This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
to me, shaving Android off their business (suggested next step if this fails) would be way more impactful
Why not both!
good point, I guess one worry here is about the way in which this will affect Firefox (note Firefox here, not the Mozilla Fdn who have managed to Elon their own thing without help, seemingly)
I'm worrying that whatever gets sold (Chrome or Android) might end up in the hands of someone even more scummy than Google.
They would have to be more scummy and also at least similarly competent... Google can't innovate for crap, but they're pretty good at maintaining projects (when they don't randomly kill them off)
If they stop work on chromium, or belief in the stewardship of chromium wanes, it'll fragment the ecosystem again. Which is sorely needed at this point - we need to get back to standards and away from centralized control
Imagine Twitter/musk acquires them. Microsoft, Apple, and many other big companies directly or indirectly rely on a chain now controlled by a group known for mismanagement - are they going to wait and see, or are they going to diversify?
Chrome, brought to you by Palantir, heck, what if Musk bought it?
Is there any company more scummy than Google?
Oracle?
Someone needs to compile an annual league table of the scummiest companies and their practices for that year.
Chiquita and Nestlé come to mind. Within tech industry, I'd say Amazon and probably Microsoft are worse as well, and there's probably a ton of potentially even worse companies lurking in the shadows outside the top of the economic food chain.
Id actually say Meta is the scummiest tech company thinking about it now.
Adobe sucks pretty hard as well.
I don't know man. There's a lot shittier business practices out there than paying to be the default search engine - which is laughably easy to change on any browser. Like marketplaces and services that pay to be exclusive sources of content and then use the fact that they're the only source for most content to force extortionate deals on content creators and enshitify every aspect of the end user experience. Just to name one.
Did you know that paying to be default search engine isn't the only business practice that Google does.
Google has enshitified every single one of its products or deprecated it and then released an inferior replacement.
Is enshittification the scummiest thing you can think of? While other multinationals are paying for goon squads that kill people in other countries? While banks reorder daily transactions from largest to smallest so they can charge more overdraft fees, literally stealing from poor people? Even if enshittification is literally your biggest problem, you'd have to be living under a rock to think Google's products are the most enshitified of all the garbage out there. You've never heard of anything from Meta? Amazon? Netflix? Microsoft?
All the big ones constantly trade blows for the no 1 spot.
I think Google is putting their eggs in one basket (Android) in preparation for them selling off chrome. They are already killing ChromeOS.
https://www.androidauthority.com/chrome-os-becoming-android-3500661/
Android also becoming chrome OS in light of recent news of developing Android desktop mode and native Android compatibility with Linux apps, looks like they make hybrid OS that could do it all
if Google was to sell Android that would be like a nuclear bomb dropping. I mean aside from budget Android phones people are going more and more to apple devices just because of the stability.
The next day, the Chrome division is sold off to a new company "Bloogle" and we're back to square dumb.
And before you think about applying for a job there, know that the new company is still demanding mandatory 5 days in the office
If Google does not set the price for 200 trillion USD and it can be really bought, then it will be probably M$ and they will change the search engine to Bing and integrate Coplilot or whatever the fuck it is called now into it.
Pretty sure that would count as monopoly as well and the sale wouldn't be approved.
And I was pretty sure them aquiring Activision Blizzard would count as monopolizing but here we are.
Did you consider that Microsoft lawyers said prices wouldn't go up? Cause they did, they did say that, which is why the merger was approved. Do you think lawyers can just lie? Don't you think it's much more fair now that companies can make pinky promises that prices won't go up before they become more monopolistic. That's just good business for both customers and businesses /s
You had me bad in the beginning there haha, thanks for the chuckle.
Well he is called chuckleslord for a reason.
Imagine being a monopoly and still being 3rd place out of three in your field.
Why does it need to be sold to another big company, why can't they just break Google up so chrome becomes its own business?
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 major 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)
That’s fair - I should have said major browsers to be more clear. Edited above.
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.
And what's to stop it from continuing to monopolize search engine usage just because it'll be owned by another company? Wouldn't whoever purchases it just continue operating it the same way, banking on the name recognition?
MS is both wet and salivating right now.
The buyer of chrome could make bing the default search engine and re-enable whatever broke Ublock origin (the ad blocker)
They could also cripple gapps and gmail a bit. It would also be harder for google to unilaterally develop new web standards.
That would no doubt consternate a few at Google and knee cap them forcing web shit down our throats that only improves their ad business.
It will be another tech giant probably amazon or something.
Enshittification intensifies
I'll give them 5 bucks.
Good news, but does someone more knowleagable of these things know the likelihood of a Trump DOJ derailing this? I am hopefully as the original case was brought in 2017 under Trump, and his relationship with Big Tech is at best strained, but I truly don't know what to expect moving forward.
according to Cory doctorow (pluralistic), trumps gouvernement will likely selectively enforce antitrust, so the Google case would go through, but cases against, say, tesla would be dropped.
Is there any company with the funds to buy this that would not become also a monopoly?
They should make it open source
Well, it mostly already is. The Chromium project is essentially everything Chrome already has, except Chrome contains a few proprietary components (IIRC the tracking is proprietary)
I wished I got a nickel every time someone argues Chrome should be open source, only to find out it always has been
Per Wikipedia
Most of Chrome's source code comes from Google's free and open-source software project Chromium, but Chrome is licensed as proprietary freeware.[15] WebKit was the original rendering engine, but Google eventually forked it to create the Blink engine;[18] all Chrome variants except iOS used Blink as of 2017.[
Open source =/= FOSS, yes it's licensed as proprietary, but you can compile Chromium from scratch and the only drawback is Google's backup server not letting you connect. Other than that, the browser is identical...
I wonder what would happen to the 800 gorbillion Chromebooks if this sale happens
