Fuck yeah. I've been calling for this for years. Please break out Chrome. I know quite a few people that work there and I worked there myself. I'm the only one I know amongst us that feels this...
Fuck yeah. I've been calling for this for years. Please break out Chrome.
I know quite a few people that work there and I worked there myself. I'm the only one I know amongst us that feels this way. It's probably a matter of the old Upton Sinclair quote:
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
In your opinion, what monetization model make the most sense for an independent web browser? I've reviewed every option I could think of, but I don't love any of them. The first way is include...
Exemplary
In your opinion, what monetization model make the most sense for an independent web browser? I've reviewed every option I could think of, but I don't love any of them.
The first way is include advertisements in the browser itself, as Opera once did. Unfortunately, on the web, ads seem like the only model that has proven to work consistently. I can't imagine that sponsorships and product integrations alone could ever pay for the number of engineers working on the project. And I feel they'd be hard pressed to get people to pay for, or donate monthly for a product that previously was completely free.
Auctioning off the default search engine would also no longer be allowed, due to the antitrust rulings discussed in the article. That's been the only way Mozilla has been able to stay alive thus far. They've been trying to find a new business model for years, but every time they try something: Pocket, Cliqz, sponsored links - their userbase chastises them for it, or flocks to the latest fork of Firefox/Chromium.
Honestly, I'm worried about who's going to pay for all this engineering talent. If users aren't willing to, will web browser teams be stripped down and run as skeleton crews? Will we see a sharp decline in new features, standards work, and security fixes?
Micropayments are conceptually a good idea, but there's no real infrastructure to support them. Transaction fees make them a non-starter, and while cryptocurrency was once touted as a solution to this problem, their use as a speculation investment vehicle has made them completely useless for actual utility. Besides, what would you pay for? Time spent browsing?
I could maybe see browser vendors selling a "Pro" plan, with features such as remote syncing, backing up profile data, or an integrated VPN. Maybe they could also create a storefront for paid extensions and take a cut of each one. That adds infrastructure costs, but at least it gets money flowing. Somehow, they would need to commercialize the browser.
One darker possibility is selling browsing data. Credit card companies have been freely selling access to user's purchasing habits for years. Selling access to anonymized web trends could be one approach to shoring up the lost funds. It might be enough to maintain a small team of developers anyway.
The only other approach I can think of is nationalization. To be adopted by a government and paid for through taxes. It sounds crazy, but the web browser is the most important software installed on any computer. Governments do sometimes take over important utilities like water, electricity, or transportation, and I think the browser could qualify. Might we one day see a world where different governments maintain their own forks of Chromium or Firefox?
So I don't really know where this path might lead. It's difficult to say because we've never really seen browser compete in a real market before. They've always been propped up by another company or revenue stream. And unfortunately when there's no magnanimous benefactor to bankroll the project, they often don't survive. Servo was a promising rewrite but couldn't find its funding, and Opera couldn't cut the mustard and was bought by a Chinese consortium.
It seems like Apple is poised to gain the most here, since Safari will continue to receive the full support of a 3.4 trillion dollar company, while Chrome and Firefox may need to begin fighting for table scraps.
Anyway, I often see people quick to argue for breaking companies up, but I rarely see the consideration of what happens afterwards. I think these are important questions though, and should be considered in evaluating if a breakup would ultimately prove to be a public good or harm.
Once upon a time, if you wanted a web browser, you'd walk into a computer store and buy a disk with Netscape Navigator on it (exceptions made for educational and nonprofit organizations)....
Exemplary
In your opinion, what monetization model make the most sense for an independent web browser?
Once upon a time, if you wanted a web browser, you'd walk into a computer store and buy a disk with Netscape Navigator on it (exceptions made for educational and nonprofit organizations). Eventually, they started cutting deals with hardware vendors to include a disk with new computers for a reduced rate.
Then Microsoft came along and said "here's this Internet Explorer thing, built into the OS that has 99% market share, and it's free." Suddenly, nobody wants to pay for a browser, or knows what one is anymore.
This is the same fight, lost multiple times over: big companies are leveraging their scale to dominate a separate market. The only way we can have a browser market that functions is for no player that makes its money elsewhere to be allowed to operate in it, so the price of a web browser will reflect the cost to develop it, rather than being a chess piece to influence other markets.
Imagine if nobody could successfully operate a pizza shop because Verizon and AT&T just gave people as much free pizza as they wanted as a value add to their services. It doesn't matter if your pizza is better, pizza is free and you can't afford to give yours away if you just want to run a pizza business. But if those companies were forbidden from giving away free pizza to their subscribers, then the market will form around the players who are running actual pizza businesses.
Sans corporations giving away free browsers, browsers would naturally cost money in order to fund their development. Of course, a secondary affect (if this applied to phones) might be that fewer people would use web browsers and would expect apps for more things, entrenching that mentality.
Just a small correction... though Netscape technically charged for their software (for a while) there was never a time you couldn't easily download and use it for free. You just needed the...
Just a small correction... though Netscape technically charged for their software (for a while) there was never a time you couldn't easily download and use it for free. You just needed the patience for dial up download speeds.
You're completely right. And realistically, here in the 2020s, that would make browsers SaaS. And maybe that business model makes the most sense. It would just suck to have one more subscription...
You're completely right. And realistically, here in the 2020s, that would make browsers SaaS. And maybe that business model makes the most sense. It would just suck to have one more subscription service to pay for. But there's no such thing as a free lunch, no matter how much it feels like we've been getting away with it for decades.
Technically you are right that there is no free lunch. At the same time, this isn't the 90s anymore and over the past 3 decades the internet has become an integral part of societies. I left a...
Technically you are right that there is no free lunch. At the same time, this isn't the 90s anymore and over the past 3 decades the internet has become an integral part of societies. I left a comment about that elsewhere in this thread. But if browser suddenly would pivot to a paid subscription model in a lot of countries, this would effectively hurt a lot of people with lower incomes. They would be completely cut off from many government services as those increasingly have switched to digital only interactions. Or at the very least have closed down a lot of physical locations and ways to contact them.
Yeah, there would certainly be a lot of problems with browsers as a paid service. But the fact that three of the four biggest browsers (i.e., Chrome, Edge, and Safari) are "side projects" to their...
Yeah, there would certainly be a lot of problems with browsers as a paid service.
But the fact that three of the four biggest browsers (i.e., Chrome, Edge, and Safari) are "side projects" to their developers is telling. If we want to disentangle browsers from surveillance capitalism or just monopolistic business practices, though, we've got to do something.
Oh yeah, I completely agree it is a huge issue. All I am saying is that I don't agree with the sentiment that browsers then just need to be a paid model instead.
Oh yeah, I completely agree it is a huge issue. All I am saying is that I don't agree with the sentiment that browsers then just need to be a paid model instead.
This is where you loop back around to anything else that's an integral part of society and look at things like health care. As with many better systems, I think a hybrid solution is somewhat...
This is where you loop back around to anything else that's an integral part of society and look at things like health care.
As with many better systems, I think a hybrid solution is somewhat necessary, but the simple fact is that the web as it was built and designed, and hell tech as it is now, is very much in a chaotic infancy. Maybe akin to architecture after the discovery of better building materials? I dunno.
Point being that it's going to be hard as hell to come up with any meaningful standardization, and thus all web development continues to require an obscene amount of effort and maintenance. How many features do your pages really need? How many frameworks should exist? Why is it that every single week there's some new feature set and paradigm shift?
Until we have some slightly better solutions to this, subscription model and private companies is probably going to fit the bill better than straight up government solution. Ultimately I hope we can pivot towards something more sane and hybrid though because as it stands it's a giant fucking mess.
Yeah, I feel like this might be a situation where US perspectives (which I assume your is) will differ a bit from other perspectives. Not only in regards with what we expect from our governments,...
This is where you loop back around to anything else that's an integral part of society and look at things like health care.
Yeah, I feel like this might be a situation where US perspectives (which I assume your is) will differ a bit from other perspectives.
Not only in regards with what we expect from our governments, but also to what degree they have moved a lot of their services online.
The point still remains that if browsers suddenly would become a subscription model, it would enlarge inequality based on wealth at the very least. In countries who are far ahead of digitalization of services, it would outright be disastrous for entire groups of people.
It definitely needs to be subsidized by countries. At least EU and US depend on it for contact with citizens and for internal systems. I would like UN to have a program where every country would...
It definitely needs to be subsidized by countries. At least EU and US depend on it for contact with citizens and for internal systems.
I would like UN to have a program where every country would provide one person for every million people or so to work on open source public internet infrastructure and related standards.
