A year or so ago, I would have agreed. Not anymore.

Sure, a company can buy Chrome and proceed to sell user browsing habits data to the highest bidder, or use it as a backbone for decentralized scraping - backed by real user data and real residential IPs to fool most anti-scraping checks. But if they fuck with users enough, Chrome would just die off over time, and Firefox or various Chromium forks like Brave would take its place. This already happened to the browsing titan that was IE, and without the entire power of Google to push Chrome? It can happen again.

The alternative is Google owning Chrome for eternity - and proceeding with the most damaging initiatives possible. Right now, Google is seeking to destroy adblocking, tighten the control over the ad data ecosystem to undermine their competitors, and who knows what else they'll come up with next week.

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overfeed 2 days ago | parent [-]

Why do suppose Chrome would die off for user-hostile actions under a non-Google entity (2nd paragraph), but not while being controlled by Google (3rd paragraph)?

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AlotOfReading 2 days ago | parent [-]

Not the OP, but Google spent years advertising Chrome front and center on the Internet's most visited pages. Money doesn't buy that kind of real estate, ownership does.

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ACCount37 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

OP, agreed.

Prior to Chrome, Google actually used to promote Firefox on its own pages instead - which was a major driver of Firefox adoption. Google did it because they had a partnership with Mozilla, and were very much in favor of users switching to a browser that's not Internet Explorer.

Then Google decided they wanted more control over Firefox. Mozilla decided that Google isn't going to get it. This resulted in Chrome.

Firefox was evicted from Google's promotion, and it never quite recovered.

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overfeed 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> Money doesn't buy that kind of real estate, ownership does.

If this is the reason, the remedy doesn't attack the root of the matter. If Chrome were unbundled from Google, what's to stop Google from creating a new Chromium fork - and naming it Cobalt and marketing the hell out of it to achieve the same market share?

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AlotOfReading 18 hours ago | parent [-]

Antitrust orders are more complicated than just declaring a business unit spontaneously independent. They usually include provisions to ensure the the situation is actually fixed, like prohibitions on the parent competing in that entire market and financial/infrastructure support for the new companies on their transition to independence.

	▲	overfeed 29 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Are you able to share a case when an American court issued such a broad order on a F100 company? There was a stronger case for breaking up Microsoft, but the DoJ shied from that remedy, there was never a chance that Google could have been broken up in this case, IMO.