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Rony Abovitz, the founding energy behind Magic Leap, does this 'AI/XR Podcast' and last episode they discussed OpenAI rumors about a Social Network. As a founder himself who lived through being flavor of the day getting showered with venture money his observation was prescient: this 'I can do anything' approach is what happens to a certain kind of person (who will "eat everything on the table" is how he phrased it) given all checks and no balances.
He contrasted that with someone like Jenson who pulled Nvidia off of a cliff more than once and so has the scartissue to limit his reach to keep focus on core business.
> eat everything on the table
OpenAI probably senses they're not making ASI anytime soon. They have enough money to will themselves into a FAANG by essentially minting consumer and enterprise products. That could secure their long term future and returns.
Prediction: they burn through Microsoft’s loans buying social networks and browsers, and then when Microsoft stops writing checks microsoft acquire what’s left
Or someone else. They could definitely go the acqui-hire route.
I suspect that was the plan all along. I do not buy that these people believed in their own spiel for one second.
> the founding energy behind Magic Leap
So a scammer?
Great podcast!
> scar tissue*
I got excited first thinking I’m starting my day off right by learning a new word, but nope :-)
> given all checks and no balances.
Do you mean no checks and balances? A check is a restriction or constraint.
I suspect this may be a play on words where checks = cheque, or money
Yeah I thought this was possible too that's one of the reasons I asked
I checked to see if that pun occurs elsewhere and didn't see it. Someone who doesn't have English as a first language may not know the more obscure usage of check since you don't use it much these days other than as part of phrases and idioms like "checks and balances", which is 18th century English
"Balance" also has a financial meaning…
I am stating the obvious to clarify: cheques without balances is an overdraft. You give a piece of paper that can't be exchanged for money when promised.
I don’t think that the saying has anything to do with money. It’s about power, oversight and preventing overreach. Of course, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t used in reference to money by the OP.
This is the problem with breaking Chrome out of Google. It’s not just OpenAI, but the constellation of potential buyers is short and problematic.
Is Apple a good buyer? Oracle? OpenAI? NVIDIA? The Saudis? (I think I’m kidding about that?)
Someone is going to buy this for $100B and find a way to make a (big) profit off of it. I’m not sure the new landlord is going to be less rapacious than the last one was.
So don't allow that.
Chrome (and control over Chromium) go to a newly formed, independent nonprofit. The nonprofit is not in any way under Google's control.
Google receives zero compensation. The nonprofit is funded by Google at say $250M/year for 20 years... by which I mean Google writes checks and gets absolutely nothing in exchange. The funding is conditional only on the nonprofit doing something that can be vaguely viewed as shipping a browser. Don't like that? Shoulda thought about it before you started getting all monopolistic.
The nonprofit is required to spend all its incoming funds, and forbidden to do anything but provide a browser. Just the browser. No services. All elements of the browser are AGPL. The nonprofit is forbidden to accept any offer that would put it under the control of any other entity. Every Chrome/Chromium user can become a member of the noprofit and then vote for the board. The board may not recommend its own candidates.
The browser isn't allowed to have a default search engine, LLM, "safe sites list", sync server, or whatever. In fact, it's not even allowed to provide a list to choose from. The user has to find them.
No, I don't know if that's feasible under applicable law, and honestly I doubt it is. But it'd be the right direction to go.
This is hilarious! So billions of dollars of capital invested by Google on R&D results in all of the IP being seized with a $250m/year annual obligation?
> It’d be the right direction to go
Putting the legality of this aside for a moment, the second order effects of the government seizing IP at this scale would cause a massive downscaling of R&D investment followed by IP rapidly fleeing the country.
True, and consider that the current US government would probably not be a good custodian, of, well, anything, but specifically, software of any sort.
> So billions of dollars of capital invested by Google on R&D results in all of the IP being seized with a $250m/year annual obligation?
Yep. Billions of dollars of capital knowingly invested in an illegal enterprise results in penalties. Film at 11.
...except Chrome was not and is not an illegal enterprise.
The charges were against search and ads.
If the government made a decision like this it would discourage companies from trying to invest in OSS the way that Google has. Considering that this model has worked out amazingly well for the average person, that would be bad.
> ...except Chrome was not and is not an illegal enterprise.
> The charges were against search and ads.
The textbook definition of “monopolistic behavior” is “using your monopoly in one sector to extend your power in another sector”.
It’s not illegal to have a monopoly. That can happen if you are completely innocent, just because no competitors choose to compete with you.
It’s illegal to abuse the power of your monopoly.
What was the biggest browser when Chrome launched? It was Firefox. Where are they now? On death’s door.
What was the biggest commercial browser when Chrome launched? It was Opera. Where are they now? Also on death’s door.
Do you ever remember seeing ads for Chrome in any of Googles other offerings?