Plus some money for build servers and stuff like that.
I would be seriously concerned about censorship and privacy, and I'm not just talking about social topics. Stuff like copyrighted content and piracy could end up with some truly mixed incentives...
I would be seriously concerned about censorship and privacy, and I'm not just talking about social topics. Stuff like copyrighted content and piracy could end up with some truly mixed incentives under a government funding model...
But that could be easily resolved by making it open source, ran by a foundation which is funded by a collective of governments. That model of course also has it's own problems, as said foundation...
But that could be easily resolved by making it open source, ran by a foundation which is funded by a collective of governments. That model of course also has it's own problems, as said foundation would probably favour the kind of features backed by the biggest powers, but it does put some brakes on their powers, prevents blatant abuse and interference and keeps things about as balanced as geopolitics go.
Do you have any working examples of this funding model? While it's all well and good in theory, geopolitics aren't so easy to coordinate. "Government software" is a derisive term in many countries...
Do you have any working examples of this funding model? While it's all well and good in theory, geopolitics aren't so easy to coordinate. "Government software" is a derisive term in many countries for good reason.
I can't imagine China, Hungary, Malaysia, and the US funding the same core software. Feature priority would vary dramatically. Not even starting on software backdoors.
Okay, working examples. The first one that came to mind was ICANN, which takes care of namespacing on the web. (They're the ones presiding over namespaces and DNS stuff, so a very root function of...
Okay, working examples. The first one that came to mind was ICANN, which takes care of namespacing on the web. (They're the ones presiding over namespaces and DNS stuff, so a very root function of the internet) I was however surprised to find out that though they are a multi-stakeholder global organisation and a non-profit, they are still very much an American organisation. The next one I thought of was CERN, and that led me to this handy page.
I guess those are the kind of things I'd think of. Especially if that organisation would not actually employ a large body of developers but instead focus on overseeing standards and handing out grants for those working on the open-source software. (Plus a well-stocked bounty board for bugs and security) Open-sourcing and peer review is key here.
But yeah, what would realistically happen in such a scenario is that Russia, China and others would not join immediately, and perhaps later just join to be in on the table but with token support. Some states would probably develop their own browsers. (As is already the standard in China with WeChat...) But having this browser available as a free, secure and trusted (in so far as possible even with open source) option, it would probably spread. Some nations would try and stop that, as they do now by blacklisting certain sites and cutting of network traffic. But this has economic and social repercussions, so slowly it would become in most nations best interest to be a part of the decision making process.
Again. Not ideal, there's things wrong with it, but I do think it's a better option then having the 'free hand of the market' incessantly rummaging in your private data.
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is heavily funded with public money, has provided invaluable public service for decades, and has so far managed to remain politically independent from the...
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is heavily funded with public money, has provided invaluable public service for decades, and has so far managed to remain politically independent from the US government.
Who says it'd have to be a single government or a single organization? I laid out elsewhere in the thread that a $2/mo tax on ISP connections in the USA could fund like 10-12 Mozilla Foundations...
Who says it'd have to be a single government or a single organization? I laid out elsewhere in the thread that a $2/mo tax on ISP connections in the USA could fund like 10-12 Mozilla Foundations in perpetuity.
The UK does this for TV. You pay an annual tax on owning a TV, and that pays for BBC.
And while I'm in favour of public funding for things, the BBC is pretty dang transphobic and any kind of national funding can be an easy source of corruption. It's not that straightforward.
And while I'm in favour of public funding for things, the BBC is pretty dang transphobic and any kind of national funding can be an easy source of corruption. It's not that straightforward.
Would you say it's an outlier in the UK media landscape in this regard? I'm not sure it's fair to hold it to a standard that's not reflective of general opinion (even if the general perspective...
Would you say it's an outlier in the UK media landscape in this regard? I'm not sure it's fair to hold it to a standard that's not reflective of general opinion (even if the general perspective is, for want of a better word, wrong).
For example, I'm a vegan but I recognise this is a relatively fringe position, and don't really feel I can blame my precious guardian or the beeb for including meat based recipes, or positive coverage of health benefits from a diet inclusive of meat. Despite finding such content abhorrent on a personal level.
The modern BBC is decently neutral on national government matters, but that's kind of my point. The government funding the BBC receives makes it a heavyweight in the UK which effectively promotes...
The modern BBC is decently neutral on national government matters, but that's kind of my point. The government funding the BBC receives makes it a heavyweight in the UK which effectively promotes more conservative, status-quo policies.
The more heavily involved governments get in media and technology, the more staid and subdued they tend to be. This isn't necessarily a good thing as Hungary, Japan, and China show. I'm not comfortable with most governments being the primary decision maker for what news and technologies get funding.
I'm not sure it does promote more conservative than the average ideology. The BBC remains quasi-independent, and I think that the ire coming at them from both sides of the aisle would suggest...
I'm not sure it does promote more conservative than the average ideology.
The BBC remains quasi-independent, and I think that the ire coming at them from both sides of the aisle would suggest they're relatively good at honoring their mission to provide balanced coverage.
Crucially, I'd suggest that removing them from the picture would actually drive media consumption further right. The alternative to public media isn't really "free" media. It's billionaire media. For all the BBCs issues it's certainly preferable to a media landscape dominated by Murdoch and Bezos et al.
If I'm understanding your argument, you're saying there aren't any left wing sources that would become more popular if the BBC wasn't in the picture? If media is doomed to be a mouth piece for...
If I'm understanding your argument, you're saying there aren't any left wing sources that would become more popular if the BBC wasn't in the picture? If media is doomed to be a mouth piece for milquetoast, government-run, establishment centrism or billionaire vanity projects, the fourth estate is in dire straits.
While removing the BBC might make your average Brit less informed, I am not convinced it would push politics further right. There are plenty of other countries where government media pushes the populace further right, so removing those sources might make the country more liberal.
Or we do go back to the concept of paying for software one uses, if it’s too big of a task, in both complexity and time/resources necessary, for open-source volunteers. (I really like your concept...
Or we do go back to the concept of paying for software one uses, if it’s too big of a task, in both complexity and time/resources necessary, for open-source volunteers. (I really like your concept though – I just don’t think it’ll become a reality within this or the next few generations sadly)
Kagi’s Orion browser (beware: currently only available on Apple devices) is free to use, with an optional “subscription” fee or one-time purchase model that’s really a donation to the development effort. Not sure if it is profitable/sustainable yet, though.
In the case of things like email, browsers, etc. Basic software needed to properly use the internet, I kind of question if we can ever go back to a paid model. They've been free for so long that I...
In the case of things like email, browsers, etc. Basic software needed to properly use the internet, I kind of question if we can ever go back to a paid model. They've been free for so long that I don't know if people would accept paying money for them. I'm not above paying money for software that improves my life (professionally or otherwise), but I don't think I'd ever pay for a browser. Rather I'd simply hop to a FOSS solution.
I am curious what an independent Chrome would mean for Chromium and its derivative projects though. Most of the FOSS solutions out there are just built on Chromium, with the exception of Firefox and a few niche ones.
It's not even about people accepting it, it would mean effectively turning back time as well as far as dealing with government services and all that goes. How much of a problem this is will differ...
It's not even about people accepting it, it would mean effectively turning back time as well as far as dealing with government services and all that goes. How much of a problem this is will differ per country. The Netherlands for example is leaning heavily on digital infrastructure where in Germany a lot of digital counters/service points are just front-ends for printers where things still get filled by hand (disclaimer: very much simplified).
So from that point of view, it would make sense to have some sort of fund governments pay into for software they effectively rely on.
Of course, this will then also make browser development a political game. At the same time, it isn't as if Google has no ulterior motives behind some of their choices for Chromium's development direction.
Edit:
I realized that my point might have been lost a bit. You can't expect people to pay money to access essential services. Even more so if some of those services are related to things like welfare, subsidies, etc.
Going back to a paid model effectively means excluding a large group of people who simply will not have the means to pay. Because, let's be honest, it is not going to be a one time license, it will be a subscription.
Browser is not a tool anymore, it's a platform. It needs to be a part of commons like roads are, otherwise you cannot build on top of it reliably and long-term as a civilization.
Browser is not a tool anymore, it's a platform. It needs to be a part of commons like roads are, otherwise you cannot build on top of it reliably and long-term as a civilization.
Agreed – but who else would be in support of yet another “government thing that potentially costs taxpayer money upfront” in the current economic and social climate? I think we’d find ourselves to...
Agreed – but who else would be in support of yet another “government thing that potentially costs taxpayer money upfront” in the current economic and social climate?
