Comment by Hizonner

Comment by Hizonner 7 hours ago

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.

thethimble 6 hours ago

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.

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drivingmenuts an hour ago

True, and consider that the current US government would probably not be a good custodian, of, well, anything, but specifically, software of any sort.

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Hizonner 6 hours ago

> 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?
Yep. Billions of dollars of capital knowingly invested in an illegal enterprise results in penalties. Film at 11.

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- SR2Z 4 hours ago
  
  ...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.
  
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  dabockster an hour ago
  
  It could be argued that having Google retain ownership of Chrome would give them too much of a business incentive to repeat the monopoly in the near future.
  
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smegger001 7 hours ago

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...

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Keyframe 6 hours ago

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.

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dabockster an hour ago

> 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.
[1] https://notaniche.com/firefox-3-new-logo-weave/660/

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Hizonner 6 hours ago

I'd be happy to talk about doing something similar with Windows or iOS...

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- xnx 4 hours ago
  
  Chrome being open source and free seems like a significant difference.
  
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  Keyframe 2 hours ago
  
  Technically Chrome isn't open source, Chromium is and there are differences mostly related to Google services and branding.
  
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  dabockster an hour ago
  
  * As far as we all know. *
  This relationship means that Google can be throwing whatever they wanted into Chrome, and not necessarily have it make its way into Chromium.
  VS Code is the same way, and a lot of forks are finding out about that relationship right now when Microsoft blocked their C++ extensions from running on anything other than the proprietary build.
  
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iambateman 4 hours ago

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.

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