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DOJ filed paperwork to US District Court to force Google to spin off Chrome [pdf]

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Re: DOJ filed paperwork to US District Court to force Google to spin off Chrome [pdf]

#21

Post by reissbaker »

43920 wrote: post #17

This has already been discussed extensively in prior threads, but the biggest question is, how does a spun-off Chrome get funded? Chrome/Firefox/Safari all cost hundreds of millions of dollars a year to maintain. Currently, Safari and Firefox both make essentially all their revenue through default search agreements. Chrome, Edge, and now Brave are produced by companies that also own the search engines, so they're ess…

Unfortunately the real answer is:

* Only operating system vendors can ship web browsers. (But not Google.)

The USG in general seems to love giving Apple more monopoly power. This will effectively constrain browser development to just Apple and Microsoft, since as you note, the DOJ is also trying to regulate Firefox out of existence; and Apple has huge incentives to simply pause browser feature development (and has been dragging its feet on Safari for years).

Incredibly, this will also hamstring Android even further, since its parent company can't even make a web browser for it anymore! Only Apple, the Biden administration's favorite company, can do that kind of thing.

Re: DOJ filed paperwork to US District Court to force Google to spin off Chrome [pdf]

#22

Post by anon291 »

Teever wrote: post #13
anon291 wrote: post #10

As usual DOJ is late to the party. Google is already facing competition and as it falters, the doj will use this as 'evidence' it was effective.

The way you write this implies that it is somehow an intrinsic fault of the DoJ and not the fault of monopolists like Google with the massive resources to slow walk these kinds of things, or the effective lobbying of the Obama administration followed by four chaotic years of Trump. Never forget that corruption is always to blame for these failures, not the noble people who try and fix these things with flawed institu…

> Never forget that corruption is always to blame for these failures, not the noble people who try and fix these things with flawed institutions.

This is dogmatism. You're implying that those working for the government are inherently more noble than the rest, and that only private enterprise is flawed. To the contrary, I am implying nothing, just pointing out that the DOJ is late to the game. This would have meant something a decade ago when Google absolutely dominated. But they're being nipped at by a thousand different companies right now.

Re: DOJ filed paperwork to US District Court to force Google to spin off Chrome [pdf]

#23

Post by wmf »

wbl wrote: post #19
43920 wrote: post #17

This has already been discussed extensively in prior threads, but the biggest question is, how does a spun-off Chrome get funded? Chrome/Firefox/Safari all cost hundreds of millions of dollars a year to maintain. Currently, Safari and Firefox both make essentially all their revenue through default search agreements. Chrome, Edge, and now Brave are produced by companies that also own the search engines, so they're ess…

Display ad insertion would be legal and there are definitely ways to do it all client side.

Just like scraping the entire Web for AI training is totally fair use? Enjoy ten years of lawsuits to prove it. Web sites would never tolerate ads being inserted that don't pay them.

Re: DOJ filed paperwork to US District Court to force Google to spin off Chrome [pdf]

#24

Post by tsimionescu »

43920 wrote: post #17

This has already been discussed extensively in prior threads, but the biggest question is, how does a spun-off Chrome get funded? Chrome/Firefox/Safari all cost hundreds of millions of dollars a year to maintain. Currently, Safari and Firefox both make essentially all their revenue through default search agreements. Chrome, Edge, and now Brave are produced by companies that also own the search engines, so they're ess…

The most likely answer is that it will take the Linux model, with a foundation put together to fund Chrome's development. Then all of the parties interested in people having access to the Web, including Google, will have an incentive to fund this without requiring it to push their specific products.

Re: DOJ filed paperwork to US District Court to force Google to spin off Chrome [pdf]

#26

Post by timschmidt »

tsimionescu wrote: post #24
43920 wrote: post #17

This has already been discussed extensively in prior threads, but the biggest question is, how does a spun-off Chrome get funded? Chrome/Firefox/Safari all cost hundreds of millions of dollars a year to maintain. Currently, Safari and Firefox both make essentially all their revenue through default search agreements. Chrome, Edge, and now Brave are produced by companies that also own the search engines, so they're ess…

The most likely answer is that it will take the Linux model, with a foundation put together to fund Chrome's development. Then all of the parties interested in people having access to the Web, including Google, will have an incentive to fund this without requiring it to push their specific products.

One minor nit, it will be all parties interested in influence over future web standards and their eventual implementation.

Re: DOJ filed paperwork to US District Court to force Google to spin off Chrome [pdf]

#28

Post by wmf »

m4r1k wrote: post #25

Chrome is not the problem. Chrome is not even a symptom. The problem is that the world's largest search engine is also the world's largest ad distributor. Chopping off tentacles like Android or Chrome does nothing to slay the two-headed beast.

There's a bunch of other stuff in there about syndicating data (which admittedly I don't understand) that takes aim at the heart of search and ads.

Re: DOJ filed paperwork to US District Court to force Google to spin off Chrome [pdf]

#30

Post by inopinatus »

43920 wrote: post #17

This has already been discussed extensively in prior threads, but the biggest question is, how does a spun-off Chrome get funded? Chrome/Firefox/Safari all cost hundreds of millions of dollars a year to maintain. Currently, Safari and Firefox both make essentially all their revenue through default search agreements. Chrome, Edge, and now Brave are produced by companies that also own the search engines, so they're ess…

There's always the Opera model: attempt to sell inserted ads, fail, sell it to a Chinese holding company, and have future development funded by the Russians. What could possibly go wrong?
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