competition.”
The second one points to taxpayers and workers as well. This is especially important when it comes to antitrust action regarding workers rights. Actions which could lead to worse consumer experiences (at least if you consider price to be the end all)
“Taxpayers” is an extremely broad category as well, though you need an appetite for it to argue through that clause.
Though I think you can easily make a consumer argument for Chrome being unbundled (competition for Chromes default search engine pick)
...and competition is going so well in the browser market. The dedicated browser businesses (mozilla, opera, etc) are all tiny and/or struggling mightily. All of the biggest browsers are side-projects of larger tech firms.
Monetizing browsers requires either subscriptions or (further) enshittification of the web experience. Forcing /market/ competition into the space will not be great for consumers, IMO.
Perhaps the fact that large companies can subsidize their browser operations through their huge war chest and large presence on the web or in the operating system space is indicative of them using market power to crowd out competition and make paid offerings less sustainable!
Perhaps some antitrust action would help with this.
About seven different things. The whole oversimplification that it has to be one single thing has been a drift in policy (over a few decades) in combination with trying to rewrite history books. The fact that you are even asking the question that way shows how successful that rewriting was.
Start with the Sherman act and then see that "what antitrust means" has had a long, changing history. By the way, the European understanding of antitrust still includes harm to competition as well, which often pops up on HN (e.g. how does Facebook's action harm consumers? That was not the question!).
Yet, you have lots of people in this thread claim that we have always been at war with Eastasia.
Out of all the parts of Google that take advantage of integration to pump up ad revenues, I'd say Chrome is the least of them?
If we're serious about this, separate search and ads. Force ads-Google to pay search-Google for data on the open market, and let other people pay for the same data, make it transparent, and let consumers see exactly what's happening.
While we're at it, separate Google's display ad network from its RTB facilities, basically carving DoubleClick back out again.
> The only reason I still use Chrome is because I already use other Google products and they integrate well together.
And that is exactly why Chrome should be broken up/out. It is unfair competition. And you say there are many other well working options out there but that is simply not true. Googles web applications work best on Chrome and often break on non Chrome browsers. Mostly because of changes to those web applications and not because of random browser bugs. This is how you win people over and complete your browser world domination.
I think the circumstances were quite different. MS was an entrenched player when they created IE/started monopolizing. Google was not an entrenched player. They rose to monopoly power.
When you use decades, it is implied that the precision is rough, interpreting it as exactly 30 years ago is just bad faith.
OP is correct - in the timespan between 2 and 3 decades ago, MS / IE implemented its full range of anti-competitive practices and at least partially through them became even more dominant than Chrome is today.
Browsing the internet hasn't really changed during the last 15 years or so. I hope that this will enable development of totally new browsers or even completely different ways to use the internet.
> DOJ is trying to completely change Google's business model and dictate how they are supposed to make money
This is good reasoning. It is overreach for a regulatory body to do something that could impact the business model of a monopoly. Monopolies are bad, unless being a monopoly is part of that monopoly’s business model and an important part of how the monopoly makes money, in which case nothing should be done.
I do mostly agree with grandparent, but not with your take.
What is the problem with government regulating, say, the ingredients that can be used in foods, forbidding addictive drugs from being added to them? Or selling drugs that are completely fake or outright dangerous?
This obsession with small governments (and basically, libertarianism) doesn't really stand on proper grounds.
Why can't the government work for you? Maybe it's an inherent bias given that I'm from Europe, but I think the stereotypical utopia about "big government" is much more true for huge corporations (which have absolutely no safety mechanisms built in to prevent a paper clip factory going overboard in the name of profit) compared to the slow-moving, democratic, slightly corrupt governments. Only one of these have accountability in a humane form, while the only metric for corporate is a single number.
This is a good point. “Why should anyone think about monopolies when we could imagine what it would be like if they put nicotine in beefaroni?” is exactly the sort of salient and nuanced discourse that is sorely lacking these day’s
> unless being a monopoly is part of that monopoly’s business model and an important part of how the monopoly makes money, in which case nothing should be done.
My read of this is based on an assumption that monopolies will always structure their business around being monopolies. This post is implying that there cases where there are not, and those are the only cases where antitrust law should be enforced. Based on this contradiction, as well as the odd phrasing, emphasizing how important making money is over resolving the badness of monopolies, I'm pretty sure this is a joke.
For years people have complained "ugh Google is selling your data, how awful" and here is the government seeking to mandate that Google sell your data! There's no way that this is the right remedy.
Considering Chrome is just Chromium + a lil telemetry, forcing them to sell Chrome is akin to forcing them to sell consumer data. The Chromium bits are OSS, so the only proprietary and sellable bit is the user data really.
I see a lot of people saying Google services don't work well on other browsers. Can someone give an example? I've been using Firefox desktop and mobile for a year and haven't had any issues with Google stuff. At least YouTube, drive, docs, sheets, etc. seem to work just fine
In google docs if you highlight some text and right click there are options for copy and paste. If you click them in chrome it works fine, if you click them in Firefox it says:
"These actions are unavailable using the Edit menus, but you can still use:
Ctrl+C - for copy, Ctrl+X - for cut, Ctrl+V - for paste"
So for some reason some functions are just not present in other browsers. I can guarantee they could implement these functions if they wanted to.
Have you tried using Google Meet on Safari? You can’t use filters, blur the background, and basically all other features besides basic video and audio.
I have random loading issues when I try to play something on the YouTube shorts page. The audio would play but not the video. Refreshing the page sometimes fixed this
They keep firing large chunks of their employees due to not much cash, and the majority of their funding comes from google which it is phasing out over time.
Once Chrome is spun out of Google and Firefox loses its Google sponsorship, Firefox and Chrome will be able to complete for $$$ on an equal basis -- maybe by charging for the browser software, or selling a subscription, or selling user data to companies, etc.
Servo is upcoming, but so far it is fantastic in comparison to any other browser out there.
I tend to focus on any software that does not require 12 teams of people 6 weeks to determine how to build a single binary because of the use of 20 different programming languages and mixing and matching of paradigms and solutions to subconponents.
I very much appreciate simplicity and look for highly secure and private programs that highly discourage JavaScript from ever being run.
Servo is finally a breath of fresh air in that regard.
Interesting, until today I had assumed that Servo was basically dead and that most of the interesting bits had been integrated into Firefox. I'll give Servo a try and see if I like it.
So fuck all of the billions of users of Chrome I guess, and let the other advertising companies make some money.
I'm sure everyone will be thanking the DOJ for their poorer Web experience, knowing that their sacrifice is allowing other ad companies to earn their fair share.
The thing I keep coming back to is that everyone needs a job. So unless we all go to work for Google, things that help other companies help the employees of other companies.
This would be like if Tesla made the roads and the roads could recharge batteries but only to Tesla vehicles and you as a Tesla owner saying this is not anti-competitive.
Even as a non Tesla owner I would say that’s not anti competitive if every other OEM is also able to make their own roads, which is exactly the case with Chrome.
There’s multiple browsers, and people might choose Chrome because it has a better ecosystem around it. That means it’s a better product for those people.
But Chrome doesn't work that way at all? Google gives Chromium away for free - which has enabled innovation across the software industry beyond the browser space if I must say so.
> The only reason I still use Chrome is because I already use other Google products and they integrate well together.
Isn't that kind of the complaint though? Google, by controlling the platform and therefore sort of indirectly controlling the entire web, can make it artificially easier to push you to their products, and push you away from others.
If I wanted, for example, to make a competitor to Google Docs, I'm not just competing with Google Docs, I'm also competing with the integration of Google Docs with Chrome, meaning that Google Docs can be artificially better than my product. While I don't know if Google has actually done this, it would be pretty easy for them to actively gimp any Google Doc competitor in Chrome so that you're more likely to use their service instead.
> It sounds like the end goal of this is to enrich other companies, not customers.
Then end goal is fostering competitions in a market where there is basically none. So yes, it obviously benefits would be competitors. That's the point.
> The only reason I still use Chrome is because I already use other Google products and they integrate well together. There are many other better options out there otherwise, and they are all free. Breaking out Chrome from Google will not in any way benefit me as a consumer.
It will benefit you in many ways, including: Better compatibility of Google with multiple browsers, and a browser which doesn't actively encourage you to use Google products and services.
Indirectly, a reduction in Google's centralized power will make life easier for many people and organizations which offer you services and products (yes, I realize that's a bit vague and needs some elaboration).
> It will benefit you in many ways, including: Better compatibility of Google with multiple browsers
No, the way you do that is to pass a law that says Google can't intentionally make their websites work worse in other browsers. That's not what the dumb DOJ is doing.
Perhaps you're right, but this level of specificity is not usually something we find in primary legislation (AFAIK). Also, the DOJ may be motivated to act to a different extent than the two chambers of Congress. Still, it's always possible that this measure may end up not being effective.
Realistically nothing is going to happen. The incoming admin has made clear their distaste for Lina Khan. In other words, this is just an attempt at a swan song by the Biden White House.
I'm totally fine with this, but I wish they would do the same thing with Apple. Google's platform, at the very least is open and I can run my own apps.
One could ask, "How is Apple a Monopoly, and do they abuse that position?". In my view it is, since you can't have a business or build connected hardware without an iOS app. And as for abusing that position for gaining market share, there are just too many examples starting with say, watches.
Apple doesn't have a similar position in any space though, or do they? In terms of market share they're not even the biggest player in the smartphone market, they sit below 20 % (the most profitable 20 % though).
Google, in comparison, absolutely dominates the search and ad markets and sucks all oxygen out of them to keep any competition from springing up by controlling distribution and limiting choice. They e.g. paid vast amounts of money to Apple to make sure users don't get a free choice of search engine.
If you wanted to compare the Apple Watch with this it would mean that Apple would make exclusive deals with all stores (online and IRL) selling watches so that consumers would only see Apple watches everywhere they go and would need to look in the basement or on an obscure subpage to find any watches from a different manufacturer. Clearly that's not the case.
That said I'm not a fan of Apples walled garden either, I think this should be addressed (and in the EU it is being addressed). It's ridiculous to have this super powerful hardware and I can only run sanctioned apps on them instead of being able to install any kind of software I like.
> Apple doesn't have a similar position in any space though, or do they?
Apple has exclusive control over a market (AppStore), which has almost 2 million different products (Apps), 820,000 suppliers (app publishers) and over 1.3 billion customers (active iPhone users) which conducts more trade ($1.1 trillion) than the entire GDP of Luxemburg.
The relevant market for them is smartphones and smartphone apps, and again, Apple doesn't have a monopoly there. Most markets have concentration effects and players that dominate the market to a certain degree, that doesn't automatically make them a monopolist, it depends on how they got there and what exactly they do to keep or build out their position in the market. By your definition Valve is a monopolist in the gaming market due to their size and dominance, but that's likely not true either.
Anticompetitive behavior would be if they used their power to make it more difficult for people to buy Android phones e.g. by entering into exclusivity deals with cell service providers or electronics stores so that you could only find Apple products there (i.e. T-Mobile would only sell iPhones with their contracts and you wouldn't find any Android phones except in some small speciality shops out of town). That's what Google is doing in its markets among other things, i.e. pay tons of money to ensure all virtual store fronts are only stocked with Google products and everything else is hidden behind.
Apple does of course show anti-competitive behavior to a degree, i.e. they purchase the entire production capacity of the most advanced semiconductor fabs to have exclusivity and preserve their edge, but again there are still other players in that market and competition still seems possible. If you want to compare that to what Google is doing in the search and ad space it would translate to them locking up almost all semiconductor suppliers in exclusivity contracts for 10 years so that no other company could ever build any advanced chips in large numbers.
> The relevant market for them is smartphones and smartphone apps
The relevant markets includes, but is not limited to that.
> Anticompetitive behavior would be if they used their power to make it more difficult for people to buy Android phones
Anti-competitive behaviour includes, but is not limited to that.
Either way regulators are taking action.
US Justice Department Sues Apple for Monopolizing Smartphone Markets[1]
The European Commission has fined Apple over €1.8 billion for abusing its dominant position on the market[2]
> By your definition Valve is a monopolist in the gaming market due to their size and dominance
Well, no. You can install games on your computer however you want.
If Steam was the only possible way to do so, then yeah I would say Valve had a monopoly.
(It's worth noting that Apple has already gotten in trouble for this - the EU has fined them billions and forced them to allow alternative app stores. Hopefully US regulators take inspiration and force them to do the same domestically.)
> Android exists, and as long as its a viable choice, Apple isn't a monopoly.
Not only is Apple a monopoly, they become one, and maintain it illegally.
US Justice Department Sues Apple for Monopolizing Smartphone Markets[1]
The European Commission has fined Apple over €1.8 billion for abusing its dominant position on the market[2]
Just to be clear, the Justice Department has filed a lawsuit but they have not actually won it. Until a judge or jury rules in their favor (and appeals are exhausted) you cannot cite the mere existence of a lawsuit as proof of anything. Keep in mind that Epic also filed a lawsuit claiming Apple was a monopoly but could not prove it in court.
And yet Android, which is more open than Apple in all respects, is a monopoly.
I really don't think you can give a rational explanation other than the courts are mentally troubled. They should have cracked down on both Epic cases or neither.
The argument as to whether smartphones or the Apple App Store is the better definition of a market has been done to death at this point, right? IMO it would be more good faith to just reference the fact that this is a currently entrenched and impossible to reconcile matter of… opinion? Definition?
I think a lot of people aren't aware that monopolies are not illegal in the US. It is completely legal to run a business that is a monopoly.
What is illegal are anti-competitive practices that a business might employ in an attempt to create or maintain a monopoly. A business that violates these laws might already be a monopoly, or it might not be one.
> It's ridiculous to have this super powerful hardware and I can only run sanctioned apps on them instead of being able to install any kind of software I like.
Buy different hardware then. You know these things when you buy the device. It isn't a secret. If the device doesn't meet your needs, there are alternatives that do. The fact that there are adequately substitutable products available other than iPhone destroys any concept of "monopoly." Saying Apple has a monopoly on iOS is ridiculous -- they _are_ iOS.
Aston Martin doesn’t sell enough cars to be a problem for society. Apple has pretty high market share. I don’t really think they are a monopoly (because I can’t see the point of view that takes a single Apple Store as “the market”), but I think it is obvious that they have more impact than Aston Martin.
Nobody needs an Aston Martin to perform well enough at their job. I've been in multiple situations where being a Linux user put me at a disadvantage because everything else at a company assumes Apple.
Granted, the appropriate response is to demand a Mac from this company, but it still highlights that a Mac isn't a luxury item the same way an Aston Martin is
Yes it is, they are the only supplier on the market for MacOS hardware. In the market for Linux or Windows, hardware is priced at a competitive level.
You may argue that the relevant market is for "computers" as a whole, however it can be argued that bundling hardware and software to charge high prices is a classic monopoly behavior nonetheless.
Companies cannot be forced to sell their operating systems distinct from hardware if they choose not to. That's a ridiculous expectation. There is no market for macOS, only Macs, and that market is the broader PC market, which Apple is nowhere near monopoly power
Saying Apple has a "macOS hardware" monopoly is like saying Dyson has a "Dyson motor monopoly"
Companies get to choose what their products are, full stop
MacOS is also an operating system or a platform. Tesla isn't really a platform.
But... funny you brought up Tesla, because Tesla also had this exact problem! Tesla had the supercharging network, which they own and manufacture. But superchargers aren't just a product, they're a platform.
Tesla had a monopoly on superchargers, until they pre-emptively opened up the network and open sourced the connector. If they hadn't, IMO it was extremely likely they would've been forced, eventually.
More like, "why does the software I'm required to use mean there's only one hardware manufacturer I can buy from?" Or, "why does the part I need to repair my tractor only get provided by one manufacturer?"
No, that's textbook price discrimination, aka standard pricing everywhere. Have you looked at the prices for add-ons for cars? Or even for pizza toppings?
There's no world in which you can tell me Apple has a monopoly on laptops. C'mon.
Apple are creating a walled marketing garden with their new privacy features too. If a person pays for iCloud storage of any time they get placed onto the Apple VPN and their IP address resolves one of two or three different values for any given country.
This makes web tracking and attribution impossible to anyone who is not Apple. Users might be happy with it but I think it is similar anti-competitive behaviour to what Google are doing.
The App Store is one consideration, and the hardware ecosystem another. I personally think both are problems. The ability to cast audio from my device to another is less supported now than they were back when things had audio auxiliary jacks.
Apple today discontinued the lightning to 3.5mm converters, but I’m more referring to things like the apple exclusive airplay, proprietary Bluetooth codecs, etc
Who would possibly buy Chrome? Letting any of the large tech companies purchase it (the only possible buyers) would just give someone else monopolistic power.
Chrome can’t exist as a standalone business without being even more consumer hostile.
Very few companies would be able to manage a gigantic project like Chromium.
I happen to be poking around the Chromium codebase the last few days. The size of the codebase itself is at the same level as all of our company's code. Something as important and critical as GPU rendering is only a small part of the entire project. You also have v8, ChromeOS, ANGLE etc to worry about, all requiring experts in those areas. Not to mention things like Widevine and other proprietary technology surrounding Chrome.
I'm pretty sure they can, and do. The vast majority of Mozillas revenues come from Google for being the default search provider. The fact that Google pays Mozilla, Apple and Samsung (among others) to be the default search provider has been an issue with regulators, but as far as I know there has been no rulings on it (yet?).
It's 95% of an operating system. In a way it is it's own OS. Chromium has ~ 500+ distinct APIs and features such as web APIs, extension APIs, DOM, JavaScript APIs, and platform-specific features.
This is illustrates the extent and magnitude of the problem to fix the internet. That regulators failed to give enough oversight of the internet and to regulate its monopolistic players several decades ago when these problems first became obvious has meant that they are now almost insurmountable.
Ideally, Google would be forced to divest itself of Chrome and that Chrome would become an open source project a la Linux. Clearly, that's very unlikely to happen.
For those who'd argue that Chrome would have no funding to further develop I'd respond by saying that it already works well as a browser and from observation that Google is channeling most of Chrome's development funds into anti-features that are hostile to users.
As an open source project that level of funding would be no longer necessary and its future development could progress at a slower pace.
> Ideally, Google would be forced to divest itself of Chrome and that Chrome would become an open source project a la Linux. Clearly, that's very unlikely to happen.
Chrome's upstream (Chromium) is already open source. If Google is forbidden from sponsoring Chromium's development, and that of its proprietary downstream distribution (Chrome) who's going to fund Chromium's development? Even if forced to divest, Google will always have an outsized sway on any open source browser due to the engineer-hours they can spend on contributions. If they are blocked from even that, then the whole exercise would be anti-consumer IMO.
If Google were forced to divest itself of Chrome and there were no takers then Chromium would take on an altogether different perspective. That Chromium exists shows there's already an existing infrastructure that would make transitioning to it relatively straightforward.
Incidentally, I don't use Chrome, only Chromium-based and Firefox-based browsers.
> That Chromium exists shows there's already an existing infrastructure that would make transitioning to it relatively straightforward.
I think there’s a very very substantial underlying infrastructure maintained and funded by google that would disappear. This isn’t a GitHub project where you can clone and make install.
The fundamental core problem with the internet is that users have an innate feeling that they have a right to view content without being charged for it.
Google's entire existence is predicated on the ad-model internet existing, and internet users have overwhelmingly voted for this model of internet over the last 30 years.
People hate ads, but they hate opening their wallet even more.
Much as many are loathe to admit it decommercialization of huge swathes of the internet is, in fact, possible. People can make and share things without a financial incentive, and if that means that we have to reckon with the dysfunctional nature of the status quo - millions of livelihoods dependent on the grace of a few megacorporations - maybe that's a good thing (in the long run). Or, I guess we can just let the Attention-Industrial complex swallow everything without a fight.
Yeah, but if Google were forced to divest Chrome then parts of its proprietary code would have to be open-sourced and integrated into Chromium to minimize disruption to users. Alternatively, Google would have to make its services more interoperable.
Having it owned by a non-profit foundation would make a huge amount of sense, especially if that foundation was then immediately funded by a variety of companies rather than just one big advertising company.
The obvious test for whether the browser is actually independent: what is the response to "let's add an ad-blocker by default".
There would be few incentives to try and pull off something like that if nobody had any faith in the product every becoming extremely profitable though.
With Mozilla becoming so hostile to their power users in recent years (or any user who just wants to customize the interface or core functionality), I'm not sure it would make much difference.
The userbase and trademark are both very valuable. I'm guessing it would also come with some controlling positions in the chromium open source project, since those are mostly held by google by being the biggest developer and user of the project.
Good question. Chrome itself isn't a standalone business, the money generated through Chrome still primarily comes from Ads. The hardware tied to Chromebooks generates some revenue, but even ChromeOS is essentially free. They generate a tiny amount of revenue selling ChromeOS management tools in Workspace. Why not spin off an actual revenue driver like YouTube?
Logged-in Chrome users are tied to Google logins. The mind boggles at the complexity of trying to somehow separate Chrome identities from Google identities, much less explain that to the general populace for whom "Google", "Chrome" and "browse the Internet" are largely interchangeable.
No boggling required. If you want to sync your browser state or settings across computers, make a Chrome account. If you don’t, don’t. If you want to use Google, make a Google account.
We had this for ~20 years. It wasn't mind-boggling complex. On the contrary, it was much simpler: you didn't have to "log in" to a piece of software that ran on a computer you owned under a user account you already logged into.
You don't HAVE to login unless you want to share your passwords, history, bookmarks etc. between your devices. Simpler = not having those features (which most users seemingly find useful).
Presumably yes. I haven't seen any evidence to the contrary.
> and just back up my own bookmarks
Nothing wrong about that. But again.. most people don't find that to be very convenient (I'd actually bet money that that there are is magnitude or a few times more people using Safari/Chrome/etc. to sync their data automatically instead of doing it manually).
I think presuming people want this is like presuming they want 3rd party tracking cookies or that they want their online footprint profiled by the likes of data brokers and palantir and so on. Uninformed consent is not the same as support. Adult humans are mostly smart enough to change their preferences away from convenience when they understand it has bad consequences.
