In August 2024, Google was found to have abused its web search monopoly. In November 2024, the US Department of Justice proposed forcing Google to sell off the Chrome web browser — the moat around …
A lot of court documents are sealed or redacted, so I can’t quite get at all the details. Nonetheless here’s what I’ve got so far:
Chrome is just the browser, including Chromium, but not ChromiumOS (a Gentoo fork, basically) or ChromeOS (the branded OS on Chromebooks)
Chrome is unaffordable because it was quite expensive to build and continues to be a maintenance burden
The government is vaguely aware that forcing a sale of Chrome could be adverse for the market but the court hasn’t said anything on the topic yet
Via filing from Apple, the court is aware that Firefox materially depends on Google, although they haven’t done much beyond allow Apple to file as amicus
The court hasn’t cracked open AMD v Intel yet, where it was found that a cash remedy would be better than punishing the ongoing business concerns of a duopoly, but it would be one possible solution: instead of selling Chrome, Google would have to pay its competitors a lump sum and change their business practices somewhat.
I am genuinely not sure what happens to “the browser market”, as it were. The Brave and Safari teams are relatively small because they make tweaks on top of an existing browser core; the extreme propagation of Electron suggests that once a browser is written, it does not need to be written again. The court may find browsers to be a sort of capital which is worth a lot of money on its own but not expensive to maintain. This would destroy Mozilla along with Google!
Of course, chrome is Google’s primary useruseage tracking tool, so that would be a big blow for them. They’d have to buy the data they now generate themselves.
A lot of court documents are sealed or redacted, so I can’t quite get at all the details. Nonetheless here’s what I’ve got so far:
The court hasn’t cracked open AMD v Intel yet, where it was found that a cash remedy would be better than punishing the ongoing business concerns of a duopoly, but it would be one possible solution: instead of selling Chrome, Google would have to pay its competitors a lump sum and change their business practices somewhat.
I am genuinely not sure what happens to “the browser market”, as it were. The Brave and Safari teams are relatively small because they make tweaks on top of an existing browser core; the extreme propagation of Electron suggests that once a browser is written, it does not need to be written again. The court may find browsers to be a sort of capital which is worth a lot of money on its own but not expensive to maintain. This would destroy Mozilla along with Google!
yeah. Chrome exists solely to protect and enable Google’s ad business. Does OpenAI think it gets three billion phones for free?
The courts found against google in the huge search engine and online add cases, https://www.theverge.com/23869483/us-v-google-search-antitrust-case-updates finding that Google is a monopolist.
They may force Google to divest Chrome. That probably had some impact on this offer.
https://www.theverge.com/news/626502/trump-doj-recommends-google-breakup-antitrust-search-chrome
Of course, chrome is Google’s primary
useruseage tracking tool, so that would be a big blow for them. They’d have to buy the data they now generate themselves.