DOJ wants Google to sell Chrome

[will]

The US Department of Justice asked the judge of the 2020 Google antitrust case (https://www.justice.gov/atr/case/us-and ... google-llc) to force Google to sell Google Chrome (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/20/tech ... e-doj.html).
Mental Outlaw made a great, informative video about this: https://youtu.be/Obg_kq1zr-Y.
Personally, I hope Chrome never gets in the hands of another big player like Microsoft. Maybe it could be transferred to a nonprofit organization that has our best interests at heart, but that's probably just a pipe dream. What do you think?

[JINSBEK]

Thanks for sharing the video, that was really informative. I don’t know who has $20 billion dollars lying around just to buy Chrome. I mean, I do have some ideas, but I don’t think people would like them.

• Jeff Bezos
• Mark Zuckerberg
• Elon Musk
• Bill Gates
• That guy who co-founded Oracle and owns 98% of one of the Hawaiian islands

I also had no idea that Chrome’s upcoming extensions manager would kill adblockers like uBlock Origin. I can’t imagine that the other browsers based on Chromium (e.g. Edge) would bemoan the death of comprehensive adblockers. If worst comes to worst, I guess I could go crazier with my hosts file management… It’s inconvenient, but the personal upside of that friction for me, would be that it would compel me to stay off the Internet even more. Whatever happens I’ll be touching grass and playing with baby squirrels more.

What I’m more interested in, is what’ll happen to Chromium after it’s scooped up by some other giant. Will it remain open-source so that other maintainers can contribute to its development? Or will it be closed off and everyone’s going to have to eff off and actually develop their own browser, without any sort of standardisation? Because a balkanised development ecosystem would be hell to web devs. I mean it already is. But it’d be, you see, an even worse hell. And none of those developers will see their families again because nobody will agree on how to render CSS and JavaScript and HTML properly.

[Crazyroostereye]

The Chromium Project will probably stay open source. Tho if the Company that buys them does decide to close source Chromium, I can imagine that it will be forked by a Neutral Organization that is either founded by the other Big Companies or is already Neutral to the Companies. Similar to what happened after Redis changed their License, and it was forked to Valkey which is under The Linux Foundation.

[rejectconvenience]

Could you imagine if Bill Gates bought it and tried to revive IE

[JINSBEK]

Lmao. Honestly, I had some really good experiences with that browser as a kid. Good amount of spyware unwittingly and wittingly caught. Started off my cybersecurity and digital hygiene education early.

…I guess nowadays you don’t need adware for advertisers to track you, huh.