There is no value to logging into chrome with a Google account that couldn't be replicated easily with some standalone service. The fact they added google logins to Chrome still bugs me.
probably not going to be a popular take on this forum, but to me it looks like anti trust and securities laws are enforced almost randomly. Is Google a monopoly using its control to limit competition - yes but so is pretty much all of FANG and many successful businesses for that matter.
Anti trust activities are not about any one act (such as routing browsers to your site), it's more about whether the fates choose your company to end up in the DOJs roulette wheel.
This is a bad/uninformed take. The OP is about one particular anti-trust trial that ended already (with Google losing), and is in the remedies phase. The DOJ and FTC have been suing a lot of other companies over anti-trust, including the other big tech companies. Some of those are still ongoing, some haven't started yet, some have already ended.
I think the distinction is that the new Chrome company wouldn't be a "monopolist". If Chrome was a separate company and did exactly the same as Google is doing currently, there might be no problem. It's when a company "abuses" its market position to enter/capture/distort another market (or maintain the original market) is when in theory regulators have an issue. For example, free software is allowed, but when Microsoft used its dominance in the OS market to push a free browser on the world at the detriment to Netscape, regulators took issue.
The issue is that Google's dominance of the search/ad business is distorting the browser market.
This is my take, anyways (I'm not a lawyer or American).
But the DOJ wouldn't take it away. The parent comment describes exactly what the DOJ's desired outcome looks like. That's what will happen if the DOJ gets their way. It's the only possible outcome. The people praising the DOJ's decision don't understand just how stupid it is.
If this actually happens, I think it would turn perception of Nadella from good CEO that got lucky with OpenAI to a certified shadow master that's playing chess while everyone else is playing checkers.
I'm pretty sure M$ just shifted to edge because they didn't want to invest the money into catching up with chromium, since explorer was a pile of shit and was losing anyway
"Opera or somethings" tend to be too small. E.g. Google paid 20 billion just to be the default search in Safari, i.e. for a default seat in a significantly less popular browser. Opera's total assets are ~1 billion.
But say it was forced to sell for peanuts because any large company proposal was denied by antitrust review itself, a forced sale of a US company's business to a non-US company under ownership by Chinese investors would likely not be allowed go through in the current environment either. Maybe some other "or something" at this point but it feels a bit like asking for a wildcard play from a very methodical and slow process.
Interesting, I didn't know that Opera was Chinese-investor-funded.
There are a few American companies that could pull it off though; Oracle comes to mind? I know that they don't really work in the browser space, but they have plenty of money, and they work in pretty much every other part of tech.
MS owns bing. Which isn’t anywhere near as popular but still exists and is large. And effectively owns the profits from ChatGPT’s growing foray into search. Basically every Google competitor uses the bing index under the hood.
MS owns an ad network that brings in ~$10Bn a year. Much smaller than Google, but certainly nothing to ignore.
MS owns outlook/hotmail which is wildly popular.
Does Microsoft own “half the internet”? No but neither did Google. Microsoft does own Windows which is a (already sued) monopoly touch point similar to Android. They own a browser. They own a cloud platform that profits from a growing internet. They own plenty of consumer facing properties and should not be written off in monopoly or antitrust discussions.
Personally, I don’t know if I agree with the idea of spinning off Chrome (but I know Googlers so I may be biased), but I understand the appeal on paper.
Google's adware is all over nearly every site on the internet.
I don't even know what the real-world equivalent would be: maybe if you had to drive to the NYSE in an NYSE-provided vehicle (that could track your behavior to judge how much money you were likely to spend) in order to buy shares from the NYSE who sat on the other side of every trade in addition to running the market.
> They are also prepared to seek a requirement that Google share more information with advertisers and give them more control over where their ads appear.
Seems like the DOJ is angling that Chrome should be spun off as an advertising platform of some kind.
ehm... jokes aside. I think a more reasonable way is to setup a foundation, composed of biggest players in tech, also companies like Google, Meta, Microsoft, Mozilla Foundation, Linux Foundation, Apple and EFF. The foundation should steer the further development of Chrome. In that way Chrome will be owned by community just like e.g. Linux Kernel or standards like C++ lang spec.
If Chrome would be bought by a private entity, that entity would probably start milking the current user base straight away. Expect adds in bookmarks bar, more address bar spyware (e.g. sending all phrases to the cloud) and paid extensions web store.
The most used and advanced browser that we have today must stay open source. It is more than a program, it is part of global internet infrastructure. We should not destroy it by a foolish political decision.
A consortium of various tech companies, plus non-profits? Instead of it being in one corporate hand. One can dream of the EFF and Mozilla plus a bunch of other stakeholders owning it.
I think the point is to stop adding more features. The web is feature complete, everything Google is adding is just stuff to make them more money through ads and lock in.
There’s an argument to be made that a high pace of new feature additions effectively functions as a moat that ensures that new competitive web engines cannot be developed as a result of not being able to ever catch up.
So the market/consumers decided (due to whatever reasons) that they don't want to use Mozilla's browser. Lets reward them for that failure by giving them control over someone else's browser?
If the pool they're looking at is "talented people" looking to run a company, it'll be someone who's currently the CEO of 7 other companies and successfully driven each of them into the ground for short term profits, unfortunately.
Mozilla exist standalone, even if technically it depends on Googles money. They do the same, push Chrome to a separate Company, independent of Google, but getting money from who ever pays them the most for integrations and search engine-placments. It would need some additional constraints, but could position it on a more fair situation where there is not this harmful lock-in to google-services, but instead support for all services & companies equally.
Just reducing the direct influence from one company would already be beneficial for the market. And maybe Mozilla and other browser will get something out of it too.
Probably MicroFocus, they seem to buy everything and not do anything with it.
There is no potential buyers for Chrome that are serious and trustworthy. Chrome is not a profit center. Mozilla can't make money on Firefox and seems to be losing interest in the project, probably for the same reason. There's no reason to think that anyone would buy Chrome, keep it freely available and make money on the product.
Worst case is that some one will buy it, slap ads on it or turn it into a subscription service. Still I don't see that being enough to fund the Chromium/Blink development. While I do think the adding of features to the web could do with a slowdown, we're talking Internet Explorer 6 levels of stagnation if Chrome is sold of to the wrong entity.
The argument that something is untouchable because it can't continue as a going concern without continuing user-hostile behaviours is unconvincing. It's not our fault Google chose this business model, just as it's not a coincidence Google made it difficult to break up and just distinct enough to be (supposedly, formerly) legally sound.
It’s an open source project that can be forked - especially when google is not behind it to protect the market share, with users that don’t expect to pay and microsoft also involved with their own version.
Currently it’s probably worth bilingual because Google owns it. I expect it to rapidly lose value should that change.
Firefox gets along... with money from Google. And I think a good portion of the $$ that Google pays Mozilla, in their mind, isn't to be the default search engine... it's to keep competition alive in order to avoid this situation.
> Chrome can’t exist as a standalone business without being even more consumer hostile
Why not? Chrome's team isn't as prone to distracting itself as Mozilla. But there is still a lot of ancillary nonsense they get up to that wouldn't be necessary if it weren't in Google. Starting, for example, with not giving a fuck about how their product impacts ad sales.
Because you need to pay something like 1,000 engineers - and not just any engineers, but engineers used to Alphabet's SF Bay Area salaries and equity packages.
This quickly adds up to billions of dollars. You have the option to massively downsize, likely sacrificing product quality; or to sell something very valuable to a business-mined buyer. And there's really nothing a browser vendor can sell that isn't bad news for the users.
About the best option would be for Chrome to be spun off and then for Google to keep paying them for being the default search engine.
Presumably Google, Bing etc. would still be bidding to be the default search engine?
Google is paying Apple $20 billion per year just for that so financing 1000 engineers (which is probably excessive, a few hundred + contributions from other companies using Chromium might be enough) shouldn't be too hard.
Yes technically, but the appeal process will likely drag on for years and the outcome isn't clear (now that Republicans are in charge they might just drop it before that happens anyway).
That seems to work for Mozilla. It would be nice to see other revenue models, but that exists and having the most used browser as a search client should pay at least as good as whatever deal Mozilla and Apple get.
Sort of? Mozilla is not doing well. Further, the only reason Google is paying Mozilla is to keep a notional third-party competitor alive; search traffic from a sub-3% browser is not worth that much. If the Chrome deal goes through, there's really no business reason for Google to keep paying them.
> you need to pay something like 1,000 engineers - and not just any engineers, but engineers used to Alphabet's SF Bay Area salaries and equity packages
Why? I'm arguing you can downsize the portfolio without sacrificing product quality for most users. That should let one get by with fewer engineers and/or ones in lower-cost areas.
Mozilla has ~700 employees just to keep an ailing browser on life support. Brave has ~250 employees, but they're building largely on Google's core engine, so they're getting a ton of engineering for free.
Browsers are massive. I'm pretty sure the complexity is exceeding the complexity of the Linux kernel. You can pull off heroics with fewer people, but if you want to build a company that brings in revenue, has a security team and a privacy team... all of sudden, it's a pretty big enterprise.
Given the current political climate, this is incredibly unlikely. Reference the situation with TikTok and the "Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act" which became US law earlier this year.
It doesn’t matter if no one buys it, or if it doesn’t even continue to exist as a standalone business. That’s preferable.
The important part is ending the egregious conflict of interest where an advertising behemoth controls access to the internet.
Ideal result is that Chrome ceases to exist and Chromium continues as an independent open source project controlled by a nonprofit. Even if Google is one of the contributors, so long as they don’t control the product they will exert a lot less control over the web and how people access it.
What would that even mean? Anyone can fork Chromium and do whatever they want including establishing a non-profit foundation to finance its development.
Should Google be banned from forking an open source project and/or just developing any type of browser at all?
The only reason Google "controls" Chromium is that they are spending the most money/development time on it.
Yes, Google can be forced to sign a consent decree saying it will not engage in browser building or distribution for a set length of time and the DOJ can set up offices inside of Google and staff them with DOJ employees who make sure Google follows that agreement.
It seems like you have no familiarity with any of this. If so, happy to help educate you. If I'm wrong and you're just trolling, it was hard to tell.
I desperately wish they'd give me the option to pay for Firefox Sync. I would, genuinely, pay for that every month. I get a massive amount of value from being able to throw tabs from my laptop to my phone and vice versa, and have everything synchronized, in a way I trust.
Arguably out of the big 4 (Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon) Google gave the most back to humanity: Android, Chromium, Kubernetes, Google Office suite, the Go programming language, Tensor Flow, Alpha Fold (and Google DeepMind), donating to Linux, etc. All these are things everyone has access to precisely because Google is such a big player and can afford to lose money on innovation that fails. What did Microsoft and Apple gave us? Yet Google gets targeted while Microsoft, Apple and Amazon are left alone. Why is that?
1. Microsoft gets left alone - Really? You may want to ask the closest adult near you about this.
2. Amazon - The government has looked into Amazon multiple times. It’s hard to see where Amazon does anything to illegally use its monopoly (they don’t use their shopping advantage to cross sell AWS in any way, or Vice versa). Amazon is genuinely not a bad monopoly (they have pushed down prices), but they are a terrible monopsony (basically destroying retailers that are not Chinese knockoffs), but monopsony protection laws are weak to non-existent world wide.
3. Apple - Apple is not a monopoly in nearly anything, which makes antitrust action against them very difficult. The EU has better laws around this, which has allowed them to force Apple to do the right thing in many cases (USB-C, opening up the App Store, although Apple complies in the worst ways possible, even though compliance has often been beneficial for them, like in the case of USB-C connectivity), but US laws are far too rigid to be able to really do much with them, as long as they are not monopolies.
> It’s hard to see where Amazon does anything to illegally use its monopoly
Amazon literally uses the marketplace data to determine which products to make Amazon Basic versions of.
I think the better argument of "Google isn't getting targeted" is that literally all of those companies have been sued in the past (and will be in the future and probably currently have cases being worked against them).
> Amazon literally uses the marketplace data to determine which products to make Amazon Basic versions of.
So does BestBuy, Kroger, WalMart, drug manufacturers, and literally ever single other industry where there are generics, private brands, and copycat products/services of all types.
Which is a problem there as well. The way I see it, just empirically, is that the marketplace needs separation from an actor on said marketplace, on a strict no-collusion basis. It’s two naturally opposing roles with a conflict of interest (by design - it can be a force for good). Every time I see this inbreeding, sure enough there’s corruption, laziness, perverse incentives, and at the end of it, high prices and poor consumer experience.
It can be train operators and rail, fiber owners and ISPs, insurance companies and pharma, or an App Store and apps, social media and ad delivery.
US antitrust law doesn’t cover this, but I believe in EU there’s stricter pro-competition enforcement (I don’t know enough to pinpoint the exact laws behind, but some markets really work here. Writing this post from a 10GBit symmetric residential line for €24/mo). At least you don’t see as much of this kind of false choice and nefarious market makers.
You're explaining it ok, it's just not a workable idea. You're talking about taking away a fundamental aspect of economics, which if even if it were possible would be a huge blow to efficiency of markets. It's like saying you don't like that people die at different ages so you're going to legally mandate everyone gets to live for 1000 years. It can't be done, and the ramifications if you could are earth shattering.
First, it's not possible because to do this you'd have to outlaw sales analytics. You'd have to ban companies from making decision on what to sell and what to price things at based on what is happening in the market. Even if you pass a law that says that, you'll never be able to prove a company did or didn't make a decision based on sales data. Imagine going to a grocery store in November in the USA and seeing 18,000 cases of sardines but no breadcrumbs or stuffing boxes because the ordering guy isn't allowed to know what is selling well and what is selling poorly. That's insanity.
Second, market efficiency. The cornerstone of the economics of trade is that goods should be produced by the most efficient producer and sold by the most efficient seller to a market where they get a good return. By blocking companies from doing this, you're saying pricing should be made blindly, and you can't change based on what other actors do, what the market does, what customer want, because that would be "unfair". In the 90s I was part of a small business that built and sold PCs. Dell's volume ability absolutely destroyed the small-business PC maker industry, including mine. That wasn't unfair, that's economics.
Huh? I am talking here about EU regulations that are in effect today, and giving examples of healthy markets. This isn’t some hypothetical thing, they do it different than (post-Reagan) US but it’s not like the US has no rules, so free market vs equal-outcome-tyranny is a completely false dichotomy here.
On topic, it seems like the US is focused on competitors ie preventing horizontal collusion and preferential agreements. At least after reading up a bit, that’s where EU is different, which considers vertical ones equally, such as supplier and distributors. In any case, that’s where antitrust seems to fall apart in practice – that depending on how you slice and dice the “market segments” you can craft a narrative where it’s impossible to prove even obvious perverse markets like health insurance - pharma.
> Microsoft gets left alone - Really? You may want to ask the closest adult near you about this.
I've got some bad news for you: 2001 was 23 years ago. It's possible to not just be a legal adult (18) but also old enough to drink (21) and still not have been born yet when that was going down.
* Microsoft did just fight off a huge government battle on Activision. I believe they lost a battle on Teams bundling. Last week the FTC announced they were looking into Azure.
* Apple, their store & mobile browser has been a topic of monopoly discussions for years.
* Amazon wasn't allowed to buy Roomba just this past year. They've had tons of inquires over the past decade.
Who are the "they" in your question? Clinton's administration that started the enforcement action against Microsoft, or Bush' administration that ultimately presided over the conclusion of the case?
Similar thing will happen now: none of these actions will be pursued nor enforced by the new government.
> hey don’t use their shopping advantage to cross sell AWS in any way, or Vice versa
Isn't AWS directly sponsoring Amazon by essentially letting them run the biggest online retailer for free, which other retailers can't? And Amazon in itself is a terrible monopoly because it has unfair access to all user purchase data, while also selling their own amazon products on their platform.
AWS charges Amazon to use their servers as it does any other big business. If your department can’t be profitable taking into account your AWS bill, questions will be asked.
It happened to something related to an internal game studio (???)
When I was there, our department’s use of the internal system for creating sandbox accounts (Isengard) was charged against our profit and loss.
If you are a big enough customer, you can get rates similar to what AWS charges Amazon.
I'm not sure that misunderestimating the amount of time that's passed invalidates the point that it was pretty widely known before apparently being lost to the mists of time.
By that logic, people should still be at the mercy of AT&T because Bell Labs gave so much back to humanity. Not to mention that multiple items on your list were bought by Google.
The world's biggest ad and surveillance company having control over the most widely used browser on the planet is a recipe for disaster. That's the only thing that matters in this discussion.
> By that logic, people should still be at the mercy of AT&T because Bell Labs gave so much back to humanity.
So your argument is that Bell Labs should have never happened since it's the result of a monopoly?
My argument is that Monopolies are trade offs. In a world without monopolies you have very little innovation in peace time. Monopolies are bad for consumers but the trade off is that they can afford to innovate and push the world forward. It's not as black and white as people like to think.
Getting rid of all monopolies and having a market in perfect competition will make Bell Labs impossible and all the innovation that came from there. A ballance is required. "There are no solutions only tradeoffs" - TS
Edit: Clarify my question about Bell Labs happening.
In case I wasn't clear enough, my argument is this:
> The world's biggest ad and surveillance company having control over the most widely used browser on the planet is a recipe for disaster. That's the only thing that matters in this discussion.
And no, I don't buy that innovation can only happen through monopolies with a savior complex. That absurd amount of money those monopolies acquired through questionable means? It's going to lawyers, lobbyists, investors, and C-suites. It's being used to stifle innovation and uphold the status quo. Without the breakup of AT&T, the internet as we know it might not have even existed.
You have made the argument that monopolies are trade-offs only to the extent of muddying the waters about the matter. You have not demonstrated that the innovation benefit of monopolies offsets opportunity cost of the monopoly. If you want to make that case, you need to evidence it. You have not evidenced your claim that there is less innovation in low-monopoly situations than in high-monopoly situations. That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
(I agree with your earlier sentiment that Google has a history of giving out more than other companies you listed.)
> That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
Fair enough :) That's one way to think about it ^^ If this would have been a debate I would agree. But I don't have time for a debate so I threw an idea out there and expected people to do their own research and figure out if my idea has any teeth or not.
I initially encountered the idea in Zero to One by Peter Thiel. Feel free to dismiss it or research it further. I do not have time to provide statistical evidence :)
>so I threw an idea out there and expected people to do their own research and figure out if my idea has any teeth or not.
So noise? Ideas like this are exceptionally cheap and you didn't present any convincing arguments for doing any research. This is like _the_ problem with online discussions.
Noise for you maybe. I don't expect people with limited time to give me a scientific paper level details regarding every idea they have. If their idea is interesting I spend time researching it myself.
> So your argument is that Bell Labs should have never happened? It was a bad thing for humanity?
Yes! next question please. ;)
No in all seriousness. that's not what they said.
> My argument is that Monopolies are trade offs. In a world without monopolies you have very little innovation in peace time. Monopolies are bad for consumers but the trade off is that they can afford to innovate and push the world forward. It's not as black and white as people like to think.
I find this argument funny, as it states: "not as black and white as people think" to then paint a black and white argument...
Yes monopolies are not always bad. But one can't be serious and not acknowledge that for the most part they stifle innovation.
Also, I would say some of humanities best inventions and innovations where before monopolies. But hey, that's just my "black and white" view on history ;)
I fail to see how my argument was black and white when I say there's a trade off. Can you please tell me how my argument is black and white? Maybe we have different understanding of what a black and white argument means.
I never said that a person cannot appreciate the contribution while agreeing with the decision to break it apart. The idea was if monopolies are bad an Bell Labs is the product of a monopoly in an ideal world AT&T would never be a monopoly and Bell Labs would never existed, right? That's the first part of my question. The 2nd part was kinda asking if that's the case and Bell Labs should not have existed, why is that? Was it bad or good for humanity? If it was good then why should a good thing not exist and create so many crazy innovations. Did AT&T monopoly created so much bad in the world that it offsets the good Bell Labs generated?
This was my idea but answering 10 comments I left this short and indeed oversimplified version of my thoughts. I have since edited the comment to be clearer.
Why? What disaster? There can be no disaster when the product is free and there are many free alternatives with equal capability except for small conveniences. If you don't like Chrome because Google is being shady you can immediately seitch at zero cost. There is no disaster.
The disaster of global surveillance? Just because you don't pay with money doesn't mean the product is free. Expecting users beyond the HN crowd to have an informed opinion about the browser war is not realistic, especially given the substantial amount of dollars that Alphabet spent to market "Chrome == Internet". Which antitrust laws are supposed to prevent.
Yeah, that kind of sucks. I liked a sibling suggestion that splitting off YouTube would make more sense because at least it could be a self-sustaining product.
Thing is Google lost money for many years in YouTube. Nowadays I think it's profitable but it seems unfair to ask a company to take loses for a decade or more and then force to sell it when it's making profit. If we set that precedent nobody will take risks with the next YouTube like company that loses money initially.
So you believe that companies ought to get immunity from antitrust regulation simply because they made investments in the hopes that they'd be able to profit from their ability to dominate the competition?
Regardless, if the shareholders receiving stock in the a spun off company, so is not like their investment disappears. No one (should) care about some personified "Google" as if a particular corporate structure that happened to exist was actually a human being.
Also, Youtube prints an absurd amount of money, it isn't like this is some sort of change that is happening just at the moment that it finally making some money.
Curious, do run into any network/IO performance issues? Last time I checked, networking is horrible, I mean `npm install ` would time out when it works on the host without issues, and this was a well known issue. Haven't touched WSL for a while because of this.
The average joe can't do shit with open source. The average coder cannot sell the fruits of the progession, because of open source. And most individuals can't do anything with open source, since they lack funding. Who profit from open source? Big companies.
Don't you get it? The whole initiative is a trojan horse.
Chromium was in the wild for five years running on WebKit, and the Blink engine they use today is an evolution of that codebase, not a rewrite. Of course, Apple did not create WebKit from scratch, it was based on KHTML/KJS, but it was WebKit that Google Chrome was built on top of, not the previous project.
