What are the cons of Google being forced to give up its control of Chrome?
Seeing the courts go after Google's monopoly and the unintended consequences to Mozilla (and therefore Firefox) that can happen if the courts make it illegal for Google to pay to be the default search engine, it goes me thinking about Chrome/Chromium.
I know that the courts are trying to force Google to give up its control of Chrome (I don't even know how that is possible for the government to tell a tech company that it is not allowed to develop a tech product it created itself) but it seems to me that Google maintaining Chrome is not really a problem in and of itself. there are many browsers available to folks and if you as a user want to be completely plugged into the google ecosystem at the detriment of your online privacy, that is your choice to make.
the real issue seems to me that a user should have the exact same experience browsing a google website on chrome vs an alternative.
But that made me wonder if (like stopping Google being able to pay to be the default search engine) Google was forced to give up its control of Chrome, what are the possible negative consequences of that to users? and would forcing Google to instead relinquish its control of chromium alleviate those issues?
They will no longer have a reason to fund Firefox.
Google could still pay Mozilla to have their search engine as the default, because there is value in that in itself. They could also pay the new Chrome company to have Google as the default. I suspect it would be less money.
I could see the move being beneficial to Mozilla and all other browsers if Google is also forced to drop Chrome as the browser on Chromebooks and Android with users having to pick from a list instead. I would also welcome this for Windows, iOS and MacOS. That would lower their 67% market share for sure and as long as Firefox is convincing, Mozilla would profit.
If the ruling is half-assed though with loop-holes, I also think Mozilla will suffer.
No, not if the DOJ gets their way. See this article and discussion from yesterday
Oh wow, there is a recommendation for an actual ban. I'm skeptical that can go through, but I'm not a lawyer.
It just seems to be that since Coca-Cola/Pepsi gives restaurant chains something of value (probably a discount) for exclusive rights as their vendor, Google should be able to do something similar digitally.
What Google is doing looks to me like exclusive rights light, since users can change the default search engine. You can't drink Pepsi at McDonald's.
I mean, it makes sense. You want to break up a search monopoly of a company that has a lot of cash to throw around to keep that monopoly.
The whole point of punishing a monopoly is that it's an unfair punishment that would not get applied if they hadn't already abused their monopoly position.
It would be unfair to ban Kagi from making these deals. But to ban the market leader that only became the market leading browser because they advertised for free on the most popular website in the world, who then further entrenched that monopoly by paying off every competitor to not switch search engines....that's fair play.
If Chromium is so critical to continue on its own, give it to the Apache Foundation and encourage Microsoft and Google to contribute a few billion dollars each, which should tide it over for 20 years or so.
Sorry, I don't get your reply. Are you just affirming what I am saying in the first paragraph, or did you think I wrote something else?
Affirming.
Given fair competition, Firefox may no longer need Google to fund them.
Competition may result in both browsers getting better.
The issue is, how does a browser monetize?
Way, way, way back at the dawn of the internet, it was quickly established that the browser "should" be free. In that no one really pushed hard to charge for it. Microsoft was certainly instrumental in this. They'd sell you Windows, sell you Office, but they gave you Internet Explorer.
So every other company that thought about maybe coding and launching a browser had to compete with free. Eventually Microsoft got sued over IE, and that's a whole thing in and of itself, but the damage had mostly been done.
Today, no one thinks of having to buy a browser. They have to buy other software, either upfront or (unfortunately on an increasing basis) along the way via marketing and ads and upsale stuff, but not the browser.
Basically, the bulk of any money a browser can make comes from either ads, or some kind of "we'll pay you to include it in our install/package/device" deals. Which Google and Apple (controlling Android and the Apple Ecosystem) generally don't want or need because Chrome/Safari are the choices there. Microsoft has Edge now, so they don't want it either.
So how does Chrome, any browser, make money, without a sugar daddy? Firefox exists mostly because some open source advocate hackers forked it off Mozilla/Netscape, since they hated the commercialization of the pre-fork entity. Somewhere along the way, I'm not going to specifically research it, someone at Google realized they were vulnerable to antitrust if the government ever woke up and started paying to ensure Firefox had enough funding to survive.
