Comment by iambateman 8 hours ago
This is the problem with breaking Chrome out of Google. It’s not just OpenAI, but the constellation of potential buyers is short and problematic.
Is Apple a good buyer? Oracle? OpenAI? NVIDIA? The Saudis? (I think I’m kidding about that?)
Someone is going to buy this for $100B and find a way to make a (big) profit off of it. I’m not sure the new landlord is going to be less rapacious than the last one was.
This is hilarious! So billions of dollars of capital invested by Google on R&D results in all of the IP being seized with a $250m/year annual obligation?
> It’d be the right direction to go
Putting the legality of this aside for a moment, the second order effects of the government seizing IP at this scale would cause a massive downscaling of R&D investment followed by IP rapidly fleeing the country.
True, and consider that the current US government would probably not be a good custodian, of, well, anything, but specifically, software of any sort.
...except Chrome was not and is not an illegal enterprise.
The charges were against search and ads.
If the government made a decision like this it would discourage companies from trying to invest in OSS the way that Google has. Considering that this model has worked out amazingly well for the average person, that would be bad.
I think my preferred outcome would be donating it to either the Linux foundation or Apache software foundation rather than to a new foundation. But otherwise agree no default search/llm/etc...
This might fly in North Korea or Soviet Union, but seriously? At that point they could just abandon the project altogether. If we're discussing monopolistic position, we have to then account for what made Chrome come to such a position in the first place, aside from technical superiority of course. Leveraging google.com for promotion, integration with google services, android? What makes that different from what apple is doing? Yes, dominance was accelerated by strategic push from Google, but would it happen regardless? Was there even a war going on and won over FF, Safari, IE/Edge with unruly moves? It now needs to be broken away from a company because it's a success story? Was there a moment like "if you don't install/bundle Chrome we'll crush your business?" in style of Microsoft? Was there a moment like "Chrome or take a hike" in style of Apple?
I'm not even taking Google's side on this, just cannot see that side of it where they were evil to get to that point with it. If anything, Chrome made monopoly go away from clutches of Microsoft and to an extent Apple.
> If we're discussing monopolistic position, we have to then account for what made Chrome come to such a position in the first place, aside from technical superiority of course.
They were amazing marketers. They made television, bus stop, billboard, and other real life advertisements that you couldn't miss walking down the street. Firefox did... uhhhhh an online certificate[1] that only people who were devs or chronically online would know or care about.
Marketing and sales has long been the Achilles' heel of computer software. Mozilla and all these Firefox forks screwed up and continue to screw up to this day by only marketing their products (not just code anymore - think of it as an actual product or good) to internet niches and not at all in real life. The majority of the planet does log off sometime and touch grass, so that's where the sales pitch has to happen.
One commenter said this is funny. I don’t think it’s funny but I do think it’s the notional promise of communism.
As we know, communism has all kinds of unintended problems as a result of broken incentives. Even if it were legal, it’s unlikely to work.
What company takes it over is an important question, and I honestly don't have a good answer for that. Nearly every company I can think of would have some problem.
But my question is, do we need Chrome to actually continue in its current state?
Chromium could continue as open source with multiple companies contributing to it (and maybe it falls under the linux foundation to oversee it) then with companies like Microsoft making their own forks.
We have Safari, Edge, Firefox (which its future is also in question, but that's a separate topic). I guess Oprah is still kicking around.
When not under Google's control, what value does Chrome really serve beyond its existing install base (which not discounting, but that can change)
Opera is PRC owned and operated. Vivaldi is the actual successor to OG Opera.
I think the divide between HN and the world is significant, here.
For you (and me), switching browsers is annoying but doable. There was a time when I used Firefox, and then a time when I used Chrome, and someday I'll use something else. But for the vast majority of the world, the idea of switching browsers feels like a big challenge.
A lot of the world needs Chrome to keep working well for them.
> For you (and me), switching browsers is annoying but doable. There was a time when I used Firefox, and then a time when I used Chrome, and someday I'll use something else. But for the vast majority of the world, the idea of switching browsers feels like a big challenge.
Given this paragraph suggests you haven't changed browsers in over 15 years, you should probably give it a try sometime and see if what you think is true still is true.
(If you don't want to do your homework, it is not true. A not-very-technical person could change browsers three times between now and dinner and have no issues)
It seems like all of the browsers now import data from other browsers when you install them. So, is that really much of the case?
Beyond the old stereotype "grandparent thinks the E is the internet", there is not much of a difference in how each browser behaves. The UI's are shockingly similar.
