11–20 of 345 posts
But that investment isn’t neutral. It’s oriented towards making the Web a better place for Google to make money—not a better place for users to avoid being tracked by Google. Chrome’s dominant position means Google can kill any new web feature that would help users, but hurt Google’s bottom line.
It's hard to believe anyone can write a wall of text with so many assertions but fails to even touch on the central topic. You need to go way out of your way to be able to miss the point this hard.
Google is a web business, that’s their whole thing. They made a browser to invest in the web itself because what is good for the web is good for Google, and happens to be good for all of us. This is a panglossian take that belongs in the year 2005. Google is less a 'web business' than it is an 'advertising business', a 'surveillance business', and a 'finance business'. Consequently, it is false that 'what is good for…
> Users don’t pay for Chrome. There aren’t ads in Chrome. There is no direct business model for Chrome. Unlike Safari and Firefox, nobody writes checks to Chrome to make a certain search engine the default. They track you. There IS a business model for Chrome: monetizing user data.
And some people wonder how Chrome could ever make money if it were divested from Google...
Arguably, Google divesting Chrome would be great for the web. This piece seems to be looking at Google at large (and I think all of Alphabet would be better scope there). Certainly this would be unpopular here but I would be all for aggressive trust-busting beyond what the DOJ has done historically, including vertical integrations. Right now tech is a strange feudal state with hundreds of thousands of small teams anc…
The administration doesn’t give a shit about the web, and DOJ is a fully political entity. They’ll extort Google for whatever concession they want, and Chrome will remain.
Google is a web business, that’s their whole thing. They made a browser to invest in the web itself because what is good for the web is good for Google, and happens to be good for all of us. This is a panglossian take that belongs in the year 2005. Google is less a 'web business' than it is an 'advertising business', a 'surveillance business', and a 'finance business'. Consequently, it is false that 'what is good for…
Let’s not forget the “AI assistant”, which appears to lightly plagiarize the first three results on any topic, while adding some mistakes.