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

Google Being Forced to Sell Chrome Is Not Good for the Web

chriscoyier.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 345 posts

Re: Google Being Forced to Sell Chrome Is Not Good for the Web

#41

Post by glenstein »

paddw wrote: post #18

What's unclear is who the buyer is supposed to be? Chrome's entire monetization is centered around its synergy with Google's ad business. Cutting off Chrome is so much messier, than the obvious, (although I fear it would itself have bad repercussions) decision to force them to sell Youtube.

Exactly, this is my question as well. I was just thinking about it and thought although it's kind of silly, Google paying them (the newly-divested ChromeCo) for search engine default status could be a primary source of revenue.

I'm actually kind of curious about that as an option. Right now the distortion that makes Google any 800 pound gorilla is their leveraging of Chrome to channel users into their various monetized ecosystems.

But there could conceivably be an interesting form of parity that comes from the browsers all depending on the same form of revenue, search engine placement. I haven't fully thought this through, so I welcome corrections. I suppose Google could quite easily give favorable treatment toward ChromeCo and effectively continue to flex its monopoly muscle. Google will need them just as much as before. I'm honestly just not sure.

Re: Google Being Forced to Sell Chrome Is Not Good for the Web

#42

Post by jauntywundrkind »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #29
streptomycin wrote: post #22

I don't get the negative comments here. It's pretty simple I think... - Google is banned from paying Firefox to be the default search engine -> Firefox has way less money -> Firefox development massively slows - Someone buys Chrome and needs to turn a profit from Chrome, rather than using it to indirectly profit from the web in general like Google does -> Chrome probably goes to shit and development massively slows S…

Web browsers are probably complex enough at this point. Putting them on maintenance and letting new architectures fight it out might not be a bad outcome.

Putting hopes in someone else making an entirely new standards and protocols based hypermedia sounds outlandish. Whose going to go on a decade long quest to build something amazing to give away, again?

I for one really tire of this spiritual vandalism masquerading as a hopeful pineing ask for a new beginning. The web rocks, is amazing. Sure there's some incidental complexity that's accrued, but the versatility & wide capability from a simple core are a glorious & powerful thing that I think only a fool wouldn't celebrate.

Re: Google Being Forced to Sell Chrome Is Not Good for the Web

#43

Post by glenstein »

elif wrote: post #8

This one struck me as a weird one as browser waves come and go and I feel like opera is the big swell rising at the moment anyway. The competitive component is there and alive and well. What happens when this artificial friction causes chrome to lose network effect faster than natural, and we are ironically left with a different monopoly?

Will for a while now market here has been firmly going in one direction and it's that of increasing Chrome dominance. I absolutely loved the old opera team, and I loved them reconstituting themselves under Vivaldi, but I don't love that they now both depend on Chromium.

I do think the dynamics of browser market share it had in a previous time been subject to exactly the waves and frictions you mentioned, but it's too high stakes now. There's too much serious investment necessary, and so it's going to be responding to some business and economic dynamics Which will be different than the waves and frictions of yesteryear.

Re: Google Being Forced to Sell Chrome Is Not Good for the Web

#44

Post by pessimizer »

paddw wrote: post #18

What's unclear is who the buyer is supposed to be? Chrome's entire monetization is centered around its synergy with Google's ad business. Cutting off Chrome is so much messier, than the obvious, (although I fear it would itself have bad repercussions) decision to force them to sell Youtube.

If nobody wants Chrome, and it's only profitable use is a social negative, let it die?

A billion or two dollars would fund development indefinitely. Don't sell it to anybody, make it a nonprofit with a fat trust. I'll say the same thing about Firefox: they got plenty of money from Google. They should have been able to save enough in ten or how ever many years to fund development for all eternity. Instead they paid it to themselves.

Re: Google Being Forced to Sell Chrome Is Not Good for the Web

#45

Post by mystified5016 »

Developing a browser is fantastically difficult and expensive. How much of that is because of Google using Chrome's dominance to dictate web standards?

If instead web standards moved at a pace set by a standards body not incentivised to spy on users, how much more competition could exist in the browser space?

Re: Google Being Forced to Sell Chrome Is Not Good for the Web

#46

Post by esalman »

thomassmith65 wrote: post #10

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…

Defence contractor as well.

Re: Google Being Forced to Sell Chrome Is Not Good for the Web

#47

Post by franze »

Besides all the good points in that thread about why Google should definitely be forced to sell Chrome lets ad another one: The Google Discover Feed in Google Chrome (and Android and Google App) is by now up to 80% of the Traffic News-Sites get. Basically it is Instagram for News and massively used. So Google now controls how Users consume the News. (Also you still need AMP to perform there...)

Re: Google Being Forced to Sell Chrome Is Not Good for the Web

#48

Post by andrewflnr »

inetknght wrote: post #16
ohso4 wrote: post #9

> 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.

> nobody writes checks to Chrome to make a certain search engine the default And some people wonder how Chrome could ever make money if it were divested from Google...

Would that be a better world than we have now, though, if Chrome was nominally separate from Google but still only exists because Google pays for it? It seems like the same thing with extra steps.

Re: Google Being Forced to Sell Chrome Is Not Good for the Web

#49

Post by glimshe »

I find amazing that, in today's web, the inaner a point is, the firmer is its proponent's conviction. Today's Google is the opposite of what is good for the web; it's a business led by a McKinsey bean counter and his henchmen, people who destroyed one of the most innovative companies the world has ever known and turned into a cancer who will only stop taking a cut of everything we do when it kills its host, the Internet.
Post reply on HN