Microsoft: VSCode, Typescript, ONNX/ONNXRuntime (TensorFlow is pretty much dead), Github, npm (they bought it but so did Google with Android - m$ still paying repo/packages hosting bill)
Also worth to mention Meta:
Pytorch, LLama, React, React Native, Segment-Anything
Google didn’t “give back” any of those things to humanity. Those are all products that Google is selling to you in exchange for your privacy so that they can make a profit. Don’t mistake Google for some benevolent entity that deserves special treatment for being “good”.
If you want to go that path, then Apple also “gave” iPhones to humanity, as well as AirPods, iCloud, iTunes, and is a primary reason that mouse-based graphical interfaces exist. Microsoft “gave” humanity the largest home operating system, the dot net programming languages, Microsoft Office, Xbox, and more. Should we give them all a “get out of jail free” card for their good deeds?
Even if you assume the situations are comparable and equitable, which most commenters are focusing on, there is still a problem:
There is no reason to expect the DOJ to pursue antitrust suits against all potentially relevant companies at the same time for analogous reasons. These are complex, labor-intensive cases that frequently play off precedent established by other earlier cases. The idea that Google is being "targeted," by implication unfairly so, is out of line with how complex antitrust law can be, and the simple fact that such cases are typically serialized rather than prosecuted in bulk.
> Google gave the most back to humanity: Android, Chromium, Kubernetes, Google Office suite, the Go programming language, Tensor Flow, Alpha Fold (and Google DeepMind), donating to Linux, etc.
Most of them are tools for making money for Google. Some others are on similar level that others are contributing to open source and the world. I mean you get Microsoft Office for free too, and even with more services than Google. And, most of Googles contributions started out one or two decades ago, but are just now moving into more harmful directions. Which is a relevant point with Google. The company today, is not the same it was 10-15 years ago when they were still heavily gaining goodwill.
> Yet Google gets targeted while Microsoft, Apple and Amazon are left alone.
They are also getting targeted all the time. Microsoft had a long, deep anti-trust-process around two decades ago, which still sees some restriction imposed onto them. Apple and Amazon do see some targeting, but more outside the USA or by competitors, which means there is less demand for official influence on them, at the moment. Additionally, their specific influence is simply not as big and harmful as Google has it on some parts.
Microsoft has the most monopoly. Bundle azure with office365, bundle teams with office365, bundle windows with azure, pushing bing, edge, OneDrive on windows. Why no one investigate them? Because they stay under off consumer minds, and has good lobby
As if Google didn't take anything from us. Google makes money selling your attention and brainpower to the highest bidder. Hands down. They are the biggest entity in the attention economy and their real customers are advertisers.
Google has two billion lines of code that determine the course of your daily life. It processes incredibly sensitive information, like every interaction you have with another person in a digital medium, and has a rootkit on basically every phone that collects "anonymous usage data" that is processed in a completely opaque manner and is subject to information "requests" from illiberal and sometimes even totalitarian governments, and a few open source contributions aren't going to change that.
Open source at Google is driven by engineers and contributors, not by executives or strategy. It's a fig leaf over one of the world's largest, most valuable, and well-guarded code bases that absolutely will not be made open.
None of them are good players for humanity. "Don't be evil" is long gone.
They don't pay taxes, pollute, give means to manipulate billions of humans, concentrate wealth in a few hands.
They all give with ulterior motives, never from the goodness of their heart.
While I don’t disagree with your argument, it is bad form to claim that companies like these don’t pay massive amounts of taxes, specifically payroll taxes. They do and it’s a huge amount.
I' m European. Apple got charged by the European Union for $14.4 billions of unpaid taxes between 2019 and 2021.
Back of the mapkin they employ 22k people in EU (data Apple), average salary $80k (Apple), taxes at 30% per employee (my own understanding). Thats $550M. So their payroll taxes is about 15% of their tax package. If you have any contradictory data, I would love it, but your point is moot for 95% of the world outside California.
Do you mean the tax dispute for the years 2004 to 2014, or is there another one for 2019 to 2021? One thing about this is that the Irish government made a deal with Apple and various courts have ruled in favour and against Apple in this matter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple's_EU_tax_dispute
No it’s not. You have to give up your civil right to a jury trial via agreeing to a contract with Google. Just because something costs zero dollars doesn’t mean it’s free.
You also give up your identity; you cannot make a Google account from a VPN without providing a non-voip mobile number. Privacy has value too.
I'm sorry, I should have used more explicit terms: "free of monetary charge" is what I meant. Nothing can be free in this world. For some people not paying money for something but getting their privacy invaded is an acceptable tradeoff.
Google should allow this free tier where your privacy is invaded and monetized or a paid tier where your privacy is intact but you pay money for that.
All the permissively licensed works posted on the Internet, especially those in the public domain, speaks otherwise.
It's up to you to decide whether you want to trade your legal rights to "free of monetary charge" services, but please don't paint all the other "free with no strings attached" things with the same brush.
Quite the opposite. No government should be able to overrule your own consensual interactions by threatening to use violence against you to countermand your own choices.
I must have missed this and I’m genuinely curious how this works.
How does it work with, say, a SaaS company? Does every employee and contractor retain a perpetual license to each line of code they wrote? If that company ever looks to sell, what intellectual property does the company actually have?
Technically, there are two kinds of copyright - I'll translate loosely from the Czech law, I'm not sure about the exact English equivalent. There are "person" rights and "property" rights. You can never rescind your "person rights". But that only means that no one can claim you're not the original author. That's about it. You can transfer "property rights" via licensing as you wish. The license can be exclusive and you can give a right to further transfer or sublicense the work to the licensee.
Also, each work is copyrighted by default. You're not allowed to use something that you just found on the internet if you're not granted a license.
"Monopoly" is a technical definition, not another way of saying "has a lot of money."
Google has been proved to be a monopoly precisely BECAUSE it gives away so much. By entrenching themselves with free products that outcompete just about anyone, they get access to a massive firehose of data that they then monetize with no competition in sight
Long story short: Giving away free stuff to cripple competition who don't have scale is anti-competitive (see: Microsoft IE case)
I meant OSS or free products. Windows / Office / Visual Studio are for profit products? GitHub was free before Microsoft bought it, they just made the private repos free as well. But arguably GitHub was better before.
But I do agree C#, VS Code and TypeScript are nice Microsoft OSS/Free gifts to the world.
One of the key issues. Google has not given me a phone OS. They have taken away my ability to chose a viable competitor, one that does not run on selling my data.
You're missing my point. In a perfect competition environment all profits go to 0. This is great for customers horrible for innovation. Innovation happens when there's enough capital to take huge risks and lose. Google had a ton of innovation attempts that flopped really hard and lost ton of money. Without the extra capital none of the attempts would have happened.
I'm not sure I agree with you on innovation. One of the largest drivers of innovation, historically, has been war and desperation. In those circumstances, you generally can't afford to lose. So the idea of innovation needing the comfort of a soft landing doesn't really seem to fit reality.
I agree that war pushes innovation the most, but I assume you don't want humanity to be in constant state of war. So how do you get innovation in peace time? I would argue if you're in a very competitive market and you're margins are 1-2% you cannot afford to go for innovation. Bell Labs which arguably is one of the most innovative places in peace time was the result of the AT&T monopoly. Most innovation comes out of monopolies or excess capital in peace time.
Personally, I think you have it backwards, hard competition breeds innovation. Large companies don't have to innovate so they don't. They coast, sometimes going many decades between major innovations.
For example, Google doesn't have to change Chrome in any meaningful way to maintain (or even grow) it's market share. So, they don't. Browsers haven't changed much in a good decade and a half. That money is much better spent on marketing.
> In a perfect competition environment all profits go to 0.
Competition drives prices down to the lowest sustainable point but not to zero. If one company drives prices below a sustainable (profitable) point that’s market failure because it starves the competition. It’s the thing Google did and the reason we have anti-trust law.
Google created a situation where they had no competition. Necessity being the mother of invention suggests that they innovate less in the absence of competition. Monopolies are poison to innovation.
We're not in a perfect competition environment ; profits are not to 0. There is an incentive for innovation.
Monopolies stifle innovation just the same. Imagine having an "amazon basics" product as your competitor. Or competing with something that embeds well in a closed off ecosystem like Apple's or Google's when 90% of your target demographic will value that integration.
I agree regards Google (just beware I'm a massive Google fanboy) but I think that Microsoft do deserve at least a little bit of credit.
Microsoft gave us (counting only OSS and things they effectively gave away):
1. Microsoft Basic, the first language of a large number of developers in the 35+ age group. This was effectively given away which is part of why it was so popular (it was a small, fixed-price fee instead of the per-unit licensing)
2. TypeScript
3. C# and the CLR
4. Visual Studio Code
5. Since 2010 they've made large contributions to Open Source.
Commercially they've also been strong competition to enterprise players like Oracle and IBM and of course have done a huge amount for gaming.
Apple are narcissists, they're all take take take. They do, however, provide very strong competition which pushes other players to improve.
I agree. Love C#, VS Code and TypeScript. Microsoft changed a bit lately. But there's a lot of history with Microsoft and the recent CoPilot ripping off OSS code and blocking C# support in VS Code are still mudding the waters.
* The Apple I arguably changed the course of computer history. [0]
* The Laserwriter and the Mac inspired desktop publishing -- the Mac was the first computers with a font library.[1]
* The iPod literally changed culture. [2]
* The iTunes Store made piracy less desirable changed the music industry forever. It also led the way with digital video streaming -- while Netflix was still mailing out DVDs. [3]
And iPhone? Changed the world. [4] People have a hard time remembering pre-iPhone days. Samsung literally copied the iPhone. A judge in South Korea, in Samsung's home jurisdiction even ruled that Samsung copied iPhone. Android would still be a failed camera operating system if it were for iPhone leading the way.
* Kubernetes -- we lived just fine without it.
* Chromium? Who cares. My life isn't any different with or without it.
* Google Office? Aa cloud-based productivity suite? Nothing groundbreaking there, another competitor could have (and have) built the same thing.
* Go programming language? Apple gave us Swift and Objective C -- languages that are used for software running on over a billion devices. Go is a niche language. If Go didn't exist, humanity wouldn't notice.
We can have a difference of opinion on the relative merit of these details, but the idea that Google gave the _most_ to humanity is absolute nonsense. Amazon for example, empowered many small sellers around the world -- giving them access to a logistics network that would be impossible for a small business to recreate. Instead of selling on Main Street, sellers now can sell to literally any street in the world. I'm not the biggest fan an Amazon, however that being said, their contribution to humanity is enormous, especially in logistics. It has also changed publishing forever in ways that provide a significant benefit to independent authors -- many of whom have made careers out of self-publishing because of Amazon.
I'm not a fan of Microsoft, but their contribution to humanity is undeniable. Excel is probably the most important piece of software ever written. I'm sure others can expand on Microsoft's contributions to humanity.
By the way, I'm not saying all of these companies are "good" or altruistic, I'm only rating them on "contribution to humanity."
You're comparing Golang and Kubernetes to products that happen to have big market share. There are loads of spreadsheet apps and smartphones out there. They are replaceable. The iPhone definitely advanced the field, but it wasn't a sacrifice on Apple's part. They made boatloads of money from it. How much money did Google make from selling Golang and K8s? A large negative sum. Yet those techs have contributed enormously to economic efficiency.
All of these companies provide values, that's why they are so successful.
In particular (as opposed to Google), Apple is giving us products where the user isn't just an entity that you try to get as much data from as you can.
Without Apple we'd be stuck with tiny initiative such as GrapheneOS on mobile, limited to a small subset of apps and phones.
With AI, Apple is also being privacy conscious, i think they are doing interesting work with their private cloud compute setup.
But does it mean that Apple and Google should get a free pass? Hell no!
I'm very confused. Chrome is just Chromium with Google's own Telemetry. Chromium is open and maintained primarily by Google.
Sure, there's a userbase, but you need a business model to take advantage of it in the first place because the benefit was the Telemetry (Google's) and Google's Ecosystem.
Also, the article specifically mentions Chrome, NOT Chromium (which again, is open), so what incentive would Google have to maintaining the project without their own version of it? Would they be bared from starting a new one? Would someone else take over Chromium? Who would have the resources to do such a thing other than say Microsoft who currently uses a Chromium browser?
Why not just go for the jugular and separate Adsense from the rest of Alphabet? It's the main driving force in all their dark patterns for all other platforms (Youtube, Android, Chrome, Search...)
> Also, the article specifically mentions Chrome, NOT Chromium (which again, is open), so what incentive would Google have to maintaining the project without their own version of it? Would they be bared from starting a new one?
I wonder similarly if they are only selling the brand and the existing installation base. I do not see what is stopping them from just creating a chrome clone called Manganese and continuing.
It would be an interesting experiment though to see if the google version will regain the same market share or if chrome will maintain its current market share under the new stewardship.
They wouldn't need to do that, they would just need to sell the third party ads part they can still run their own first party ads on their own domains.
Forcing Google to do that would just hurt other websites income, not Google.
> Why not just go for the jugular and separate Adsense from the rest of Alphabet? It's the main driving force in all their dark patterns for all other platforms (Youtube, Android, Chrome, Search...)
Because this is not the case about display advertising, but the one about search engines and search advertising.
But also, if you think the display ads business is the jugular, I don't think you really understand their business. Have a look at the financials. The entire display ads business is <10% of their business, and shrinking in both absolute and relative terms.
I'm worried about what happens to the Chrome extension store. If Google sells Chrome, then does that also mean the Chrome store? I guess it would have to. So not only does someone need to buy Chrome, they also have to operate the Chrome store too. I'm not sure this is going to work out well.
Interesting idea. I'm not against forcing Google to choose either all the user platforms they run or Adsense. If they sold off Google Drive, Suite, YouTube, Google Play, etc they might improve faster. At the very least it would drive more alternatives. That seems so unlikely though.
Google kills all their other projects often enough that I don't think they are contributing to many spaces anymore so giving the technical assets to other companies would be interesting.
As much as I dislike thinking it, out of the realistic possibilities for who could buy it, Microsoft is probably among the more preferable. Their primary income isn't from advertising, at least. Most other big players would be even more likely to continue with Google's direction of killing ad blockers. MS, to their credit, has never shown interest in doing that.
So we'd end up with even less competition? As flawed as Edge is it still somewhat new/innovative/different features that Chrome doesn't because MS has to try and compete with Google.
A lot of discussion in this thread is pointing out that chromium is a thing and that it would be hard for a company to properly fund a web browser without the backing of a tech giant whose more direct revenue stream is elsewhere. I think this showcases a larger issue with the web as it stands today. Why has building a browser for the "open web" become such a complex piece of software that it requires the graces of a tech giant to even keep pace? Can nothing be done to the web to lower the barrier to entry such that an independent group (a la OpenBSD or similar) can maintain their own? Right now it seems this is only possible if you accept that you'll only be able to build on top of chromium.
I know the focus by the DOJ here seems to be more on search and less on the technical control that Google has over the web experience through implementation complexity, however I can only hope that by turning off the flow of free cash more "alternative" browsers are given some space to catch up. Things like manifest V3 show that Google is no stranger to tightening the leash if the innovation of web technologies impact their bottom line, I'd like to have a web where this type of control isn't possible.
That was the goal, not an accident. The length of the standard itself is comparable to medium-sized serious project kloc count.
They driven these numbers up to ensure that no one except them and their leashed pets could repeat it.
And here we are, you can have ten internet-enabled apps with texts, images and videos, basically the same functionality, but you can only copy nine of them.
Can nothing be done to the web to lower the barrier to entry such that an independent group (a la OpenBSD or similar) can maintain their own?
Sure, we can have the original web with text and the occasional embedded photo. But if you want what amounts to a full blown operating system, with a rock solid sandbox, plus an extremely performant virtual machine, that’s going to be a high bar.
> Can nothing be done to the web to lower the barrier to entry such that an independent group (a la OpenBSD or similar) can maintain their own?
Of course it can and it is done: Linux Foundation Europe runs Servo, GNOME Foundation runs WebKitGTK and Epiphany, Ladybird Browser Initiative runs Ladybird.
Despite existing since 2012, and getting funding from several companies, Servo development has been intermittent. It's now pretty usable, but it's not a success story in keeping pace with the tech giants.
> A lot of discussion in this thread is pointing out that chromium is a thing and that it would be hard for a company to properly fund a web browser without the backing of a tech giant whose more direct revenue stream is elsewhere.
This is not an issue though is it?
Like all those magazine subscriptions make their money off ads. The idea that a business can't survive on its own is fine, no?
If it's a singular tech giant then that's a problem but if chrome had contracts with like a dozen+ companies then it sounds really sustainable.
> Like all those magazine subscriptions make their money off ads. The idea that a business can't survive on its own is fine, no?
This is not quite the same, if a single magazine starts to become more ads than decent content it is not insurmountable for another company to start a competitor. It's not ad income itself that is bad, it's that in the case of a web browser it is insurmountable for a company to start up a competitor from scratch. It wasn't always the case, but because google has dumped so much engineering in to chrome they've effectively pulled up the ladder behind them.
So I understand trying to break up monopolistic companies to provide better competition in the market which is generally better for the consumer as a whole. This strategy of saying Chrome should be sold off seems strange to me because unlike other monopolies Google's monopoly with Chrome is fundamentally different.
Since Chrome at its core is the open source chromium browser engine the ability for your competition to leverage what you do is already there. The dynamic here is fundamentally different than many other monopolies of the past due to this fact. It must be asked are people gravitating toward Chrome because they feel there is no other viable option to offer a similar experience or is it because they choose that because it feels to them to be the best choice to make in a free market.
In the context of Google's ad business the fact that chrome is open source has little bearing. Chrome is both massively popular and also a loss leader designed to further entrench Google's ad monopoly. If Chrome were broken off then a competitor in the ads space like Meta could purchase the search traffic instead which would force Google's ad business to be more competitive.
Why would either of those two be allowed to buy Chrome. Meta is just as much an ad business and quasi-monopoly as Google is. Microsoft has already been in legal trouble over browsers and is actively trying to recreate Google ad empire.
Governments are kinda stupid in these cases, but I think Google would be able to argue, if forced to sell, that neither of those two companies would improve the market situation.
Sell it to Opera, except they're Chinese now. Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner, the co-founder of Opera and CEO of Vivaldi, should buy it, that would be a hilarious outcome.
If Apple, Mozilla, and a stand alone Chrome sell search traffic at the fair market price and Google pays the highest price (because they have the best monetization) we're back where we started.
Microsoft wouldn't have a the kind of vertically integrated monopoly where they control both the internet properties and the browser used to access them.
People gravitate towards Chrome in part because of Google’s heavy marketing of it. Whenever I sign into Gmail in Safari I get a pop up about a “better experience” awaiting me.
That is true in a valid point but install Windows sometimes and see how much it pushes you toward the edge browser. Which is chromium at its core but the experience it provides is not as good as Chrome even with all of Chrome's downsides.
So while I don't have the specific answer I think there is a much bigger question here of is it free market choice that is gravitated everyone here or is it monopolistic pressure that is squeezed out the competition. Microsoft is no small player in this space they're just the suckier player as they lost their crown with Internet explorer when they effectively owned the market too.
You're correct Microsoft ruined their own reputation with Internet explorer but does that mean when a company utterly fails with one of their products to the point that a competitor can come in and dominate the marketplace we should somehow automatically reward the one who failed.
If it's really anti-competitive practices then I would agree but if it's just market forces then we should not reward those who've already mismanage their ability and their dominant market position to lose out in such a short period of time.
Google also turns every link tap in their iOS apps into an opportunity to upsell Chrome for iOS when it should just open the link with the user’s default browser.
I’m not surprised, though. They’re not exactly on the most solid ground with them preventing any engines other than their own WebKit for third-party browsers or even apps.
How else is Google supposed to "integrate" within iOS?
Safari and Messages etcetera link to within the closed Apple ecosystem - just like Windows. It can be between difficult to impossible to send an email or create a calendar item unless you use the iOS apps.
I'm definitely no Google fanboi but every answer being "Google are arseholes" feels dishonest.
The Chromium developer team absolutely kick arse and being open source is a true gift. Mozilla is badly failing to compete. Microsoft failed to compete with their first Edge rewrite, and now ironicalky MS "competes" using Chromium open source.
And why did Chromium have to split from WebKit? As an outsider it just looked like "because Apple don't want to play nice".
The story is always simplified to Google greedy arseholes. A typical response: you can never ever ever satisfy open source proponents... The stereotype that every open source user greedily wants more.
iOS has an option to set your default browser and mail client, and it works fine. There is nothing even vaguely difficult about sending an email or creating a calendar item without using the Apple apps. Google is in fact being an asshole by prompting every time if you want to ignore the default app and use chrome in the hopes that you'll finally accidentally hit it.
> There is nothing even vaguely difficult about sending an email [] without using the Apple apps.
While offline, I can attach a photo to an email with the Apple mail app and Q it to send later. However Gmail pauses or fails if slow connection. I've always assumed (perhaps unfairly) that was due to an iOS API issue - but perhaps the Gmail app is buggy?
> or creating a calendar item without using the Apple apps.
Not sure what I'm doing wrong then - I don't even have the Apple calendar app installed and somehow I hit problems.
I guess I default to blaming Apple - over the last year I have found my iPhone to be unreasonably buggy. Or I could be emanating anti-tech radiation.
> While offline, I can attach a photo to an email with the Apple mail app and Q it to send later. However Gmail pauses or fails if slow connection. I've always assumed (perhaps unfairly) that was due to an iOS API issue - but perhaps the Gmail app is buggy?
This is most likely a Gmail issue. How apps behave on an unreliable connection is entirely up to the developer.
> How else is Google supposed to "integrate" within iOS?
Like everybody else. If the user wants Chrome on iOS, they can install it and set it as their default browser. To link to other Google apps, Google can use Universal Links[0] to directly open Calendar, Sheets, etc or open the corresponding App Store page if they haven’t been installed yet.
