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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.
This...doesn't seem like a good idea.
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…
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.
Only search has high propensity to buy right there from the interaction. Third party and even meta don't have that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 f…
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…
Isn’t Google refusing to make changes that boost online privacy because it’ll tank their ad revenue?
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.
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.
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?
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. >…
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.
"Who would possibly buy Chrome?" 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 a…
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.
"Who would possibly buy Chrome?" 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 a…
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.