Without Google paying, Firefox's revenue craters. Because it's mostly that nice fat lump sum Google pays into their coffers. Edge is funded by Microsoft. Safari by Apple. Those browsers exist only because their parent entities want a browser on their OS with their branding, so they pay rather than just walking away and letting some other entity supply the browser.
Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, really all the megacorp tech companies need to be broken up. I doubt it's going to happen because they'll just pay a nice lump sum to Trump, probably some smaller sums to others in the administration, and Kahn along with the rest of the troublemakers at the FTC who've decided to start enforcing antitrust will just go away. The cases will also go away for the same reason. Money talks.
But in some fantasy world where law and order still has a role, what about isolating Chrome from Google? As a thought exercise.
Breaking Chrome alone out of Google is stupid. It won't solve the problem they claim it will. Who's going to pay billions for Chrome? It's value is only to Google, who can only tap that value via monopolistic practices they're under antitrust scrutiny for.
Sure it means Chrome can "operate independently" without "Google's abusive influence", but that's not the same as being able to operate. What does an independent Chrome do to survive? Sit around waiting for a benefactor to start paying them?
Are we going to accept that Google and Bing, maybe the AI companies if they move into the search space as some expect they will, any well funded search company, simply begins paying regularly into browser coffers for some reason? For what? To buy the default search option, or branding rights (Chrome, sponsored by OpenAI, as an example) or something similar?
Or do the browsers do what a lot of tech savvy consumers already hate, and cave to marketing. Adblock only works because browsers don't outlaw it. Google finally got tired of not outlawing it, and has done so with Chrome. When it's their code, of course they can guarantee it will take massive, ongoing effort by anti-commercialization hackers to have any chance of any kind of functional adblock. If any such adblock even exists.
So in this untethered browser tech world, all the browsers become massive ad whores just to survive? Will we have a constant revolving door of the latest "fuck you, we're forking because ads are evil" breakaway groups who, a year or two later, get tired of living out of their relatives' basements and not getting paid? So their forks start monetizing via ads, and "how dare they" outrage swells up yet again, and then the next cycle of "fuck you" forks spiral off again, and again, and again?
If they want to break Google, some sort of top to bottom full slice has to occur I think. Like, take the entire company and divide it evenly into four or five pieces. Not something siloed out by division. Unless the expectation is to do a major breakup, and somehow the ad company will be expected to make deals with all the others so they have funding.
But, again, I really doubt Google is about to be broken up. Their revenue is into the hundreds of billions of dollar range annually. If they got broken apart by real antitrust action with serious teeth, they know full well that revenue would plummet. Even before competition might impact it, just losing the synergies and monopolistic abuses that inflate their takings would have a significant shrinking effect.
So what's cheaper? Lose tens of, probably hundreds of, billions of dollars annually going forward? Or write a few billions (plural) dollar checks to Trump and a couple of others to make sure the third-of-a-trillion dollar gravy train keeps chugging unimpeded?
I would be shocked if Google or Alphabet reps aren't already in contact with Trump. It's just a cost of doing business. And if even one out of fifty senior execs quit in outrage over it, I'd be even more shocked. They're senior execs raking in mega bucks from a mega corp. They didn't get to those positions by being kind and altruistic. Moral. Ungreedy. No, they'll be sitting in meetings deciding how much to pay Trump, not if they will.
You are making a few leaps here and there which I think are a bit of a stretch. More problematical is that the timeline you paint is just not correct in many areas. Some things are fine as they don’t really matter for your overall point, but others are.
To give a few examples.
Effectively the period between roughly 1993 and 1995 you couldn't browse the web without having to pay for a browser. Mosaic and Netscape both were paid options, where Netscape quickly grabbed the majority market share. It maintained that majority market share well until roughly 1998 and only became free in 1998. You are right that Microsoft was the source of this shift as they started shipping IE in 1995 with the windows 95 plus pack and later bundled it in windows OEM releases.
