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