A better question would be, “Before 2020 or so, do you think it was possible to use Google Search without having Chrome advertised to you?”
Chrome got special treatment above and beyond anything available to anyone else. Even more than anyone else with an unlimited Google ad budget. It got special placement in the Google search interface. “Try chrome!” On the otherwise bare Google search page. You know, the one that was famously minimalistic and “ad-free”.
Google leveraged its search and ads pseudo-monopolies to help Chrome become its own pseudo+monopoly.
And now that Chrome is its own pseudo-monopoly, what is their behavior?
Well, now, you can’t install (good) ad blockers anymore. Does that benefit users, or is that abusing their browser monopoly to help Google’s other business lines?
And until approximately yesterday, they were saying they were going to disable third party cookies. That’s nice. It probably would help some users. Note that it will definitely hurt Google’s competitors.
And it’s interesting timing, isn’t it? They could have done this, to help users, at any point in the past 15 years, but they only decided to do it recently, when their search and ad businesses are a little shaky compared to where they used to be.
Google absolutely used its search and ad monopolies to build a browser monopoly. And now that they have a browser monopoly, they’re using the power of that monopoly to act in ways contrary to their users interests.
> "What was the biggest browser when Chrome launched? It was Firefox"
No way. Internet Explorer had about 70% of the market, with Firefox at about 15%.
Today Chrome has basically the same marketshare as IE back then. Courts found that Microsoft created IE's dominant position by abusing its monopoly, and now it seems to be Google's turn.
Oops, sorry, you’re right. The biggest browser was IE. The same rhetorical argument holds… IE isn’t even on death’s door. It’s so dead that I forgot about it.
Chrome is wildly popular because it's a GOOD BROWSER. Google's search and ad monopoly do not matter; people loved the browser because it was fast, minimalist, bundled flash and PDF readers, and had great support for adblockers.
More than for any other Google product, Chrome won because it was good in its own right.
Now that Google has gotten rid of adblockers we will see exactly how much ability they have to compel people to use the browser :)
This third-party cookie thing has been in the news for half a decade at this point. It's not a new idea at all.
Yes, Chrome was great. Google search was also great.
That’s the nature of enshittification, and a core tactic of monopolists: give your customers something for free (or below cost) until you have killed the competition, and then exploit your “customers” (victims).
> Google's search and ad monopoly do not matter
Some questions:
When Google used its search monopoly to promote Chrome in a way that no other company is capable of (a link on the Google search main page), did that have some impact, or zero impact?
When Google used its ad monopoly to give Chrome free ad placement… That is, when the Chrome team was able to ‘buy’ keywords for free that Firefox, IE, and Opera had to pay 5 cents per click for… Did that have some impact, or zero impact?
It could be argued that having Google retain ownership of Chrome would give them too much of a business incentive to repeat the monopoly in the near future.
I think my preferred outcome would be donating it to either the Linux foundation or Apache software foundation rather than to a new foundation. But otherwise agree no default search/llm/etc...
"donating" in that case would be burdening
This might fly in North Korea or Soviet Union, but seriously? At that point they could just abandon the project altogether. If we're discussing monopolistic position, we have to then account for what made Chrome come to such a position in the first place, aside from technical superiority of course. Leveraging google.com for promotion, integration with google services, android? What makes that different from what apple is doing? Yes, dominance was accelerated by strategic push from Google, but would it happen regardless? Was there even a war going on and won over FF, Safari, IE/Edge with unruly moves? It now needs to be broken away from a company because it's a success story? Was there a moment like "if you don't install/bundle Chrome we'll crush your business?" in style of Microsoft? Was there a moment like "Chrome or take a hike" in style of Apple?
I'm not even taking Google's side on this, just cannot see that side of it where they were evil to get to that point with it. If anything, Chrome made monopoly go away from clutches of Microsoft and to an extent Apple.
I'd be happy to talk about doing something similar with Windows or iOS...
Chrome being open source and free seems like a significant difference.
Technically Chrome isn't open source, Chromium is and there are differences mostly related to Google services and branding.
* As far as we all know. *
This relationship means that Google can be throwing whatever they wanted into Chrome, and not necessarily have it make its way into Chromium.
VS Code is the same way, and a lot of forks are finding out about that relationship right now when Microsoft blocked their C++ extensions from running on anything other than the proprietary build.
> If we're discussing monopolistic position, we have to then account for what made Chrome come to such a position in the first place, aside from technical superiority of course.
They were amazing marketers. They made television, bus stop, billboard, and other real life advertisements that you couldn't miss walking down the street. Firefox did... uhhhhh an online certificate[1] that only people who were devs or chronically online would know or care about.
Marketing and sales has long been the Achilles' heel of computer software. Mozilla and all these Firefox forks screwed up and continue to screw up to this day by only marketing their products (not just code anymore - think of it as an actual product or good) to internet niches and not at all in real life. The majority of the planet does log off sometime and touch grass, so that's where the sales pitch has to happen.