Google forked WebKit because they wanted to take it in a direction that was fundamentally incompatible with the direction Apple wanted to go: Google wanted more core functionality (process management, etc) to be written as part of the browser (likely to serve as a moat) while Apple wanted all that to live within the engine itself so third party devs could take advantage of it without having to fork a whole browser (just drop WebKit into your app and go).
Yes - working code that everybody uses now including a major competitor - Microsoft. Where's the alternative timeline with a WebKit browser on Windows? Oh, Apple killed v5.1.7 Safari on Windows in 2010 - their choice. Windows Safari had its issues but it was a great browser when it was released. Virtually nobody has chosen to base their browser on WebKit - and they choose not to for good reasons. Similarly why nobody forked Gecko - they didn't want that code.
> without having to fork a whole browser (just drop WebKit into your app and go).
But Apple failed at that goal - saying that WebKit works better as an engine is just not what happened in reality. WebKit was certainly a worse choice for open source engine on Windows back when Windows really mattered. Nobody used it.
> likely to serve as a moat
That is just making shit up. If Google wanted a moat then they could have built a moat. History has shown that the multiprocess design of Chromium was no moat. You might argue there are other moats - and that is what the DOJ seems to be arguing.
WebKit never took off on Windows, true, but saying that it was a failure is a stretch. It’s served Mac and iOS devs well in the past 22 years, both as a full-featured embeddable multiprocess webview and as the core of alternative browsers (OmniWeb in the past, Orion today).
The reason I believe that moving functionality out of the engine into the browser serves as a moat is because it gives Google more power to exert its will on Chromium forks.
If Blink were fully independent, third parties wouldn’t be beholden to forking Chrome; they could just drop Blink into their bespoke UI. Google’s decisions in Chrome would be entirely irrelevant to these third party devs. As things are now, forking Chrome is for practical purposes required if you want to use Blink, and diverging from mainline presents a risk — the more divergent forks become, the more effort and developers it takes to keep up with patches. Few organizations have the kind of manpower required to move at the Chrome team's pace while also maintaining their own large sets of patches.
This means that every decision in Chrome that forks disagree with adds more maintanence overhead, limiting the bulk of changes to those that are skin deep.
Google may not have intended this effect from the outset but it’s certainly realized the leverage it gives them in the time since.
Chrome is definitely a better experience than Safari, and not by a little bit. In many ways Safari is the worst browser out there right now. Most of its market share comes from the fact that Apple still forces Safari to be used on iOS no matter what browser you think you have installed. I think the DOJ should go after Apple harder on that than they are on Google, because nobody is forcing anyone to use Chrome the same way Apple is forcing their users to use Safari.
Desktop Safari’s ~15% market share, which exceeds Firefox’s ~7%, suggests otherwise. Mac users can freely switch and yet many don’t.
There are likely several reasons for this but I think the two biggest ones are its differences in philosophy: first, that browsers should be just one utility among many on a desktop OS and not try to set itself apart and second, to actively combat the internet’s hostilities on behalf of the user.
Chrome will never do either. It tries to be a distinct brand and platform instead of meshing with your desktop nicely and it’s not going to do anything that will negatively impact Google’s many ad businesses.
I agree that the DOJ should enforce browser choice in iOS much like the EU has but in this scenario it feels besides the point. No matter how better or worse anyone might think Safari is it’s my right to choose which browser I access a site with, and I’d rather not be harassed to change.
Apple forces you to use Safari because it's the least capable mobile browser, which pushes developers to develop iOS apps to use the device APIs that other browsers allow but Safari won't implement - this drives people to the 30% cash grab Apple gets from their app store, instead of using web applications that are possible on other browsers on other platforms. It's awful what Apple is doing with forcing Safari on iOS. To make it worse, there are plenty of Apple-only proprietary things about Safari that make buying their hardware a necessity to debug problems that only appear on Safari. Web developers hate Safari, it's now known as "the new IE" because it's so bad.
Like I said, I agree with you on all that. I develop mobile web sites, I’m very familiar with all this. I still choose to use Safari on my Mac, it should be my choice to make.
I find Safari to be a fantastic product overall both on desktop and mobile but I have stuck to Chrome to keep my options open in future in case I want to use non-Apple hardware
But I don't see how that equates to a monopoly. They certainly have the ability to direct their development of their product in the way that they want. Since the core foundation of their product is open and available to every other competing browser they could implement better privacy protections while still leveraging all of the other benefits of Chrome.
If the edge browser was so much better and much better privacy wise or the kiwi browser or any of the others the internet can move fairly quickly from one choice to another when that choice is better. For all the downsides that Chrome has I don't see anything that fits the term better for my use case. I'm also guessing that most other users also haven't found anything "better"
If Chrome was not owned by an ad company, the owners of chrome would push for instead of against privacy protections (see: firefox, safari).
The browser monopoly, which Chrome sells at a loss, enables the ad company. This is the problem.
Chromium does not get features Chrome does not need from Google. So anything against ads does not get upstreamed to Chromium.
Chrome also is a major browser vendor, whereas kiwibrowser and opera are not, which means the standards boards listen to them more. If those seats were not owned by an ad company, standards would likely be different.
> What exactly do things like WebUSB and Web Bluetooth contribute to Google’s ad business?
Google keeps proposing specifications like Web USB, Web Bluetooth, Web MIDI, Web Serial, etc., and both Mozilla and Apple keep shooting them down on privacy and security grounds. Meanwhile Google ignores the problems and builds them into Chrome anyway, and guess what happens? They start getting used to fingerprint and track people.
Who knows, maybe it’s just a coincidence that all of these technologies that advertisers can use to fingerprint and track people keep making their way into the browser owned by one of the world’s largest ad companies.
How would you use WebUSB or Web Bluetooth for device fingerprinting?
HID, mass storage devices etc. are required to be filtered by implementations, and why would I grant a random news or social media site access to my MiniDisc player, Arduino board, Bluetooth thermometer/hygrometer etc. when it asks for it?
The prompts are pretty scary/disruptive, and I've never seen any website actually try (unlike for e.g. web push notifications, which are fairly private but can be super annoying).
> why would I grant a random news or social media site access to my MiniDisc player, Arduino board, Bluetooth thermometer/hygrometer etc. when it asks for it?
Part of the problem is that a vast number of users neither understand nor care about these prompts. They just click to make them go away.
There’s a few long discussions on the unsuitability of these specifications in the Mozilla standards positions repo:
Or things like Web USB start getting used to provide useful features without needing to install whole apps, like mouse/keyboard dongle pairing, phone OS flashing, etc.
As far as fingerprinting/tracking goes, I have never seen a random site prompt for these features, only apps where it makes sense.
The monopoly the DoJ is trying to break up isn't Chrome, it's Search. From TFA:
> Antitrust enforcers want the judge to order Google to sell off Chrome — the most widely used browser worldwide — because it represents a key access point through which many people use its search engine, said the people.
>Since the core foundation of their product is open and available to every other competing browser they could implement better privacy protections while still leveraging all of the other benefits of Chrome.
With what funding? Chrome loses money. Edge loses money. Safari loses money. Firefox loses Google's money. Brave loses VC money.
Without some endless source of money, funding you for an ulterior motive, you can't compete with them. Which is why:
>For all the downsides that Chrome has I don't see anything that fits the term better for my use case.
The anti-competitive practices ensure there can't be effective competition.
Monopolies aren't bad per se. Monopolies are bad because they allow you to abuse the market and consumers. If you can be similarly abusive without a full monopoly that's equally bad.
Isn't it even worse than that? Didn't they make changes via Manifest v3, which will not allow me to follow the FBI's advisory about using ad blockers, to make sure their ad revenue does not decline?
I do realize you can still use uBlock, but my understanding is that updates will be slow rolled, correct? Doesn't this open the window to malicious people to serve me mal-ads?
No. They're not doing those changes because regulators like the DOJ[0] threatened them with anti-trust action if they did. That's the same DOJ that's now asking for Chrome to be divested.
Uh. That was not my understanding of that situation.
Blocking third party cookies this way still leaves Google’s tools which people voluntarily install with access to data that now nobody else has access to.
The whole reason for "privacy sandbox" is to still do user tracking, but do it in an anonymous way that they hope legislators won't go after. It's Google seeing the writing on the wall that legislation will soon ban third-party cookie tracking and fingerprinting and the like, so they need to be proactive and protect the ad tracking business.
A better name for it would have been something like "anonymous user tracking / data collection", but "privacy sandbox" is probably a good marketing term to fuzz what it's really doing. To a normal user it makes it sounds like Google is doing something good and protecting them, while it's really just "please opt in to our new more anonymized tracking technology while still allowing us to track you".
The root problem here is that users don't want any of these tracking alternatives. All of the other browsers have said "no thanks" to any of the alternatives, and already moved forward with blocking third-party cookies (the main vector for tracking). Chrome hasn't moved forward with this because their ability to still track you thanks you being logged into Google means that disadvantaging every ad provider paints a massive target on their backs for antitrust law (even more so than they already have). Hence their attempt to fix it by creating new vectors of tracking so they can get the privacy "win" of blocking third-party cookies.
Blocking third-party cookies is a big privacy win. Getting untargeted ads is not something 99.9% of people care about and getting rid of actual real spying opportunities is great.
We all know this is going to push tracking server side but at least that makes it expensive and dangerous for companies that run it. Cloud costs for the hardware, and having to run third party code on your servers, built by known creeps.
I genuinely have no idea what "missing features" or incompatibilities keep people on Chrome compared to the benefits of uBlock just plain working better on Firefox.
Bookmarks, passwords, payment information, recent tabs, extensions... all synced with your Google account in Chrome. Firefox can't sync to your Google account. All that information is synced across the entire Google account system, to your Android phone, other Chrome browser instances and so on. Yes I know you could export your data from Google and pull it into Firefox's sync system, but that's a hurdle.
Why would you want all this stuff synced? The only thing I want out of that is passwords, but 1Password works just fine for that. In fact, I don't trust a browser to store my passwords securely.
Would any answer satisfy you? People want bookmarks synced because they use the same bookmarks on different devices. Many trust Google to transmit their passwords securely and store their email securely. Why not store their passwords securely?
You can either use Mozilla accounts to do that for free and as easy as it is with Google accounts. Or if you are a power user and would like an adventure, you can selfhost sync and accounts servers yourself. Does chrome provide that ability?
Right, I was confused by this comment. I actually don't think it's that hard to switch, tools to import your stuff across browsers have existed for a long time. It might be that Firefox isn't particularly polished on this front but I don't think it's outside the realm of achievable and I don't think the difficulty of switching is by any means a deal breaker.
However, recently there was a healthy thread about the massive trackers found in mobile apps[1] which wouldn't be a problem with PWAs since they live in the same sandbox as the browser (meaning no exfiltrating all the shit) but yet can one-click launch from the normal app mechanisms and (AFAIK) can be the subject of Intent handlers just like apps
uBlock Origin Lite works perfectly fine for me on Chrome.
Maybe there's some 0.01% of ads that would get blocked in the Firefox version that aren't in Chrome. But I don't see any regular users switching because they're noticing ads not getting blocked now.
One difference between lite and the full version is CNAME cloaking protection. The enforcement of Manifest V3 in Chrome opens up a gap in the ecosystem where analytics and advertising providers will increasingly use CNAME cloaking, since it can't be blocked from the world's most popular browser. And this is the world in which using Firefox with its support for Manifest V2 suddenly becomes quite a bit more attractive.
If CNAME cloaking takes off in a big way, then yes at that point I agree I could see people moving to Firefox. But for now that's not happening.
Also, if that actually led significant numbers of people to leave Chrome, isn't that where we'd see "Manifest V3.1" or whatever that allows matching against CNAMEs?
Chrome is pretty central to Google's strategy. If we assume that people who want to block ads will (by switching to Firefox when necessary), then it's in Google's interests for Chrome to support ad blocking. If they're not going to get ad revenue anyways, they'd still rather it be happening on Chrome.
Also see a recent comment by a member of the Chrome team on why Manifest V3 was for performance reasons, not to cripple adblocking (I don't know if it's true, but it seems worth considering): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41815861
It works fine for now. As soon as Manifest V2 is officially gone you will certainly see an increase in ads. What ad company wouldn't take advantage of more limited ad blocking capabilities in the most popular web browser?
The only reason I keep a Chrome installation is for when I want seemless in-page translation. Firefox just added a version of this feature but, for some reason, didn't include the most important language for nerds: Japanese.
I use FF full-time but have to use Chromium for WebEx and Teams calls to avoid massive jank.
I bought Ozlo Sleep buds recently. Really cool hardware that does exactly what they say they do. However, the device I read with at night runs Android 11 which is too old for their app (requires Android 12). I can configure and update the sleep buds through a browser with WebUSB...but only with Chrome.
In what way does uBlock work better on Firefox? I don't see any ads in Chrome. Ad block is more important to me than any browse. I use Kiwi on Android instead of Chrome, and would switch immediately on desktop if I saw ads.
I disagree. We get things in Chrome that is not in the consumer's interest simply because Google wants to get more data from its users and display more ads.
If Chrome were to be separated from the Ad business, it would be beneficial for privacy.
> It must be asked are people gravitating toward Chrome because
....
It's because Chrome used to be shoved down everyone's throat up until few years ago. Once stable base of users was made (by force and deception) the market took momentum
I do think you're rewriting history a bit here. Of course a Google advertised to their product but people didn't move to Chrome simply because of the advertisements. Chrome took hold because literally every other choice sucked and sucked hard. When you only have sucky choices you have to deal with them and they made something massively better than anything else at the time. Companies with buckets of money like Microsoft didn't innovate in this space and even when they saw what Google was doing with Chrome their ability to compete with it was laughable. Even when they finally switch to their edge browser because the Internet explorer name was so tainted with bad experiences they still suck in this space. Even with Bing and the billions of dollars they can throw at it they still suck in this space.
I think it's a combination of both. There was absolutely a period where Chrome was faster, and Chrome still has a better security design. But Google also pushed Chrome incredibly hard, including bundling it with other software as a checked-by-default box, and used all the tactics to get it made the default browser and make it hard to switch, and advertised it on Google services for free, and made some features of Google products require it.
To fight the Microsoft monopoly. And we are lucky that browsers (Firefox&Chrome&SafariMobile) won on the back of DOJ action against IE. We could all be using Windows applications and a few lucky rich have a Compaq iPaq phones: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=compaq+ipaq&iar=images&iax=images
Without Chrome would we have got Safari on the iPhone? I also remember WAP (uggggh) pages before HTML. In the alternative universe DOJ is fighting their 10th lost cause against Microsoft (who keeps getting away with their evil ways).
One of the hidden costs of Chrome on society is it supports radically ramping up the complexity of web specifications in order to extend the moat around it. It is one of the most extraordinary software engineering projects ever done, with multiple components each of which are game changers. (ANGLE, v8 and libwebrtc immediately come to mind). It is no accident Rust spun out of an effort to compete with this complexity explosion without having infinite financial resources.
Personally I would prioritize spinning off Android though, and partly pragmatically since at least that would have a clear revenue stream. Maybe the Chrome App Store will experience a sudden surge in importance. A degoogled Chrome OS could almost start to look better than the direction Windows is going in.
Chrome makes enormous sums of money through ads. Also, these companies pay fortunes for default settings like search engines and other backroom deals. Someone could buy Chrome and ask Microsoft for 30% of Bing's search revenue to be the default search engine and Microsoft would agree.
This makes sense, but it is made even more nonsensical by the fact that the DOJ is also separately saying traffic aquisition deals are anticompetitive as well.
Google makes money from ads by having control of Chrome. I don't see how that would continue if it's spun out. I'm not aware of any ads in Chrome itself (but I've been using FF for years, so what do I know). And Chrome controlling the default search engine is exactly why they want it spun out from Google, so if the result was simply that it makes money by defaulting to a different search engine, that would be an absurd, pointless result.
Imagine if Google isn't allowed to pay Chrome Inc for traffic acquisition so Chrome changes the default search engine to Bing and now Bing is a monopoly because 90% of browsers default to Bing.
This is good guess unfortunately. However, there are second order effects as we've seen with X that will drive people to Firefox so this could end up being a good thing.
> They are also prepared to seek a requirement that Google share more information with advertisers and give them more control over where their ads appear.
I don't think Google are fully clean in all this by any stretch, but for all the people saying that Google is just privacy-violating data junkies, did you catch that aspect of the DOJ statement?? The DOJ wants the advertisers to have MORE information (about us). That makes me sick.
I definitely glossed over this line. This line of thinking makes me worried that someone in the upcoming government will get the "good" idea of trying to ban adblockers.
My primary worry here is that this would hurt the open web - whether or not splitting out Chrome into a separate business would be good for consumers in and of itself.
It's true that Google adds a lot of things to Chrome or their own benefit or even the potential detriment of others like Mozilla.
That being said, they also do a tremendous amount of work to push the state of the web forward and, most importantly, they release Chromium 100% free and open source. That's not to mention the other incredibly impactful free projects that have stemmed from it like V8/NodeJS, Electron, Puppeteer, Chrome Devtools, etc.
On the flip side, it's been argued that Google's control over web standards is too strong and they can essentially strong-arm other browser vendors into implementing whatever they want. It's also been argued that Google pushes too fast and makes it impossible for other vendors to keep up, leading people to use Chrome if they want the latest + greatest web features.
But when we look at the other browser vendors, I personally feel like Google seems like a much better alternative. Mozilla feels like a dried up husk of the company it apparently once was and Apple pushes a buggy, closed-source, locked-down browser which has been purposely held back from critical features in the past (I think they did that to try to keep users off web apps and keep them paying Apple huge app store fees).
----
Anyway, I certainly have very mixed feelings on this one. My main hope is that this doesn't spell the beginning of the end for Chromium because I truly believe it's a piece of software that has provided immense public benefit.
Google has to be dismantled in parts one way or another - too much control over search and Youtube to the point where they are able to enforce Chrome standards that prevent adblocks from working.
The trademarks, the team, and the infrastructure. Mozilla spun out of Netscape exactly like that, with the trademarks, part of the team and part of the infra.
The monetization is up to the spinoff or acquirer to figure out.
But as many have said repeatedly here, people use Chrome BECAUSE it has Google's integrations. They choose to use Chrome because of Google. So why would anyone buy Chrome that is devoid of anything Google?
Further more, why would Google pay money to Chrome's buyer if they can simply spin up another browser used open source Chromium (which Google maintains), and start marketing that?
Basically, I think you're making more stuff up to substitute for the lack of argument in the previous stuff you've made up, which isn't related to the main point.
So, no, of course you guessed wrong again in your 1-4
How would you provide an argument with such a level of comprehension? There are 3 identical questions you ignored, if you can't comprehend the third one you could fall back to the first two, which are phrased a bit simpler.
But that's enough of your trolling for me, goodbye
Thinking this through, it’s hard to even imagine how such a selloff and transfer could happen.
Chrome, which is built downstream from the open-source Chromium, is a behemoth project with development spanning nearly every domain — rendering, GPU ops, WASM, AI, js engines, web standards, and much more.
Sure, Google doesn’t always prioritize developments that don’t align with its ad monopoly. Still, Chrome remains a polished & widely used product.
As far as I can see, it would be best to establish a "Chromium Foundation," akin to the Linux Foundation, with emphasis on advancing web standards, unencumbered by corporate priorities.
That said, the more entrenched monopoly Google maintains lies in its "Search Experience," integrated with complementary products like Maps, YouTube, Android, and others.
I don't see any other viable alternative that serves the needs of most users across the board.
Bing doesn’t come close, and while private search engines cater to power users, the average web user rarely switches search engines.
For many, Google Search has become the de facto entry point to the internet and their view of the Web.
The main problem is that, thanks to Chrome's massive market share, Google is in a position where they can effectively dictate the future of the Web as a platform.
We've already seen a few instances of this: Manifest v3 and FLoC/Privacy Sandbox, for example, were met with widespread opposition, but eventually they made their way into Chrome; WEI, on the other hand, was withdrawn due to backlash, but make no mistake, it will come back at some point.
The current state of Web standards can be summed up as: whatever Chrome does is the standard. The other browsers have to follow along, either because their modest market share doesn't afford them the luxury to be incompatible with Chrome, or because they're based on Chromium, so they hardly have a choice. The only exception is Apple, but let's be honest, they only do so because of their own business interests.
Ideally, Chrome/Chromium should be spun off as an independent non-profit foundation set up to act in the public interest. Obviously there would be trade-offs: a slower development cycle, new features taking longer to be shipped, etc. But in my opinion that's far preferrable to having Google continue to exert this level of control over the Web.
Unfortunately, the current administration has two months left in its term, so it's not going to happen.
With those rulings come conditions. Corporations under a judgement under monopoly practices can't do anything they want wily-nily. AT&T, for example, was forbidden from selling computers in 1956.
You could make all these arguments against Android, no? Perhaps moreso while they maintain the garden wall.
It isn't wrong to point out how harmful to society monopolies are, and to identify them, but the development of Chrome, Android, etc, do also present genuine value to anybody who wants that code.
Without Google making money from the search/targeting/advertising model, who is paying for Chrome, Firefox and Google Search? Who is paying for Android after third party marketplaces take off?
I'm not making any recommendations here except that I think we need to be careful what we wish for. Tools we rely on might evaporate.
Why is this a better solution than forcing chrome to have no defaults and select an option just like IE.
Chrome google pulled the entire browser market forward by investing in chrome.
A stand alone chrome is just going to make money by charging by default status or be bought by someone else trying to create push their defaults.
+ No platform ever must include an Internet Brower by default. User must install one some way without anyone being suggested or hinted by platform. Platform can inform user an internet browser can be installed but not saying how. Platform owner can set a default anytime
+ No Internet Browser ever must default, or suggest or hint a search engine. The platform owner can always pick one himself.
Internet Browser is defined as any program with a User Interface which can acquire content from any public network
The devil is inthe defaults.
Edit: I forgot to add how to finance it: Internet browser will now datamine the customer. Customer can pay for a privacy respecting browser, but we all know how that doesn't fly (yet)
Looking at this case and the recent case against SpaceX (which is required to only hire US permanent residents and citizens) for not hiring asylees, makes me think DOJ which has the bandwidth to only work on few very important cases isn't doing a good job overall.
