Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

DOJ will push Google to sell off Chrome

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 1001 posts

Re: DOJ will push Google to sell off Chrome

#151

Post by nixass »

elmerfud wrote: post #62
nixass wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Micros…

It took hold because it was a part of almost every popular piece of software installer back in the day, and enabled by default

Re: DOJ will push Google to sell off Chrome

#152

Post by AyyEye »

mrandish wrote: post #128
bityard wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the most chaotic alternate reality possible: Mozilla

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.

They'll do what their benefactor (Goog) wants whether they own chrome or not.

Re: DOJ will push Google to sell off Chrome

#153

Post by legitster »

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.

Re: DOJ will push Google to sell off Chrome

#154

Post by JoshTriplett »

elmerfud wrote: post #62
nixass wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Micros…

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.

Re: DOJ will push Google to sell off Chrome

#155

Post by hermitdev »

winterbloom wrote: post #47
curiouscat321 wrote: post #5

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.

How would they even sell it, chrome is based off of chromium. What is there to sell exactly? You can already fork chromium

> What is there to sell exactly?

widevine and all the other DRMy bits.

Or, better yet, deprecate and disable all the DRMy bits. (One can wish)

Re: DOJ will push Google to sell off Chrome

#156

Post by ForHackernews »

gerash wrote: post #138
throwawaythekey wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is Meta or Microsoft buying Chrome a good outcome?

IMHO Microsoft yes, Meta no.

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.

Re: DOJ will push Google to sell off Chrome

#158

Post by throwawaythekey »

gerash wrote: post #138
throwawaythekey wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is Meta or Microsoft buying Chrome a good outcome?

My ideal outcome would be something like:

1) Chrome is spun out as a standalone entity. Google would originally have full ownership but be forced to sell down over time.

2) Google buys the Chrome traffic at a fair price

3) Apple sells their traffic to someone else, potentially an AI search player (Meta??)

4) MSFT makes a new browser in response to Chrome going closed source

Re: DOJ will push Google to sell off Chrome

#159

Post by rpdillon »

crazygringo wrote: post #63
XorNot wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.
Post reply on HN