One commenter said this is funny. I don’t think it’s funny but I do think it’s the notional promise of communism.
As we know, communism has all kinds of unintended problems as a result of broken incentives. Even if it were legal, it’s unlikely to work.
What company takes it over is an important question, and I honestly don't have a good answer for that. Nearly every company I can think of would have some problem.
But my question is, do we need Chrome to actually continue in its current state?
Chromium could continue as open source with multiple companies contributing to it (and maybe it falls under the linux foundation to oversee it) then with companies like Microsoft making their own forks.
We have Safari, Edge, Firefox (which its future is also in question, but that's a separate topic). I guess Oprah is still kicking around.
When not under Google's control, what value does Chrome really serve beyond its existing install base (which not discounting, but that can change)
> I guess Oprah is still kicking around.
Wouldn't have been my first choice, but she's not the worst idea I've seen so far in this discussion.
Opera is PRC owned and operated. Vivaldi is the actual successor to OG Opera.
I think the divide between HN and the world is significant, here.
For you (and me), switching browsers is annoying but doable. There was a time when I used Firefox, and then a time when I used Chrome, and someday I'll use something else. But for the vast majority of the world, the idea of switching browsers feels like a big challenge.
A lot of the world needs Chrome to keep working well for them.
It seems like all of the browsers now import data from other browsers when you install them. So, is that really much of the case?
Beyond the old stereotype "grandparent thinks the E is the internet", there is not much of a difference in how each browser behaves. The UI's are shockingly similar.
If it was, I would not think that Google would be as successful as they are to push Chrome heavily. Users would not transition over.
I will admit that I do sometimes have a different view of technology than many people, I mean as it is I have multiple browsers running right now. And generally when I step back I can see, oh yeah this really may be a bigger deal for most people.
I am struggling to see it in this case, especially with every browser trying very hard to make it as easy as possible.
> Beyond the old stereotype "grandparent thinks the E is the internet"
That stereotype is now "grandparent thinks Chrome is the internet". It still exists in a big way. It also exists in the sense that "no one ever got fired for downloading Google Chrome".
> For you (and me), switching browsers is annoying but doable. There was a time when I used Firefox, and then a time when I used Chrome, and someday I'll use something else. But for the vast majority of the world, the idea of switching browsers feels like a big challenge.
Given this paragraph suggests you haven't changed browsers in over 15 years, you should probably give it a try sometime and see if what you think is true still is true.
(If you don't want to do your homework, it is not true. A not-very-technical person could change browsers three times between now and dinner and have no issues)
> A not-very-technical person could change browsers three times between now and dinner and have no issues
Unlikely. Maybe if they have no saved bookmarks, no saved passwords, and no saved cookies (which isn't most users). Let alone usability differences. They might get lucky for certain OSes and certain browser current combos that auto-import, or they might not.
Whenever I watch someone change to a new browser, there are multiple serious issues to deal with.
FWIW I use Chrome because my customers use Chrome, so I want to see what they’re seeing as much as possible.
I know how to install Arc :)
Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Similar to the current antitrust case with Meta. The time to have tackled these problems was probably about a decade ago.
> Damned if you do, damned if you don't
Only if you wait a few decades to break a monopoly up. This is the fall out of the lack of US government intervention in their megatech companies.
We see the EU trying to fight back, but really all of this is far too late. There will be significant fall out, I’m sure. The sale of Chrome could be an unmitigated disaster.
Totally agree. I think the only option here would be separating the company into multiple companies. This seems to be the direction the Meta case is more likely to go in.
Eg. Google could become, Google Search (and AI), YouTube, and an independent ad tech company with the remnants of DoubleClick (maybe Google Ads moves into this group as well and has deals with the other two entities).
Chrome exists entirely as a power play. For a while, it aligned pretty well for consumers to get a browser that was produced by their search engine. However, it really only exists because google wanted direct control over their main medium.
Not quite. It exists (or at least, it originally existed) because Google didn't want Microsoft to have direct control over their main medium. (In particular, IE/Edge were funneling people to Bing.)
Yes, and it would be the same reason OpenAI would be interested. They'd get to control the client.
One more step, sama, and you too can have an advertising company.
Correct. Chrome is not and never was a profitable venture apart from Google. It was a strategic move designed to push web technology forward to allow Google's other, more profitable businesses like Gmail, Google Drive etc. to compete with their desktop counterparts.
Before Chrome, Google had an Internet Explorer plugin called Google Gears that enabled functionality like LocalStorage and Service Workers since those were not standard web features at the time. Eventually they made Chrome and only then were they able to push to make those things into web standards.
Apart from Google, Chrome can't survive in its current form. It's not profitable on its own, and any attempt to make it so will inevitably result in either huge cuts to development staff or some pretty intense enshitification, or both.