"make" Mozilla buy it, give em a heaping grant from the Library of Congress to keep the open web open, and be the engine behind every browser keeping things fair... sounds good to me!
In this scenario I’d much rather that heaping grant goes to a newly independent Chromium nonprofit org. Browser engine diversity is a good thing and worth trying to preserve.
The conflict of interest between owning search, being a provider of user identity/login, and effectively owning the entire internet ads marketplace, and being a provider of the "user agent" (remember when people thought of that way!?) is immense.
This should have happened years ago.
TBF, I worked in Chrome almost 7 years and I didn't see anything outright nefarious. I don't know how user-hostile decisions (like breaking ad blockers and serving advertisers better) get made, but they do get made, or defaulted into. Trust me, the leadership of Chrome knows exactly how to justify its $300 million+ budget to the rest of Google, revenue numbers and all.
But there's no vendor lock-in from providing the user agent. It only costs a few minutes to switch to a different browser. The problem is other browsers suck, through no fault of Chrome (other than setting the bar high).
Sure that's a colloquial sense, but we're talking about a legal sense here.
The legal/ethical sense is where one party has an actual obligation to multiple other parties whose interests are incompatible. For instance, a lawyer who represents both sides of a dispute has a conflict in interest; they cannot faithfully satisfy their obligations to all their clients.
In your example you cited a few services,
* provide a search engine
* provide login
* run ads business
* provide a web browser
But you haven't explained what the legal/ethical obligations are, and where the conflict arises, e.g., how one company cannot possibly fulfill all of those obligations.
Am I alone in thinking that all the stuff I get for free (in exchange for some amount of targeted advertising) from Google is pretty cool and that these attempts to break up big tech are going to be very bad for consumers and the economy and is just punishing successful companies that produce products that customers want to use. You all can use mosaic/edge if you want to.
You get nice stuff for free, right up until the moment Google decide that they've done enough. Then you get nothing. And the unfair funding and disparity in features means no competitors can ever provide a superior alternative.
And then it might not be for free. It's very tempting to rent-seek when you have a captive user base. That's bad for consumers and bad for the economy.
Focusing on what we get today is myopic and it's not by mistake that Google give them to us.
You are certainly not alone. I’d say you’re in the vast vast majority, just not necessarily on our little corner of the Internet (hackernews), but realistically probably the majority here as well.
Kagi’s argument is simple: Google should give public access to their Search Index so that any company can take advantage of the core machine directly, under some terms of agreement. Like an API.
Selling off Chrome might help, or it might just be the lesser evil/a pawn sacrifice in order to prevent split up of AdSense from Google Search (which is in obvious conflict of interest, as Google's ad business is already under scrutiny under alleged price fixing along with Meta), or of YouTube. Neither Google's acquisition of YouTube nor that of DoubleClick should've been allowed in the first place under any reasonable antitrust enforcement, the purpose of which is to prevent exactly this kind of monopoly.
Again, no idea how Google's supposed monopoly of web browsers is worse for the consumer than Apple's actual monopoly on iPhone browsers (they're all Safari under the hood) and on App stores.
The DOJ is after monopoly in search space (and how Google is using chrome position to strengthen the search monopoly) not the browser space itself (Which is another monopoly but to less extend). People don't look into one product and DOJ are not naive to fall into this trap.
As you might know. DOJ is not able to pass laws for obvious reasons. They do enforce the current laws. Google is free to lobby for such law as they do with other things.
> no idea how Google's supposed monopoly of web browsers is worse for the consumer than Apple's actual monopoly on iPhone browsers (they're all Safari under the hood) and on App stores
For the same reason proprietary cables aren't generally a monopoly problem: Apple hasn't been declared a monopoly. Google has [1].
I was one of the very few voices against using Chrome when it debuted in 2008. How on earth did it make sense, even for the supposedly enlightened programmer/IT tech/gamer/nerd crowd to use a browser made by a company whose business model depends on profiling user data to sell ads? And mind that in 2008 they had already ditched the 'don't be evil' slogan for those naive enough to think that businesses are anything but amoral.
And splitting hairs over Chrome vs Blink (the engine), or switching to the multiple other Blink wrapper browsers that are there, or Chrome's controlled opposition Firefox() makes no sense either; by using any of these you only help maintain Google's hegemony over the web and its standards.
() - they don't get to call themselves a scrappy little privacy crusading rebel when bankrolled by Mozilla whose multi million dollar revenue remains primarily from Google being the default search engine in Firefox, plus their own shenanigans.
Browsers are complicated enough that I don’t see how a company could do the right thing without it being subsidized by a larger business. I feel like this is paving the ground for a Chinese startup to come take its place.
Browsers simply require paying a few hundred very in demand engineers, and that's hardly impossible if Mozilla's been doing it for 20 years as a non-profit. How many software shops out there have 500 engineers? I'm guessing literal hundreds US companies have that today and wouldn't be surprised if someone could build something that scale in a couple years with the proper budget and leadership.
But they won't have to build it, they'll just buy a chunk of Google's team with the Chrome trademarks and the chromium infrastructure and then scale back attempts to outpace the few other engine makers by piling on features only useful to an advertising monopoly and instead focus on the core feature set while raking in big bucks selling search and ad distribution to all the search and ad companies not named Google (and perhaps some even from Google too.)
Mozilla does it by getting Google to pay them a bunch of money, which itself is the subject of anti-trust investigations. That money could dry up if Google is forced to no longer fund Mozilla, and if that happens, they’re screwed. It’ll also mean others likely won’t be able to pay either, which only leaves either buying software (who will pay for a browser?) or ads.
Also note that Mozilla has been doing this a long time, and yet they’re effectively irrelevant in market share now. So they’ve done a terrible job.
Browsers are a specialized technology and skill set that isn’t easily found, nor can you just throw any old SWE at the problem.
What kind of continuity can be expected when the head of the DoJ is a political appointee by the president, and we're getting a new president in 2 months with radically different ideas compared to our current one?
Stuff like this. It feels like there's less of a case here than with Microsoft. In the 90s, Windows nearly became _the_ OS, especially had Apple folded like it nearly did. There really wasn't an alternative in the emerging home computer space as well as the OEM shenanigans among other things. Threatening to pull office for Mac if Apple failed to include IE.
I'm struggling to see how Google is truly behaving monopolistic here. Chrome is available for compile, and is part of other browsers like edge. It's like suggesting linux has a monopoly because almost all web servers run on it.
Chrome can't really be sold unless it'd mean Google is not allowed to maintain a fork of Chromium.
While you can sell access to the existing installations (control over the update url), if Google continues to invest development into a fork (and just drops the information about it on Google frontpage) then that new fork will become defacto Chrome.
EDIT: To clarify, the value of Chrome is not only the userbase, but also its placement in Google products and importantly, the development effort on a scale few can afford.
I think this would be a very unfair action to perform so late in the administration.
Simply because the other two dominant personal computer OS vendors, Microsoft and Apple, will be allowed to maintain their browsers. The less entrenched company and younger company is getting singled out?
If they had more time to build cases against the more entrenched Apple and MS, maybe I'd give them some benefit of the doubt. But we can't assume the next administration's antitrust policy will be consistent or even sensible.
Google says the proposals would harm consumers and developers
Hey Google - I'm both, and your trend over the years of degrading products I used to love with increasingly user-hostile choices has already caused me more harm than I can imagine could arise out of fixing the incentives.
First, it's important to keep a clear view of what's actually for sale here. Chromium is an open source project that already forms the basis of other browsers (most prominently Edge and Brave) and does not include all the weird Google stuff that the the DOJ takes issue with (tracking for ads, special privileges for Google websites, etc.). Chrome is basically a thin layer of shittiness on top of Chromium. That thin layer of shittiness is what's for sale. Its entire value is derived from the fact that it's already dominant. So whoever buys it is effectively buying that user base, but not much of a technical moat to keep them all in.
Who might buy it? I can list them:
- Apple
- Microsoft
That's it. Turns out you can't properly invest in a Browser without conflicts of interest. Apple might buy it to help drive more users toward the App Store. Microsoft might buy it for similar, all-too-familiar reasons. They both have the funds and incentives to want this massive "captive" audience, and the means to exploit it, and I can't think of anybody else who would care enough to bid much.
So what would happen to Google? That's the real question. Seems like the point is not selling anything. The point is to ban Google from having influence over any web browser. I wonder if Judge Mehta will be able to craft an effective order to that end.
We went from hardware we could trust & control and gopher + plain html to hardware that spies on us and have limited control over and fully turing complete software with access to all hardware & DRM. - and no sensible way out.
Maybe not only Google, but everyone needs to rethink the concept of a browser.
I'm reading this on a non-Chrome browser based on Chromium, the project Google gave freely to the world that enables competitors to reach hundreds of millions of users
You can look up details of the lawsuit, but the idea is that Google paying Apple to be the default search engine prevents other search engines from competing with Google search. The default search selection has been shown to be quite important. Anti-trust law is built around the idea of maintaining competition - “monopolies” aren’t inherently illegal.
A much better decision would have been to require them to fund some amount of the various open source competitors so there can be alternatives. Makes as much sense as forcing them to sell a thing that has no market.
"Selling" off chrome is probably not even really possible in any reasonable business way.
Finally! My only concern is that this should have been done much sooner, in particular before the recent anti-trust ruling that basically forced Google's hands to pull the rug under Mozilla.
Google's sole business is to make people look at content they don't want to look at (ads), and I find it deeply problematic that they not only control the operating system and software distribution platform for a large fraction of devices, but now also the browser and by extension the standards of what used to be the open web.
DuckDuckGo has a web browser. Brave has a search engine. Kagi has a web browser.
It seems weird to single Google for this. Wasn't the core issue behind this that these other search engines couldn't compete with Google?
Vivaldi is a much better browser than their Chromium re-skins. Perhaps if their browsers were better people would use them instead of using Chrome. Additionally, perhaps if their search was better than Google, they would use it as well!
Google shoves AI overviews in your face now, and if that sucks, the only reasonable alternative is to use Bing currently. I can't use Brave's search or Mojeek. Brave ignores underscores. Mojeek doesn't even have a business model so it stops anyone from actually using it as a search engine. Yandex is full of results in Russian.
I wish someone would tell me what is this fabled competitor to Google that would benefit from crippling Google because so far I haven't been able to find one. I'd say the only engines better than Google are Wiby and Kiddle, because they focus on a specific niche instead of trying to compete on general web search.
Interesting, when I was taking a look at alternative search engines I tried Mojeek and I never saw a single ad, so I assumed it had no way to make money (just like Wiby).
But where are the ads?
I just searched for "best cars 2024." Not a single ad. "Insurance lawyers," no ads. "Best keyboard," no ads.
Maybe the reason why this happens is because I'm not from the US/EU/UK?
Also when I use a search operator, like "insurance lawyers" surrounded by double quotes, I get a 403 forbidden error because I appear "to be sending automated queries so we can't process your search at this time." To me, that means Mojeek won't let me use it as a search engine.
That's not how this works. They'll sign a consent decree that forbids them from just that for a decade or three and the DOJ will have staff officed in Google campuses monitoring them for the entire time.
Not to be dramatic, but from a security perspective, it feels a little like the scene in Ghost Busters where the EPA inspector orders a Con Ed worker to shut down the containment system.
I'm trying to imagine all the operational implications and this particular suggestion feels hasty.
Buying the browser should come with most of the engineers that actively work on it, or at least the ones with most experience working on it, maybe even give them a tiny part of the shares of whatever company gets to own it, or perhaps with a contract for at least for a couple of years (and then could return to Google or whatever), and if possible include some incentives to make them focus on working on security bugs over new features, which tbh I think there is just too many every year.
> Buying the browser should come with most of the engineers that actively work on it
The 13th Amendment to the US constitution makes the sale of people illegal.
Seriously though - how would this ever work? Google cannot negociate on behalf of their employees or promise they will work somewhere if Google stops employing them.
I don't like it either, but it doesn't seem unprecedented. Companies sell units to each other (complete with staff) all the time.
I'm pretty sure everyone who worked at Universal Studios still worked there after Comcast bought them. I don't recall any staff being included when Google sold Domains to Squarespace, but they very well could have been.
Hell, if you've ever temped in tech, sometimes you wake up and find out you work for a different agency. "Yesterday you worked at Magnit. Today you work at TechPro."
Or it could be something in between - the buyer offers you a new contract and the seller says you'll be laid off if you don't take it.
Companies regularly buy and sell parts of themselves. I think the standard approach would be for Chrome employees to be given golden handcuffs of some sort.
Being owner of even a tiny bit of a brand new company that owns Chrome would be very attractive to engineers already working on Chrome, and it wouldn't be wise for any parent company to piss them off as they know the software better than anyone.
The revenue and profitability of "the Chrome Company" is going to be far less than Google, since Google's rising tide is what lifted that particular boat.
How would the Chrome Company deal with this?
Would they do closed source development going forward, no more free lunch for other browsers or shells using Chrome as an engine?
How much of a hit does this mean for employees salaries? They are currently making Google money, and now they're about to make Microsoft money.
How many would just be flat out laid off due to a lack of revenue, at least in the short term? Would it be a 50% lay off? Into a job market that's already bad?
Firefox makes hundred of millions of dollars in revenue per year. If you assume the same revenue per user and apply it to Chrome's market size (about 30x that of firefox) then you have a top 20(?) tech company in revenue terms.
They will have more money than they know what to do with. But yes, going closed source does seem more likely.
Isn't firefox mostly making its money from Google? They'll be struggling too if Google gets out of the browser business and no longer feels the pressure to sustain them
Yeah, especially if this breaks Chrome Remote Desktop in any way, seems like that capability would be tied into the Google ecosystem... I wonder how long we will have to say goodbye to the simplest remote desktop that has ever existed.
Not sure how this works but if some party purchased chrome, isn't the best business for it to sell advertising back to google? And then sell the default search engine back to google?
Every time these cases come up, I ask the same question: what is this supposed to actually achieve and how will it work?
Who will buy chrome? And how will they make a profit from doing so?
Presumably they will charge google for good to remain the default search engine? But then we will just end up in the same place as now won't we? (Chrome being a popular but not the only browser; Google being the default but not only search engine).
So how will this make the end user or the advertisers (don't forget, they are the consumer here, since they are paying, not the user) richer or happier or whatever else?
People seem stuck on "monopoly bad" and that something has to be done. But are not clear on what the harm is here, or how to prevent that harm. Instead, this is something and something has to be done...
If Google is forced to sell off Chrome why would any company buy it? They wouldn't get the developers that work on Chrome / Chromium. They wouldn't get access to the proprietary Google services that Chrome uses so they would be buying a copy of Chromium. Google could then close the Chromium source code and develop a new closed source browser. The Chrome browser would then slowly die due to lack of development resources, money, and innovation while the new Google browser would quickly gain the market share that was taken away from them.
It is mostly better advertising compared to what Mozilla was pulling of, the initial edge in performance (at least that’s what people said), integration with google for the android users (Firefox was late to this) as well as some issues if garbage websites didn’t test on Firefox.
Regarding features, things I’d miss include PWA, some APIs like WebUSB that let me flash microcontrollers in the browser and I think WebGPU is still only in Firefox nightly.
Most of those things are very specific to what I do. Most people don’t need PWAs. Most people have no need for WebUSB and most applications run on WebGL so that’s mostly an issue for developers.
It’s not like Firefox is bad but I think Google just managed to capture the market and now the userbase doesn’t have a good reason to switch to Firefox (most people don’t think about privacy if it’s not in their face. Very few people will have no passcode on their phone. But even less people will think twice before uploading the images of stranger’s kids to Google Drive because they happened to be in the background when you made a photo of your own kids even though google has no reason to respect your privacy).
Maybe force of habit from years ago when Mozilla was the dominant non-default browser and chrome rolled in and ate their lunch by feeling so much faster.
This will likely lead to a Safari hegemony. Possibly an Edge / Safari duopoly.
Chrome doesn't have a business model to make money. If it gets calved off into its own thing, it'll either need to find another line of business to supplement the cost of building and maintaining a browser, or it'll go bankrupt. Close-to-nobody is willing to pay money for a browser alone, so it's unlikely they'll be able to float a business on selling the browser itself.
This feels like doing something just to do something. I hate the fact that Google owns Chrome just as much as the next person here, but what's going to happen next? Are you going to sell it to ByteDance since they have the biggest offer? Just having half a plan can be worse than having a full plan.
At the same time, it might be just a thread from the DOJ to get Google to play ball on something else, but it's hard to assume competence and forethought for something like this.
They had these alleged resources for almost two decades now. Did they manage to force Apple? Or do they give them two digit billions dollars for Google to be the default search engine on safari?
Weird that this is so doom and gloom, the world's most popular browser decoupled from the ad machine. What's not to love? People champion Firefox and Brave constantly and they're independent browsers.
Brave is not an independent browser, the majority of development comes for free through Chromium, funded by… Google. Firefox by Mozilla Corp survives on loads of cash from… Google.
Whoever’s going to pay for the acquisition and the shit ton of ongoing development costs will have to milk it a lot harder than Google (unless the buyer is something like Microsoft, but what’s the point then). A browser alone, especially the type people here champion, is a bad business.
I think there's an implicit assumption here that Google isn't milking the browser for all it's worth. It isn't as if Google is footing the bill for all those ongoing costs for nothing. I think the argument that Chrome avoids some general badness because Google gets value from a purely strategic interest isn't without merit but even that value is captured eventually. Sure they'll probably sell their default search placement to Google for a pretty penny to sustain development just like Firefox but I consider that a strict improvement over the status quo because Google has less direct power over the new company.
I wonder what the bounds of this would be. Most people still think of Chrome as just a browser, but there is quite a bit of other stuff:
Chrome Web Store
ChromeOS
Chromebook (somewhat intertwined with Android)
Chromecast (discontinued, sort of; succeeded by Google TV Streamer)
Web.dev (not Chrome branded, but probably wouldn't exist if Google didn't start Chrome)
Also, I have to wonder, if breaking off Chrome makes sense to the DOJ, does breaking off Android also make sense? Is that the next piece that they will propose?
albeit n=1 sample size, but looking at firefox should give enough indication to what would become of chrome if it gets detached from google.
it is wishful thinking to assume that maintaining a dominant browser can be done if not through subsidizing through other means. as time has shown repeatedly that nobody wants to pay for this directly, it seems like any new ownership would resort to things that would ultimately ruin the browser for everyone.
maybe that is the goal all along, but it is hard to debate whether that is going to be a net positive.
Maybe this will lead to Chromium finally getting proper vertical tabs which Google clearly otherwise block due to it eating up horizontal real estate that would otherwise be used for ads.
It feels odd to me that this was the first proposal from the DOJ, considering that the case initially seemed quite focused on the advertising side of Google's business:
I don’t really understand how this would work and the article doesn’t really give me enough detail to know. But for me, Google abandoning their plans to disable third party cookies tells me everything I need to know: their ad business calls the shots and an ad company having monopoly over the browser market is an unequivocally bad thing.
I just have no idea how we get from here to there. And let’s be real, with Trump re-elected the chance of the DOJ following through with this is very low.
Antimonopoly action is good for the market, but let's be honest nobody will make a better chrome, at best they will inject ads or turn it to a walled garden. It will be a bad thing in the end for us web developers , and we will lose the last open platform.
Why is this considered a good move anyway? The obvious way to split google is to separate the buy side from the sell side of ads market
Right now a healthy web ecosystem is Google's existential hedge, against all the closed platforms of the world coming to devour the web and Google's business.
Getting rid of Google as a patron for the web would be one of the most harmful damaging & awful things the DOJ could do this world. Strongly opposed, what a godforsaken heinous crime against humanity to consider leaving no one funding the web at scale.
I haven't read the article but I immediately see a few comments about benefitting consumers. I don't think that's the DOJ's charter. I think when you consider all the things that Google is to the government and to the people, this decision makes sense. It's weird that it becomes a discussion about what consumers want.
How exactly does Chrome make money without leveraging the exact antitrust behaviors that are driving this decision?
Do they become like Firefox and make themselves dependent on Google to pay top dollar for the default search engine? Wouldn't that just make them beholden to their original owner anyways?
Taking into account all the noise the EU is making about Internet, privacy, digital laws it's mind-bending that there is no the EU WebBrowser. There is Opera, there are original KHTML/Webkit creators - just use them and make an engine that's not adverts powered.
The DOJ is technically illiterate if they think Google selling Chrome is the solution. If Google was forced to divest itself from Chrome, I see no need for Google to keep Chromium open source.
I have a feeling this will get worse. I can think of these companies which have the resources to take over Chrome - Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle, Apple and Facebook.
I can't see anybody else. They are all monopolies and is gonna screw it up big time for us consumers.
>I can think of these companies which have the resources to take over Chrome...
Exactly, who on Earth could build a competitor? You're describing the problem!
The ability to take stunning losses each year without worry, knowing that it pays dividends in the value to search, ensures competition can't flourish. So it is anti-competitive.
I am definitely not a google fan here. In fact a privacy nerd. But if they sell it off like this, it will hurt consumers more.
We need to make Google play by the rules so that we can set an example for the rest. Not recreate the same problem with another company so that we will have to do the same after a decade all over again.
Cos at that point, nothing will change for the consumers except the brand logo of the company that is doing crazy things.
Sure. In an ideal world. But let's be real here. FB or Microsoft or Amazon will buy it. Do the same shi*y things google were doing (in fact, probably more) and consumers will have even more worse experience. Cos only these companies have the resources.
Not to mention, Its impossible for Chrome to be a standalone business without being even more outrageous to consumers. And they will be even more evil against users. Mark my words.
If we do this like this, we are just replacing the logos of companies that own Chrome. Not the end result. We need to fix the root cause.