I think we’d find ourselves to be in a minority opinion pretty quickly… Even if it’s unjustified due to e.g. benefits outweighing the costs of turning such a project into “public infrastructure” after some time.
5 mid level developers at Google salaries would cost a million dollars a year. Objectively a small sum in the grand scheme of government budgets, but it's more like dozens or hundreds of devs....
5 mid level developers at Google salaries would cost a million dollars a year. Objectively a small sum in the grand scheme of government budgets, but it's more like dozens or hundreds of devs. Suddenly we have a good story about "government wastes millions on web browser project abused by advertising companies!"
There are developers outside Silicon Valley. You can have 5-10 senior developers in Germany for that amount. And I think the idea is that countries should supply their own staff, not subsidize...
There are developers outside Silicon Valley. You can have 5-10 senior developers in Germany for that amount. And I think the idea is that countries should supply their own staff, not subsidize US-based company and their super-high wages.
Yeah, I think big software projects like operating systems and web browsers can and should have their development subsidized by governments, if they're open-source. I think a particularly clever...
Yeah, I think big software projects like operating systems and web browsers can and should have their development subsidized by governments, if they're open-source. I think a particularly clever solution to all the abuses of corporate social media would be to "internationalize" a lot of those platforms (YouTube, Facebook, Spotify, etc). Make them freely accessible, operate them under a non-profit organization funded by an international charter, employee actual human beings all around the world as moderators.
While nice to have, none of these qualify for critical infrastructure in my opinion, though. They should be regulated to prevent misuse, especially Amazon with it's practice of creating copycat...
While nice to have, none of these qualify for critical infrastructure in my opinion, though.
They should be regulated to prevent misuse, especially Amazon with it's practice of creating copycat products and advertising them more, but they are not critical to how we function as a civilization.
A simple test is: "If all X disappeared overnight, how much would be food production impacted?"
Roads
Catastrophe
Phone coverage
Severely impacted logistics, catastrophical in 3rd world countries without widespread Internet
Banking
Severely impacted logistics, without mitigation long-term catastrophical
Internet
Severely impacted, issues with payments, accounting and logistics
Browser
Severely impacted, same as Internet as more and more software moves to web
Spotify
Minor inconvenience, have to tune to a local radio station for background music
And both internet and browsers are also in the loop for software development. They are the primary communication channel for coordination of software development. They are also the only general global M:N communication platform we operate.
Fun fact, in the EU due to DMA, it's now illegal for Amazon's "Amazon Basics" business to use internal business data from other businesses for this purpose.
They should be regulated to prevent misuse, especially Amazon with it's practice of creating copycat products and advertising them more
Fun fact, in the EU due to DMA, it's now illegal for Amazon's "Amazon Basics" business to use internal business data from other businesses for this purpose.
Fundamentally, monetization on the web is broken. The expectation is set amongst nearly everyone that everything on the Internet should be free, so virtually any service you have to pay for is...
Fundamentally, monetization on the web is broken. The expectation is set amongst nearly everyone that everything on the Internet should be free, so virtually any service you have to pay for is doomed to fail outside of an extremely small, niche audience that's willing to pay for things.
People don't mind paying for the infrastructure that runs the Internet; your Comcast/T-Mobile/ATT bill pays for billions of dollars of routers, switches, firewalls, and extremely highly paid engineers, architects, and technicans to keep it all running. The problem is paying for content.
I'd say the best way to solve it is to force service providers to foot that bill, and build the cost into access fees. Have some sort of independent organization that builds web browsers operated by the ietf with funding coming from the big ISPs and content providers.
Government grants to independent non-profits like the Linux Foundation and Mozilla, funded by taxes on internet connections. Just like we use public funds for radio and tv (NPR and PBS...
Government grants to independent non-profits like the Linux Foundation and Mozilla, funded by taxes on internet connections. Just like we use public funds for radio and tv (NPR and PBS respectively). The TV tax that funds the BBC in the UK is another example. A $2/mo tax on ISP and phone service yields no less than $500 million$6 billion, which could fund 10-12 Firefox-sized browser foundations (I forgot to multiply by 12). And that's just for residential numbers. Charge a 5% tax on other sector internet connections, and that money pool gets a lot bigger (to the tune of $10/mo or more for each business requiring an SLA from their ISP).
Force Microsoft to resurrect Internet Explorer? I would absolutely point and laugh at everyone whose investments tanked due to antitrust purity. Problem for the shareholders.
It seems like Apple is poised to gain the most here
Force Microsoft to resurrect Internet Explorer?
Anyway, I often see people quick to argue for breaking companies up, but I rarely see the consideration of what happens afterwards. I think these are important questions though, and should be considered in evaluating if a breakup would ultimately prove to be a public good or harm.
I would absolutely point and laugh at everyone whose investments tanked due to antitrust purity. Problem for the shareholders.
Just about everyone with a 401(k) or IRA is an investor in Google (even if in small amounts) and a bigger one in tech. A forced breakup of the tech sector (and possibly others depending on how...
Just about everyone with a 401(k) or IRA is an investor in Google (even if in small amounts) and a bigger one in tech. A forced breakup of the tech sector (and possibly others depending on how aggressive the FTC is) would likely have significant short/medium-term negative effects.
Thankfully, my expected retirement year is far enough away that it won’t matter one way or another in that regard for me. Could affect my parents, though.
Thankfully, my expected retirement year is far enough away that it won’t matter one way or another in that regard for me. Could affect my parents, though.
With the obvious caveat that it's still a very young project, Ladybird's donation-only approach is refreshing: Obviously there are downsides to not getting funding any other way, and like I said,...
In your opinion, what monetization model make the most sense for an independent web browser? I've reviewed every option I could think of, but I don't love any of them.
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Obviously there are downsides to not getting funding any other way, and like I said, the browser is still very early in development. However, this funding model has been immensely successful for them so far. They are currently well-funded for the next few years, beyond the timeline of when they plan to release their first alpha build. I'm optimistic that Ladybird is going to demonstrate that even software as complex as a web browser can be built by a dedicated (small) core team of developers, open-source contributions, and donations.
Alternatively, or concurrently I guess, I could imagine a future in which the web and web browsers are governed and maintained similarly to the Linux kernel, with core maintainers presiding over various subsystems, companies and foundations employing or funding most of the work because it's in their common interest, etc.
I do understand the sentiment, at the same time I am wondering where an independent Chrome would find the revenue for further development. Which I think is a valid question considering the...
I do understand the sentiment, at the same time I am wondering where an independent Chrome would find the revenue for further development. Which I think is a valid question considering the struggles Firefox is facing and how much of their revenue actually comes from Google.
Android I would be slightly less worried about, if they get to keep the play store and services, which would set them up nicely as far as revenue goes.
Part of me also wonders what would happen with services like Gmail. I have set up my own domain a few years ago and have been moving most important accounts and contacts to there. But a scary amount of people heavily depend on Gmail. Which actually is a good indicator of how dominant Google is in many people's digital life, but also why it worries me. So if it comes down to Google being split up, I really hope it is done in such a way that it ensures services like these are not jeopardized.
I can't think of any times Google abused their ownership of Gmail. And probably because email is so old it's less of a concern here. It's a properly federated system. Businesses have lots of good...
I can't think of any times Google abused their ownership of Gmail. And probably because email is so old it's less of a concern here. It's a properly federated system. Businesses have lots of good competitive options to pick from and individuals aren't money makers. They don't show ads in Gmail - although they likely harvest information from your inbox for ads.
Chrome could get revenue the same way Firefox does - through selling the position of the default search engine to the highest bidder, side projects like VPNs and news aggregation, etc. It would be massively scaled down, but if Firefox can run on its current shoestring budget then it's clear you don't need that much money to run a web browser.
I am not saying that they are abusing Gmail, but it would find itself as part of the now separate Google entities, which might change their perspective on maintaining a service that costs money...
I am not saying that they are abusing Gmail, but it would find itself as part of the now separate Google entities, which might change their perspective on maintaining a service that costs money while they now have less of a revenue stream.
Yes, it is a federated system, so in theory people can switch. In practice, if you have had the same Gmail address for years (mine is from 2005) there are a lot of places where your access is tied to you having access to that Gmail address.
I'd argue that Firefox only gets by because Google is willing to pay up for search to this degree. I am not sure if that will maintain to be the case in this future scenario. Not to mention that while Firefox is doing okayish, there are still a lot of rough edges to various aspects of it that Chrome does not. Likely due to choices Mozilla had to make in as far as priorities go.
I am not saying it is all impossible. But, it isn't something that is going to be easy by any means either.
