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Google must sell Chrome to end search monopoly, justice department argues in court filing
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2024
485 points (99.2% liked)
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Why does it need to be sold to another big company, why can't they just break Google up so chrome becomes its own business?
Chrome by itself would likely cost 100 billion dollars to sell, and then more to maintain, without any clear revenue except selling user data. Chrome is not a profitable product on its own. Not many companies can afford that.
Well shucks, I guess it should just be made fully open source, the code distributed, and the business dissolved. Womp wooomp.
The overwhelming majority of development to Chromium is done by Google and not the open source contributors to the project. Maintaining a browser is not something that can be done for free as a hobby. It requires an army of full-time developers to sustain.
Given all of the major browsers except Firefox are using Chromium, the best case scenario for spinning off Chrome is that Microsoft would pick up the lion’s share of development to keep Edge up to date.
This is the same reason that all of the major Linux distributions have large foundations to support them.
The DoJ would do less harm to the internet if they just forced Google to sell off Search instead. Then they’d be an advertising and cloud services company that happens to maintain a major browser to serve their ads.
There are multiple other browser startups in development that are not Chromium based. Like LadyBird (which is completely independant), and Zen browser (which started as a FF fork)
That’s fair - I should have said major browsers to be more clear. Edited above.
Ehh, I wouldn’t consider Safari “using chromium” at this point. It has been hard forked for years. Chrome could disappear tomorrow and it wouldn’t affect Safari development.
Safari has roots in chromium? I thought it was WebKit or something else for it's engine.
Safari is using WebKit. WebKit started as a fork of the KHTML and KJS libraries from KDE and has since been further developed by KDE contributors, Apple, Google, Nokia, Bitstream, BlackBerry, Sony, Igalia and others. On April 3, 2013, Google announced that it had forked WebCore, a component of WebKit, to be used in future versions of Google Chrome, under the name Blink. Source: Wikipedia
so its been awhile since they have been together.
Because chrome doesn't make any money
Google could pay chrome billions just like they pay mozillla and apple..
Besides it's not like that's really true anyway, chrome would make tons of money independently, it would just sell user data to Google or other parties instead of Google getting it for free. Chrome 'doesn't make any money' because it doesn't need to on paper, the same way a parking lot doesn't make any money for a grocery store, but if a third party owned the lot, the grocery store would just pay them to use it, or the individual people using the lot would.
Chrome is the biggest browser and successfully collects data on billions of people, additionally, chrome development would absolutely be supported by all of the companies that build chromium based browsers like Microsoft, opera, brave, etc.