The DOJ still wants Google to sell off Chrome

Here&#x27;s something I don&#x27;t understand.<p>If you want to switch your search engine for Safari on iOS, you open Settings, tap Safari, tap Search Engine, and tap your preferred search engine. Not many users do this, and the conclusion is that the default has an unfair advantage.<p>If you want to make Chrome your desktop browser, you open the default browser, search for Chrome, click the correct result, download the installer, run the installer, open Chrome, and set it as the default browser. So many users do this that people conclude Chrome has an unfair advantage.

First I don&#x27;t believe this is an effective remedy to break up a Google monopoly, but I have no influence on the DOJ.<p>I&#x27;m curious though, if Google can no longer pay browsers for search engine traffic what is the business model that will sustain development and advancement in the space?<p>How does a non Google owned Chrome support itself and continue development?<p>What happens to all the applications that rely on Chrome extensions?<p>As much as I dislike Google behavior, I don&#x27;t see this as being a good thing.

If Google sells Chrome keeps control over Chromium, I don&#x27;t see this benefiting users. They&#x27;ll continue with their anti-user efforts (Manifest V2 phaseout, Web Integrity), and the only difference is that the new Chrome will come with a new set of spyware, probably a worse one than Google because no one is in as good of a position to benefit from the lock-in as Google does, so they have to be more aggressive with their monetization, like with ads inserted into pages.<p>But at the same time maintaining Chromium is a pretty thankless endeavor and I don&#x27;t see any entity with that capability. It&#x27;s much bigger than Linux, and the developers are employees, not volunteers.<p>The best possible outcome I can imagine is if Google is required to spin off Chromium into a nonprofit that would be independent but they are required to fund it for many years. The nonprofit would need some kind of oversight from adversarial companies to avoid collusion with Google or any other company.

Regardless of what happens to Chrome per se it&#x27;s who is involved with pushing for major controversial changes in Chromium that matters.<p>Manifest v3 and Web Integrity API are prominent examples of Google&#x27;s team shaping how all Chromium based browsers will be, regardless of pushback (though they relented with the latter for now).

Google has to sell Chrome, a completely optional browser, and stop supporting Firefox, the best Chrome alternative, while Apple is allowed to completely lock down iOS without allowing installing alternatives to Safari, or any third party app stores. Not to mention that Apple for years exploited its dominant market position in the US by resisting messaging RCS Android compatibility, and pressuring teens into either buying into the Apple or ecosystem or risk being socially ostracized from incompatible group chats. It seems to be more that a double standard.

A company owning a web browser isn&#x27;t the problem. A company owning a web browser, OS and search engine shouldn&#x27;t be a problem either. I don&#x27;t know why the remedy can&#x27;t actually address the problem, and the DOJ can&#x27;t move more quickly to address antitrust across the industry. This feels like randomly cutting a baby in half, while the rest of the thieves, even those in the same family, are not deterred.

At this point, tech&#x27;s major competitors are overseas. Never thought I&#x27;d be making this argument, but does breaking up the search monopoly help America or up and comers?

Who would even buy Chrome? No one&#x27;s building new browsers, and MS even walked away from the browser game. Mozilla and Firefox haven&#x27;t been relevant for a decade. The only buyer I can see is private equity, and that&#x27;s sort of the big boy version of buying an abandoned browser plugin so it can track you and show more ads.

If you look carefully at the Chromium project, it’s made up of teams that specialize in different components. The majority of the members of those teams are in turn Google employees. Presumably they have the best qualifications to be on those teams. I don’t see how a DOJ decision against Google would change any of that. Ban Google employees from participating in the project? And then who would replace them?

(Googler opinions are my own, don&#x27;t work on chrome)<p>Chrome has just been a better product for the last 10 to 15 years.<p>Every other company has just failed to make a good browser because they lack the incentives to do so (have gone back and forth as a Firefox user).<p>The only competitive browsers are those already built on chrome or safari.<p>I&#x27;m not personally a big fan of Safari but it&#x27;s bigger issue is that it is only available on one platform whereas the web is naturally cross platform.<p>Almost by definition Safari can&#x27;t be the &quot;winning&quot; browser.<p>This feels like ruling that the iPhone is a monopoly in the US and that Apple needs to divest from phones.<p>Edit: to those replying I 100% don&#x27;t agree with all the decisions chrome make, very importantly ad block.<p>But just survey the actual browser market in the last 10 years to understand Chrome&#x27;s dominance