Gmail just goes with the rest of the Workspace software in the breakup. Drive, Sheets, Docs, Photos, Meet, Chat, and all the others I forgot. It doesn't make sense in a post-monopoly world to have...
Gmail just goes with the rest of the Workspace software in the breakup. Drive, Sheets, Docs, Photos, Meet, Chat, and all the others I forgot.
It doesn't make sense in a post-monopoly world to have a search engine providing productivity software. We all got suckered in on Google's Don't Be Evil days and are paying the Pied Piper now.
Google has most definitely included ads in Gmail. I don't see them with my ad blocker, nor in the mobile app, so I don't know for sure if they're still doing it.
Google has most definitely included ads in Gmail. I don't see them with my ad blocker, nor in the mobile app, so I don't know for sure if they're still doing it.
Not Gmail directly, but with the integration of everything into Google Workspace, there have been a few instances recently where Google started causing trouble for GSuite legacy users. After a lot...
Not Gmail directly, but with the integration of everything into Google Workspace, there have been a few instances recently where Google started causing trouble for GSuite legacy users. After a lot of pushback, Google changed course, and GSuite legacy users could continue using it for free, but I'm sure in another decade they'll try again.
Since then, I've basically stopped using my custom domain for Google services, other than email, so that if I need to, I can migrate away. But that was much easier for me than for other people, because I've been using a regular gmail address for services like Google Play. Since I'm the only user for my domain, it probably wouldn't be a big deal to pay for it, but it felt like a shakedown.
I'm also affiliated with a non-profit that uses Google Workspace for free. This was going to cost them a lot of money, since we have about 15 users. They have since created a separate (free) category for nonprofits, but that wasn't the case when they announced the migration from GSuite.
I get that we're all just using this product for free, but when everything is bundled together through Workspace, it makes it very hard to leave - and that's why their monopoly is a problem. It's not any one individual product (though some are definitely worse than others), it's that it's a tightly bound ecosystem that makes it really hard to leave without losing something.
What if they didn't find the revenue and just died? I could imagine all "Chrome, but it looks different" browsers like Edge, Vivaldi, and Opera would keep going. Maybe they'd slowly diverge into...
at the same time I am wondering where an independent Chrome would find the revenue for further development
What if they didn't find the revenue and just died? I could imagine all "Chrome, but it looks different" browsers like Edge, Vivaldi, and Opera would keep going. Maybe they'd slowly diverge into their own increasingly unique browser implementations?
Assuming, in that scenario, Firefox (and Ladybird, and Servo) kept going, I don't think that would be such a terrible world to live in?
I am all for any breakups the DOJ can manage. There are so many companies I would love to see broken up. I want to give some free advice to the DOJ. If you break up monopolies such that they are...
Exemplary
I am all for any breakups the DOJ can manage. There are so many companies I would love to see broken up.
I want to give some free advice to the DOJ. If you break up monopolies such that they are still monopolies, just smaller monopolies, that kinda doesn’t work. Breaking up Bell into regional monopolies changes nothing. It just means the monopoly I have to pay for phone service covers a few states rather than the entire country.
So don’t bother for example separating Android from search. You have to shatter search into pieces to make it not a monopoly. Yes, it will be painful. But that is the only way to actually address the monopoly.
It looks like the angle is to not only break up Google, but also declaw Android's position by requiring easy access to competing app stores. That would be a huge step and I'd be more than happy...
It looks like the angle is to not only break up Google, but also declaw Android's position by requiring easy access to competing app stores. That would be a huge step and I'd be more than happy with it.
From a technical standpoint breaking out Android is actually relatively easy. It was an acquisition. Android has a big enough code base with a sufficiently different culture that to this day it's a separate monorepo. Everything else is in what's called google3: a monorepo of every other piece of Google code (live, deprecated, and experimental). Android is mirrored there, but the source of truth is separate.
Okay, so we break Android out from Google. But Android is open source. Does Google just then make Googledroid with minimal changes and get new phones to run Googledroid?
Okay, so we break Android out from Google.
But Android is open source. Does Google just then make Googledroid with minimal changes and get new phones to run Googledroid?
I would just mandate that the "android" part of Google is the entire consumer hardware division, including Chromebooks, Fi, Pixel, Android. We'll call this new company Pixel. They will make most...
I would just mandate that the "android" part of Google is the entire consumer hardware division, including Chromebooks, Fi, Pixel, Android. We'll call this new company Pixel. They will make most of their money by selling phones and phone plans, and having that operating system that they don't need to pay extra for will be a competitive advantage. Samsung and Amazon have as much of a vested interest in Android as Google.
(as an aside, I'd love to see all operating systems from large companies be forced to have a user-choice wizard as part of the initial setup, where say the top 5 most popular options for the most-critical basic software. For phones, this would mean Phone, Text, Browser, App Store, and Launcher.
The other parts of Google can make apps for the new company's phones.
I've got a fairly good sense about how all the major tech companies should be smashed up into completely separate viable companies. It's pretty easy: You just find a small player in a given sector that is profitable and you've found a chunk that can be spun off. It's extra easy because you can basically just undo all of the company buyouts these tech giants have done over the last 20 years. Even Fi itself could be broken off entirely from the phones and OS.
In which I break apart Google
Search engine (competes with the hopefully-soon-to-be-independent Bing)
Ad selling platform
Youtube
Youtube Music
ISP/Mobile phone MVNO
Phone/tablet/laptop manufacturing company
Office suite company (competes with hopefully-soon-to-be-independent Office365)
Cloud services provider
Smarthome stuff
You take all this vertical and horizontal integration and smash it to bits, forcing them to use open standards such that other players can interop with them (on the condition anybody doing so also has open standards).
The problem is that many of those services live off the largesse of the ad division. The replacement isn't a competitive ecosystem; it's that the existing competition grabs the pieces after the...
The problem is that many of those services live off the largesse of the ad division. The replacement isn't a competitive ecosystem; it's that the existing competition grabs the pieces after the new companies go bankrupt when they find that raising prices to sustainable levels makes them far higher than the market's willingness to pay.
In Google it does....but the fact that there are still bit players in these other markets mean it is possible to survive, and without Google being able to charge far below market rates due to ad...
In Google it does....but the fact that there are still bit players in these other markets mean it is possible to survive, and without Google being able to charge far below market rates due to ad subsidies, costs will rise proportionately across the board and make it even easier for others to compete.
It would suck if Gmail died. But not impossible to recover from. And if the business can't stand on its own, it's a good thing for it to die, so that the remains get consumed by players that were able to barely stand on their own and make space for proper innovation.
Businesses dying is like compost for the growth of innovation. Send all their patents and copyrights to the public domain and let other companies bid on the physical scraps.
I honestly think you underestimate how many people's digital lives are directly tied into their Gmail account. For someone slightly technically inclined, it is entirely doable to switch over. But...
It would suck if Gmail died. But not impossible to recover from.
I honestly think you underestimate how many people's digital lives are directly tied into their Gmail account. For someone slightly technically inclined, it is entirely doable to switch over. But even then it is not as straightforward as you might think. I switched most of my stuff over a few years ago using my own domain. Even though I thought I had by now changed my contact address for everything important, just last week I got a mail from a government organization on my Gmail mail address.
A lot of the people around me simply wouldn't know where to start, and certainly wouldn't be able to switch in any short period if Gmail went the way of the dodo without much notice.
It wouldn't just suck, it would be a huge disruption at the very for a huge amount of people and outright disastrous for many others.
Yeah. I got an invite to Gmail back when it was a thing you needed an invite to get into, and have used it ever since. It's been my email provider for literal decades. Needing to change that would...
Yeah. I got an invite to Gmail back when it was a thing you needed an invite to get into, and have used it ever since. It's been my email provider for literal decades. Needing to change that would be tremendously disruptive, and that's with a password manager to keep track of most places I've signed up for an account that ties into it.
I get it. I work in identity management. Losing access to old email addresses is hard, and a major PITA. The thing is, Gmail would be pretty easy to keep live and become sustainable for this...
I get it. I work in identity management. Losing access to old email addresses is hard, and a major PITA. The thing is, Gmail would be pretty easy to keep live and become sustainable for this reason. It's just that the email/docs/drive sync will need to transition to paid plans (or you know, sell ad space from an ad provider).
"Effective starting January 2026, Gmail will cost $5/mo per account. If you choose not to pay, your account will be put in read-only mode and may be forwarded automatically to an email provider of your choosing for up to 5 years."
People would either pay up, or there would be a mass exodus. And if that wouldn't be affordable enough to keep it afloat, nationalize the gmail domain to do that exact thing.
