to me, shaving Android off their business (suggested next step if this fails) would be way more impactful
I’m worrying that whatever gets sold (Chrome or Android) might end up in the hands of someone even more scummy than Google.
They would have to be more scummy and also at least similarly competent… Google can’t innovate for crap, but they’re pretty good at maintaining projects (when they don’t randomly kill them off)
If they stop work on chromium, or belief in the stewardship of chromium wanes, it’ll fragment the ecosystem again. Which is sorely needed at this point - we need to get back to standards and away from centralized control
Imagine Twitter/musk acquires them. Microsoft, Apple, and many other big companies directly or indirectly rely on a chain now controlled by a group known for mismanagement - are they going to wait and see, or are they going to diversify?
Chiquita and Nestlé come to mind. Within tech industry, I’d say Amazon and probably Microsoft are worse as well, and there’s probably a ton of potentially even worse companies lurking in the shadows outside the top of the economic food chain.
I don’t know man. There’s a lot shittier business practices out there than paying to be the default search engine - which is laughably easy to change on any browser. Like marketplaces and services that pay to be exclusive sources of content and then use the fact that they’re the only source for most content to force extortionate deals on content creators and enshitify every aspect of the end user experience. Just to name one.
I think Google is putting their eggs in one basket (Android) in preparation for them selling off chrome. They are already killing ChromeOS.
https://www.androidauthority.com/chrome-os-becoming-android-3500661/
The next day, the Chrome division is sold off to a new company “Bloogle” and we’re back to square dumb.
And before you think about applying for a job there, know that the new company is still demanding mandatory 5 days in the office
If Google does not set the price for 200 trillion USD and it can be really bought, then it will be probably M$ and they will change the search engine to Bing and integrate Coplilot or whatever the fuck it is called now into it.
Pretty sure that would count as monopoly as well and the sale wouldn’t be approved.
And I was pretty sure them aquiring Activision Blizzard would count as monopolizing but here we are.
Did you consider that Microsoft lawyers said prices wouldn’t go up? Cause they did, they did say that, which is why the merger was approved. Do you think lawyers can just lie? Don’t you think it’s much more fair now that companies can make pinky promises that prices won’t go up before they become more monopolistic. That’s just good business for both customers and businesses /s
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.
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.
And what’s to stop it from continuing to monopolize search engine usage just because it’ll be owned by another company? Wouldn’t whoever purchases it just continue operating it the same way, banking on the name recognition?