Firefox didn't come from "open source advocate hackers" forking Mozilla because they "hated commercialization." Firefox was an official Mozilla Foundation project, created to make a standalone browser from the Mozilla Suite. It was always part of Mozilla, not a rebellious fork. The Mozilla Suite itself was effectively the open sourced version of Netscape and contained a mail client, HTML editor and IRC chat client. The main reason Firefox was created because Mozilla developers wanted a standalone, lightweight browser instead of the full suite.
As far as I know, the initial deal happened somewhere in 2009ish (not going to look up the exact year) and really was a simple search engine deal. At that time Chrome was brand new as it was release in 2008. It was quickly gaining market share but even in 2011 when the deal was renewed Chrome and Firefox had a roughly equal market share. And based on the data back then Firefox was losing some share but IE was losing it faster so it anyone at google who was thinking anti-trust at this point in time must have had a functional crystal ball.
Then it's a good time to switch to Waterfox (separately funded/via search) or to Vivaldi (not sure their revenue model). For the Chrome lovers, I don't know why more people haven't made the switch to Vivaldi. Inertia, I guess. But I love it.
Waterfox has its own issues and can't actually maintain the engine all by itself.
I love Vivaldi, but it depends on the chromium project, currently owned by Google. The future of chromium derived projects would be nclear.
Of course, they are dependent on their engines. But so is Edge dependent upon chromium. If Chrome loses some of its natural integration into Google-related products/services, like Android, I don't see why Waterfox or Vivaldi couldn't fill the void for a couple of years, the way that Chrome gained popularity at the expense of IE losing mindshare. In that time, perhaps more people will get behind backing alternatives to Google, if the Mozilla Foundation is distasteful.
Skinning Firefox is very different from writing Firefox. Waterfox probably doesn’t have the money/resources needed for maintaining something as massive as Firefox’s codebase on their own.
I genuinely don't understand how the US government decides these things.
For decades now, telecom companies have had actual monopolies which they used to price gouge the shit out of customers who literally had no other option. That's fine apparently.
Microsoft Windows is the only viable operating system for most people. Linux may be more accessible now but realistically most businesses and average people are completely locked in to Windows for a million reasons. Not like it's cheap either. This is somehow okay.
Google has an Internet browser that people gladly use for free - one that has some competition and would certainly have a lot more if it started to suck. I don't feel forced to use Chrome. I don't feel stuck. It's just the best there is. Why is this a problem?
The best there is? That's subjective. Did you mean Chromium or actual Google Chrome?
I actually prefer Edge, to the point I use it on Linux for work purposes.
Firefox is still the toolbox browser, if a little slower.
Chromium is Chrome for all intends and purposes. The Chromium project is owned, operated and hosted by Google and Chrome is effectively Chromium with a few proprietary things baked in at the last minute. When the DOJ is talking about splitting of Chrome I can only assume they also mean splitting of the Chromium project into its own governance.
If you say you prefer Edge you are still saying you prefer a flavor of Chrome in the context of these discussions.
I agree that Firefox is still quite decent, but for everyday browsing the web unfortunately has regressed to supporting one browser (or engine if you want to nitpick) for the most part (Safari support is sometimes thought of).
I almost never run into any compatibility issues with Firefox. It's super rare. I'm not opposed to having a secondary browser for compatibility as long as I have the choice for my regular day to day browsing. And that's going away.
Should Firefox die, effectively my choices are... Chromium, chromium, chromium, orrrr chromium.
It's bizarre how breaking the monopoly has the opposite effect. I suppose I should applaud Google for learning from Microsoft and keeping Firefox as a monopoly shield for this long.
But it does happen, you don't mind switching to a different browser when that happens. You also realize that it mostly is not a reflection on the quality of the browser but rather of developer focus. That doesn't matter for the majority of people though, they want as few issues as possible and from that perspective Chrome is a "better" (notice the quotes) browser.
We don't know what the future will bring if all of this goes through. I do agree, there is quite a bit that is uncertain. But I don't think that Firefox will cease to exist, although I am sure that Mozilla will struggle to adjust.