This sentence simply does not match with what you follow it up with. More specifically, the scenario you sketch which I assume is the “positive” outcome there are a few items that I'd effectively...
Gmail would be pretty easy to keep live and become sustainable for this reason.
This sentence simply does not match with what you follow it up with. More specifically, the scenario you sketch which I assume is the “positive” outcome there are a few items that I'd effectively describe as wishful thinking. More importantly, you do recognize that if all else fails, maybe the domain should be nationalized.
Which is an acknowledgment of how essential it is for so many people. I am not against splitting up Google, but governments have let this situation simmer for too long to simply say “just split if off, it will work out somehow”. They effectively have been fine with this status quo that we now find us in this ridiculous situation where Gmail effectively has become essential global infrastructure.
What I am getting is that if things are getting split up, they better make damn sure that it also comes with hard stipulations on keeping essential infrastructure like Gmail in the air. Or at the very least keep it on life support as a forwarder. Not, as you said, like an afterthought when it turns out it is not affordable, but as a non-negotiable requirement when things are split off.
This in itself does not make all of this easy. At least not as far as Gmail is concerned.
To be clear, it is only really Gmail I feel this strongly about. All the other Google spinoffs you sketched out, I couldn't care less about when they fall over. Although you have split them up in such a way that I almost feel you want them to, which is a different topic to explore.
Here's the thing: There is a viable competitor in every single segment that I split that into. As redwall_hp's excellent comment pointed out, they just have to stop giving out free pizza. To lay...
Although you have split them up in such a way that I almost feel you want them to
Here's the thing: There is a viable competitor in every single segment that I split that into. As redwall_hp's excellent comment pointed out, they just have to stop giving out free pizza.
To lay out out explicitly:
Search engine will be ad supported, the way other sites inject Google Ads now. They just also can't own the ad network. That will be spun off into its original most-profitable-standalone-company: Doubleclick
Youtube/Music is essentially the same: It can serve ads, but they can't own the ad network. Spotify manages with monthly subscription only, no reason Youtube can't.
Fi and Google Fiber are self-explanitory. They'll almost certainly survive in some fashion, ISPs are quite profitable. But by and large there's plenty of fallback opportunities available.
Phone/tablet/laptop manufacturing company, ie undoing the Motorola aquisition again. Last I checked, there are dozens of these and the last time I remember a major player going under, it was Gateway. Lenovo is doing just fine, and could certainly carry the torch if Google's own couldn't cut it without monopoly backing.
Spinning off docs and email is little different than splitting off Office from Windows back under MS's reign. It'll either plaster itself with (more) ads, increase subscription costs, or cut quality. Ad-supported webmail still exists outside of Gmail, they'll be able to compete on more-even footing now.
Cloud services provider. This is easy money, since they'll be able to sell services to all these these new companies that just formed. Plus all of the others that are still massively profitable.
Smarthome stuff. IE Nest before Google bought it. There are standalone competiton for almost every device Google sells. The only thing that would make this fail is utter mismanagement, and it would drive some great innovation in the space.
I really don't comprehend how I this would be setting them up for failure. It's setting them up to compete in market segements that have comparable competition. To be fair and balanced, this also needs to happen to Amazon, Microsoft, and (to a lesser extent) Apple.
Honestly, I think the only thing that might fail in this case is the search engine. And if that came to pass, I could see a legitimate arguement for ownership to be handed over to an NGO with UN oversight.
One possible other alternative is to make @gmail.com a sort of generic domain that many providers could send/receive email from. It already sort of works like this with sending through imap and...
One possible other alternative is to make @gmail.com a sort of generic domain that many providers could send/receive email from. It already sort of works like this with sending through imap and smtp. They could just have a setting that disables all of the Gmail web interface and storage, and forwards all email to a different provider.
Phone numbers stayed the same when we broke up Bell. Calling a phone number managed by a different Bell offshoot just forwarded the call to their network. No reason Gmail couldn’t be broken up in the same way.
The question I have is how many of the free customers would pay and how many would either pirate everything (if it's content that was subsidized) or go without (for infrastructure, perhaps sharing...
The question I have is how many of the free customers would pay and how many would either pirate everything (if it's content that was subsidized) or go without (for infrastructure, perhaps sharing e-mail addresses)?
Have situations where what's necessary for a competitive market and what's best for the consumer diverged this sharply been anywhere near as frequent before the rise of online businesses? It seems that the ad-supported internet has decoupled customer harm from functional markets while previous antitrust almost exclusively had straightforward customer harm cases.
I hope so. I'll believe it when I see it. I have no faith that the modern US actually has the will to break the tech megacorps. I seriously hope it does.
I hope so. I'll believe it when I see it. I have no faith that the modern US actually has the will to break the tech megacorps. I seriously hope it does.
Fuck yeah. I've been calling for this for years. Please break out Chrome.
I know quite a few people that work there and I worked there myself. I'm the only one I know amongst us that feels this way. It's probably a matter of the old Upton Sinclair quote:
In your opinion, what monetization model make the most sense for an independent web browser? I've reviewed every option I could think of, but I don't love any of them.
The first way is include advertisements in the browser itself, as Opera once did. Unfortunately, on the web, ads seem like the only model that has proven to work consistently. I can't imagine that sponsorships and product integrations alone could ever pay for the number of engineers working on the project. And I feel they'd be hard pressed to get people to pay for, or donate monthly for a product that previously was completely free.
Auctioning off the default search engine would also no longer be allowed, due to the antitrust rulings discussed in the article. That's been the only way Mozilla has been able to stay alive thus far. They've been trying to find a new business model for years, but every time they try something: Pocket, Cliqz, sponsored links - their userbase chastises them for it, or flocks to the latest fork of Firefox/Chromium.
Honestly, I'm worried about who's going to pay for all this engineering talent. If users aren't willing to, will web browser teams be stripped down and run as skeleton crews? Will we see a sharp decline in new features, standards work, and security fixes?
Micropayments are conceptually a good idea, but there's no real infrastructure to support them. Transaction fees make them a non-starter, and while cryptocurrency was once touted as a solution to this problem, their use as a speculation investment vehicle has made them completely useless for actual utility. Besides, what would you pay for? Time spent browsing?
I could maybe see browser vendors selling a "Pro" plan, with features such as remote syncing, backing up profile data, or an integrated VPN. Maybe they could also create a storefront for paid extensions and take a cut of each one. That adds infrastructure costs, but at least it gets money flowing. Somehow, they would need to commercialize the browser.
One darker possibility is selling browsing data. Credit card companies have been freely selling access to user's purchasing habits for years. Selling access to anonymized web trends could be one approach to shoring up the lost funds. It might be enough to maintain a small team of developers anyway.
The only other approach I can think of is nationalization. To be adopted by a government and paid for through taxes. It sounds crazy, but the web browser is the most important software installed on any computer. Governments do sometimes take over important utilities like water, electricity, or transportation, and I think the browser could qualify. Might we one day see a world where different governments maintain their own forks of Chromium or Firefox?
So I don't really know where this path might lead. It's difficult to say because we've never really seen browser compete in a real market before. They've always been propped up by another company or revenue stream. And unfortunately when there's no magnanimous benefactor to bankroll the project, they often don't survive. Servo was a promising rewrite but couldn't find its funding, and Opera couldn't cut the mustard and was bought by a Chinese consortium.
It seems like Apple is poised to gain the most here, since Safari will continue to receive the full support of a 3.4 trillion dollar company, while Chrome and Firefox may need to begin fighting for table scraps.
Anyway, I often see people quick to argue for breaking companies up, but I rarely see the consideration of what happens afterwards. I think these are important questions though, and should be considered in evaluating if a breakup would ultimately prove to be a public good or harm.
Once upon a time, if you wanted a web browser, you'd walk into a computer store and buy a disk with Netscape Navigator on it (exceptions made for educational and nonprofit organizations). Eventually, they started cutting deals with hardware vendors to include a disk with new computers for a reduced rate.
Then Microsoft came along and said "here's this Internet Explorer thing, built into the OS that has 99% market share, and it's free." Suddenly, nobody wants to pay for a browser, or knows what one is anymore.
This is the same fight, lost multiple times over: big companies are leveraging their scale to dominate a separate market. The only way we can have a browser market that functions is for no player that makes its money elsewhere to be allowed to operate in it, so the price of a web browser will reflect the cost to develop it, rather than being a chess piece to influence other markets.
Imagine if nobody could successfully operate a pizza shop because Verizon and AT&T just gave people as much free pizza as they wanted as a value add to their services. It doesn't matter if your pizza is better, pizza is free and you can't afford to give yours away if you just want to run a pizza business. But if those companies were forbidden from giving away free pizza to their subscribers, then the market will form around the players who are running actual pizza businesses.
