As much as I’m a fan of breaking up Google, I’m not entirely sure carving Chrome out of Google without a further plan for what happens to the browser is a great idea. I mean, Google is bad, but things could be so, so much worse.
OpenAI would be interested in buying Google’s Chrome if antitrust enforcers are successful in forcing the Alphabet unit to sell the popular web browser as part of a bid to restore competition in search, an OpenAI executive testified on Tuesday at Google’s antitrust trial in Washington.
↫ Jody Godoy at Reuters
OpenAI is not the only “AI” vulture circling the skies.
Perplexity Chief Business Officer Dmitry Shevelenko said he didn’t want to testify in a trial about how to resolve Google’s search monopoly because he feared retribution from Google. But after being subpoenaed to appear in court, he seized the moment to pitch a business opportunity for his AI company: buying Chrome.
↫ Lauren Feiner at the Verge
Or, you know, what about, I don’t know, fucking Yahoo!?
Legacy search brand Yahoo has been working on its own web browser prototype, and says it would like to buy Google’s Chrome if the company is forced by a court to sell it.
↫ Lauren Feiner at the Verge
If the courts really want Google to divest Chrome, the least-worst position it could possibly end up is in some sort of open source foundation or similar legal construction, where no one company has total control over the world’s most popular browser. Of course, such a construction isn’t exactly ideal either – it will become a battleground of corporate interests soaked with the blood of ordinary users – but anything, anything is better than cud peddlers like OpenAI or whatever the hell Yahoo! even is these days.
As users, we really should not want Google to be forced to divest Chrome at this point in time. No matter the outcome, users are going to be screwed even harder than if it were to stay with Google. I hate to say this, but I don’t see an option that’s better than having Chrome remain part of Google.
The big problem here is that there is no coherent strategy to deal with the big technology companies in the United States. We’re looking at individual lawsuits where judges and medieval nonsense like juries try to deal with individual companies, which, even if, say, Google gets broken up, would do nothing but strengthen the other big technology companies. If, I don’t know, Android suddenly had to make it on its own as a company, it’s not users who would benefit, but Apple. Is that the goal of antitrust?
What you really need to deal with the inordinate power of the big technology companies is legislation that deals with the sector as a whole, instead of letting random courts and people forced to do jury duty decide what to do with Google or Amazon or whatever. The European Union is doing this to great success so far, getting all the major players to make sweeping changes to the benefit of users in the EU. If the United States is serious about dealing with the abusive behaviour of the big technology companies, it’s going to need to draft and pass legislation similar to the European Union’s DMA and DSA.
Of course, that’s not going to happen. The United States Congress is broken beyond repair, the US president and his gaggle of incompetents are too busy destroying the US economy and infecting children with measles, and the big tech companies themselves are just bribing US politicians in broad daylight. The odds of the US being able to draft and pass effective big tech antitrust regulations is lower than zero.
OpenAI Chrome. You feeling better yet about the open web?
I’ll be blunt, and honest.
There is no other entity that will keep Chrome as functional as its current state, without any further erosion of privacy.
(Except maybe Microsoft, but that would be debatable).
Why?
Google uses Chrome to keep the web open. And does not directly benefit financially from it.
However…
They also spend a lot of resources. Not only engineering and code quality wise, but also the infrastructure (I don’t think anyone has any idea how much storage and network bandwidth is required to store profiles for synchronization for example, and that is only one of the features).
Yet…
There is also the question of Chrome OS. Is it also part of “de-bundling?”
Not to mention the hardware devices that are tightly tied in (yes, they make money here). And Chrome OS is also used in smart devices like the original ChromeCast (hence the name). And it is (was) the foundation for Fedora CoreOS.
It would be a mess to separate Chrome from Google, and probably a death sentence to many Chrome features, and a major hit yo user privacy (contrary to common misconceptions, Google does not sell user information. In fact, I complain that they buy the data).
If they want to separate something, take out YouTube.
Let’s see how this plays out.
sukru,
I would point to google’s web-drm, although thankfully a failed initiative, as a counter example. Also their attempts to clamp down on adblockers and 3rd party extensions doesn’t paint a picture of openness either. They want the web to be open for themselves, however it seems less clear that they want openness for others.
Google do put a value on browser control as is made evident by the $0.5 billion/year paid to mozilla to set google as the default search engine and an undisclosed amount to apple. Extrapolating to chrome’s market share would suggest chrome is worth at least $13B/year to google on the basis of defaults and possibly more with the value of telemetry & service integration, having the ability to veto 3rd party ad-blocking extensions and so on. I guess you mean they aren’t paid directly for chrome. Maybe the indirect financial benefits are worth a lot more than direct financial benefits.
