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Comment by lemoncookiechip | Hacker News Reader

I'm very confused. Chrome is just Chromium with Google's own Telemetry. Chromium is open and maintained primarily by Google.

Sure, there's a userbase, but you need a business model to take advantage of it in the first place because the benefit was the Telemetry (Google's) and Google's Ecosystem.

Also, the article specifically mentions Chrome, NOT Chromium (which again, is open), so what incentive would Google have to maintaining the project without their own version of it? Would they be bared from starting a new one? Would someone else take over Chromium? Who would have the resources to do such a thing other than say Microsoft who currently uses a Chromium browser?

Why not just go for the jugular and separate Adsense from the rest of Alphabet? It's the main driving force in all their dark patterns for all other platforms (Youtube, Android, Chrome, Search...)

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> Also, the article specifically mentions Chrome, NOT Chromium (which again, is open), so what incentive would Google have to maintaining the project without their own version of it? Would they be bared from starting a new one?

I wonder similarly if they are only selling the brand and the existing installation base. I do not see what is stopping them from just creating a chrome clone called Manganese and continuing.

It would be an interesting experiment though to see if the google version will regain the same market share or if chrome will maintain its current market share under the new stewardship.

Forcing Google to sell their ad business would be the death of that company. After all, it's mostly an ad company...

They would just have to go back to their original business model before they became an ad company when they ran third-party ads on Google search.

Granted, that may not get them enough income at their current scale. They would definitely have to scale back hard for that.

They wouldn't need to do that, they would just need to sell the third party ads part they can still run their own first party ads on their own domains.

Forcing Google to do that would just hurt other websites income, not Google.

> Why not just go for the jugular and separate Adsense from the rest of Alphabet? It's the main driving force in all their dark patterns for all other platforms (Youtube, Android, Chrome, Search...)

Because this is not the case about display advertising, but the one about search engines and search advertising.

But also, if you think the display ads business is the jugular, I don't think you really understand their business. Have a look at the financials. The entire display ads business is <10% of their business, and shrinking in both absolute and relative terms.

I'm worried about what happens to the Chrome extension store. If Google sells Chrome, then does that also mean the Chrome store? I guess it would have to. So not only does someone need to buy Chrome, they also have to operate the Chrome store too. I'm not sure this is going to work out well.

Interesting idea. I'm not against forcing Google to choose either all the user platforms they run or Adsense. If they sold off Google Drive, Suite, YouTube, Google Play, etc they might improve faster. At the very least it would drive more alternatives. That seems so unlikely though.

Google kills all their other projects often enough that I don't think they are contributing to many spaces anymore so giving the technical assets to other companies would be interesting.

As much as I dislike thinking it, out of the realistic possibilities for who could buy it, Microsoft is probably among the more preferable. Their primary income isn't from advertising, at least. Most other big players would be even more likely to continue with Google's direction of killing ad blockers. MS, to their credit, has never shown interest in doing that.

> Their primary income isn't from advertising, at least

Surely they wouldn't auto-default Chrome to Bing and try to become an ad company.

It's not like they're selling ads in the Start menu or anything...

MS gaining control of Chrome would be the worst timeline

> Microsoft

So we'd end up with even less competition? As flawed as Edge is it still somewhat new/innovative/different features that Chrome doesn't because MS has to try and compete with Google.

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