Sans corporations giving away free browsers, browsers would naturally cost money in order to fund their development. Of course, a secondary affect (if this applied to phones) might be that fewer people would use web browsers and would expect apps for more things, entrenching that mentality.
Just a small correction... though Netscape technically charged for their software (for a while) there was never a time you couldn't easily download and use it for free. You just needed the patience for dial up download speeds.
You're completely right. And realistically, here in the 2020s, that would make browsers SaaS. And maybe that business model makes the most sense. It would just suck to have one more subscription service to pay for. But there's no such thing as a free lunch, no matter how much it feels like we've been getting away with it for decades.
Technically you are right that there is no free lunch. At the same time, this isn't the 90s anymore and over the past 3 decades the internet has become an integral part of societies. I left a comment about that elsewhere in this thread. But if browser suddenly would pivot to a paid subscription model in a lot of countries, this would effectively hurt a lot of people with lower incomes. They would be completely cut off from many government services as those increasingly have switched to digital only interactions. Or at the very least have closed down a lot of physical locations and ways to contact them.
Yeah, there would certainly be a lot of problems with browsers as a paid service.
But the fact that three of the four biggest browsers (i.e., Chrome, Edge, and Safari) are "side projects" to their developers is telling. If we want to disentangle browsers from surveillance capitalism or just monopolistic business practices, though, we've got to do something.
Oh yeah, I completely agree it is a huge issue. All I am saying is that I don't agree with the sentiment that browsers then just need to be a paid model instead.
This is where you loop back around to anything else that's an integral part of society and look at things like health care.
As with many better systems, I think a hybrid solution is somewhat necessary, but the simple fact is that the web as it was built and designed, and hell tech as it is now, is very much in a chaotic infancy. Maybe akin to architecture after the discovery of better building materials? I dunno.
Point being that it's going to be hard as hell to come up with any meaningful standardization, and thus all web development continues to require an obscene amount of effort and maintenance. How many features do your pages really need? How many frameworks should exist? Why is it that every single week there's some new feature set and paradigm shift?
Until we have some slightly better solutions to this, subscription model and private companies is probably going to fit the bill better than straight up government solution. Ultimately I hope we can pivot towards something more sane and hybrid though because as it stands it's a giant fucking mess.
Yeah, I feel like this might be a situation where US perspectives (which I assume your is) will differ a bit from other perspectives.
Not only in regards with what we expect from our governments, but also to what degree they have moved a lot of their services online.
The point still remains that if browsers suddenly would become a subscription model, it would enlarge inequality based on wealth at the very least. In countries who are far ahead of digitalization of services, it would outright be disastrous for entire groups of people.
It definitely needs to be subsidized by countries. At least EU and US depend on it for contact with citizens and for internal systems.
I would like UN to have a program where every country would provide one person for every million people or so to work on open source public internet infrastructure and related standards.
Plus some money for build servers and stuff like that.
"Government funded web browser" doesn't sound like something that, on the face of it, I'd be content to use on a daily basis.
I would be seriously concerned about censorship and privacy, and I'm not just talking about social topics. Stuff like copyrighted content and piracy could end up with some truly mixed incentives under a government funding model...
But that could be easily resolved by making it open source, ran by a foundation which is funded by a collective of governments. That model of course also has it's own problems, as said foundation would probably favour the kind of features backed by the biggest powers, but it does put some brakes on their powers, prevents blatant abuse and interference and keeps things about as balanced as geopolitics go.
Do you have any working examples of this funding model? While it's all well and good in theory, geopolitics aren't so easy to coordinate. "Government software" is a derisive term in many countries for good reason.
I can't imagine China, Hungary, Malaysia, and the US funding the same core software. Feature priority would vary dramatically. Not even starting on software backdoors.
Okay, working examples. The first one that came to mind was ICANN, which takes care of namespacing on the web. (They're the ones presiding over namespaces and DNS stuff, so a very root function of the internet) I was however surprised to find out that though they are a multi-stakeholder global organisation and a non-profit, they are still very much an American organisation. The next one I thought of was CERN, and that led me to this handy page.
I guess those are the kind of things I'd think of. Especially if that organisation would not actually employ a large body of developers but instead focus on overseeing standards and handing out grants for those working on the open-source software. (Plus a well-stocked bounty board for bugs and security) Open-sourcing and peer review is key here.
But yeah, what would realistically happen in such a scenario is that Russia, China and others would not join immediately, and perhaps later just join to be in on the table but with token support. Some states would probably develop their own browsers. (As is already the standard in China with WeChat...) But having this browser available as a free, secure and trusted (in so far as possible even with open source) option, it would probably spread. Some nations would try and stop that, as they do now by blacklisting certain sites and cutting of network traffic. But this has economic and social repercussions, so slowly it would become in most nations best interest to be a part of the decision making process.
Again. Not ideal, there's things wrong with it, but I do think it's a better option then having the 'free hand of the market' incessantly rummaging in your private data.
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is heavily funded with public money, has provided invaluable public service for decades, and has so far managed to remain politically independent from the US government.
We can agree that's extremely different from an international consortium of governments creating a single piece of consumer software.
Who says it'd have to be a single government or a single organization? I laid out elsewhere in the thread that a $2/mo tax on ISP connections in the USA could fund like 10-12 Mozilla Foundations in perpetuity.
The UK does this for TV. You pay an annual tax on owning a TV, and that pays for BBC.
And while I'm in favour of public funding for things, the BBC is pretty dang transphobic and any kind of national funding can be an easy source of corruption. It's not that straightforward.
Would you say it's an outlier in the UK media landscape in this regard? I'm not sure it's fair to hold it to a standard that's not reflective of general opinion (even if the general perspective is, for want of a better word, wrong).
For example, I'm a vegan but I recognise this is a relatively fringe position, and don't really feel I can blame my precious guardian or the beeb for including meat based recipes, or positive coverage of health benefits from a diet inclusive of meat. Despite finding such content abhorrent on a personal level.
The modern BBC is decently neutral on national government matters, but that's kind of my point. The government funding the BBC receives makes it a heavyweight in the UK which effectively promotes more conservative, status-quo policies.
The more heavily involved governments get in media and technology, the more staid and subdued they tend to be. This isn't necessarily a good thing as Hungary, Japan, and China show. I'm not comfortable with most governments being the primary decision maker for what news and technologies get funding.
I'm not sure it does promote more conservative than the average ideology.
The BBC remains quasi-independent, and I think that the ire coming at them from both sides of the aisle would suggest they're relatively good at honoring their mission to provide balanced coverage.
Crucially, I'd suggest that removing them from the picture would actually drive media consumption further right. The alternative to public media isn't really "free" media. It's billionaire media. For all the BBCs issues it's certainly preferable to a media landscape dominated by Murdoch and Bezos et al.
If I'm understanding your argument, you're saying there aren't any left wing sources that would become more popular if the BBC wasn't in the picture? If media is doomed to be a mouth piece for milquetoast, government-run, establishment centrism or billionaire vanity projects, the fourth estate is in dire straits.
While removing the BBC might make your average Brit less informed, I am not convinced it would push politics further right. There are plenty of other countries where government media pushes the populace further right, so removing those sources might make the country more liberal.
Or we do go back to the concept of paying for software one uses, if it’s too big of a task, in both complexity and time/resources necessary, for open-source volunteers. (I really like your concept though – I just don’t think it’ll become a reality within this or the next few generations sadly)
Kagi’s Orion browser (beware: currently only available on Apple devices) is free to use, with an optional “subscription” fee or one-time purchase model that’s really a donation to the development effort. Not sure if it is profitable/sustainable yet, though.
Edit: typo
In the case of things like email, browsers, etc. Basic software needed to properly use the internet, I kind of question if we can ever go back to a paid model. They've been free for so long that I don't know if people would accept paying money for them. I'm not above paying money for software that improves my life (professionally or otherwise), but I don't think I'd ever pay for a browser. Rather I'd simply hop to a FOSS solution.
I am curious what an independent Chrome would mean for Chromium and its derivative projects though. Most of the FOSS solutions out there are just built on Chromium, with the exception of Firefox and a few niche ones.
It's not even about people accepting it, it would mean effectively turning back time as well as far as dealing with government services and all that goes. How much of a problem this is will differ per country. The Netherlands for example is leaning heavily on digital infrastructure where in Germany a lot of digital counters/service points are just front-ends for printers where things still get filled by hand (disclaimer: very much simplified).