Who’s to say these chrome features would not be better if they weren’t so tethered to google? Rather than developing features to tether everything to google servers, they could focus more on vendor neutral federated standards that empower users instead. I understand that many companies prefer to invest in vendor locked features than federated ones, but then the costs they incur for this are their own fault and they hardly deserve sympathy for costs that are the byproduct of their own self-serving decisions. Chrome could have been better off in the hands of a team focusing more on federation and less on centralized infrastructure.
While you make some valid points, you do seem to be implying that google having the data is not a privacy issue. But personally I feel that it is. I think google’s data hoarding entitlements are a danger to privacy rights regardless of whether they sell it.
It’s definitely messy. This is why I believe in smaller but earlier interventions. Now that we’re here there’s no good strait-foward path to fix the monopolies without taking very drastic measures.
Alfman,
Yes, they have received negative feedback and had to roll back some changes because of that. (Some, not all)
An open web benefits all, even if it might be first and foremost beneficial to Google. After all if everything is behind a paywall or an app, nothing is indexable, and Search fails.
Without Search, there is no Ads.
There is an organic symbiotic relationship here.
The same is true for Firefox. Even though they don’t benefit by indexing the web, they allow free access to it. Any DRM or closed system would be counter-productive.
Yes, that would be nice. But I do not think anyone has achieved that. Even Mozilla provides their own servers this the sync feature.
I don’t know on which planet you live but it’s not Earth.
Google didn’t roll back anything, in fact they even rolled back the removal of 3rd party cookies.
Manifest 3 went ahead despite anyone else objecting?
Open and Google shouldn’t be in the same sentence at all. Google is now in a position to push through shitty “enhancements” because of total browser control. The 500M to Mozilla is to blind government agencies that there is no monopoly, never mind the 20 billion to Apple for being the default.
There is a reason why they pay that kind of insane money. They clearly make more money than they spend, it IS profitable!!
But the biggest problem for users is the sheer pervasiveness. It’s virtually impossible to escape Google.
When you are logged into your Google account (Gmail, Youtube, Oauth, Android phone, etc) it will tell Google exactly what you did, to shove some more ‘you really are interested in these’ ads in your face.
Or the hoops you have to jump through to stop data collection from your Android phone? Big Brother is watching you.
And about Mozilla Sync: you don’t have to use Mozillas servers, you can run your own.
And why does YouTube load considerably slower on Firefox than on Chrome? It’s all deliberate.
Wondercool2,
It would be very difficult to go over all these. But Google has really saved the open web multiple times.
I was at “planet Google” during one of these.
If you are open to actually discussing what happened (and as far as I can share), we can touch those if you’d like.
You are completely right about that Sukru. Google did a lot of good for the web in the 2000s and probably even in the 2010s.
But I think that time has gone for a few years now. Around the time they dropped “Don’t do Evil” and money became more important than anything.
And I am not the only one who thinks so, it’s also the American and EU judges these days. Hell, it’s even the Google employees themselves it seems, considering the protests and questions to the management.
Truely Open means something else in my book: allowing true participation in the Open Source projects that Google started (not just token open repositories) and to use the software without be coerced into the Google Ad ecosystem. But let’s face it, slowly but surely the thumbscrews are turned on user/consumers at the moment in the ever increasing demands of producing bigger profits.
PS Since you apparently worked at Google I am really curious if Google also tracks people without a Google account? Do you know? What I mean is, if I visit sites owned by Google or with Google Analytics on it, will modern fingerprinting, usage patterns, IP addresses, etc create a profile for what Google think is a unique person? even for a person(s) who don’t have a Google account?
The problem is that I can’t really deduct that from Googles Privacy Policy.
Wondercool2,
I agree. Google is definitely not the same company. Having seeing it slowly turn was not easy.
In any case, for specifically Chrome / Chromium, I would still argue they are still the best caretakers.
However maybe, there could be some limited adult supervision. Like the whole “manifest v3” fiasco.
sukru,
Well, I did say google wants the web to be open for itself, but not necessarily others. I already mentioned their intention to add a layer of google controlled DRM. the exact opposite of openness. Who do you think that would have hurt most? It got canceled due to protests, but that’s not always the case as manifest v3 situation demonstrates.
Another example where google have an advantage is with recaptcha specifically giving google the keys to many websites. I have no evidence that google are using recapcha to grant themselves privileged access, but they clearly could. It’s quite easy to show that recaptcha is much less aggressive against chrome users logged into google than firefox users who aren’t. Sometimes it’s so aggressive I can’t access a website at all (happened to me this month on osnews, other times I’ve had to abandon a shopping cart). Intentional or not it is google’s fault and it clearly does interfere with the open web.