It should also be noted that whoever ends up owning Chrome/Chromium will very likely have similar issues as Mozilla has now. I doubt that the DOJ will allow Microsoft or other big tech companies with large cash reserves buy it. This is of course speculation from me side, but it would mean that whoever ends up with Chrome will not have an endless amount of cash to throw at browser development.
The more likely scenario is that browser development will severely slow down for the considerable future. Meaning that fewer new technologies and APIs pushed through at a rapid pace. Which, might actually be a good thing as it will allow everyone to stop and take a breather for a moment and actually might give projects like servo and ladybird a better chance of catching up. Simply because the target isn't moving (as fast) anymore.
Again, this is mere speculation on my side as we simply don't know what will happen, and it doesn't have to be all bad.
Edit: I would also like to note that Mozilla has had well over a decade to adjust their course to rely less on Google. I realize that this was an easy source of income that was impossible to say no to. But unless their management is entirely incompetent (something that can be debated) I would imagine they have some contingencies in place.
That is what I meant when I said Chromium or Google Chrome.
The Chromium browser, pre branding and bastardisation by any other corp is good. The bells, whistles and proprietary crud they shove into it for Google Chrome, I don't like. I prefer MS's implementation.
Back in the day, Opera was my favourite browser, pre Chromium.
The primary reason average people are locked into Windows is because Windows is the only operating system distributed by OEMs (statistically speaking), as well as the primary OS kids are exposed to in schools (see why Google is giving Chromebooks like candy).
If we slapped Microsoft properly when they were caught making anticompetitive contracts for OEMs in the early 90s when operating systems were simpler, there would be a much healthier and diverse set of usable operating systems today.
MS-DOS was not the only DOS. It just seemed that way because Microsoft made it economically impossible to let OEMs offer any other.
A large mix of what's current and what they think they can actually win.
Oligopolies technically, which is why it's a harder fight for the government.
Android, iOS, and OSX are all valid, and much larger, competitors. Android is 40% of that market followed by Windows 30%. Not that they didn't literally just start an investigation into Microsoft.
By many technical metrics it's far from "the best there is" but it is the most well known. Like microsoft they obviously own a shitload of other products, and the bundling/vertical monopoly is an issue. That said chrome has 70% of the webbrowser market, and more like 99% if you actually consider chromium chrome, which it is.
So in short, it's a problem because you are vastly unaware of the degree to which chrome permeates its market, and whataboutism isn't a real defense.
It seems like technically, all mainstream browsers are very good at rendering websites. Most of the time, the user won't notice a difference. For example, Chrome on iOS uses WebKit. I don't care. I use it because I have bookmarks and passwords saved in Chrome, not in Safari.
As long as web developers stick to well-established standards when building regular websites, which is quite easy these days, they are unlikely to care either. It's only when pushing the limits in some way that browser differences matter.
So if most users don't care about browsers, don't care about browser market share, and stick with whatever they're used to or whatever the default is for their OS, maybe that's... fine?
This varies heavily on your actual use case. Smaller sites, like bill pay portals, frequently will fail on different versions of chrome, let alone other browsers.
Which history has shown they don't and they can't.
Of course it's fine, until it's not. That's the whole point and problem of a monopoly. It's like a benevolent dictator. Things are fine, until they aren't, and then you're screwed.
I haven't noticed this, though it's true that there are low-quality websites out there that seem pretty fragile. They must be doing something weird, because bill pay only needs simple forms that don't require any browser API's that aren't at least ten years old and completely standardized.
Although, it doesn't help that users are often making things harder by installing random browser extensions. When I help others, the first thing I ask them to do is to create a vanilla profile and try it without extensions. That part of the browser ecosystem is a real mess. But it's the sort of mess that I don't think is going to get fixed with browser politics.
There's a fair number of sites that insist they only support Chrome, but work fine if you change your user agent on Firefox to say you're Chrome. The browser extension that does this is pretty popular as a result. There are also sites that do genuinely break when not using Chrome, but a much smaller number.