Google can probably bribe its way out of this problem. [1][2] Might not even take money. Just favorable search result positioning.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;newrepublic.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;188271&#x2F;trump-profit-presidency-emoluments-supreme-court" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;newrepublic.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;188271&#x2F;trump-profit-presiden...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&#x2F;politics&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2025&#x2F;02&#x2F;trump-bribery-corruption-legal&#x2F;681658&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&#x2F;politics&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2025&#x2F;02&#x2F;trump-b...</a>

Google has a monopoly but focusing on Chrome seems wrong. Here’s my prediction, let us remove chrome from the world tomorrow, make bing the default search engine on all devices. How much will Googles search market share fall by?<p>From 90% to 80%. Maybe even 70%. I don’t see it falling below that. Does DOJ think that hypothetical market shares could be 40% Google, 30% Bing, 20-30% rest. I don’t think this is possible short of banning Google or making it extremely cumbersome to access Google (for example, making it impossible to set Google as default). Which makes this whole exercise seem pointless.<p>Then we also come to the realm of justice. Google built Chrome (no easy task), fair and square. Chrome is a better browser engine than that of most competitors, so much so that its competitors use the same browser engine (Firefox and Safari Exempted). (Chromium is also open source). Why should Google be forced to sell Chrome? Is the assumption here that by the default the government owns everything you make, and the fact that you get to keep something you made is because of the benevolence of the government? This doesn’t seem like a good precedent. The government can’t even justify this as some big harm to society like it’s an addictive drug. What’s the consumer harm here? Is it that Google has monopoly pricing on serving ads to users, so if any company wants to do digital marketing, they have to pay whatever price Google sets?<p>In the end, this just seems like a big unnecessary mess. The govt surely must have better things to do.

Can Google just &quot;donate&quot; Chrome to a foundation like a lot of big companies do to deal with this?<p>Maybe we&#x27;ll soon have Apache Chrome!

Last time the DOJ declared a web browser monopoly, they lost the case on appeal, then the web browser does on its own.<p>The problem isn&#x27;t within Google. They aren&#x27;t doing anything substantial to lock users into Chrome. The problem is unforced errors on the part of both Apple and Mozilla creating awful web browsers that aren&#x27;t worth using.

Discussion on the Proposed Final Judgement yesterday:<p><i>DOJ asks for judgement requiring Google to divest Chrome [pdf]</i> (31 points 30 comments) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43296045">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43296045</a>

Google just needs to send the appropriate amount to kleptocracy war chest and this will get killed on the backend.

It’s a big world. Does breaking up google give the Asian giants an advantage? Wonder if China breaks up their large tech companies?

I can&#x27;t find information on what would happen to Chromium, would google need to hand it over too? That&#x27;s probably more important than the fate of Chrome.

So they sell Chrome today and create Ghrome tomorrow?<p>I can&#x27;t see Chrome surviving as a standalone product - where is the revenue? I am sure someone will buy it and try to create some &quot;premium&quot; version, but ultimately it will wither and die I expect.

Crazy to think that most users never change a single setting. They live in default mode. Which is the issue with how most software works. Even how browsers will try to get set as default.

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Chrome is so user hostile and entrapping I don’t know why anyone uses it. It should absolutely be separated and spun off to live on its own and make its own profit.

This is the absolutely dumbest thing that I have read. Who would buy Chrome and why? If you just want the codebase, you have Chromium. Chrome only monetizes because of ads.<p>Then what happens to Chromebooks? Can Google no longer ship a browser with Android?<p>Besides, unless you have an Android - which is only 30% of the US market or a Chromebook, everyone who uses Chrome went through the process of downloading it and made a purposeful choice to use it

It&#x27;s just nuts that the &quot;penalty&quot; for violating antitrust law is that the offender gets to sell part of themselves and receive compensation. Engaging in unfair competition or obtaining too large a market share should be <i>punished</i> with remedies that make the perpetrator worse off than it was before it began the offending behavior.

Someone didn&#x27;t send a large enough campaign contribution.

I agree there needs to be remedy, but Does chrome have a profit without Google? Who’s going to buy it? Oracle?

&gt; The Justice Department also kept a Biden-era proposal that seeks to ban Google from paying companies like Apple, other smartphone manufacturers and Mozilla to make its search engine the default on their phones and browsers.<p>RIP Firefox?

If Google was forced to sell off Chrome, I wonder what the ramifications would be for Chromebooks. Chromebooks have become quite popular in K12 schools. I don’t see how they could continue to run or why Google would have any continued interest in this device ruling.

good. ublock origin finally stopped working for me two days ago and for the first time in like 20 f&#x27;n years I got a popup yesterday.

Always had to. They built Alphabet but its obvious they didnt break things up. Whats going to be interesting is how some of them will even be able to afford to operate under separate orgs.

