to me, shaving Android off their business (suggested next step if this fails) would be way more impactful
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/
I’m worrying that whatever gets sold (Chrome or Android) might end up in the hands of someone even more scummy than Google.
Is there any company more scummy than Google?
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
You had me bad in the beginning there haha, thanks for the chuckle.
Is there any company with the funds to buy this that would not become also a monopoly?
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.
Because chrome doesn’t make any money
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.
I’ll give them 5 bucks.
They should make it open source
I wished I got a nickel every time someone argues Chrome should be open source, only to find out it always has been
Per Wikipedia
Most of Chrome’s source code comes from Google’s free and open-source software project Chromium, but Chrome is licensed as proprietary freeware.[15] WebKit was the original rendering engine, but Google eventually forked it to create the Blink engine;[18] all Chrome variants except iOS used Blink as of 2017.[
Open source =/= FOSS, yes it’s licensed as proprietary, but you can compile Chromium from scratch and the only drawback is Google’s backup server not letting you connect. Other than that, the browser is identical…
Well, it mostly already is. The Chromium project is essentially everything Chrome already has, except Chrome contains a few proprietary components (IIRC the tracking is proprietary)
Google doesn’t have to do shit. Ffs
It will be another tech giant probably amazon or something.
Enshittification intensifies
The buyer of chrome could make bing the default search engine and re-enable whatever broke Ublock origin (the ad blocker)
They could also cripple gapps and gmail a bit. It would also be harder for google to unilaterally develop new web standards.
That would no doubt consternate a few at Google and knee cap them forcing web shit down our throats that only improves their ad business.
I wonder what would happen to the 800 gorbillion Chromebooks if this sale happens
Good news, but does someone more knowleagable of these things know the likelihood of a Trump DOJ derailing this? I am hopefully as the original case was brought in 2017 under Trump, and his relationship with Big Tech is at best strained, but I truly don’t know what to expect moving forward.
according to Cory doctorow (pluralistic), trumps gouvernement will likely selectively enforce antitrust, so the Google case would go through, but cases against, say, tesla would be dropped.
