418
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
418 points (99.3% liked)
Technology
59554 readers
3072 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.
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)
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.