So from that point of view, it would make sense to have some sort of fund governments pay into for software they effectively rely on.
Of course, this will then also make browser development a political game. At the same time, it isn't as if Google has no ulterior motives behind some of their choices for Chromium's development direction.
Edit:
I realized that my point might have been lost a bit. You can't expect people to pay money to access essential services. Even more so if some of those services are related to things like welfare, subsidies, etc.
Going back to a paid model effectively means excluding a large group of people who simply will not have the means to pay. Because, let's be honest, it is not going to be a one time license, it will be a subscription.
Browser is not a tool anymore, it's a platform. It needs to be a part of commons like roads are, otherwise you cannot build on top of it reliably and long-term as a civilization.
Agreed – but who else would be in support of yet another “government thing that potentially costs taxpayer money upfront” in the current economic and social climate?
I think we’d find ourselves to be in a minority opinion pretty quickly… Even if it’s unjustified due to e.g. benefits outweighing the costs of turning such a project into “public infrastructure” after some time.
Umm, the actual amount of money is so small, it's about 2-3 orders of magnitude away from making news.
5 mid level developers at Google salaries would cost a million dollars a year. Objectively a small sum in the grand scheme of government budgets, but it's more like dozens or hundreds of devs. Suddenly we have a good story about "government wastes millions on web browser project abused by advertising companies!"
There are developers outside Silicon Valley. You can have 5-10 senior developers in Germany for that amount. And I think the idea is that countries should supply their own staff, not subsidize US-based company and their super-high wages.
Yeah, I think big software projects like operating systems and web browsers can and should have their development subsidized by governments, if they're open-source. I think a particularly clever solution to all the abuses of corporate social media would be to "internationalize" a lot of those platforms (YouTube, Facebook, Spotify, etc). Make them freely accessible, operate them under a non-profit organization funded by an international charter, employee actual human beings all around the world as moderators.
While nice to have, none of these qualify for critical infrastructure in my opinion, though.
They should be regulated to prevent misuse, especially Amazon with it's practice of creating copycat products and advertising them more, but they are not critical to how we function as a civilization.
A simple test is: "If all X disappeared overnight, how much would be food production impacted?"
And both internet and browsers are also in the loop for software development. They are the primary communication channel for coordination of software development. They are also the only general global M:N communication platform we operate.
Fun fact, in the EU due to DMA, it's now illegal for Amazon's "Amazon Basics" business to use internal business data from other businesses for this purpose.
Fundamentally, monetization on the web is broken. The expectation is set amongst nearly everyone that everything on the Internet should be free, so virtually any service you have to pay for is doomed to fail outside of an extremely small, niche audience that's willing to pay for things.
People don't mind paying for the infrastructure that runs the Internet; your Comcast/T-Mobile/ATT bill pays for billions of dollars of routers, switches, firewalls, and extremely highly paid engineers, architects, and technicans to keep it all running. The problem is paying for content.
I'd say the best way to solve it is to force service providers to foot that bill, and build the cost into access fees. Have some sort of independent organization that builds web browsers operated by the ietf with funding coming from the big ISPs and content providers.
The content bill or the web browser bill? I do NOT want some cable TV model for monetization.
Government grants to independent non-profits like the Linux Foundation and Mozilla, funded by taxes on internet connections. Just like we use public funds for radio and tv (NPR and PBS respectively). The TV tax that funds the BBC in the UK is another example. A $2/mo tax on ISP and phone service yields no less than
$500 million$6 billion, which could fund 10-12 Firefox-sized browser foundations (I forgot to multiply by 12). And that's just for residential numbers. Charge a 5% tax on other sector internet connections, and that money pool gets a lot bigger (to the tune of $10/mo or more for each business requiring an SLA from their ISP).Force Microsoft to resurrect Internet Explorer?
I would absolutely point and laugh at everyone whose investments tanked due to antitrust purity. Problem for the shareholders.
Just about everyone with a 401(k) or IRA is an investor in Google (even if in small amounts) and a bigger one in tech. A forced breakup of the tech sector (and possibly others depending on how aggressive the FTC is) would likely have significant short/medium-term negative effects.
Thankfully, my expected retirement year is far enough away that it won’t matter one way or another in that regard for me. Could affect my parents, though.
With the obvious caveat that it's still a very young project, Ladybird's donation-only approach is refreshing:
Obviously there are downsides to not getting funding any other way, and like I said, the browser is still very early in development. However, this funding model has been immensely successful for them so far. They are currently well-funded for the next few years, beyond the timeline of when they plan to release their first alpha build. I'm optimistic that Ladybird is going to demonstrate that even software as complex as a web browser can be built by a dedicated (small) core team of developers, open-source contributions, and donations.
Alternatively, or concurrently I guess, I could imagine a future in which the web and web browsers are governed and maintained similarly to the Linux kernel, with core maintainers presiding over various subsystems, companies and foundations employing or funding most of the work because it's in their common interest, etc.
I do understand the sentiment, at the same time I am wondering where an independent Chrome would find the revenue for further development. Which I think is a valid question considering the struggles Firefox is facing and how much of their revenue actually comes from Google.
Android I would be slightly less worried about, if they get to keep the play store and services, which would set them up nicely as far as revenue goes.
Part of me also wonders what would happen with services like Gmail. I have set up my own domain a few years ago and have been moving most important accounts and contacts to there. But a scary amount of people heavily depend on Gmail. Which actually is a good indicator of how dominant Google is in many people's digital life, but also why it worries me. So if it comes down to Google being split up, I really hope it is done in such a way that it ensures services like these are not jeopardized.
I can't think of any times Google abused their ownership of Gmail. And probably because email is so old it's less of a concern here. It's a properly federated system. Businesses have lots of good competitive options to pick from and individuals aren't money makers. They don't show ads in Gmail - although they likely harvest information from your inbox for ads.
Chrome could get revenue the same way Firefox does - through selling the position of the default search engine to the highest bidder, side projects like VPNs and news aggregation, etc. It would be massively scaled down, but if Firefox can run on its current shoestring budget then it's clear you don't need that much money to run a web browser.
I am not saying that they are abusing Gmail, but it would find itself as part of the now separate Google entities, which might change their perspective on maintaining a service that costs money while they now have less of a revenue stream.
Yes, it is a federated system, so in theory people can switch. In practice, if you have had the same Gmail address for years (mine is from 2005) there are a lot of places where your access is tied to you having access to that Gmail address.
I'd argue that Firefox only gets by because Google is willing to pay up for search to this degree. I am not sure if that will maintain to be the case in this future scenario. Not to mention that while Firefox is doing okayish, there are still a lot of rough edges to various aspects of it that Chrome does not. Likely due to choices Mozilla had to make in as far as priorities go.
I am not saying it is all impossible. But, it isn't something that is going to be easy by any means either.
I'm saying I don't think they should break out Gmail. I don't see an issue with it as is.
Gmail just goes with the rest of the Workspace software in the breakup. Drive, Sheets, Docs, Photos, Meet, Chat, and all the others I forgot.
It doesn't make sense in a post-monopoly world to have a search engine providing productivity software. We all got suckered in on Google's Don't Be Evil days and are paying the Pied Piper now.
Google has most definitely included ads in Gmail. I don't see them with my ad blocker, nor in the mobile app, so I don't know for sure if they're still doing it.
Not Gmail directly, but with the integration of everything into Google Workspace, there have been a few instances recently where Google started causing trouble for GSuite legacy users. After a lot of pushback, Google changed course, and GSuite legacy users could continue using it for free, but I'm sure in another decade they'll try again.
Since then, I've basically stopped using my custom domain for Google services, other than email, so that if I need to, I can migrate away. But that was much easier for me than for other people, because I've been using a regular gmail address for services like Google Play. Since I'm the only user for my domain, it probably wouldn't be a big deal to pay for it, but it felt like a shakedown.
I'm also affiliated with a non-profit that uses Google Workspace for free. This was going to cost them a lot of money, since we have about 15 users. They have since created a separate (free) category for nonprofits, but that wasn't the case when they announced the migration from GSuite.
I get that we're all just using this product for free, but when everything is bundled together through Workspace, it makes it very hard to leave - and that's why their monopoly is a problem. It's not any one individual product (though some are definitely worse than others), it's that it's a tightly bound ecosystem that makes it really hard to leave without losing something.
What if they didn't find the revenue and just died? I could imagine all "Chrome, but it looks different" browsers like Edge, Vivaldi, and Opera would keep going. Maybe they'd slowly diverge into their own increasingly unique browser implementations?
