Google Being Forced To Sell Chrome is Not Good for the Web
You've got a monopoly on lemonade because you pay all the grocery stores to be the default lemonade. So we're going to force you sell your car. What's with the weird redirect? If the monopoly is directly caused by paying the grocery stores for placement, then stop that part. We can see this exact redirect happening in the ruling in the U.S.
https://chriscoyier.net/2025/03/14/google-being-forced-to-sell-chrome-is-not-good-for-the-web/
@chriscoyier There are two major points that seem to be missing here:
1. Google, through their involvement in (and more recently, dominance over) the standards process, has generated a lot of changes and expansions to the web platform that primarily serve Google's interests, not those of users or 'the web' more abstractly. "What's good for Google is good for us" absolutely is not true, and this 'investment' comes with strings. It's worth asking how many of these 'contributions' to the web platform are actually desirable, and how many of them merely serve to make developing a competing browser an insurmountable task (as everyone who has tried has already discovered).
2. Because Chrome is so heavily subsidized, precisely *because* it does not need to be free-standing to survive, it has generated an environment where nobody can meaningfully compete with Google (at least, without becoming similarly malicious as Google) because they do not have a surveillance capitalism sidehustle to fund their browser development with. This has created a Chrome monoculture, which is the opposite of an open and standards-based web. This kind of bundling is, in fact, the core of antitrust issues, for exactly this reason.
@williamoconnell This incorrectly assumes that users directly assess the feature capabilities of browsers. Pretty much only computer nerds do that.
What actually happens is that sites are built with the assumption that features are present, those sites then break on browsers that do not implement them, and the customer service for those sites tells people to "use Chrome instead", gradually building a reputation of other browsers as being "unreliable" in the process.
@joepie91 So they're desirable to developers then. I don't buy into this idea that the way to save the web ecosystem is by stopping browser innovation. We don't need 12 competing browser engines. There are already 3 big ones and they're all open source. We just need to make sure someone keeps paying to maintain them. And at the moment Google is one of the few companies that has both the resources and the motivation to consistently invest in the web platform.
@williamoconnell You seem more interested in convincing (yourself?) that there is no problem, than you are in genuinely understanding the problem I am trying to describe, given that you haven't meaningfully engaged with any of the points I've raised, so I'm not really interested in continuing this line of discussion.
@joepie91
"It's worth asking how many of these 'contributions' to the web platform are actually desirable, and how many of them merely serve to make developing a competing browser an insurmountable task"
No user cares if their new browser doesn't have the Topics API or whatever. New web features only make competition more difficult when users actually value them, and therefore refuse to switch to a browser that doesn't support them.