If it was, I would not think that Google would be as successful as they are to push Chrome heavily. Users would not transition over.
I will admit that I do sometimes have a different view of technology than many people, I mean as it is I have multiple browsers running right now. And generally when I step back I can see, oh yeah this really may be a bigger deal for most people.
I am struggling to see it in this case, especially with every browser trying very hard to make it as easy as possible.
> Beyond the old stereotype "grandparent thinks the E is the internet"
That stereotype is now "grandparent thinks Chrome is the internet". It still exists in a big way. It also exists in the sense that "no one ever got fired for downloading Google Chrome".
> Damned if you do, damned if you don't
Only if you wait a few decades to break a monopoly up. This is the fall out of the lack of US government intervention in their megatech companies.
We see the EU trying to fight back, but really all of this is far too late. There will be significant fall out, I’m sure. The sale of Chrome could be an unmitigated disaster.
Totally agree. I think the only option here would be separating the company into multiple companies. This seems to be the direction the Meta case is more likely to go in.
Eg. Google could become, Google Search (and AI), YouTube, and an independent ad tech company with the remnants of DoubleClick (maybe Google Ads moves into this group as well and has deals with the other two entities).
Not quite. It exists (or at least, it originally existed) because Google didn't want Microsoft to have direct control over their main medium. (In particular, IE/Edge were funneling people to Bing.)
Yes, and it would be the same reason OpenAI would be interested. They'd get to control the client.
One more step, sama, and you too can have an advertising company.
While I shudder at the privacy implications of some of those buyers, there's a really ironic concept here: Google always had a conflict of interest between giving the user agency in their browser, and making ads unblockable (namely, its own). Under different stewardship, we might see a shift towards the user in the ad-blocking wars.
After all, the new buyer gets value out of your loyalty in using their browser to view more pages than ever before, so that it can use that data to train its LLMs! People bouncing from pages due to ads just gets in the way. We will have freedom from online advertising, for the low, low cost of a Larry Ellison or Elon Musk-managed panopticon!
The US courts would require they not enter the business at all, so that wouldn’t be feasible.
Best case scenario is this pisses off enough people to create a sea change toward alternative browsers.
Couldn’t we have an open source group fork Chromium and keep it sane? I’d imagine that would quickly become one of the most used browsers
Correct. Chrome is not and never was a profitable venture apart from Google. It was a strategic move designed to push web technology forward to allow Google's other, more profitable businesses like Gmail, Google Drive etc. to compete with their desktop counterparts.
Before Chrome, Google had an Internet Explorer plugin called Google Gears that enabled functionality like LocalStorage and Service Workers since those were not standard web features at the time. Eventually they made Chrome and only then were they able to push to make those things into web standards.
Apart from Google, Chrome can't survive in its current form. It's not profitable on its own, and any attempt to make it so will inevitably result in either huge cuts to development staff or some pretty intense enshitification, or both.
Apple? No. They have a browser and buying Chrome gives them more monopoly power on MacOS. Plus, they have to maintain a version for other OSes and that … well, they might not hate it, but I doubt they'd like it.
Oracle? Fuck no. To my knowledge, nothing good has ever come from Oracle.
OpenAI? Privacy nightmare.
NVidia? uh, why? Not even remotely their gig.
The Saudis? Not their gig, but wind blows, river flows, who know? But, not exactly known for their software devlopment prowess.
So don't allow that.
Chrome (and control over Chromium) go to a newly formed, independent nonprofit. The nonprofit is not in any way under Google's control.
Google receives zero compensation. The nonprofit is funded by Google at say $250M/year for 20 years... by which I mean Google writes checks and gets absolutely nothing in exchange. The funding is conditional only on the nonprofit doing something that can be vaguely viewed as shipping a browser. Don't like that? Shoulda thought about it before you started getting all monopolistic.
The nonprofit is required to spend all its incoming funds, and forbidden to do anything but provide a browser. Just the browser. No services. All elements of the browser are AGPL. The nonprofit is forbidden to accept any offer that would put it under the control of any other entity. Every Chrome/Chromium user can become a member of the noprofit and then vote for the board. The board may not recommend its own candidates.
The browser isn't allowed to have a default search engine, LLM, "safe sites list", sync server, or whatever. In fact, it's not even allowed to provide a list to choose from. The user has to find them.
No, I don't know if that's feasible under applicable law, and honestly I doubt it is. But it'd be the right direction to go.