Am not saying no one complained about it. FLoC aand many many decisions by google proves they are horrible. But I dont think this will solve the problem. This will make it more worse.
splitting Chrome and Android off from Google will do little to kneecap Google's monopoly power, and will just cause those two projects to fail, with no revenue source. There's no way to make money from Chrome that wouldn't just _suck_ for consumers.
google's monopoly powers come from its ads business, and the data collection network that comes with search and other facilities.
Split crawling/indexing (for search), search itself, and search ads/display ads out into separate businesses. Search has to pay for the index, and others could buy access into the same index. Ads has to pay search for data. etc etc.
Antitrust and antimonopoly would do so much for the economy over in the USA. We need smaller companies, and more of them. Leads to more innovation, better jobs / distributions of wealth.
This is the strangest decision I've ever seen. Chrome isn't the default anywhere except Pixel branded devices (most or all of the Android OEMs have their own browsers) and you need to actually seek out and download Chrome from Google.com. So how will Google selling Chrome lead to less traffic towards Google? It seems the DOJ has cause and effect completely backwards.
IF Google is a monopoly that abuses search and ads, IMO it would make much more sense to split it like this:
- Google Search
- Ads
- Consumer facing everything, so Chrome, Android, Pixel devices, Nest, etc... all together
- YouTube
This kind of split would prevent Google dominating search, abusing their dominance of ads while also enabling their device division to become a proper competitor to Apple and Samsung.
Simply splitting off Chrome is weird, kills Chrome for absolutely no reason, does nothing to help consumers and most importantly doesn't prevent Google from dominated search and ads which is the whole point of the suit in the first place...
It's also strange that the DOJ is letting Apple, MS and Meta off the hook when those businesses clearly engage in anti-competitive practices.
I dont think anyone has pointed this out - Apple and Google have long fought against improvements in mobile browsers. Specifically because they threaten the app store monopoly.
Push notifications in PWA was one of the big big ones. Apple blocked it for years and years.
Spin off, maybe. Make it something more akin to The Linux Foundation where a consortium of vested interests donate time and resources. This should also include public funds as part of civic infrastructure and national defense funding. BTW, Mozilla really should be in such a bin too.
Thats lovely but I think ultimately not going after the root problem. Going after the root problem would be pushing them to divorce the advertising business from the rest.
Honestly, on a consumer/public interest level, this would be a great thing to see. Google would have to make sure their sites work well on all browsers, since they wouldn't maintain Chrome anymore (or have control over its functionality), Chrome wouldn't get an extra marketing, since Google wouldn't be able to market it to people using its products or services, and there would be far less of an incentive to do things like change addon APIs if it's not the parent company losing money from blocked ads.
The two big questions however are:
1. Who would buy it?
Because if it's someone like Microsoft, then we're back to square 1. It's another IE6/Chrome situation, with conflicting interests and unfair marketing efforts. Personally I can't see Apple, Meta or Microsoft buying Chrome though (or being allowed to under anti monopoly laws), so lord knows who'd end up with it. Mozilla or an open foundation of sorts would be the best option, but I somehow doubt it'll be those either
2. How is it going to be funded?
You ideally don't want the Firefox 'solution' where Google basically pays them to exist, but you can't really sell a browser either. So how it could be standalone and remain a viable venture is anyone's guess.
My understanding is that google lets anyone freely use chromium, and chrome is just their flavour of chromium with google services integrated ontop of it. Microsoft took chromium and sprinkled ai-enhanced microsoft flavours on top to make edge, which doesn't look like a monopoly. Presumably, microsoft is able to use windows to push edge, and use edge to push bing. If chrome was sold and had the google integration removed I would switch to a vanilla chromium.
I see some argument for google paying firefox to be the default search engine, but is that worse than firefox not existing at all?
In terms of search engines, I think there's just a lack of good competition. The search engines I'm aware of are:
Google: Just works. The only problem is you need to add "reddit" to most searches to get actual real, human-written non-seospam text, but I doubt that's unique to just google.
Bing: I'm greeted with an uncomfortably flashy layout shift, a page full of american news and some popup about AI. They also cover up and censor for the CCP.
Kagi: Their website is literally broken right now and I can't even see the pricing or other pages. I tried safari, chrome, firefox and edge, the hamburger menu doesn't open. Ultimately though, nobody except the kind of audience on HN is going to pay for it. If I told anyone else about a search engine that costs $16/month to use, I'm sure they'd think i'm joking, irregardless of how good it may be.
Yandex: Good for the reverse image searching, but otherwise probably not good to use.
Most of this article is ads, and it's paywalled so I can only read the first couple sentences, so if this is addressed in it I apologise.
> Ultimately though, nobody except the kind of audience on HN is going to pay for it. If I told anyone else about a search engine that costs $16/month to use, I'm sure they'd think i'm joking, irregardless of how good it may be.
What do you want out of an alternative though - Better search or free? Because you can't have both. Ad-based search being free is exactly the reason it is bad. You get what you pay for?
Chrome and Chrome-related employees of Google worrying about their future compensation under a smaller company.
Don't worry, I'm sure that Chrome / Chromium will be picked up by several big players together, Microsoft is involved via Edge, ... I don't see much changing.
I think that government should limit its interference in the market as much as possible, but Chrome is just so monopoly-oriented from the get go, it's no wonder it will deservedly get split off.
Also, look from the bright side, multiple large players have it in their interest to keep Chrome / Chromium alive, so it will survive the death of Google and it's main ads business.
The sale wouldn't involve Chromium nor the Google employees that work on Chromium or Chrome. But good luck to whoever buys it to keep funding it and acquire the talent to work on it at the speed Google does. Meanwhile, Chromium will go closed source as there's no incentive to keep it open and Google will develop a new closed sourced browser to reclaim its market share.
They could spin it off and then set up the same kind of pay-for-default-search deal that Mozilla has. This might put just enough distance between the two orgs to satisfy the DOJ without actually changing much.
I believe they'll settle on splitting out Youtube - which I believe makes perfect sense and from a rev/valuation perspective, would be a top 20 company.
I thought Trump could be bought off to make this go away like he flipped on the til too forced sale of ban. But this whole thing began under his last administration (sic):
“If Mehta accepts the proposals, they have the potential to reshape the online search market and the burgeoning AI industry. The case was filed under the first Trump administration and continued under President Joe Biden. It marks the most aggressive effort to rein in a technology company since Washington unsuccessfully sought to break up Microsoft Corp. two decades ago.”
The thing is chrome isn’t as sticky or important as the ads marketplace. Google would be wise to let chrome go and hold on to the cash cow that is the ads marketplace where they make most of their money.
Chrome data may be feeding Search Results based on how long people stay at different pages and where they go. Thus removing Chrome may remove a substantial data advantage for search.
I have no idea how this would work either, but I feel like the election makes this more likely to happen, not less, after the amount of rhetoric that Google needs taking down a peg.
Google as Microsoft did years ago will stall until a new administration is in office and reach a settlement for what is effectively a slap on the wrist.
It's very weird to see that same point brought up multiple times in this thread. It makes me worried that this all was cooked up my M$ all along (A company which doesn't have any antitrust litigation being brought against them despite putting ads in their latest operating system)
In 62 days we will have a completely different Department of Justice that is unlikely to follow the current administration’s approach to these issues, so I’m surprised that they’re even bothering.
This has to be the case of the lifetime to anyone at the DOJ that worked on it. Of course they want to see it to the end. And there's no reason to believe that the approach would be different.
Like, who exactly in the new administration is a fan of Google? The Republicans have complained for years about a perceived bias. Trump vowed during the campaign that he'd prosecute Google if he won re-election.
They'll absolutely continue driving that case, if nothing else to use as leverage to try to force Google into making pro-conservative algorithmic changes.
My understanding is that this is based on a fairly novel antitrust theory that only exists inside the Biden administration. I expect the new DOJ to attack Google for entirely different reasons. But you might be right.
A single attempt to separate google and chrome (with all its products) would make the eco-system pointless and swipe away google entirely from the global market.
why not to give Youtube instead tho? (even if the revenue/monetization of every single channel would be heavily impacted)
Android and chrome are necessary for google to live, so Youtube or something else would be better
The point is not to do what is good for Google. The point is to do what is good for users and the market. Separating Chrome from Google's despotic plans such as AMP and blocking ad-blockers so that the browser is independent from their attempts to further control the web would be a good thing.
If it's sold to Opera I'll stop using it. Old Opera was good, and the people who made it are now making Vivaldi. New Opera promotes cryptocurrencies. :-(
Ultimately, how does Chrome itself make any money? As far as I know it doesn't, so the value to Google is ultimately control. The positives include not having to tolerate the whims of Microsoft or Apple or Mozilla or Amazon or beg any of these to implement features or endure microsabotage. The negatives are the temptation to subject everyone else to Google's whims and sabotage competitors.
This is too complicated Chrome couldn't survive on its own without Google. Chrome is fundamentally a way for users to interface with their products. However it would be better to give regulation to Goolge about information handling.
Facepalm. So I guess this weak cookie cutter approach is what we get for the high water mark of opposition before the imminent corporate coup against constitutionally limited government.
Splitting the surveillance giants into different vertical markets makes no sense at all, and this particular division illustrates it well. We might have had a chance if government, two decades ago, had worked towards creating new specific types of regulations that reflected what competition in the digital realm actually requires - for example prohibiting this now widespread bundling of proprietary client software with hosted services, by mandating that hosted services must only be offered through published APIs. Instead we got some token opposition of "selling off" (checks notes) a web browser that's ultimately "open source".
State owned web browser might be a thing. If it's in the interest of many the state should pay for it.
I know what you're thinking, "but that's communism".
Well, you can't clench and fart, how they say.
This of course adds new problems, like backdooring by 3 letter agencies, corruption, abuse by politicians who exclude certain countries by agenda etc
The DOJ are apparently idiots that do not understand tech, let alone anti-trust or monopolies... for instance: I create a useful device that consumers love and use, I sell ads on the device to anyone who will pay, in fact I auction them to the highest bidder... DOJ: you are a monopoly and must sell the device... wtf?
eg Just spent a fair bit of time trying to figure out why links in outlook open in edge even if browser is set to chrome. Microsoft chose to just ignore what browser you select (in their OS). It’s just so blatantly monopolistic behaviour
This is so stupid. I am a fan of the books Privacy is Power and The Tech Coup, both books do a great job arguing for privacy and mitigating the harm of tech giants.
What should be done is having strong privacy laws, requirements for encrypting user data, 100% transparency on how user data is sold (require all buyer and seller information to be public), prohibiting sale of user data in most cases, super fine control privacy and security settings.
Google already does a good job on some of these things, and they and other tech giants need to be fenced in by strong privacy and user rights laws.
Corporations are good at still making profits when they have to follow laws that are inconvenient to them.
If members of the US Congress were prohibited by law from stock trading, that might help clean up the logjams preventing better laws.
How likely will Trump DOJ drop this? Consumers have choice, albeit just a handful of credible options. Nobody is forced to use Chrome (unlike MSFT pushing IE back in the day)
Trumpers in the GOP hate Big Tech too, but their concerns are exclusively about censorship of conservatives (for Google) and domestic manufacturing (for Apple). Market competition is not their framework. Gaetz is in that group, but he's also a moron who doesn't care about policy details.
If he's smarter than I think, then expect him to go after Google Search (the alleged source of anti-conservative bias). But if he's as dumb as I think, expect him to support the Chrome breakup, even though it would not advance his goals and wouldn't be coherent antitrust policy, because it would let him claim a "win".
If the work you're doing isn't valuable then eventually economic reality will hit, the money will run out and the businesses from China that are actually disciplined and productive will take your market share.
I'd like to remind you all.. You were the ones who abandoned Firefox and pushed Chrome and clones ruining Firefox and Mozilla as a whole by market dumbassery in the process.
NOW Microsoft is primed as they have defacto control of the windows chromium branch to go full force Internet Explorer with Edge .. i been seeing the features creep up toward that end. Re-interpretations of 25 year ideas that frankly would have been better then than now.
GOOD WORK TECHIES you just handed the web back to Microsoft. Guess that counts as part of .. some sort of great reset huh?
The EU uses better terms such as "dominant position" which deal with the fact that although a big vendor(s) can fully steer the market and has no meaningful competition while at the same time not "technically" being a monopoly / duopoly etc.
It's not about deserving. It's about the fact that once a company grows so dominant, that they will undoubtedly exploit their position of power. Which is bad for innovation, bad for the consumers and so on.
Find it strange to focus on what that article says when 10 years ago we were using CUDA in a professional context for real world work and AMD didn't have anything competitive at all in the field till very recently.
If the tech was comparable maybe we could entertain the idea but Nvidia was just so absurdly ahead in tooling than AMD that the better dev team won.
Yes, the article focuses on GPP, which is more on the gaming side rather than the compute side. CUDA was clearly ahead and I think AMD still hasn't quite caught up, however, call me old fashioned but I don't like arbitrarily hardware-locked proprietay software frameworks like CUDA (and the same applies for all other nvidia stuff imho in the same category: rtx, dlss, gsync, etc).
For sure the better dev team won there, but on the long run, especially once CUDA becomes the only way to do "professional real world work", I'd like the hardware company to sell the hardware and the software company to sell the software, to avoid a dominant market position that hurts consumers and the industry, which is forced to pay premiums to monopolists.
I'm a bigger fan of the approach that AMD had over the years, their software frameworks are open and hardware agnostic, which resulted in improvements for everyone and not just their customers (e.g. Vulkan which came from Mantle, games with FSR or TressFX run well on all hardware, those with DLSS or Hairworks don't) and enable competition that brings prices down.
This isn't about "deserving". Clearly you still don't understand why monopoly prevention exists.
It's about protecting the customer and the market. Yes, Nvidia deserves their success - of course - but the concentration isn't good for the market. Companies exist to provide services and products to customers and should enjoy no special treatment from us, no matter how successful.
Also, any measure should be not as disruptive as to bankrupt the company or even put it in second place in the market. It's just about leveling the playing field.
Monopolies are bad. Splitting up monopolies is good for the consumer.
That doesn't mean this makes any sense.
How are they going to separate Chrome from Chromium? If they do, what incentive does Google have to keep maintaining Chromium? Can Google make another new fork of Chromium and start yet another browser? Or are they now banned from making browsers? What company has the resources to maintain Chrome's massive codebase? What profit incentive is there in maintaining Chrome without Google's ad business? What about ChromeOS? How are they going to handle the extensions store and ecosystem? How is this going to impact web standards?
There's just a lot of significant unknowns surrounding this.
in general, I find a little bit distasteful that the only way to build a browser is as a loss leading project for the largest advertising company on the planet
No wonder nobody can compete, loss leaders tend to kill competition as they can be maintained without direct business revenue at all.
The same issue plagues domesticated cats, they don’t need to hunt for food since they have an abundance at home so instead without risk of starvation they are free to hunt all birds in the territory for fun.
There are no browsers left except the artificial ecosystem of Safari. Firefox is not a blip on the radar.
So, everything is chrome and chrome is the web standard. Having a single private company in charge of what is and what is not web standards is a little bit scary, as, like the cat, they don’t really need to see and serve the needs of the environment. They are fed at home.
It is the only way to build a browser and push adoption.
The problem is not the lack of direct revenues. It is the lack of marketing budget and control of platforms (Chrome dominates on Android for exactly the same reason Safari does on Apple).
Firefox is a perfectly good browser, but has lost its market share because Google has huge marketing advantage.
There's Mozilla Foundation (where making a browser is not on the road map) and Mozilla Corporation (which makes money by making a browser to finance the foundation).
Mozilla Corporation revenue is about half a billion, most of it coming from Google and only 2% (from what I found) going to the foundation. The foundation gets most of its money from Google as well, but separately, and the foundation's revenue is about 10% of Mozilla Corporation's. So overall over 90% of Mozilla's budget goes to software development and to cost centers that are associated to Mozilla Corporation.
That vast majority. And Firefox is massively profitable, too (with a rising share of income not coming from google, up to 15% the last time I looked).
Software development was 220 out of a total 425 M$ of expenses. General and administrative coming in second at 108 M$.
I don't know exactly what comparable software companies invest, but assuming that the 220 is entirely SWE salaries this seems appropriate overhead to my mind.
good rule of thumb (at least in Europe) is that whatever your developer salaries are, double it to get closer to the actual operational cost.
There's lots of hidden costs, licenses, insurances, computers/servers, email hosting, document editing suites; that's before you get to the big stuff like office space and social contributions. -- then there's managers, HR etc;
This is how it is in Denmark as well. Here the general rule of thumb is that any non-managing employee is 70-100k in expense a year. For some specialist workers it’a a little higher, but that is the general cost when you include sick days, vacation, cost-centers like HR, IT and so on.
Somewhat ironically that metric is often used to cut-costs on the long term budget at an increased expense to hire tempts when a team is understaffed for whatever reason. (I’m not sure if “temp” is the correct word for when a team of nurses is staffed to only function within the law when nobody is on vacation/sick. It’s what Google translate gives me for “vikar”.)
In the US that kind of nurse is specifically known as a "travel nurse" because they work on short term contracts and travel from hospital to hospital but in general describing these sorts of workers as "temps" is accurate.
> loss leaders tend to kill competition as they can be maintained without direct business revenue at all
Ding ding ding. This is a classic monopolist strategy. It poisons the market for any other potential competitors by removing all possibility of profit from the category.
It's kind of eyebrow-raising that more people in this thread don't notice this. And instead just assume of COURSE browsers can't be funded except by a monopolist using it to shore up their surveillance business.
Tangent, but I don't understand this argument at all:
> The same issue plagues domesticated cats, they don’t need to hunt for food since they have an abundance at home so instead without risk of starvation they are free to hunt all birds in the territory for fun.
Please could you help me understand.
- If they don't _need_ to hunt for food, the frequency of hunting birds should go down (even if they still do it for fun sometimes)
- If they don't need to take risks to get food, why would they then take those same risks now for the purpose of entertainment? (That cancels out any meaning of there no longer being any risk in killing birds, so why mention it at all?)
My understanding is that you are implying that cats not having to kill birds out of necessity leading to them now being able to do it for fun is a bad thing. Is that correct? And if so, I don't follow that logic because of my above two points.
The points you raise would make sense if cats were purely logical, unfortunately they're not and a lot of what makes a cat work is instinct.
- Instinctively, cats will hunt.
- Lack of care about food source will make cats outlast prey who have to leave safe areas to find food.
- Lack of care about food availability can (and has been proven to) cause cats to hunt more often, not less- as the "cost" of going for a hunt is basically zero; there's no consequences for failure and even success is met with satisfaction but no "cost".
Essentially, in the wild, cats would be forced to hunt based on hunger, so they'd have to pick and choose what to hunt.
Since they're never hungry, they do it based on fun, and they can "out-starve" their prey who may be hiding but have a higher need to eat and thus: leave their safety.
> in general, I find a little bit distasteful that the only way to build a browser is as a loss leading project for the largest advertising company on the planet
Safari came into the world on a similar timeline so this isn't true
If you look at the code size and feature set of Safari 1.0, it’s really a different universe from 2024. Web browsers have become miniature OSes. They contain multiple 3D rendering stacks (WebGL, WebGPU), hardware-accelerated 2D compositors, multiple languages that JIT optimize into native code (JavaScript, WASM), and require passing test suites with millions of cases. The bar has been raised massively since Safari came out, largely to user’s benefit, and honestly we mostly have Chrome to thank for it.
> A Web browser is on the way to being similar, just a standard tool?
I hope not, because then we get no choices regarding privacy and the most likely dominant player right now cares very much to not give you any privacy.
> the most likely dominant player right now cares very much to not give you any privacy.
I've installed a recent version of Chrome, but likely your point is some of why I've never let that program even execute.
Firefox seems to do well on privacy. Maybe that's why I use it and some of why it gets funded!! And for privacy I do use the proxy Firefox offers.
Some people want privacy. If they begin to sense that Chrome is a real threat to privacy, people will look for alternatives. Then some people, maybe with venture funding will get one of the recent copies of the Chrome source code, modify it, and offer a browser with good privacy, maybe charge $50 for it. Okay, problem solved?
Then hopefully privacy will be as accepted as 120 volt, 60 Hz AC home electrical power. All the homes want that power because all the appliences use it because all the homes use it.
Google makes their money from people arriving for the Google search service, maps, etc. From Web crawling, or whatever is done now, for their search service, Google is also a HUGE user of the Internet. Then it is very much in Google's interest to have the many millions of Web sites, HTTP, HTTPS, TLS (Transport Layer Security), DNS (Domain Name System), HTML, JavaScript, etc. all very standard: Google has to be able to read those millions of Web sites so wants them all to be standard, i.e., without a Tower of Bable problem.
Or all the Web sites (and programmers) follow the standards because all the Web browsers do (and several billion Web users use those browsers); and all the Web browsers do because many millions of Web sites do.
Maybe some of what Google might do but does not is due to some people noticing that situation and being sure to help Firefox.
> If they do, what incentive does Google have to keep maintaining Chromium?
I agree, this is a problem, but there should be a trivial solution: Users of the browser should pay a small amount of "money" for the product they use all day every day. This money should go into paying to maintain it.
Anything else is perpetuating the Trash Web as it's come to be.
The only reason a "web browser" is "free" (as in beer) is because Microsoft in the 90s was (belatedly) very worried about a world where Netscape held a lot of power, and realized making and giving away a slightly better browser would neutralize this upstart. Everything flowed from that one tactical decision by a couple of execs at MS.
I'd argue that a browser should be a part of the OS or be a paid product, but funding it with ad money from under the same corporate umbrella is a gross practice which promotes things like... Google nerfing adblocker plugins, and Google trying to kill cookies in favor of something only they control. (Although on that last one, by some miracle their hand was stayed and they backed down.)
Of course the DOJ can't ban the idea of a browser funded by ad money (and most are) but separating it from the other side of the business which should have zero say in how it's implemented, that's common sense to me.
> The only reason a "web browser" is "free" (as in beer) is because Microsoft in the 90s was (belatedly) very worried about a world where Netscape held a lot of power, and realized making and giving away a slightly better browser would neutralize this upstart. Everything flowed from that one tactical decision by a couple of execs at MS.