While I shudder at the privacy implications of some of those buyers, there's a really ironic concept here: Google always had a conflict of interest between giving the user agency in their browser, and making ads unblockable (namely, its own). Under different stewardship, we might see a shift towards the user in the ad-blocking wars.
After all, the new buyer gets value out of your loyalty in using their browser to view more pages than ever before, so that it can use that data to train its LLMs! People bouncing from pages due to ads just gets in the way. We will have freedom from online advertising, for the low, low cost of a Larry Ellison or Elon Musk-managed panopticon!
If someone else buys Chrome, hopefully Google starts a Chrome "v2" from scratch and we'll have a few more years with a good early Chrome browser experience until that one is sold. And the cycle continues...
The US courts would require they not enter the business at all, so that wouldn’t be feasible.
Best case scenario is this pisses off enough people to create a sea change toward alternative browsers.
Couldn’t we have an open source group fork Chromium and keep it sane? I’d imagine that would quickly become one of the most used browsers
"We" could do that now. "We" haven't because it's not profitable to do so, and there's barely enough oxygen as it is for one non-profit browser funded by donations (Firefox).
If only Firefox were funded by donations!
If it was that easy we would have it already.
ungoogled-chromium?
That is only half of the statement I was replying to.
You missed
> I’d imagine that would quickly become one of the most used browsers
It doesn't need to be one. And even if it was, we'd never know as it doesn't have any built-in telemetry and doesn't use a custom useragent.
Just like TikTok being forced to be spun off. Would gov allow ByteDance to buy it without the need to make profit?
Apple? No. They have a browser and buying Chrome gives them more monopoly power on MacOS. Plus, they have to maintain a version for other OSes and that … well, they might not hate it, but I doubt they'd like it.
Oracle? Fuck no. To my knowledge, nothing good has ever come from Oracle.
OpenAI? Privacy nightmare.
NVidia? uh, why? Not even remotely their gig.
The Saudis? Not their gig, but wind blows, river flows, who know? But, not exactly known for their software devlopment prowess.
You can ignore it, this is just a page taken from the Musk school of attention farming.
It actually kind of makes sense.
The DOJ wants to break what it considers to be Google's monopoly, and Chrome is a prime target. The problem is that Chrome by itself is worse than worthless, it is a money sink and it only makes sense as a part of a system.
OpenAI is starting to feel the competition. ChatGPT is no longer the only game in town, DeepSeek happened, Google is becoming actually good, Claude is quite popular among coders, and Grok is not a joke anymore. They need something if they don't want to lose out, and buying the most popular browser to make it into a gateway into their service may be an option.
But removing Chrome from Google makes zero sense and won't stop it from being a monopoly. The monopoly part comes from buying DoubleClick (in 2007!) -- that should never have been allowed.
Not sure how to extract that part from Google now. It would be difficult, but probably quite effective.
Quite effective at destroying anything good left of Google I would say.
Google has a bunch of nice things (search, gmail, maps, ...) that cost money, and an advertising business that makes money, the former helping the latter. Split the two and the nice stuff will be without funding and die out, and only the "evil" part will survive. Or so I think. Splitting out Chrome will not change the face of the world, but Firefox has shown that an (somewhat) independent browser can work.
Those 'nice' parts of the google are feeding the 'evil' advertisement business. Now more than anything, the reason google's ad business is so rich specifically because they (and only they) know everything about most of the denizens to farm them efficiently and thus demand a premium. Take their feed away and the ad business livestock will suddenly be lot more docile.
It would be interesting to hear how much a subscription to docs, gmail, maps, etc. would have to be to keep them operating at current levels.
Google could have had solid competition if Garmin and TomTom made their offline map subscriptions available on phones instead of pushing their dedicated devices so hard. TomTom just started publishing their own apps during Covid, and Garmin is still nowhere to be found. There's also other apps like Magic Earth that use other data, but they're also super recent.
I feel like the whole tech industry, especially the American part, really dropped the ball on this.
> But removing Chrome from Google makes zero sense and won't stop it from being a monopoly. The monopoly part comes from buying DoubleClick
Not only. Google controls a lot of user attention. See how many services they link together to serve you ads .... erm .... recommendations to make browsing better or something: https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1908951546869498085 And one of those services is Chrome
They could just split DV360 from Google Ad Manager and Google Ad Exchange.
> The problem is that Chrome by itself is worse than worthless, it is a money sink and it only makes sense as a part of a system.
Or, just an out-there idea, what if the Chrome became property of the government instead? Forced to be FOSS, put into maintenance mode and offer it as a truly user-focused browser instead of driven by any for-profit company (which will eventually run it into the ground).