Of course, I’m a proponent for the open web and open technology that places users in the drivers seat. To this end I am more comfortable with browsers being totally independent from advertisers and media companies with their conflicts of interest. However I’m always forced to concede the point that corporate giants have access to money and resources whereas it can be a struggle for indy projects to get funding.
Now days the tech giants are all promoting their tethered services. Federation is frowned on because it helps users be independent, which is viewed as bad in the corporate world. Federated services we had like XMPP get discontinued. Even mozilla tries to compete head to head with google chrome to a fault but to be fair I do think you can self host sync….
https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/r4nso8/selfhost_your_own_firefox_sync_server/
There is so much untapped potential for federated devices & networks operating under the owner’s control, but it’s not under corporate interests. In everything from TVs to lights and thermostat the owner empowering innovation that I dream of is largely absent from today’s products – they’re all being engineered to control us and make us dependent on them. It’s not a technological problem so much as a problem with corporate incentives.
Anyway, my long winded response is probably boring you, haha.
Alfman,
I get what you are saying, but unfortunately reality does not always favor idealism.
An organization like Chrome is very expensive to run, and Google built it for their own needs (open web vs. Internet Explorer monopoly). People did actually come to Chrome willingly, and even when there is a “browser choice” most still do the same.
Can Firefox compete? Honest, they cannot. They just do not have the resources. That is why every now and then this site, or that site has issues working there.
I’m doing my part, though. Moved maybe one quarter to one third of my browsing to Firefox.
If more people willingly do this, things might change.
(As for “recaptha”, I don’t know how they are organized. But those kind of technologies are “necessary evils”. Unless we can figure out a way to do distributed micro-payment systems for each web access, people would want to abuse the open web, and we will need to add extremely wasteful barriers).
sukru,
I think the vast majority of users stick to the defaults rather than go out and switch browsers on their own. Those who do switch are probably compelled to do so for sync purposes with their phones.
Granted, they obviously can’t compete on resources or marketing reach. However I think there is a difference between being unable to compete on merit versus being unable to compete against a monopoly. Firefox could be more competitive on level playing field, problem is the playing field is not level. Developers are starting to target the chrome monopoly rather than standards compliance, kind of like how things were with IE.
I’m a bit surprised, haha. Honestly though people like us are a tiny minority so I don’t think it will help 🙁
I want to clarify that my issue isn’t the mere existence of captcha, but the fact that google treats users differently on competing products. If I’m made to suffer more aggressive recaptchas and even denials of service under firefox as a “necessary evil”, then it seems very unfair to give chrome users the green light. Yet time and time again this is exactly what happens – I’m blocked on my preferred browsers until I switch to google’s browser. You can admit that’s a serious antitrust issue, right? It only happens to me a couple times a year, but when it does happen it’s aggravating as heck.
Google keep spending money in Chrome because it’s the best way for them to serve ads to everyone. Same thing with Android, so they can serve ads on your phone. It has been a long time sine google wanted to “do no evil”. They should break up Chrome and YouTube. Maybe then, we could have some competition.
franksands,
Exactly, it is a mutually beneficial situation for Google to keep Chrome functioning.
I have tried to summarize above. However, can you explain the logistics of an “independent Chrome” or selling it to a third party?
To begin, let’s do a mental exercise.
Just for a baseline, Mozilla spends about $500 million per year, most of it coming from Google!
Chrome would be much more expensive. Just as a proxy, let’s use “market share” 66% to 2.5%. So roughly over $10 billion per year. Let’s say half of it is fluff, and $5 billion per year as absolute minimum.
Where will “the hypothetical company” that buys Chrome will find those funds?
(Except for selling user data… most likely to… yes, you know it… Google)?
sukru,
Mozilla grosses $500 million per year, it doesn’t follow that this is all spend on firefox. Mozilla have lots of other projects and initiatives that cost money too not to mention the fact that they’ve been putting excesses into investments rather than spending every dime of revenue outright. With this in mind, “$500 mil” number is not directly indicative of their browser costs.
Also, I’d push back on the notion that chrome costs more simply because it has more market share. In fact I’m confused why you’re trying to use market share as a proxy for costs at all. Software development has the funny property of approaching zero marginal cost. It’s expensive to build, but once built it’s very cheap to duplicate. Granted there are some marginal costs for distributing more bits and whatnot, but even so scaling software up is extremely cheap. I’m sure that you know all of this already, which is why I’m confused about your statement.