There were free as in beer browsers before IE (although many were free for non-commercial use only).
Chromium is a fork (well, a fork of a fork) of a FOSS browser specifically developed to be a FOSS browser for FOSS OSes (primarily Linux).
> Anything else is perpetuating the Trash Web as it's come to be.
unless you ban "Free" products, this is going to keep happening. People seems to think that just because something is "Free" it must therefore cost nothing to make. I mean, downloading Chrome takes 2 minutes max and seems trivial to me? Whats the problem?
People think Youtube should just allow them to watch videos without any ads nor paying any money. Clearly, the consumer is not rational.
Android shares my location more than 14 times a day IIRC. They snoop through every single thing in my life. I can list a bizillion no. Of things. Zero damn given when they are horrible. Let them stop with dark patterns. Then I will start caring.
I pay for all my games, all good services which ainuse. I try and donate to open source project wherever and when I can. But I couldnt care less about FAANG like companies. If they want us to be good to them, let them be good first.
Hell, its just the other day we were talking about Youtube showing ads to paying customers. I really dont care whether a company is big or small. When companies are bad, they just are. That is it. I dont lose sleep over using FreeTube for watching youtube videos for free. Paying will solve issues, yeah right!
> I agree, this is a problem, but there should be a trivial solution: Users of the browser should pay a small amount of "money" for the product they use all day every day.
If getting people to pay for stuff they use were trivial then advertising wouldn't be as big as it is.
Yeah, OP is naive. Nobody ever paid for browsers, even before IE was a thing (well, nobody I know...).
We also don't pay for open TV which is ad supported.
This isn't a single decision that someone madennn it's actually very natural.
We don't pay for most of the web, not only browsers. Indirect monetization is great because making a consumer open his/her wallet takes a lot, no matter the price.
Netscape was sold at Babbages in my local mall. Plenty of people bought it. Just like my father bought Telix and Laplink and earlier communication software.
Not knowing anyone who admits to having done something, doesn't mean that thing never happens.
Netscape was free for non-business users before Internet Explorer existed. Netscape was competing with Mosaic, which was free, what with being a product of the NCSA (hence “Mozilla = Mosaic Killer”).
It's easy to just say "well, a company should charge money for a browser", but a company is free to write their own browser and charge for it right now. Chromium though, is bound by its open-source license and its copyright is owned by thousands of different contributors.
Sure, it's BSD licensed, all future development could be done closed-source. Note that the name "Chromium" would need to stay with the open source side of the project, so it would be more like a closed fork than a re-licencing.
99% sure you could just keep using the name "Chrome", though, and stop releasing code into chromium instead.
So all companies can, right now, make a private fork and start selling it. There's no reason to pay for that right, everyone already has that right.
(I'm, of course, speaking in the context of xp84's suggestion that the browser should cost money. It's a fine idea, but I don't see how it applies here.)
You're essentially paying for control over the currently dominant web browser. You're paying for the existing Chrome installation base and to skip an absolute hell of a hiring process. Because forking Chromium and continuing development on your own needs over 100 of extremely narrowly specialized experts.
If you want your project to remain the currently dominant web browser, you better keep developing APIs people love, you better keep doing it faster than your competition can keep up with implementing them, and you better keep dominating the web standards committees.
Doing this from a position of a Chromium fork is orders of magnitude more difficult than just buying Chrome (and then keeping up pumping money into it at the rate Google has been doing).
> If you want your project to remain the currently dominant web browser, you better keep developing APIs people love, you better keep doing it faster than your competition can keep up with implementing them, and you better keep dominating the web standards committees.
Hey look, an incidental collision with my point!
I'd argue that Google specifically doesn't have nearly the obligation to keep doing these things as long as they are the ones who own Chrome, due to how many other things they can do to put their finger on the scales.
For instance, they could do things like:
- Show overwhelming amounts of ads in everyone's Gmail and say "Switch to Chrome for an ad-light experience."
- Or limit YouTube to 360p in non-Chrome browsers.
- Or only show the sponsored Google Search results (no organic) to non-Chrome browsers (let's be honest though, most non-nerds never click non-sponsored results anyway, and could scarcely find them even in the current Search UI).
- Or limit any new features on Google Workspace to Chrome browsers.
Google can maintain the Chrome near-monopoly using leverage from their other monopolies and near-monopolies. And they can use the Chrome near-monopoly to preserve and expand their marketshare of those other products. A very neat virtuous cycle (for Google). I don't think it promotes the health of free markets or consumer choice.
> Users of the browser should pay a small amount of "money" for the product they use all day every day
How do you do this for something that's a basic necessity at this point? There must be a free browser because so many services depend on their user having access to them through one, and browsers aren't in the category of product where you can provide users a basic browser without features and then selling them a better version. If it's not Chrome that's free, any other free issue would inevitably run into the same issue. If not bankrolled by a company, browsers would need to be government funded
> How do you do this for something that's a basic necessity at this point? ... If not bankrolled by a company, browsers would need to be government funded
You mean like government funded food, housing, health care and other basic necessities?
Exactly, many of which now need to be requested through online portals. I know that the US is oddly a bit backwards in that regard (even though it houses Silicon Valley) but in many other countries in the world they have moved many if not all of these services online.
Making browsers paid would create all sorts of problems for people with lower incomes if not properly considered. Note the last part of the sentence, thank you.
I didn't make my point clear: that something is a necessity typically doesn't have the consequence that "government" has to provide it. In the general case, people are expected to buy food, pay rent, etc. These things are typically not provided for free or exchange for exposing your personal data. Only in exceptional cases does society step in to cover these expenses.
The argument that browsers somehow "need" to be free because they are a necessity makes little sense. Compare that phone or laptop the browser is running on is not provided free of charge either. A working automobile is arguably a necessity in large parts of the US and I don't see anyone handing out cars.
Yeah, I was afraid it would be replied to through a US pov. A lot of these essentials are actually "handed out" or at least subsidized to some degree for people with lower incomes in many countries.
Of course this could also be done for browser but still would leave people vulnerable.
To get back to the US. So you think it is a good idea to add yet another expense to vulnerable incomes in a country where there is much less of a safety net?
Maybe you could be a little more concrete. So you're not taking a United States point of view, which point of view are you taking? I'm not aware of any country which provides "necessities" such as food and housing as the general case. Not anywhere in the EU, not in "communist" countries and outside of famines, certainly not in the third world. Of course there are food stamps and social housing projects for poor and elderly people, but I'm referring to the general case. Where do you see any significant necessities being provided to the general populace by the state? Which necessities?
Of course you can define "subsidies of some degree" to prove your point, but that doesn't change the fact that most people in the world generally have to pay for things, even necessities. The major exception being basic education which seems to be universally provided for free.
I have no idea what sort of a burden paying $5 for browser software would place on poor people, but I am sure that society would find a way, much like it does with other necessities. I also disagree that a browser financed by advertising is less of a burden to the vulnerable. The advertising revenue comes from the products they purchase.
- General welfare, where often the amount is determined based on minimal wage and other things.
- Various benefits and subsidies for various necessities like rental support, support for child care, etc.
And to make it extra clear, a lot of these need to be requested through digital portals these days as well.
$5 might not seem that much to you (I am assuming you are talking about a monthly subscription here), but I assure you it is a lot if you have to reconsider every single purchase to make sure you will make ends meet.
And I am fully aware that there are workable solutions to make it less impactful. I do however disagree with the simple sentiment of "just make browsers paid software and be done with it" without those considerations.
> I'd argue that a browser should be a part of the OS or be a paid product
I am getting Microsoft flashbacks now. There is no way that bundling browsers with OSes and making all the others paid will have negative side effects! Oh wait... The 90s just called, it is Netscape and they would like to have a stern word.
> I agree, this is a problem, but there should be a trivial solution: Users of the browser should pay a small amount of "money" for the product they use all day every day.
What a brain-dead idea. Having to pay for something does not affect the openness of a platform. You just create a de-facto tax that benefits no one at all.
If no one can maintain Chromium, well, that's a pity. On the other hand other projects can catch up then, and maybe the web as a whole can take a breather, without Google pushing more and more "standards". That's actually a good reason to do this. I really couldn't care less about Google's ad business. It is a burden on society.
I think it cannot get much worse than it currently is, with one company dictating the web's future and raking in the money from that. So while there are significant unknowns, probably the result will be something at least a little bit better. I am a little worried about Chrome being only fake sold, to some company that is indirectly controlled by Google again.
> What company has the resources to maintain Chrome's massive codebase? What profit incentive is there in maintaining Chrome without Google's ad business?
As an aside, maybe this is part of the issue. We have been privileged to enjoy some of the most advanced and complex software created for free since basically their inception. Nobody every paid for a web browser.
But then look around the software industry and every software of even remotely similar complexity need to be paid for, or are a kept free due to a convergence of interest of people who can make money out of it (most notably: Linux).
Now, a web browser could be seen exactly the same way Linux is: Many, many, (many!) company makes ton of profit from people have access to a web browser, therefor, they should be fine with paying people to develop it. And in some way, considering that chromium and firefox are open-source, this is what could happen. But it does not really happen. Google is bankrolling both FF and Chromium, and they have basically total control over Chromium development. Who else is even giving remotely even money for 1 FTE for FF or Chromium ?
Thing is, no company would do it for Chromium because it is seen as a Google product, so why pay them for something they will do in any case. Company could have financed Firefox, but now that it is the underdog (and that the Mozilla Foundation makes questionable decision), it doesn't seem like a very good investment.
This is in many way crazy to me that almost every tech company heavily really on people having free access to a web browser, yet nobody is really trying to finance one. But I do think it is a political issue, and that, maybe just maybe, separating Chromium from Google would actually give incentive to the rest of the industry to finance the development of a browser that is not directly own by neither of them. Again, some what just like Linux.
Sure we did! Back in the day when the choices were Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator, and Opera, many people -- me included -- paid for Opera. I continued to do so up to version 5 in 2004 or 2006, can't remember, when I noticed that Phoenix aka. Firebird aka. Firefox were good enough for me. Have been a Firefox (and derivatives) user ever since.
There's an implicit assumption embedded in this comment that the Chromium project is indispensable, whereas I'm unconvinced it's even a net positive at all.
Anyone who follows standards discourse would probably appreciate the prospect of this open source codebase having independent stewards much more than any fears over maintenance resources.
Yes and no. The web may exist, but there is a viable digital alternative to it today, which didn't exist before Chrome - the mobile and app ecosystem. Virtually everybody who uses the web also uses mobile apps, but there are people who only ever use Android or iOS on a handheld device. It is also possible that in losing Chrome, Google will neglect its web properties and focus exclusively on access to services through mobile apps.
(I don't think your analysis makes sense, but...) Hey, if Google loses its advertising cash cow and vacates the web for apps, that'll really open up the web search market too! Great news!
In the broadest sense Android and IOS are similar to browsers: All are platforms that execute code given in a certain format and have APIs for interacting with the device.
(The browser is different in that it doesn't need a separate download to acquire the code and makes partial code downloads easy. And from search to opening an app is a single click and very quick.)
Just thinking through this now, but the ease of authoring content on the web started very early on, whereas publishing new mobile apps on the dominant platforms is highly technical and exclusionary many years in.
Web - available in 1993, content authoring/hosting become available through blogger, wordpress, etc, in about 7-10 years. Authoring tools Frontpage and ColdFusion were available in 1995, Netscape Composer in 1997. In other words, one could build a basic website with a bare minimum of technical knowledge with the help of widely available tools within 5 years of the web becoming available (it would take many more years for the web to become pervasive).
Mobile - It has been 17 years since the iphone was launched, 19 years since Google acquired Android. To my knowledge, there are no easy ways for a non-technical person to author a basic app, let alone one that runs on both platforms.
> There's just a lot of significant unknowns surrounding this.
That's what happen when you let anomalies like this become the norm. Antitrust actions should have been taken against Google 15 years ago, and at that point it wouldn't have undermined the whole web because back then didn't yet control the entire web (but the trend was clear and that's why action should have been taken).
Yes, but they have successfully been shrinking that down from 94% in 2016.
Long road towards independence, but moving in the right direction at least.
And the default spot in the search bar is valuable to people outside of Google. Even if we assume that Google is overpaying, Mozilla could keep operating as is with another entity paying significantly less...
I use Brave which is based off of Chromium just like Chrome, and the experience is great. I’d say I’ve had to go to chrome maybe 3 times in the last year, and it was always for some super complicated SPA.
Whatever decrease we see to our browsing experience will be worth the gains I expect to see from dealing a blow to a monopoly like Google.
> I'm very surprised by the number of people in this thread who don't seem to understand that monopolies are _very_ bad for consumers.
Bad for consumers, how? Financially? How does that translate to the current situation? The average "consumer" here is paying $0.00 for Google, Chrome, Gmail, Maps, Flights, Docs, Sheets, Chat, Meet, Books, Scholar, Shopping, YouTube, News, Groups, Voice... how are you going to argue that this "monopoly" (?) is bad for consumers? Do you imagine Microsoft or Apple would've created better search, email, news, etc., or that the mom & pop shop down the store would've done that?
I can think of so many other arguments you could use to suggest the current situation is bad, but monopolies are bad for consumers seems like a really tough argument to apply here.
Edit: You need to argue more than "the current situation is bad". Because that in itself does not imply "removing the 'monopoly' would necessarily lead to the better outcome in my imagination." Exhibit A is all the behemoths trying to compete against Google and still offering objectively worse products.
They are not paying $0. They are manipulated into believing they are paying $0.
If people were offered the google suite for 'free','you just have to let us siphon 4 liters of blood from you every year', would people still claim the price was 'zero dollars'.
Just because you extract the price from your users in a different denomination/method than ordinary dollars, doesn't mean it's 'free'.
Precisely because they are not asking for dollars, indicates they are actually extracting value from their users. They are not giving, they are taking, and it is also clear they are taking more than they are giving, given their revenue and profits.
I could see a similar argument being made by plantation owners in the past "we are lodging these guests from africa for FREE", they don't even have to PAY to live in the houses we offer them! There is only the small detail of the activities they will have to do in OUR fields, which will kill them off in 10-15 years, but that is another matter which should not be confused".
"Deals" of the kind google and facebook offer are not to the consumer's advantage. Insisting on not having a facebook account is akin to choosing not to use the paved asphalt roads the society makes available to you.
I could "choose" not to have a facebook account, but it would lock me out of effectively both my friends group and my family's daily communication.
> Just because you extract the price from your users in a different denomination/method than ordinary dollars, doesn't mean it's 'free'
That is, in fact, what it means. "Free" (in the transaction sense) means you didn't pay money for it. Just because Krispy Kreme hopes you buy some donuts while you're in the store doesn't make the loss leader donut not free. Just because Google gets something other than money from the deal doesn't mean that the product isn't free.
> I could see a similar argument being made by plantation owners in the past "we are lodging these guests from africa for FREE", they don't even have to PAY to live in the houses we offer them! There is only the small detail of the activities they will have to do in OUR fields, which will kill them off in 10-15 years, but that is another matter which should not be confused".
Seriously?
> "Deals" of the kind google and facebook offer are not to the consumer's advantage.
Again -- explain how "splitting up" the "monopoly" would realistically get you out of this situation? Pointing to something and saying it's bad doesn't imply your solution would solve the problem.
Not OP, but the idea is that when split from their massive parents, these products would be much more vulnerable to competition in a way they are very safe from it today. It's not an insurmountable task to create, say, a video-sharing site, or a chat program. Better versions of YouTube and MS Teams could be made with 20 developers in 18 months. However, those would be suicidal uses of capital today, since who's going to actually buy "CorpChat" when Microsoft bundles Teams, and Salesforce bundles Slack? Who's going to want to host their content on a new video sharing site if Google can easily make sure YouTube will always outrank it in Search, and could even ensure the videos don't play right in Chrome?
All products which lose money and are propped up by money firehoses from other parts of their dominant owners, are products that enjoy an unfair advantage in the market leaving less marketshare (often strikingly less) for anyone who might be better.
> All products which lose money and are propped up by money firehoses from other parts of their dominant owners, are products that enjoy an unfair advantage in the market leaving less marketshare (often strikingly less) for anyone who might be better.
Is it your opinion that every product is monetizable, and should be if that would make it self-sufficient? Do you not feel some would just get killed entirely if they couldn't be subsidized through other products?
I feel that when a company is in a super dominant, dare I say monopoly position (Google Search is the most obvious example) with one of its product lines, it usually is destructive to free markets when they aim the money firehose at another, money-losing product. It does this by driving out competition against that second product, which results in less choice for consumers.
I don't think it's necessarily a problem when a company that isn't a monopoly subsidizes another product. I agree that's pretty normal.
This has the same energy as arguing that gathering your private data to give you more accurate ads does not hurt consumers, it's in fact helping them!
Google has been the one pushing for getting rid of the v2 manifest for browsers extensions, which just so happens to seriously nerf ad blockers. Because so many browsers are forks of Chromium v2 will disappear from a majority of browsers. Meanwhile if you try to use a non-Chrome browser like Firefox a lot of websites are buggy and outright don't work. Opening images in issues broke in GitHub for firefox a year ago and they still haven't fixed it.
You are being *very* naive if you think that Google having this sort of monopolistic power over the web does not hurt consumers.
> This has the same energy as arguing that gathering your private data to give you more accurate ads does not hurt consumers, it's in fact helping them!
> You are being very naive if you think that Google having this sort of monopolistic power over the web does not hurt consumers.
No, I think you're being incredibly naive if you think the outcome you imagine would necessarily come to fruition without Google being a "monopoly" (however you define it). It didn't happen for Microsoft (Chrome is an angel compared to Edge), and nobody has managed to create comparable solutions for so many other products Google offers that have nothing to do with the browser or search.
gmail works really badly in firefox, it doesn't show new emails unless you force a refresh while it seamlessly loads them in chrome. There is also a popup whenever you use gmail, youtube or google search telling you to switch to chrome because it's "safer and faster".
Google was also caught giving special treatment to google-related domains in chrome, and had to revert the advantages around cookies that they gave to themselves.
> Because so many browsers are forks of Chromium v2 will disappear from a majority of browsers.
It rather sounds like a great marketing opportunity for anyone trying to compete with Chrome, whether they keep the v2 or just implement ad-blocking themselves.
That's a counter argument that can be used against any monopoly that abuses their position to extract value from the market. It's just a market opportunity for somebody else to topple them!
But in reality it just doesn't work out that way, the negatives from abusing their monopoly can be overshadowed by the power of the monopoly itself, for example Google promoting Chrome every time you you gmail, google search, or youtube. Or making their services not work well in non-Chrome browsers.
Or in the case of microsoft, their monopolistic behavior is overshadowed by the fact that too much important software only works on Windows. It's a tale as old as tech.
I don't think you appreciate how easy it is for the chromium forks to add their own ad blocking. This is simply not a good example of monopoly abuse on Google's part.
I could probably fork chromium myself and add some blacklist over ad domains in a couple of hours. But I fail to see how this refutes the idea that Google has a monopoly and abuses it to it's advantage.
Accurate ads does in fact help consumers. Ads facilitate free stuff. Better ads = less ads. When I was a kid every TV show timeslot was like 25% ads. Do you not remember those days? Do you want to go back to that?
When I was a kid cable TV was the the ad-free alternative, where you paid a monthly sum to finance the channel instead of the channel being financed by advertisements.
Your implication that google services are free is untrue.
You are paying with your privacy and data. And the price is such that, if I ever made a better mail service than gmail that openly asked to sell and privately use all your data, nobody would subscribe.
You are paying by seeing ads.
You are paying by being coerced into a certain ecosystem.
You are paying by having one company chose what standards are the de facto web standards of tomorrow. And their main business is selling your data.
You are paying by losing access to your data if a company feels like it.
etc.
It's very similar to the situation in the nineties where Microsoft used their OS monopoly to push Internet Explorer "for free". You could make the same argument there "now consumers have free access to an internet browser, how is that bad?".
It was bad because it effectively ended innovation in the browser space for decades by pushing Netscape out of business (and discouraging others from entering that space).
Similarly, many consumers are unaware of alternative search engines, if Chrome pushes Google as the default. This kills innovation and puts more power in Google's hands as to what parts of the web get promoted.
Many a business owner can tell you that when Google changes their search ranking it can have an effect on the bottom line. This is also bad for consumers, as only bigger businesses which have the dough to pay for many Google ads get returned in a search.
> Do you imagine Microsoft or Apple would've created better search, email, news, etc., or that the mom & pop shop down the store would've done that?
Yes, enthusiastically yes. With the exception of maybe search, products like gmail, docs, and sheets are basic projects tossed out into the ecosystem for free to suck up all the oxygen for minimal dev cost. How is an upstart supposed to compete with a better mail/doc/spreadsheet app if the basic use case is covered for free by some loss leader funded from a different vertical?
Most of these classes of apps have been stagnant for decades.
> The most obvious example is malvertising. Chrome is pushing ManifestV3 with extreme prejudice and Youtube pushes ever more malvertising by the day. Why can Google do this? Because there is no competition.
Also, have you missed how terrible e.g. Edge is for user privacy? It's trying hard as heck to compete, and even playing dirty to get there. What happened to competition making things better?
There are so many things I could say in response to this, and at the risk of getting off topic: is it your belief that if you put the average user (not you, but the average user) in front of a default install of all the major browsers and had them use the browsers for a while on completely unaffiliated websites, they would find Firefox better than the others based on its merits?
Even as a privacy-conscious techie (and former Firefox user) who has repeatedly tried to switch back, I've found Firefox to be objectively worse in general, regardless of the website.
Yes, malvertising. There is no such thing as non-malicious advertising in this day and age.
>Also, have you missed how terrible e.g. Edge is for user privacy?
I mean, Edge is Chrome.
The only saving grace is that it all goes to Microsoft instead of Google, which probably isn't as damaging because if you're using Edge you're probably using Windows already anyway.