Neither of these issues is common enough to really be an issue for my browsing experience personally (the existence of real ad block on Firefox is by far a more important contributor to a liveable web experience) but it's not hard to find other people complaining about them even here on Tildes. It probably depends a lot on what sites and tools you need to use, after all.
Political willpower probably. I think Google has done a lot to irritate both Democrats and Republicans. They also have a national profile.
Fewer resources to maintain high standards of security and performance, and greater pressure to monetize the userbase in increasingly user-hostile ways.
You might be interested in these previous conversations on Tildes:
But to answer your question nobody knows, it all depends on how Chrome is being split-off. The conditions attached to it, who will be the new owner, funding, etc.
And after the new owner and funding questions are answered, it still remains to be seen how many experienced developers move on over to that company versus finding a new role at Google.
Apart from browser engine freedom and revenue stream, which is already being discussed in this thread, one of the thing Google do with end-to-end control is that they shipped some experimental features by using Google's server. QUIC was first deployed this way as nobody know whether UDP traffic actually works in all environments in the real world, so Google developed a draft version and they could monitor the real world conditions.
By separating Chrome from Google, the targeted website (usually the cloud service parts of the browser) may not be popular enough to reflect real world conditions. Perhaps Cloudflare would be willing to ship experiments like that to its own free customer network, but a browser monitoring users' usage of nonconsenting 3rd party website is its own legal issue.
Other than browsing website, Browsers do have complete control over the Certificate Authority industry.
In 2011, Google also had problem with malicious Certificate Authority issuing bogus certificate for its own domain. iirc Chrome has Google's cert pinned and Google were able to detect the attack. They then developed Certificate Transparency and enforced that every public certificates to be trusted by Chrome needs to be publicly listed on CT. Today, most TLS security recommendations (other than from OWASP and Apple) would recommend against pinning certificates, because of the widespread use of CT making it possible to monitor misissurances. Other than Apple and perhaps Mozilla, I don't know anyone else who would otherwise have pushed the state of the art like Google did if they have the same influence.
I feel like these are good points but also one side of a coin. The other side I briefly touched on here is that Google's ability to rapidly innovate and push new changes kept the web moving at such a rapid pace that it is difficult for anyone to keep up. Both developers on the frontend but also other browser developers. By the time Google proposes a new standard, they will already largely have developed it, tested it and have it ready to ship.
Having this slow down might allow others to finally catch up properly and have things stabilize somewhat. If anything, the amount of features and abilities in modern browsers does deserve to have the "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should" meme attached to it.
For example, this separation could have prevented introducing of Manifest v3 that broke and reduce functionality of ad-blockers.
I don't know how to predict what the terms would be, so it seems like it could go a lot of different ways.
Chrome is, among other things, a cross-platform password manager. How would synchronization work?
Well, you're all going to hate this idea, but: we're really talking about revenue streams here as the problem, so what if a big corporation with a deep developer bench took over? Instead of everything being ad supported, they monetize by making the homepage serve their core business, but also legislatively enforced strict limits on collection/leverage of user data?
I'm picturing a retail homepage that is truly blind to the users as soon as they leave it. Want a non-dev-driven business driving it instead of something like the data-vacuum that is Amazon? Spin out Mozilla and chromium into dedicated non-profits that can't spend their money anywhere else, say they can only spend their money on the browser or .dev-like resources, and the sponsor corp writes a check or rev share to fund them indefinitely.
Basically something to switch monetization from ads and data over to literal retail purchases (ignoring all the problems of retail juggernauts and their disruption on local markets for no , just to serve the thought experiment).
(just edited this for clarity a couple minutes after posting).
A mighty big if.
I don't see any benefit in coming up with reasons to defend a bad status quo.
If Google has to divest Chrome, they're not incentivized to work on Chromium. V8 and all the other sub components are now one of those Foss projects that hold up the entire web while being entirely community maintained. Maybe Microsoft adopts it or Chromium starts to decay and more people build the web for iPhones?