Do we know how many full time developers actually work on chrome? Just throwing a number out there, it seems like 100 developers could reasonably do the maintenance work while add features here and there. Not cheap, but not the hundreds of millions or even billions that are being suggested. There are a lot of companies that could afford this, but the bigger question is what they’d get out of it. A purely benevolent benefactor is probably wishful thinking, there’s going to be a catch.
Another idea could be to have the browser maintained by an independent browser consortium and somehow convince corporations to fund it.
This is probably not realistic, but the number of users is so large that if they all contributed just $0.50/year it would create a fortune that could easily pay for the browser.
Alfman,
In the past 12 months, there were estimated total of 2,600 unique contributors to Chromium source code. This of course does not include all other infrastructure that is not public. And not all contributors are full time Google employees.
Average Google employee salary is around $290,000 per year. With overhead like office usage and taxes, for cost to company this would be $500,000 per head.
(Not to mention they get the benefit from the larger organization like marketing, source control, administration, cloud infrastructure and so on).
I used the marketshare as a proxy, because it provides an “inverse” relationship. The usage is based on the feature set, and the quality of the software (plus Google’s influence of course, but that is limited). Relationship might not be linear, but it is arguably highly correlated.
sukru,
My god I choose the wrong career path. Actually I did apply to google but they turned me away. Smaller local companies out here don’t pay that 🙁
Does chrome actually have more features though? I don’t know how much it costs to develop chrome but I would not assume it has to be higher just on the basis of market share. I’m not convinced there is a strong correlation at high scales of economy. Otherwise you could end up projecting ridiculous costs for software like notepad and mspaint simply because they have higher market share when in actuality a single dev could do it in their spare time. The point being, I think the market share methodology for estimating software development costs is very flawed.
Alfman,
There is also this massively inflated cost of living. So, it mostly evens out.
Yes, it does.
From raw numbers perspective, Chrome codebase is ~35-40 million LOC, whereas Firefox would be ~20-25 million (for a comparison Linux Kernel is ~30 million. Chrome is even more complex than the Linux Kernel, go figure)
From practical looks, Chrome offers a lot more like:
a better javascript engine (v8) which is the root of all node.js backend ecosystem and electron desktop apps,
an entire linux based operating system (Chromium OS) which is also the precursor to all read only / containerized linux distributions (like CoreOS).
native chromecast support
PWA integration
and more…
For the record, I think this LOC argument is stronger than the market share argument. I can believe there’s a higher correlation between LOC and cost. I could be convinced of chrome being 60% more expensive than firefox is a reasonable estimate on this basis. Expensive but still within reach for large companies.
I wouldn’t say that these are exclusive to chrome though. Mozilla had a version of node.js, firefox os, etc. Obviously mozilla’s products failed, but part of that ties into the fact they were competing against google and not necessarily that mozilla engineers were unable to deliver a product. This goes back to the point about uneven playing fields.
I’ve had some clients ask me to not bother supporting firefox, not because there was a problem with firefox, but because they didn’t see a point in supporting a niche browser. I believe these network effects are some of the strongest advantages monopolies have. I’m not suggesting chrome is a bad product, but it does receive disproportionate support because of their monopoly status. The IRS of all things told me to pay my estimated taxes using chrome because their site didn’t work under firefox, which I tracked down to a user agent check blocking FF. When I used a user agent switcher, FF actually worked. It’s so damn unfair to mozilla, but it’s the reality they have to live in.
Come on now, how bad can a company with the word “open” in its name really be?
Yup, it reminds me of countries with the name Democratic in their name 🙂
And frozen food with “gourmet” in its name
Growing up in a “Socialist” republic as it was falling apart, I remember talking to my dad and I suggested that after we are free, we should rename our country “Democratic”, and he way like no, no-no-no-no, no! 😀
I think of this as more shiny tinfoil to keep the henhouse clucking. I think that CHrome is no longer the future cashcow of Google, although it was in the past. Everything now is aimed at the smartphone. Although there is a smartphone version of Chrome, Ai, and other future endeavors are aimed at search, chatbots, youtube, and social media. So I see why the government took aim at carving out CHrome, as it would raise eyebrows,as did the Colosseum in Rome, but wouldn’t prove much harm in the longrun. Just my opinion.
spiderdroid,
That would only be half of the story. Yes, plain old “web” usage is decreasing (for decades now). And yes, Search is moving elsewhere.
However… there is still the need to keep the web open. Google not only earns money as secondary effects (AdSense and display ads on landing pages), they also get to keep their index for information.
That is why they collaborate with publishers like New York Times to ensure their news pages stay up, fund smaller news initiatives, and provide open source libraries to keep the pages fast and clean.