Considering the questionable choices made by the current President of the US let's maybe not do this. Let's not act like this wouldn't be turned into a propaganda machine in minutes
Yep, move it into an independent non-profit foundation and have the government fund its development through taxes as a public good software that benefits everyone. The idea makes sense, which is why it'll never happen.
Especially during the current (2025) iteration of the US government. All sides of the political spectrum will be accusing the program of having political bias against each other.
> All sides of the political spectrum will be accusing the program of having political bias against each other.
That's pretty much the optimal state of the current iteration of democracy, isn't it? I'd feel more scared if everyone agreed to it and there was no complaints, then something is guaranteed to be fucky-wucky for the normal person, but without knowing about it. At least if both sides complain about the other, it's relatively impartial.
> Yep, move it into an independent non-profit foundation and have the government fund its development through taxes as a public good software that benefits everyone. The idea makes sense, which is why it'll never happen.
Or turn it into a tightly regulated natural monopoly, a la a public utility.
But I totally agree with you: some things should just be state-owned. We should put our energies into identifying those things and addressing any legitimate concerns (e.g. spying via requiring open source and reproducible builds) instead of trying to free market all the things.
Chrome is already FOSS, and there is no shortage of forks, including Edge.
The only part that isn't is the brand, and the ties with Google. And I am not a fan of the idea of a (foreign in my case) government browser, I'd rather have Google. At least, Google has a presence in my country and is bound by its laws,
Chrome is not FOSS. Chromium is FOSS. Chrome is a proprietary fork.
> put into maintenance mode
That seems like a death sentence. The standards aren't stagnant.
Yeah, let’s put Trump in charge of the most popular browser in the world. What could go wrong?
Comment was deleted :(
> Google is becoming good
Where?
New Gemini models are quite good, Gemini 2.5 Pro is 1st in the user-benchmarks [1]. They also have Gemma, very good model that can run locally [2]. Benchmarks are not oracles of truth, but I feel like Google is not a kid who arrived late at the party anymore.
Considering that several key breakthroughs happened at Google that made GPT-style LLMs possible (e.g. Attention is all you need paper), it's more like they took a long smoke break than showed up late.
Yeah, with Gemini 2.5 Google stepped up to the grown up AI table and added on top. I still have a soft spot for Claude for general purpose chats, but have fully switched to Gemini for dev.
Totally agree, I stopped visiting Ars Technica because a lot of the "journalism" is reports on Elon Musk and reposts from Hacker News. It is very clear some of their writers just watch for what is popular on this site then write about it (which is not bad in itself, they just don't put more effort than the original report on it).
The original Ars I had bookmarked and visited every day. With seriously in depth articles about computers. When they got bought out it quickly became attention seeking with very shallow articles. It has not gotten better. I had honestly forgot they existed.
> it quickly became attention seeking with very shallow articles
Welcome to the internet post-2008
This sounds a bit clickbaity, they could just fork Chromium and build their own version as Edge or Brave. After all, they already have the distribution (ChatGPT).
The title is clickbait. Most of openai's comments were about their desire to have access to google's index. They also discussed how open AI is thinking about creating a chrome Fork to compete with Google Chrome. The specific part where they mentioned wanting to buy chrome was a hypothetical muse:
> According to Turley, OpenAI would throw its proverbial hat in the ring if Google had to sell. When asked if OpenAI would want Chrome, he was unequivocal. "Yes, we would, as would many other parties," Turley said.
If they get chrome they can push updates to the already existing user base.
They’d be buying the user base.
but my main reason for using chrome is my google account
Is there any talk about how google account integration would change if they were forced to sell?
I guess most people use chrome because it is the default. Some people think I don't have internet because I don't have a chrome icon.
The default where? In Windows the default is Edge, in Mac is Safari and in Linux distros usually is Firefox. And somehow people prefer to download Chrome.
> The default where?
Android and ChromeOS
And it's very, very different from buying the chrome itself and getting >50% of market share overnight.
I think you’ve proved your own point: yeah they could launch the next brave, but then they’d have brave and not chrome. 99.9999% of the world haven’t heard of brave.
The Chrome brand (logos, trademarks, its "word on the street" recognition - its marketing) are the true meat and potatoes of that web browser. Forking Chromium would force them to build a new brand on that scale from scratch. That's not an easy thing to do.
They do not have the distribution, that would be the entire point of buying Chrome. ChatGPT is not a web browser, buying Chrome lets them hoover up web browsing data + billion users, which are crucial to developing an ads product, which is ultimately what this will shake out into.
Surely they'd be wanting to buy 3.5billion users, though?
I actually wonder what the price tag is for that, lol.
That's it, if Chrome goes independent and / or is opened up for purchase, it's a very attractive target for companies for data harvesting. I mean I'm sure Google does as well (and got in trouble for e.g. incognito mode not being as incognito as advertised), but they keep it under wraps and make sure to not scare people off.
