Comment by GuB-42

Comment by GuB-42 9 hours ago

It actually kind of makes sense.

The DOJ wants to break what it considers to be Google's monopoly, and Chrome is a prime target. The problem is that Chrome by itself is worse than worthless, it is a money sink and it only makes sense as a part of a system.

OpenAI is starting to feel the competition. ChatGPT is no longer the only game in town, DeepSeek happened, Google is becoming actually good, Claude is quite popular among coders, and Grok is not a joke anymore. They need something if they don't want to lose out, and buying the most popular browser to make it into a gateway into their service may be an option.

bambax 8 hours ago

But removing Chrome from Google makes zero sense and won't stop it from being a monopoly. The monopoly part comes from buying DoubleClick (in 2007!) -- that should never have been allowed.

Not sure how to extract that part from Google now. It would be difficult, but probably quite effective.

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GuB-42 8 hours ago

Quite effective at destroying anything good left of Google I would say.
Google has a bunch of nice things (search, gmail, maps, ...) that cost money, and an advertising business that makes money, the former helping the latter. Split the two and the nice stuff will be without funding and die out, and only the "evil" part will survive. Or so I think. Splitting out Chrome will not change the face of the world, but Firefox has shown that an (somewhat) independent browser can work.

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- e3bc54b2 7 hours ago
  
  Those 'nice' parts of the google are feeding the 'evil' advertisement business. Now more than anything, the reason google's ad business is so rich specifically because they (and only they) know everything about most of the denizens to farm them efficiently and thus demand a premium. Take their feed away and the ad business livestock will suddenly be lot more docile.
  
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- troyvit 6 hours ago
  
  It would be interesting to hear how much a subscription to docs, gmail, maps, etc. would have to be to keep them operating at current levels.
  
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LunaSea 7 hours ago

They could just split DV360 from Google Ad Manager and Google Ad Exchange.

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troupo 7 hours ago

> But removing Chrome from Google makes zero sense and won't stop it from being a monopoly. The monopoly part comes from buying DoubleClick
Not only. Google controls a lot of user attention. See how many services they link together to serve you ads .... erm .... recommendations to make browsing better or something: https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1908951546869498085 And one of those services is Chrome

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diggan 8 hours ago

> The problem is that Chrome by itself is worse than worthless, it is a money sink and it only makes sense as a part of a system.

Or, just an out-there idea, what if the Chrome became property of the government instead? Forced to be FOSS, put into maintenance mode and offer it as a truly user-focused browser instead of driven by any for-profit company (which will eventually run it into the ground).

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kouteiheika 8 hours ago

Yep, move it into an independent non-profit foundation and have the government fund its development through taxes as a public good software that benefits everyone. The idea makes sense, which is why it'll never happen.

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- palmotea 6 hours ago
  
  > Yep, move it into an independent non-profit foundation and have the government fund its development through taxes as a public good software that benefits everyone. The idea makes sense, which is why it'll never happen.
  Or turn it into a tightly regulated natural monopoly, a la a public utility.
  But I totally agree with you: some things should just be state-owned. We should put our energies into identifying those things and addressing any legitimate concerns (e.g. spying via requiring open source and reproducible builds) instead of trying to free market all the things.
  
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GuB-42 8 hours ago

Chrome is already FOSS, and there is no shortage of forks, including Edge.
The only part that isn't is the brand, and the ties with Google. And I am not a fan of the idea of a (foreign in my case) government browser, I'd rather have Google. At least, Google has a presence in my country and is bound by its laws,

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- tristan957 8 hours ago
  
  Chrome is not FOSS. Chromium is FOSS. Chrome is a proprietary fork.
  
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NegativeK 7 hours ago

> put into maintenance mode
That seems like a death sentence. The standards aren't stagnant.

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tomalbrc 8 hours ago

Considering the questionable choices made by the current President of the US let's maybe not do this. Let's not act like this wouldn't be turned into a propaganda machine in minutes

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senordevnyc 8 hours ago

Yeah, let’s put Trump in charge of the most popular browser in the world. What could go wrong?

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[removed] 5 hours ago

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Alifatisk 9 hours ago

> Google is becoming good

Where?

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fscaramuzza 9 hours ago

New Gemini models are quite good, Gemini 2.5 Pro is 1st in the user-benchmarks [1]. They also have Gemma, very good model that can run locally [2]. Benchmarks are not oracles of truth, but I feel like Google is not a kid who arrived late at the party anymore.
[1] https://lmarena.ai/
[2] https://blog.google/technology/developers/gemma-3/

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- danielbln 9 hours ago
  
  Yeah, with Gemini 2.5 Google stepped up to the grown up AI table and added on top. I still have a soft spot for Claude for general purpose chats, but have fully switched to Gemini for dev.
  
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- nisegami 9 hours ago
  
  Considering that several key breakthroughs happened at Google that made GPT-style LLMs possible (e.g. Attention is all you need paper), it's more like they took a long smoke break than showed up late.
  
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