If you think I'm saying these out of some personal incentive you're sorely mistaken. I've hated so much of what the tech companies have been doing (very much including Google, like various competition things related to the Play Store). What I don't want to see happen are (a) the world getting worse as a result of a misguided belief that things would necessarily get better if X was done, and (b) regulators pursing a break-up and then losing and thus cementing the behemoths in place even more thus making it even harder to address other problems.
On other hand splitting "free" product is somewhat questionable. When the competitor don't have exactly viable business model. Pushing for something that will clearly in not too distant future kill the split product is not helpful.
Why are you saying that like it's a bad thing? That's what antitrust means. Chrome is free because it's unfairly subsidized by Google Search. Standard Oil was also cheaper because it was a monopoly.
And noting that Chrome doesn't have anything close to a monopoly - people can use any browser they like. Having >90% of the market doesn't make it a monopoly, it just makes it good. It is the last sort of product people should be attacking, Chrome is a free market success story and Google's strategy is an exemplar of good corporate citizenship.
This exactly. An independent Chrome’s best path toward financial sustainability is closing down the source code and selling everyone’s browsing data to the highest bidder.
We all like to have a high minded ideal of some kind of wonderful fully independent for-the-good-of-society entity stewarding Chrome, but history has shown us that’s not what will happen.
Chrome is already closed-source. The chromium project can't be closed because it's already free and released.
The new Chrome company could stop contributing back to Chromium if they wanted, but it would mean they'd diverge from the other browsers backed by the OSS project which is one of their big advantages.
I'm not saying they wouldn't do that or it wouldn't work out, but it's not an obvious win.
> This setup prevents new entrants from competing just the same.
Look at the new entrant browsers out there: all of them are based on Chromium. The existence of Chrome as an OSS project enabled competition in practice - the cost of entry is orders of magnitude lower when you have a mature browser engine at your disposal.
> Pushing for something that will clearly in not too distant future kill the split product is not helpful.
They’re not considering this because of Chrome’s market share, but because of Google’s power in the search engine market. Indirectly killing Chrome may be acceptable if it makes the market for search engines more competitive.
Having said that, I don’t think it will matter much as long as Apple and, in particular (because they also have a search engine) Microsoft can ship browsers with preconfigured search engines with their OSes, but we will see.
I think there are 2 products. Google Chrome and Chromium. For one of them: Good riddance! For the other: Well, actually you cannot really kill that, because anyone can fork it or contribute patches, so if the world thinks some change is needed, the world can make it happen. There is no need to be worried about the project. We could also put it under a copyleft license that obligates anyone to contribute modifications and we will be fine, if some company decides to fork it.
Chrome is like a service not a product it is effectively Google installing a window so you can see it's fresh baked goods. It isn't something they should break up because it isn't something that inherently makes money and nor should it.
That’s a “half baked” analogy if ever I heard one. With you on the service but the rest of it is just stupid. To align with your analogy Google would have to restrict chrome to accessing only their sites and services, which would be useless, compared to other browsers.
Google could do this if they wanted very very easily but they wouldn’t make any money because as you know they sell advertising, for things they don’t provide.
You can walk into the store and see the store across the street. Chrome is akin to a loss leader like hotdogs CostCo.
The problem isn't the Browser it is the other services it has that makes it a monopoly.
Don't let, "Oh we sell off our loss leader so we are not a monopoly." fool you. It has YouTube, office solutions and even every other software under the sun.
Without Chrome being managed or maintain it becomes vulnerable exposing customers to viruses or attacks. It is a service because it stores passwords and manages bookmarks in a secure location for Google products. It is ingrained.
To me this sound like Edge wants to be king, but oh wait Edge is also part of a monopoly. So should not Microsoft experience this too?
Monopolistic practices are not necessarily monopolies, but rather require regulation to encourage fairness.
Didn’t dispute it was a service. What I was saying that Google run everything at a loss, and it’s all paid for by advertising. They don’t sell themselves advertising. No advertising no money.
Right, but the problem with most arguments supporting the break up of Chrome from Google are really not looking at the bigger picture. YouTube is more of a monopolistic threat than Chrome will ever be. If it was sold off it would mean most browsers could monetize and we'd be back to the AOL age. I don't dislike that era but it is 10 steps back. While Google isn't great applying simple policies would be easier to address monopolistic practices than just telling Google to sell it off.
Agreed, and I’m not fully aware au fait with DOJ reasoning. Perhaps it’s an anti-trust thing as it gives them a way to steer the development of the web to their own ends? That would be my key concern about Chrome anyway.
But to come back to the original point I was making, is that it’s really not akin to a bakery window. If I wanted to allow the metaphor to be further tortured I’d allow “Sears” or something.
But it’s more than that, as Google’s business model is largely parasitic to what users would be doing anyway.
Most of Google is "free" products that feed into its surveillance advertising platform. That's the problem. How are you supposed to break that sort of thing up without destroying most of the products? They were never designed to work independently from the network.
Why? "Big companies bad" are one of those fundamental truthiness we are all supposed to believe for some reason but as a European I wish we had more US/Chinese-style megacorps who have dominant positions in some fields that allows them to innovate or provide free/cost-cutting products in other niches.
Maybe we should reconsider what we consider monopolies in the 21st century. I'm already using ChatGPT and Perplexity more than Google.
It follows from a few premises. The point of creating/allowing private companies to compete in a market and profit from doing so is to encourage them to innovate via competitive pressure. If you just wanted to produce well-understood goods or infrastructure then the most efficient way to do that is to pool resources and have the State do it, because they don't need to make a profit and, if not totally dysfunctional, are accountable to the people. If you let private companies consolidate power and influence then they largely escape competitive pressure and can streamline operations to maximize profits. That is, they benefit from the same efficiency the State does, but capture more of the value and remain unaccountable to the people, existing only to enrich their owners.
Yep. The issue with megacorps (and more generally monopolies) is that they want to have their cake and eat it too. You want capitalism but you also want to be the only one on the market. Pick a side.
They do pick a side: success at capitalism implies outcompeting your peers. Without regulation, there will be winners, and they will tend to be monopolies. Marx pointed this out in his book “Capital” (Das Kapital) in the late 1800s.
Capitalism without regulation can’t reach a stable equilibrium.
Free products are not the consequence of megacorps existence. Free products exist, because you are the product. Big companies also doesn't necessarily mean monopolies.
Splitting off Chrome doesn't make any sense as a stand alone business. Anyone who could buy Chrome would immediately cause other anti-trust issues. This solution for Google is probably bad for consumers.
What the DoJ should be pursuing is having Google divest YouTube. Now we're talking real change.
And if they sold off Youtube, we'd have 500 comments saying, "This is a bad idea. They can't make a profit. They should divest from Chrome."
Splitting Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, etc up all at once and into multiple separate pieces each would be great for consumers. But that's a huge undertaking, and the bigger the changes required, the less likely they are to happen. Taking it one step at a time, with the first step being Chrome and Google search (two products that strongly push users of one to use the other) being split up, is better than no progress at all.
At the very least, the biggest force in killing adblockers (Google gradually gutting them in Chrome) will have fewer means to kill them in browsers. That's a win for consumers.
Not sell YT to another company, but split off likely in an IPO. The big difference is that YT is a stand alone business that could function on it's own.
> The big difference is that YT is a stand alone business that could function on it's own.
We (public) don't know that. Google never splits YouTube's costs out, only revenue, and the only reason I can think of is that it's losing money. IMO it's highly likely that YouTube costs a lot to run (just imagine the costs of storing zettabytes of videos, 99.9% of which will get watched less than 10 times ever, in 4K, and be ready to quickly stream them anywhere in the world) and Google lose money on it, but compensate with user data they use for their wider ad business. People complain about YouTube ads today, and how expensive Premium is; maybe a future independent YouTube can cut costs, shed some old/unwatched content, and become profitable.
Splitting these companies would also be good for people like Bezos and Gates as splitting Standard Oil was good for Rockefeller. They don't lose their interest in the companies and the newly formed companies likely will benefit from the competition creating much more aggregated wealth. In the end, the breakup of Standard Oil made Rockefeller wealthier. He gained from owning shares in the spinoff companies, their rising market value because competition, diversified investments, and the growing demand for oil.
Firefox is profitable thanks to Google's money, and Google are probably so generous with them to ensure they have some competition. In the EU, OSes and browsers have to ask the user which browser and search engine they want to use, and an independent Chrome might be forced to follow the same logic. Then Google would have little incentive to splash as much money.
Chrome is designated a Core Platform Service, Alphabet is the gatekeeper. If Chrome is independent, it could only be designated a gatekeeper if it has an annual turnover of 7.5 billion Eur in the EU. In which case it is definitely economically viable.
It's a balance. If you would dissolve anything that slightly looks like a monopoly, then there would be lower incentive for innovation. Even though there are many things wrong with venture capital, they do occasionally produce useful companies. Also let's not forget that Bell Labs was sponsored by a monopoly too. So I'm not saying monopolies are great. I'm saying that it's important to find a balance.
It's a balance but IMO there should be no realistic concept of "winning the market". If it gets to that point then sure the company is probably making a lot of money but they also have the power to squeeze as much as they can. The irony of posting this on a forum originating from VC culture does not escape me.
Seeing for years the views expressed here about Meta & TikTok, I think at least some of this must come down to a gap in understanding of web technologies.
Meta & TikTok decidedly don't have monopolies, yet still come under fierce scrutiny for their pervasive handling of consumer behaviour & data. What seems to be less evident to people is that Google's monopolies give them far greater reach in these areas than either of the other two. The majority of that reach is entirely invisible to most: I think if this negative impact was more visible it might drive home the downside of these particular monopolies.
Not sure if this is an innocent comment or not but I'll answer earnestly.
They're not, technically. They're hegemons, which doesn't make them much better. In fact, I'd argue the situation is worse.
Chrome predominantly owns the web at this point. There are few contenders, and making a new browser is a lot of work (see the Verso browser). Google has the arguably unearned luxury of dictating what APIs and protocols the nebulous "web" should use, can throw a bunch of money at adding them quickly, and leave competitors struggling to keep up, effectively buying chrome's guaranteed superiority.
"But there are standards committees!" Yes, but it really doesn't matter when Chrome either uses its own APIs privately on its sites[0] or just adds new APIs without any committee consideration for people to use and fall in love with and demand that other vendors add them (or something similar, such as proposing a great idea at the committee, it's accepted, and the other vendors lagging for months or even years - see WebGPU as an example).
One might think "it's just a browser". Yes, but browsers are -for better or for worse - the global defacto for sending and receiving almost all of our sensitive data. Even "desktop apps" like Whatsapp, Signal, and Bitwarden all either use or have used Chromium to display their contents (via Electron).
Much of the community has asserted Google owns the web at this point, and I tend to agree. It's very, very hard for smaller vendors to have much of a day these days without Google getting theirs, too.
> Chrome predominantly owns the web at this point. There are few contenders, and making a new browser is a lot of work (see the Verso browser). Google has the arguably unearned luxury of dictating what APIs and protocols the nebulous "web" should use, can throw a bunch of money at adding them quickly, and leave competitors struggling to keep up, effectively buying chrome's guaranteed superiority.
As an example: Microsoft is building Edge on open source Chromium. Are you sure Microsoft is the little guy that needs protection? I'm fairly sure they have enough heft that they can fork Chromium and do their own thing, if Google does anything sinister.
But in any case, there's still Safari with a substantial market share, too.
> "But there are standards committees!" [...]
I agree with you here: commercial standards are more important than whatever a standards committee says.
I agree that Google has a large share in many markets. I just don't see the monopoly.
> I'm fairly sure they have enough heft that they can fork Chromium and do their own thing, if Google does anything sinister.
They were already doing their own thing and they couldn't keep up with Google. Although, starting from a Chromium fork, it could take longer for the code to diverge.
I mean, in the world where chromium exists, maintaining your own entirely independent codebase of a full web browser does not make business sense. It's better and easier to reuse what you can and build on top of that.
I think what people fail to see is that this is the same as "owning the sea by the British Empire" or "owning the railroads/roads". The economical benefit is not direct monetary gain, but nonetheless absolutely huge, and basically plays outside the "normal" rules.
Google can use their web dominance to push another service of their, or cripple a competitor's in a completely different domain.
Google (the search engine) has a market share of over 85% worldwide. [0]
Google therefore controls what can be found on the Internet for 85% of search engine users. Recent updates, or Core Updates, have demonstrated how easy it is for Google to put businesses out of business by removing their visibility. [1]
It seems to me that this is a problem.
Ditto for Chrome, which has +60% market share [2]. A failed or deliberate update could make a website inaccessible to 60% of the population.
There are billions of Web browser users and, from a fast Google search, 1.1 billion Web sites, still a large number if count only the ones that still have traffic.
So, billions of listeners and many millions of talkers. Without good, stable, universal standards, we'd have the biggest "Tower of Babel" problem in history.
Hypothetical examples:
(1) Maybe Company A wants to change the standards so that Web sites will have to revise their code. Hmm!!! Many millions of Web site owners will say "no way". Company A just left the party.
(2) Web site B wants to change their Web site so that only certain Web browsers will be able to use that site. Hmm!!! Site B won't get much traffic. Even if that site is Google -- people will use Bing, etc.
(3) Maybe Google announces that as of July 1, 2025 the Google search engine Web site will work only with Google's latest Chrome Web browser. Hmm .... There are billions of people who will want a search engine that works with the old, standard Web browser they already have -- "billions of people"!! Sounds like, with Bing, Microsoft's stock just doubled! And July Google's searches per day fell by 50+%.
E.g., I still like Windows 7 Professional. Occasionally I run Microsoft's Web browser Edge, and when I do there is a message that Windows 7 won't get updates for Edge and I should convert to Windows 10/11. I don't really want an update to Edge -- what I have does work; I don't like it; occasionally I use it to check some issues. Hmm!!!!
Microsoft, one of your most important business assets is that old applications will still run on the latest versions of Windows. So, I run Kedit, Object Rexx, Firefox, VLC media player, PhotoDraw, Media Player, PhotoViewer, Sketchup, Office 20??, IBM's OSL (Optimization Subroutine Library and a certain Watcom Fortran compiler), LINPACK, etc., .NET 3??, and I do not want to lose use of any of those old programs.
(4) Some company tries to have all the Internet ads flowing through their software, servers, etc. Hmm!! Sites have a file ads.txt that usually shows one heck of a long list of Internet ad brokers. Not easy for one company to dominate the ad market or even just the Web site ad market.
Monopoly is probably not the right word. "Trust" (as in "anti-trust") is maybe better, but I'm not sure the last gilded age really had a perfect analogy to what's been happening in the tech services sector.
The problem is these sprawling companies who make so many interrelated services and can suppress competition in one area (browsers, e-mail, video-over-the-internet) due to extreme profits in another area (ads).
* Google effectively holds a monopoly of the browser market (Chrome). Apple (Safari) only exists because of vendor lock-in, and Mozilla (Firefox) is a vassal state; all "other" browsers are Chrome.
* Google shares a duopoly of the mobile OS market with Apple (Android vs. iOS).
* Google holds a monopoly of the video streaming market (Youtube).
* Google holds a monopoly of the malvertising market (Adsense, Doubleclick, et al.).
* Google effectively holds a monopoly of the web search market (Google Search).
* Google holds the vast majority of the email market (Gmail).
* Google is the absolutely dominant player in the consumer cloud market (Google Drive).
* Google shares a duopoly with Apple in the cloud photo market (Google Photos vs. iCloud Photos).
* Google shares a duopoly with Microsoft in the consumer office software market (Google Docs vs. Office 365).
* Google shares a duopoly with Apple in the digital wallet market (Google Pay/Wallet vs. Apple Pay).
I can go on, but with this being said let me ask you: Why the hell should Google not be split and cut apart nine ways to Sunday?
Thanks. The summary seems to be: Google is a big player in many markets, but not a monopoly.
You mentioned some as 'monopolies'. Let's go through them:
Browsers: as far as I can tell, the other browsers that 'are Chrome' are Chromium at most. Eg Microsoft is surely capable of forking Chromium, if Google does anything untoward.
Video streaming: I hear TikTok and Instagram and Netflix etc are popular for streaming videos, too? People also seem to be getting a lot of videos via telegram channels? (I don't know the exact numbers here. So I can't say anything definite.)
Web search: Google used to be really dominant, but they are arguably on a downward trend without any government interference: more and more people are using the likes of ChatGPT to fill the same niche in their lives.
> Why the hell should Google not be split and cut apart nine ways to Sunday?
Presumably because there's a presumption of non-interference in the markets? The same reason the government doesn't just lock you and me up for no good reason, or confiscates our property.
> Google is a big player in many markets, but not a monopoly.
Yes. The EU "dominant position" terminology is better because otherwise someone will do an "well achscually" about it being a 90% market position or whatever. In practical terms, you can assume "monopoly" is used as "too big" or "too dominant" not, "sole player". It's best to just accept it.
>Thanks. The summary seems to be: Google is a big player in many markets, but not a monopoly.
And the combination thereof is an unholy abomination.
Namely the unholy trinity of Browser + Malvertising + Search. Nothing can compete against Google so long as that trinity stands, and it protects all the other mono/duopolies from incursions with impunity.
I'm not claiming they are. But given their current market share and its trajectory, they're marching towards one. Furthermore, it's a clear mechanism for further monopolizing the search engine market (I'm more comfortable calling google a monopoly on this front). I'm a staunch capitalist and believe in the innovative power of competition, and monopolies ground that whole machine to a halt.
Google is currently feeling the heat from people switching to the likes of ChatGPT for what they would have previously used Google Search for.
In any case, it's really easy to use alternative search engines, if you don't like what Google offers. They are dominant, because people are happy enough with what they are getting.
I'm not surprised at all, because I've used AirPods and AirDrop on an iPhone and MacBook.
You have to have a much deeper understanding of tech to understand why they're bad, yet the examples of why they're good are obvious when a consumer stays within one ecosystem.
No, most user don't choose. Android doesn't provide a menaingful way to choose to the users, it pushes you to choose Google. That's a big difference. It would be a choice if, when you start android for the first time, it asks you which browser you want to use, in a list where all browsers are shown equal; not "hey you'll use chrome and you can change later any time you want". Ideally, it would provide an explnanation of each browser. That would be a better way to propose a choice.
Would it make users smarter about their choice ? Probably not. But at least, they could smell there is an actual choice.
Monopolies tends to maintain users in ignorance. This way, although they can look elsewhere, they won't feel the urge to do so.
Users must be helped to make their own choice, not guided to make the monopoly's choice. And that must be done before the choice is made.
As long as there will be monoplies, this tension will exist and people like me will continue to explain that the State is the best way to push the balance in favor of those who don't get the importance of the choice.
The problem is not that there is a dominant player. The problem is the dominant player uses ignorance and subtle strategies to make sure users saty with it.
> There is no monopoly. There are a lot of other browsers. A lot of people use them.
There is market dominance: Chrome has 65%, Safari has 18% but that’s because of iOS, and the few others have the rest. It’s false to say there are "a lot" of other browsers when nobody can enter the space anymore.
> They chose to do it. If you ask them, they think it's good.
Most people don’t choose their browser, they just take whatever comes preinstalled. Even then, Google pushes you to use their browser every time you use their services: I know a lot of non-tech people who use Chrome on iOS not because they chose to, but because they got a pop-in on Google that told them to do so.
> It is bad for you.
The current situation is indeed bad for the consumer, even if it’s not a monopoly per se.
There's a very vocal subset of people here that believe monopolistic entities arise due to how much better they are than their competition, and thus deserve to be monopolies.
The very same users believe that such companies aren't "bad" yet, but in some kind of intermediate stage between successful startup and evil MEGAcorp.
I don't know. I think it's the mix of nostalgia, and being too invested in their ecosystem/products. Fanboying, basically.
When Microsoft did it 25 years ago, it was bad. When Google does it now, it's not bad.
If your goal is to reduce the influence Google has on the browser market is this really the best move? From a practical standpoint I find it hard to believe.
While I agree that monopolies era bad for consumers and that the position Chrome currently have is pretty much a monopoly I don't think this particular move would be good for consumers in the short and mid time-frame. Maybe in the long run this is the correct decision, but this will cause quite a lot of pain for quite a lot of time.
I think one of the ways this could backfire against the users is that removing Chrome from Google will create a 'power vacuum' in the web standards. Currently Chrome is this de facto standard, for better of for worse. Removing that can create a situation where we have a couple of competing standards.
In my opinion the problem with this kind of competition is that making browsers will become significantly harder, because now instead of just copying Chrome you will have to implement several standards. And this is why I expect the web experience to become significantly worse in the short term.
And you know what will happen when the web experience degrades? Every company will push their own app. And even more experiences/services will be locked behind an android/ios app with the excuse "we want to deliver a great experience to our users". And this is WAY worse for users than the monopoly Google has in the browser.
Maybe a better solution would be for the US government to create/adopt a web standard and create a rule that says "if you want to sell to the US government you need to be fully compliant with standard XYZ". This way you create a goal that everyone can work towards.
As far as I know this is how the government handle this situation in the medical sector, where they have HL7 to create the relevant standards. And I'm fully aware that this brings a lot of problems to the table. The first one is that definition of standards for the web will become a political topic, and this is never a good sign. However, I think this is really the only option if we want the web to be a place with fair competition.
Thank goodness the era of ridiculous anti-trust is coming to an end.
Every "normie" knows about edge, it comes with your new Windows. no one uses it, people know quality when they see it and everyone prefers chrome. If there was a better browser we'd use it.
The default should definitely be: Companies should be incentivized to create great products.
If the incentives include, get 90% market share, that's great! No one would put it the amount of work Google has if the incentives were small
That really does not come as a surprise and that was totally expected. [0] As soon as Chrome started to become more of a platform (for their extension API) with many other companies using it in their own browsers, it tells you why they had >90% of the search market for years.
This is what the folks at Google have all feared and why they started to run away from the company, spurring up 'Google' competitors (including Microsoft & OpenAI) all bringing it down.
Google will appeal and fight back and either way will survive. But we have given Sundar enough time to turn it around and it's time for him to leave and a wartime CEO to step up.
It's possible as Sataya Nadella did this for Microsoft. Google needs to do the same.
