This has already been discussed extensively in prior threads, but the biggest question is, how does a spun-off Chrome get funded?<p>Chrome/Firefox/Safari all cost hundreds of millions of dollars a year to maintain. Currently, Safari and Firefox both make essentially all their revenue through default search agreements. Chrome, Edge, and now Brave are produced by companies that also own the search engines, so they're essentially a loss-generating product, that exist because they cancel out distribution costs that Google and Microsoft would otherwise have to pay other browsers.<p>But the DOJ order is also asking to ban payments between search engines and browser makers:
> As detailed in Section IV, the PFJ prohibits Google from providing third parties something of value (including financial payments) in order to make Google the default general search engine or otherwise discouraging those third parties from offering competing search products<p>With that revenue gone, the only real options to fund a browser are:<p>* Directly charge users for it. This is effectively a non-starter, because the vast majority of people aren't willing to pay for it.<p>* Insert ads or sell user data - users also hate this, it's probably not legal in the EU, and it may not be legal in most of the US in the future either.<p>* Use the browser as a platform to push some product that does make money - a non-Google search engine? A social network? An LLM interface?<p>Alternatively, a narrow reading of the proposed order is that this only applies to <i>Google</i>. In that case, perhaps Bing or OpenAI takes over all the distribution agreements and becomes the top search engine. Whether that's better for consumers seems fairly questionable.
Page 12 is also very interesting to me personally, as it contains orders mandating the opening of Google’s search index to their competitors. I had been wondering if that would make it in there and am happy to see it land.
Chrome is not the problem. Chrome is not even a symptom.<p>The problem is that the world's largest search engine is also the world's largest ad distributor.<p>Chopping off tentacles like Android or Chrome does nothing to slay the two-headed beast.
I'm quite weirded out about the part about sharing google's data with other companies to allow competition. Yes, sharing my data allows other companies to advertise to me and to monetize my interests. No, I don't want that. I don't even want google to do that.
Personally I'd rather just see users given a choice. Ban the ability to pay to be the default search engine, and throw up a search engine selection screen when a user first launches the browser.<p>If people still choose to use Google then so be it.
As usual DOJ is late to the party. Google is already facing competition and as it falters, the doj will use this as 'evidence' it was effective.
The solution should just be to force browsers to support profile migration from one browser to another.<p>And generally, they should just pass laws that enforce interoperability in the software world, from OS to social networks, users should always be allowed to easily migrate.
There appears to be a hyperfocus on only a single element of the requested remedy. Perhaps many HN commenters are "web developers" and this explains the fixation on popular web browsers.<p>Perhaps commenters should consider that this particular request regarding Chrome may be removed when the revised Proposed Final Judgment is filed in March or this particular request regarding Chrome may be denied by the Court.<p>More often than not, the unbounded speculation put forth by HN commenters is incorrect in predicting the future.<p>IMHO, it would be great if web browsers became simpler to write and more numerous as opposed to the status quo where people commenting online assert that writing a web browser takes enormous investment and accept that there are only a handful to choose from, and these must be all controlled by commercial entities seeking to sell advertising services or partner with such commercial entities.<p>Browsers do not need to be Trojan Horse software to enable surreptitious data collection, nor vectors through which unsolicited advertising may be served. I am typing this comment with one that satisfies neither of those "requirements".
Weird that a Biden DOJ would do this.<p>Here's a bet: they are offloading a legal liability. Within 12 months someone reverse engineers the binaries and show that they were siphoning out all keystroke data, or it has an official remote backdoor or something equally horrendous.