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Google must sell Chrome to end search monopoly, justice department argues in court filing
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2024
422 points (99.3% liked)
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Chrome by itself would likely cost 100 billion dollars to sell, and then more to maintain, without any clear revenue except selling user data. Chrome is not a profitable product on its own. Not many companies can afford that.
Well shucks, I guess it should just be made fully open source, the code distributed, and the business dissolved. Womp wooomp.
The overwhelming majority of development to Chromium is done by Google and not the open source contributors to the project. Maintaining a browser is not something that can be done for free as a hobby. It requires an army of full-time developers to sustain.
Given all of the browsers except Firefox are using Chromium, the best case scenario for spinning off Chrome is that Microsoft would pick up the lion’s share of development to keep Edge up to date.
This is the same reason that all of the major Linux distributions have large foundations to support them.
The DoJ would do less harm to the internet if they just forced Google to sell off Search instead. Then they’d be an advertising and cloud services company that happens to maintain a major browser to serve their ads.
Ehh, I wouldn’t consider Safari “using chromium” at this point. It has been hard forked for years. Chrome could disappear tomorrow and it wouldn’t affect Safari development.
There are multiple other browser startups in development that are not Chromium based. Like LadyBird (which is completely independant), and Zen browser (which started as a FF fork)