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DOJ will push Google to sell off Chrome

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Re: DOJ will push Google to sell off Chrome

#101

Post by internet2000 »

gerash wrote: post #83
rahidz wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is Chrome being run so bad that we need even more committees, councils and bureaucrats to implement every single feature ? Microsoft is already using the Chromium and changing the default search engine to Bing and shipping it as Edge. What else is needed? This DOJ looks like they just want to pad their resumes with some grandiose case which might be bad for everyone else.

I think the point is to stop adding more features. The web is feature complete, everything Google is adding is just stuff to make them more money through ads and lock in.

Re: DOJ will push Google to sell off Chrome

#102

Post by catlover76 »

ninth_ant wrote: post #65
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.

It doesn’t matter if no one buys it, or if it doesn’t even continue to exist as a standalone business. That’s preferable. The important part is ending the egregious conflict of interest where an advertising behemoth controls access to the internet. Ideal result is that Chrome ceases to exist and Chromium continues as an independent open source project controlled by a nonprofit. Even if Google is one of the contributo…

[dead]

Re: DOJ will push Google to sell off Chrome

#103

Post by techjamie »

lemoncookiechip wrote: post #72

I'm very confused. Chrome is just Chromium with Google's own Telemetry. Chromium is open and maintained primarily by Google. Sure, there's a userbase, but you need a business model to take advantage of it in the first place because the benefit was the Telemetry (Google's) and Google's Ecosystem. Also, the article specifically mentions Chrome, NOT Chromium (which again, is open), so what incentive would Google have to…

As much as I dislike thinking it, out of the realistic possibilities for who could buy it, Microsoft is probably among the more preferable. Their primary income isn't from advertising, at least. Most other big players would be even more likely to continue with Google's direction of killing ad blockers. MS, to their credit, has never shown interest in doing that.

Re: DOJ will push Google to sell off Chrome

#104

Post by linuxhansl »

Slightly off-topic:

I am always baffled with the widespread use of Chrome.

On all my machines (including work) I use Firefox. Even on Android I disabled Chrome, so that the feed will have to use Firefox.

Chrome is neither faster nor more convenient than Firefox, so it is a bit of a mystery to me - I guess on Android it comes as the default.

Re: DOJ will push Google to sell off Chrome

#106

Post by Sabinus »

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.

That's just Google boiling the frog slowly.

Re: DOJ will push Google to sell off Chrome

#107

Post by techjamie »

throw_m239339 wrote: post #91
lemoncookiechip wrote: post #72

I'm very confused. Chrome is just Chromium with Google's own Telemetry. Chromium is open and maintained primarily by Google. Sure, there's a userbase, but you need a business model to take advantage of it in the first place because the benefit was the Telemetry (Google's) and Google's Ecosystem. Also, the article specifically mentions Chrome, NOT Chromium (which again, is open), so what incentive would Google have to…

Forcing Google to sell their ad business would be the death of that company. After all, it's mostly an ad company...

They would just have to go back to their original business model before they became an ad company when they ran third-party ads on Google search.

Granted, that may not get them enough income at their current scale. They would definitely have to scale back hard for that.

Re: DOJ will push Google to sell off Chrome

#109

Post by gerash »

Looking at this case and the recent case against SpaceX (which is required to only hire US permanent residents and citizens) for not hiring asylees, makes me think DOJ which has the bandwidth to only work on few very important cases isn't doing a good job overall.

Re: DOJ will push Google to sell off Chrome

#110

Post by consumer451 »

hinkley wrote: post #23
elmerfud wrote: post #16

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?

Isn't it even worse than that? Didn't they make changes via Manifest v3, which will not allow me to follow the FBI's advisory about using ad blockers, to make sure their ad revenue does not decline?

I do realize you can still use uBlock, but my understanding is that updates will be slow rolled, correct? Doesn't this open the window to malicious people to serve me mal-ads?

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