Without an open web, there is not crawling, no data, no index.
(And no, Google will not “scrape” data from your Android apps. Not for user profiles, unless of course the app itself is serving ads, but that is a different topic).
I posted a similar thought yesterday: Anyone who can *afford* to buy Chrome is going to be a worse steward of Blink/Chromium than Google would.
I have an idea of who would be the best organization to take over Chrome, and I’m goanna catch people off-guard: THE KRONOS GROUP. As in, the graphics and compute people.
Now, it sounds insane. Kronos is a _graphics_ organization. Why the heck should they get a browser!?!?! But the more you think about it, on a technical level, the more it makes sense.
Firstly, Kronos is connected to everyone in the industry. Everyone who has a browser ALSO works with Kronos already, and has good high-trust working relationships with them. Microsoft, Google, Apple, Samsung, Intel, ARM, Valve, EVERYONE works with Kronos.
Second, Kronos specializes in standards and protocols. Chrome and the engine are, essentially, a collection of standards and protocols. Kronos knows how all this works, they’re used to balancing industry needs, they think both in terms of documentation and implementation. When it comes to working with the W3C, they’ll be bringing a massive wealth of experience in high-performance standards-driven design to the table, all in an era of smaller underpowered devices expected to compute way harder. With browsers also leaning towards AI, they’re also in a strong position to help standardize AI standards on the web in a positive way.
Third, Chrome is, at this point, the vanilla browser people build on. Every browser adds its own features, and many other browsers want them too. Kronos, experienced in working with vendors and vendor-specific extensions, and collating them into protocols, is very experienced in extending products to fit their users.
Fourth, Kronos has a very strong membership list. They’re well-funded, and in a strong position to make decisions which are good for the web without the need to make profit. Existing stakeholders who are already members can chip in more if they want, and they might pick up more members from the (VERY FEW) stakeholders who aren’t already members.
Fifth, Kronos, being a standards house, isn’t prone to undue influence. Google can’t give them Chrome and just lean on them the same way they could with someone else. Google also won’t threaten to cut funding, because they already rely on Kronos for about a dozen other things. They;re actually very resilient.
Sixth, just, repeat after me… “Download Kronos Chrome” … And say it doesn’t sounds f*cking badass.
Why not just sell it to the CIA and the NSA? Since that’s who gets all the data anyways. Cut out the middleman.
andyprough,
Finally, a solution we can all agree on 🙂
The problem is, there is no browser market.
Nobody is going to buy Chrome to “compete” in the web browser space. This is the base premise of breaking it out and it is totally false.
Yes, Firefox would be better able to compete with Chrome if Chrome were independent and not part of the Google monopoly. Sure. That is because most of the financial resources would disappear from the space and Chrome and Firefox would both be competing with the likes of Igalia (Servo) and Ladybird. They would all be small teams running relatively small businesses.
Apple would clearly shrink down the Safari team to match. Does Microsoft get to keep Edge? Even using the same engine, they might be the only winner in this case.
Or….the government can force Google to divest Chrome to somebody else that is also not in the browser business but who will leverage Chrome’s popularity to compete unfairly in their core business (the business where they actually make money). This would be the case for OpenAI or any of the other players mentioned. What exactly does that accomplish?
Is the goal just to hurt Google or to help the consumer?
Why does the article and most comments start from the assumption that Chrome is what keeps the web open?
On the contrary, I’d say Chrome’s dominant position is what harms the web’s openness. How many times have you lately ran into sites that will only work properly in Chrome but not in Firefox? How is that “open”?
I think the best that could happen for the open web – not chrome – is the brand being sold to a bad administrator that will lose market share, while a bunch of clones from the chromium code base compete with it and the other browsers.
This misses on the biggest collateral damage here: browser engine diversity.
The current proposal will also kill Firefox. That is why they were against it:
https://mezha.media/en/news/zaborona-viplat-za-poshuk-google-mozhe-postaviti-pid-zagrozu-maybutnye-firefox-300433/
What? How?
Google basically pays almost all revenue for Firefox as well.
The government will shut this down, too.
(Otherwise, they could just “take over” Mozilla, just as Microsoft did to CloseAI, sorry OpenAI)
It is extremely likely…
Without Google money, there would be no Firefox, and no Gecko.
(Other companies like Microsoft might try to take over, but they would probably prefer to spend resources to take over Chromium instead).
Firefox needs a management shakedown.
I’d donate to them but there is no way to donate strictly for the development of the browser, it goes into a pool and you have no guarantee they won’t waste your money on the next blockchain/AI/whatever comes next initiative.