this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2025
37 points (100.0% liked)
TechTakes
1804 readers
80 users here now
Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
A lot of court documents are sealed or redacted, so I can't quite get at all the details. Nonetheless here's what I've got so far:
The court hasn't cracked open AMD v Intel yet, where it was found that a cash remedy would be better than punishing the ongoing business concerns of a duopoly, but it would be one possible solution: instead of selling Chrome, Google would have to pay its competitors a lump sum and change their business practices somewhat.
I am genuinely not sure what happens to "the browser market", as it were. The Brave and Safari teams are relatively small because they make tweaks on top of an existing browser core; the extreme propagation of Electron suggests that once a browser is written, it does not need to be written again. The court may find browsers to be a sort of capital which is worth a lot of money on its own but not expensive to maintain. This would destroy Mozilla along with Google!
yeah. Chrome exists solely to protect and enable Google's ad business. Does OpenAI think it gets three billion phones for free?
The courts found against google in the huge search engine and online add cases, https://www.theverge.com/23869483/us-v-google-search-antitrust-case-updates finding that Google is a monopolist.
They may force Google to divest Chrome. That probably had some impact on this offer.
https://www.theverge.com/news/626502/trump-doj-recommends-google-breakup-antitrust-search-chrome
Of course, chrome is Google's primary ~~user~~useage tracking tool, so that would be a big blow for them. They'd have to buy the data they now generate themselves.