It will never happen. But it would be a good thing for the openness of the web. More Firefox, less Chrome.
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Yep.
Tech companies have extreme "Fuck You" money. They have learned a lot from the past two decades of Antitrust acts.
That politician is either going to quickly change their mind with some bribes, or watch their entire life disappear with an army of lawyers or paid off peers shutting them down.
LoL they won't, even if they buy it for 1 trillion dollar
What's to stop them just making another browser?
What’s to stop them just making another browser?
Nothing. Chromium is open source. So they could just fork it and declare a new "official" google browser and it would be a lot like Chrome.
I'm not sure why the govt thinks forcing google to give up a particular fork/branch of an open source browser is all that meaningful. It might make more sense if Chrome was a closed source one of a kind browser.
I’ve worked in the aftermath of DoJ agreements like this one. The DoJ is not stupid (or at least didn’t used to be) and will have stipulations about removing Google employees from governance/write permissions to the project, with follow up check-ins every few months to make sure any shenanigans aren’t occurring.
..none of that matters though now that the DoJ is going to be dissolved.
Not needed. Internet Explorer existed for years after the 90s. It wasn't killed by the courts. It was killed by the fact that it's only function was to install a better browser on first boot.
I think you are severely underestimating how many people don’t even understand the difference between windows, explorer, a web browser and even the Internet itself during the 90’s well into the 2000’s even 2010’s.
That’s who kept IE alive
No offense but it was the US Government. Most of their websites were coded for it, and quite a few of them didn't work properly or reliably in other browsers as a result. This was true up until it was sunsetted and they were forced to update to Edge and some of the websites still haven't been properly moved over to Chromium. When the pandemic hit and the Armed Forces had to setup remote work for thousands of people Microsoft basically built them a fork of Teams. The US Government is kind of running hand in hand with Microsoft on a lot of stuff if you just hazard a cursory look.
Sell off? So who will buy
Microsoft
doubtful. they replaced trident (in house engine) with chromium for edge because of the cost of maintenance.
What if Linux foundation buys Chrome?
They already have Servo.
Do they have the money? What is the value of Chrome anyways, if you can't do monopoly things with it? About as much as Firefox?
Sprint merged with TMobile