The only person&#x2F;institution to buy Chrome in the current setting would be EM. It would make sense to embed xAI all over it, make Twitter a home page. I can see it play really well for Musk, not so much for the users though.<p>I can even see him spending less money on it than during Twitter acquisition.

I don&#x27;t know the legal and justice aspects of this, but I personally hope whatever happens prevents the ongoing privacy abuses, like uBlock not working into the future due to decreased ability to block content. Just my personal preference.

Speculation: Perhaps Google accelerated the Manifest V3 change to get anti-adblocking &#x27;baked in&#x27; and benefitting their interests, before they&#x27;re forced to sell off Chrome?

To try to stem the tide of &quot;Trump will just make this go away because ${corruption}&quot;, I want to remind everyone of a few things:<p>* This is not a Biden-admin lawsuit. It was launched by the first Trump admin.<p>* Of the 14 co-plaintiffs, only 1 (CA) is a state that didn&#x27;t vote for Trump in 2024. The Colorado Plaintiff States include another 16 red states, for a total of 29 red states represented.<p>As much as it&#x27;s trendy in 2025 to talk about this admin as though it&#x27;s entirely unprincipled, it&#x27;s actually been doing exactly what it said it would do to satisfy its base. This lawsuit was started by them in the first place and if the list of Attorneys General is anything to go by has overwhelming support from the base that Trump is acting to satisfy. Google&#x27;s not getting out of this from just a small amount of kowtowing now, it&#x27;s <i>far</i> too late for that.

It would be hilarious if Google just formed a foundation to open source and manage Chrome going forward. I mean, it&#x27;s already built on Chromium.

Who would buy it? Oracle?<p>What would be the difference between Google shoveling money at Safari and Firefox for default search and shoveling money at some “independent” Chrome?

Isn’t android like 10 times the problem chrome is?

The doj should split up more of big tech. The industry is stagnating and allowing a more healthy competition would do wonders.

Keep Google Chrome. Separate search. Sell it to private equity. (I bet DoJ didn’t think about that whammy.)<p>And start charging for everything else out there like maps, street view, and browser. And buy cloudflare while at it. Push themselves into everything related to connectivity and internet properties.<p>The search business is the cash flow that is being a thorn in the side of Google. And it doesn’t even make sense in its vision anymore.

How about youtube, gmail too please

I disliked Google ever since they started their &quot;Do No Evil&quot; PR campaign. For as long as I remember I was the extreme rare few on internet against them.<p>And I also disliked Chrome. Especially the direction of the web they are using Chrome to push forward.<p>And I also disliked Electron.<p>But I am against DOJ forcing Google to sell off Chrome. Especially when most of Chrome is open sourced. I think this is just plain wrong. Why dont we force Apple to open source macOS? Microsoft to Open Source Windows? Or Selling off Office. SpaceX to sell its Engine?

I don&#x27;t get some of the antitrust measures.<p>It was dumb when they battled with microsoft&#x27;s IE, and it&#x27;s especially dumb when they battle Google&#x27;s Chrome.<p>Chrome isn&#x27;t just another google product, it is central to its search engine, they did an ofshoot into a browser because they found they needes to effectively develop a headless browser to scrape some js and mixed media websites.

My first reaction when reading this is: how does this help Musk?<p>Sigh.

It says something about how universally despised Google and other tech giants are that two presidential administrations who are so acrimonious and diametrically opposed that they have spent much of their time destroying everything the previous one did agree on it.<p>I genuinely can&#x27;t think of anyone, of any political stripe, outside of Google and its employees and investors, who thinks Google should have the power it has now. Honestly, the degree of pushback this is getting on HN is shocking to me. Google is massively anti-competitive and spends a ton of energy hurting startups to its own benefit.<p>I hope the DOJ gets its way on this, and I hope they aggressively pursue anti-trust actions against other organizations in similar positions - Oracle, Epic Systems, and Meta all come to mind.

How about Amazon buying Firefox instead?

This is so so dumb and not related to the already dumb monopoly ruling.

Sell it and drop Mankfest V3 lol

All that rather pathetic grovelling and kowtowing to Trump, for naught.

It&#x27;s morning in America - pmarca

So sad all that sucking up to the new administration didn&#x27;t work. Oh well...

I don&#x27;t care that Google, Apple or Microsoft have their own browser.<p>Especially not when there are other third party browsers. Wouldn&#x27;t say no to a government funded one that was secure and tested with government services.<p>There are some issues with the big tech giants that is likely harmful to consumers and the industry, and I&#x27;d welcome anti-trust investigations into all of them, but I feel like minor issues like browsers is an attempt to pretend like meaningful regulation and government control has been applied, while the real problems are ignored.