Two of top Chrome co-founders, beng and darin, who are also Firefox alumni, are now working at OAI. It's rather surprising if they do not build a web browser. These are browser people.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/bengoodger/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/darin-fisher-7059ab/
I think it's less about the difficulty of forking versus buying Chrome and more about not wanting to compete with a Google owned Gemini enabled Chrome
Perhaps they will fork it anyway, but the type of people that ill flock to an OpenAI web browser are the people that already install and use ChatGPT.
Chrome specifically hands a huge audience of tech laggards over to OpenAI very very quickly.
When you fork Chrome, you have zero users instead of 4 billion.
It's not like OpenAI would struggle to acquire users for a new AI browser. It's not like they don't have a platform with millions of AI-loving users already.
They absolutely would struggle. 70% of browser usage is mobile where people use the pre-installed browser: Chrome or Safari. There's not a single alternative mobile browser that has more than 2.5% market share.
WTF. I had the exact same idea. Why buy Chrome when Chromium is open source and there are existing successful forks (e.g. Brave browser) which managed to do it... Why pay $100 million for something you can have for free? It's not like Open AI would struggle to find users for their new browser... They could just advertise it "Download our new GPT Browser" on their website above the chat window.
It is about brand and who gets to be default search engine.
> I honestly wonder whether they even have to buy Chrome.
Momentum. Any change of direction they take after such a purchase is taken by a huge number of current users whether they like it or not (unless they dislike it enough to make the effort to switch their daily driver browser).
> They can just fork it.
That would result in much lower user numbers unless their changes are incredibly attractive. Most users will start where they are due, again, to product momentum.
Google is likely to have 1000 people or so working on Chrome and Chromium.
That's going to be difficult to maintain. If OpenAI takes over i expect Chrome and Chromium to go closed source.
Chromium would be hard to relicense due to copyright but trivial to fork.
So, chromium won't go away. Those 1000+ people are the main resource here. Effectively they work mostly on chromium and not on chrome. What happens to chromium if that stops?
My guess is MS might step up and hire people.
> "So, chromium won't go away."
Sadly, it absolutely can go closed-source as it's licensed under BSD-3 clause, which is not a copyleft license.
I think the old versions would still be OSS (or "source available" at the very least) and could be used in some way in other products.
The old version would stay licensed exactly as it is. You can't retroactively change a license.
Technically any form of re-licensing the original implies some kind of fork happens. The old system continues to exist for anyone that has a copy. The license allows anyone to fork of course. So anyone with a copy could just pretend that's the main fork.
Chromium is actually a complicated project. Some of the project coordination is actually taken care of by the Linux Foundation; not by Google. But Google of course controls and hosts the key code repositories. However, they don't own the code base exclusively though because they have been accepting contributions from e.g. Microsoft and the many other companies that base their browser on Chromium. And of course individual developers. Copyright stays with those.
The partial permissive licensing (it's a mixed license code base) makes it possible to incorporate the code in a closed source system. But some of the components are LGPL, which still would require publishing the code of those components. And of course Chrome is an example of such a system and Chromium is the way they publish the source code. And Edge. And Brave. Etc. Chromium is the shared source code base for those. But it doesn't allow Google (or anyone) to take away the copyright from contributors. That would require a copyright transfer agreement. And no such thing exists for Chromium.
So, Chromium is unlikely to stop existing. And if it somehow does, it would immediately trigger a fork with a different name created by all the stakeholders that would require such a thing.
The only question is who ends up employing the Google employees that currently provide most of the code contributions and who owns the Chromium trademark (Google currently). IMHO that's an unhealthy situation that should be resolved in any case. And with multiple wealthy companies using chromium, funding that should be no issue.
I assume a condition of the sale would be a contract to pay Google $XX M/yr for support.
I assume a condition of the sale would be a contract to pay OpenAI $XX B/yr for the default search.
Not sure why the DOJ would permit that.
I mean a condition for Google to continue to exists and for the spinoff of Chrome to be economically viable. I don't care about both these outcomes tho.
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800 on tracking, 150 on marketing and 50 on features that are useful for the user...
0.5 people (part timer) on bug fixes, they slow roll the fixes for any of the bugs that are tracking loopholes.
So if Google sold off "Chrome" to OpenAI for billions. Now that OpenAI can push whatever update or search to Chrome as default. Assuming they have use of it.
What would stop Google to build another browser say Information Explorer with the same engine and code? And market the hell out of it on its Web property?
> What would stop Google to build another browser say Information Explorer with the same engine and code?
The courts. The courts would stop them. The entire premise for Google selling-off Chrome is a mandate that they divest themselves from the business itself.
> What would stop Google to build another browser say Information Explorer with the same engine and code? And market the hell out of it on its Web property?
Probably a court order, no? If you’re ordered to sell something, can you just recreate it immediately?
