to me, shaving Android off their business (suggested next step if this fails) would be way more impactful
Why not both!
good point, I guess one worry here is about the way in which this will affect Firefox (note Firefox here, not the Mozilla Fdn who have managed to Elon their own thing without help, seemingly)
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/
Android also becoming chrome OS in light of recent news of developing Android desktop mode and native Android compatibility with Linux apps, looks like they make hybrid OS that could do it all
if Google was to sell Android that would be like a nuclear bomb dropping. I mean aside from budget Android phones people are going more and more to apple devices just because of the stability.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Ehh, I wouldn’t consider Safari “using chromium” at this point. It has been hard forked for years. Chrome could disappear tomorrow and it wouldn’t affect Safari development.
Safari has roots in chromium? I thought it was WebKit or something else for it’s engine.
Safari is using WebKit. WebKit started as a fork of the KHTML and KJS libraries from KDE and has since been further developed by KDE contributors, Apple, Google, Nokia, Bitstream, BlackBerry, Sony, Igalia and others. On April 3, 2013, Google announced that it had forked WebCore, a component of WebKit, to be used in future versions of Google Chrome, under the name Blink. Source: Wikipedia
so its been awhile since they have been together.
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?
MS is both wet and salivating right now.
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.
It will be another tech giant probably amazon or something.
Enshittification intensifies
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.
I’ll give them 5 bucks.
Is there any company with the funds to buy this that would not become also a monopoly?
They should make it open source
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