Assuming, in that scenario, Firefox (and Ladybird, and Servo) kept going, I don't think that would be such a terrible world to live in?
I am all for any breakups the DOJ can manage. There are so many companies I would love to see broken up.
I want to give some free advice to the DOJ. If you break up monopolies such that they are still monopolies, just smaller monopolies, that kinda doesn’t work. Breaking up Bell into regional monopolies changes nothing. It just means the monopoly I have to pay for phone service covers a few states rather than the entire country.
So don’t bother for example separating Android from search. You have to shatter search into pieces to make it not a monopoly. Yes, it will be painful. But that is the only way to actually address the monopoly.
It looks like the angle is to not only break up Google, but also declaw Android's position by requiring easy access to competing app stores. That would be a huge step and I'd be more than happy with it.
From a technical standpoint breaking out Android is actually relatively easy. It was an acquisition. Android has a big enough code base with a sufficiently different culture that to this day it's a separate monorepo. Everything else is in what's called
google3: a monorepo of every other piece of Google code (live, deprecated, and experimental). Android is mirrored there, but the source of truth is separate.Okay, so we break Android out from Google.
But Android is open source. Does Google just then make Googledroid with minimal changes and get new phones to run Googledroid?
I would just mandate that the "android" part of Google is the entire consumer hardware division, including Chromebooks, Fi, Pixel, Android. We'll call this new company Pixel. They will make most of their money by selling phones and phone plans, and having that operating system that they don't need to pay extra for will be a competitive advantage. Samsung and Amazon have as much of a vested interest in Android as Google.
(as an aside, I'd love to see all operating systems from large companies be forced to have a user-choice wizard as part of the initial setup, where say the top 5 most popular options for the most-critical basic software. For phones, this would mean Phone, Text, Browser, App Store, and Launcher.
The other parts of Google can make apps for the new company's phones.
I've got a fairly good sense about how all the major tech companies should be smashed up into completely separate viable companies. It's pretty easy: You just find a small player in a given sector that is profitable and you've found a chunk that can be spun off. It's extra easy because you can basically just undo all of the company buyouts these tech giants have done over the last 20 years. Even Fi itself could be broken off entirely from the phones and OS.
In which I break apart Google
You take all this vertical and horizontal integration and smash it to bits, forcing them to use open standards such that other players can interop with them (on the condition anybody doing so also has open standards).
The problem is that many of those services live off the largesse of the ad division. The replacement isn't a competitive ecosystem; it's that the existing competition grabs the pieces after the new companies go bankrupt when they find that raising prices to sustainable levels makes them far higher than the market's willingness to pay.
In Google it does....but the fact that there are still bit players in these other markets mean it is possible to survive, and without Google being able to charge far below market rates due to ad subsidies, costs will rise proportionately across the board and make it even easier for others to compete.
It would suck if Gmail died. But not impossible to recover from. And if the business can't stand on its own, it's a good thing for it to die, so that the remains get consumed by players that were able to barely stand on their own and make space for proper innovation.
Businesses dying is like compost for the growth of innovation. Send all their patents and copyrights to the public domain and let other companies bid on the physical scraps.
I honestly think you underestimate how many people's digital lives are directly tied into their Gmail account. For someone slightly technically inclined, it is entirely doable to switch over. But even then it is not as straightforward as you might think. I switched most of my stuff over a few years ago using my own domain. Even though I thought I had by now changed my contact address for everything important, just last week I got a mail from a government organization on my Gmail mail address.
A lot of the people around me simply wouldn't know where to start, and certainly wouldn't be able to switch in any short period if Gmail went the way of the dodo without much notice.
It wouldn't just suck, it would be a huge disruption at the very for a huge amount of people and outright disastrous for many others.
Yeah. I got an invite to Gmail back when it was a thing you needed an invite to get into, and have used it ever since. It's been my email provider for literal decades. Needing to change that would be tremendously disruptive, and that's with a password manager to keep track of most places I've signed up for an account that ties into it.
I get it. I work in identity management. Losing access to old email addresses is hard, and a major PITA. The thing is, Gmail would be pretty easy to keep live and become sustainable for this reason. It's just that the email/docs/drive sync will need to transition to paid plans (or you know, sell ad space from an ad provider).
"Effective starting January 2026, Gmail will cost $5/mo per account. If you choose not to pay, your account will be put in read-only mode and may be forwarded automatically to an email provider of your choosing for up to 5 years."
People would either pay up, or there would be a mass exodus. And if that wouldn't be affordable enough to keep it afloat, nationalize the gmail domain to do that exact thing.
This sentence simply does not match with what you follow it up with. More specifically, the scenario you sketch which I assume is the “positive” outcome there are a few items that I'd effectively describe as wishful thinking. More importantly, you do recognize that if all else fails, maybe the domain should be nationalized.
Which is an acknowledgment of how essential it is for so many people. I am not against splitting up Google, but governments have let this situation simmer for too long to simply say “just split if off, it will work out somehow”. They effectively have been fine with this status quo that we now find us in this ridiculous situation where Gmail effectively has become essential global infrastructure.
What I am getting is that if things are getting split up, they better make damn sure that it also comes with hard stipulations on keeping essential infrastructure like Gmail in the air. Or at the very least keep it on life support as a forwarder. Not, as you said, like an afterthought when it turns out it is not affordable, but as a non-negotiable requirement when things are split off.
This in itself does not make all of this easy. At least not as far as Gmail is concerned.
To be clear, it is only really Gmail I feel this strongly about. All the other Google spinoffs you sketched out, I couldn't care less about when they fall over. Although you have split them up in such a way that I almost feel you want them to, which is a different topic to explore.
Here's the thing: There is a viable competitor in every single segment that I split that into. As redwall_hp's excellent comment pointed out, they just have to stop giving out free pizza.
To lay out out explicitly:
Search engine will be ad supported, the way other sites inject Google Ads now. They just also can't own the ad network. That will be spun off into its original most-profitable-standalone-company: Doubleclick
Youtube/Music is essentially the same: It can serve ads, but they can't own the ad network. Spotify manages with monthly subscription only, no reason Youtube can't.
Fi and Google Fiber are self-explanitory. They'll almost certainly survive in some fashion, ISPs are quite profitable. But by and large there's plenty of fallback opportunities available.
Phone/tablet/laptop manufacturing company, ie undoing the Motorola aquisition again. Last I checked, there are dozens of these and the last time I remember a major player going under, it was Gateway. Lenovo is doing just fine, and could certainly carry the torch if Google's own couldn't cut it without monopoly backing.
Spinning off docs and email is little different than splitting off Office from Windows back under MS's reign. It'll either plaster itself with (more) ads, increase subscription costs, or cut quality. Ad-supported webmail still exists outside of Gmail, they'll be able to compete on more-even footing now.
Cloud services provider. This is easy money, since they'll be able to sell services to all these these new companies that just formed. Plus all of the others that are still massively profitable.
Smarthome stuff. IE Nest before Google bought it. There are standalone competiton for almost every device Google sells. The only thing that would make this fail is utter mismanagement, and it would drive some great innovation in the space.
I really don't comprehend how I this would be setting them up for failure. It's setting them up to compete in market segements that have comparable competition. To be fair and balanced, this also needs to happen to Amazon, Microsoft, and (to a lesser extent) Apple.
Honestly, I think the only thing that might fail in this case is the search engine. And if that came to pass, I could see a legitimate arguement for ownership to be handed over to an NGO with UN oversight.
One possible other alternative is to make @gmail.com a sort of generic domain that many providers could send/receive email from. It already sort of works like this with sending through imap and smtp. They could just have a setting that disables all of the Gmail web interface and storage, and forwards all email to a different provider.
Phone numbers stayed the same when we broke up Bell. Calling a phone number managed by a different Bell offshoot just forwarded the call to their network. No reason Gmail couldn’t be broken up in the same way.
The question I have is how many of the free customers would pay and how many would either pirate everything (if it's content that was subsidized) or go without (for infrastructure, perhaps sharing e-mail addresses)?
Have situations where what's necessary for a competitive market and what's best for the consumer diverged this sharply been anywhere near as frequent before the rise of online businesses? It seems that the ad-supported internet has decoupled customer harm from functional markets while previous antitrust almost exclusively had straightforward customer harm cases.
SCOTUS has been pretty rough lately, but DOJ has been kicking ass.
FTC too. Fingers crossed the leaders at both survive the administration change.
The main point of Project 2025 is to prevent that survival.
Commence full moon goat sacrifices to ensure the gods are receptive.
I hope so. I'll believe it when I see it. I have no faith that the modern US actually has the will to break the tech megacorps. I seriously hope it does.