I dont know I have no idea. Could a court ruling bar certain entity from doing business in certain areas? Because That sounds silly to me. I wont be surprised if it was in other countries such as China, or EU , UK and Canada.
But US? The place that is perhaps the most pro Business or capitalistic on earth?
> with the same engine and code
Presumably they would be selling the IP rights, so at least some kind of rewrite would be required, possibly without utilizing staff who worked on Chrome.
The Code is open source, they just get someone to package the browser into something different. Just like how M$ is doing with Edge?
It would be funny though if they hire different people to build another browser on top of webkit again XD.
...in rust, right? what an opportunity.
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Possibly a non compete?
MMW: This will be the death of Chrome.
I also do not see Google parting with something so critical to their advertising. With their own browser they control the full length of the wire between the ad-server and the user. Without it, they don't. Only way I could see this happening is if Google then released what they considered a better browser.
> I also do not see Google parting with something so critical to their advertising. With their own browser they control the full length of the wire between the ad-server and the user. Without it, they don't.
They've already been convicted of anti-trust behavior for precisely this reason. Now the trial is in the remedy phase where the DOJ is asking that they be forced to divest ownership of Chrome and other properties.
Google will have no choice in the matter. It's entirely up to the judge at this point.
Up to 'the' judge', plus the many other appellate judges, unless DoJ and Google come to an agreement and Google decides not to appeal. Google can both appeal the original verdict and any remedies.
> I also do not see Google parting with something so critical to their advertising.
This is not really their choice at this point. They were already found to have abused their position so it's up to a judge to decide what Google has to to next. Google doesn't need "a browser", they need a tool that allows them to exercise more control and this whole court case is about preventing that.
OpenAI is just looking for new ways to funnel data into the training of their models. And I'm afraid so many people would eat it up as long as OpenAI gives them some AI candy in return.
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I don't even use chrome and this sounds miserable.
I had to run it for something the other day and immediately got nagged to remove uBlock Origin because they automatically disabled it. And I'm just thinking.. I will never, ever use this browser for anything other than light dev work if I really needed to.
Using ublock origin lite, haven't noticed a difference. It still blocks all the ads including google's and youtube.
> But who would buy it? An OpenAI executive says his employer would be interested.
These days, OpenAI seems to be leaning more toward expending its business beyond AI. Not sure why, but they may have come across a roadblock that is holding them back from achieving AGI soon. The past few days we heard that they maybe in the process of building a social network [1] and the willingness to buy the AI IDE, Windsurf [2].
Also, from the article:
> Among the DOJ's witnesses on the second day of the trial was Nick Turley, head of product for ChatGPT at OpenAI.
Perplexity has also been asked to testify in the Google DOJ case [3] and their opinion about Chrome was:
"Google should not be broken up. Chrome should remain within and continue to be run by Google. Google deserves a lot of credit for open-sourcing Chromium, which powers Microsoft's Edge and will also power Perplexity's Comet. Chrome has become the dominant browser due to incredible execution quality at the scale of billions of users"
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1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43694877
I am a big fan of having deep-pocketed corporations pay huge amounts of money to pay for open source products. I suppose this fits into that category.
> deep-pocketed corporations pay huge amounts of money to pay for open source products.
There are many names for this: co-opt, assimilate, bribing ...
A lot of times it is like when Tony Soprano offers you a deal, or like when the U.S. made the NAFTA deal with Canada and Mexico.
It feels good and awesome at the beginning but later on, when you become dependent on it, you'll have to pay an heavy price.
This is a transaction between 2 giant corporations. What is there to be a fan of? Chrome is not open-source, Chromium is.
Make default search be a version of ChatGPT and put ads on it? Could work (I wouldn't use it though). The way a lot of people use their browser they might be fine with it if it puts navigation-type links up top (I have literally seen a technical colleague with a PhD do a Google search for "x" and click a link rather than type the ".com"). The inference costs would surely make it hard to profit from though.
Having just closed a $40 billion USD funding round [1], OpenAI might actually be able to afford a fair price for Chrome (supposedly $15-20 billion USD [2]).
[1] There are some catches to that: https://www.investopedia.com/openai-closes-up-to-usd40b-fund...
If I'm typing website name, I'm always using Google to ensure that I won't mistype it and won't land on malware domain. Google always corrects me and will make sure that search results are safe.
Google won't even make sure that the ads they show you above the search results are safe
https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2025/01/the-great-goo...
Autocompletion is much better for that IME. SEO is too good for anything not really well known, so I find I have to pay much more attention with search results.
Ads? Customers would not pay for ads, they would pay for getting convenient "truths" emphasized in the training material, and inconvenient ones deemphasized. Imagine Wikipedia with pay-to-edit.
That's the beauty of ads. Customers don't pay, the advertisers do.
Customers are whoever is paying. Non-paying users are not customers, they are the resource to be sold.
I see a great future for Firefox.
Chrome: unilaterally disables uBlock Origin
Mozilla response: mess around with Firefox's privacy notice in such a way that it generates _negative_ press
Potential future Chrome: gets bought by OpenAI
Estimated future Mozilla response: "every time a user installs Firefox, a healthy tree is chopped down, the wood is used to create bats with the user's name engraved on them, and the bats are used to hit endangered animals"
I love Firefox but Mozilla seems determined to self-sabotage itself. it is painful to watch
Mozilla will quite literally die if the demands of the judge get satisfied - https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/internet-policy/mozilla-....
So I guess the last resort for people who don't want to surrender to the Big Tech will be niche hard forks of Firefox, of which there are 3 - Pale Moon, Basilisk and SeaMonkey.
It is interesting how the data rush is changing, it was about Ads targeting, now it is about training AI. I wonder if one is better than the other for the open-source community? Would Chrome be more free or more locked-in with OpenAi
> it was about Ads targeting, now it is about training AI.
It's the same data rush. Don't fr a second think that "AI" will be used for anything but ads and selling your data t the highest bidder
I think it could be interesting to see Chrome sold to ten or more different entities. Allow none of them to use the Chrome name. The last thing Google can do with Chrome is have it randomly select one of the new variations for updates.
Let's give Chrome to a million different entities, for free. None of them can use the name. We can remove all the Google add-ons as well. Call it something like... Chromium?
How would this even work in practice? Hundreds of million installs out there already use Chrome. How do they get updates (from servers) and which browser does it upgrade to?
The DOJ / FTC / W3C / SEC / whomever vets all of the entities purchasing a share of the Chrome userbase. Part of the purchase agreement would be to have the update and development infrastructure in place and commit to updating their version of the browser and making good faith efforts to adhere to W3C standards for the next 3 years.
Once the sale details are finalized, Google pushes out a final update that changes where the next update to Chrome would come from (and it would be a random selection from the list of buyers).
OpenAI must be planning to release their own browser. After their crawler gets blocked from properties with valuable data, vacuuming up data directly from the user agent is the best workaround.
This is my only fear about this, honestly. I already had to put my websites behind a login as that's the only realistic defense against LLM crawlers.
If the data collection is moved to the browser, though, then requiring a login would no longer be adequate protection. I'd have to also ban the use of Chrome itself. I'd have to seriously consider the possibility of just not having a web presence in any form.
Use Anubis - https://anubis.techaro.lol/.
There's very little actual information about Anubis there. At least, I couldn't find much, but perhaps I missed some docs. I'm skeptical about the effectiveness of PoW solutions for this sort of thing, but I'm open to learning about new approaches.
How would PoW be effective when the adversary is the user's browser itself and the user is already authenticated?
Most scrapers don't run browsers. Making the scrapers run real browsers changes the economics of scraping and makes it less cost-effective.
I am working on making it allow more traffic by default and then applying challenges based on request pressure or other factors like system load. I also need to finish the WebAssembly PR and a few other important things.
It's a work in progress, but it's used by the United Nations so it can't be that bad :)
> Most scrapers don't run browsers.
The specific risk I was talking about was that if OpenAI buys Chrome, they could (and I think it's likely they would) use the contents of whatever pages the users browse to as training for their models. Basically, turning the browser into a disguised crawler that would be immune from the usual anti-crawling methods, including putting up a login page.
So literally spyware. Don't get me wrong, current Chrome is also spyware, but sending every page you visit to a third-party is just a whole new level.
I wonder if OpenAI would monetize the browser primarily by collecting user data and advertising, or by pushing ChatGPT subscriptions.
I guess they could effectively copy Kagi's model at mammoth scale - offering a premium internet browsing experience with a 'personalised assistant'.
Easy to convince at least 10% of the users to sign in to their browser with a verified credit card to 'protect the children', and governments around the world would give you full support.
At that point, would be trivial for them to track browsing habits, and then to start offering personalised assistants which save you time and eventually cost money.
Pretty sure you could save money throuh having a huge botnet of computers to tap into, and a huge amount of data to help cache and standardise common requests.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but if the DOJ requires Chrome to be sold off ... they would also not allow the new owner of Chrome to get revenue from search engines to be the default search engine.
In which case, what is the monetization model for the new owner of Chrome - other than just buying a daily portal where users go?
> if the DOJ requires Chrome to be sold off
The DOJ doesn't require anything. They are the ones arguing for Chrome to be sold off. The federal court is the one that would require a particular remedy outcome to the anti-trust conviction.
> they would also not allow the new owner of Chrome to get revenue from search engines to be the default search engine
There would be no such mandate. Google will be allowed to pay the new company to be their default search provider. And other search providers can bid on that opportunity as well.
Google itself just cannot own the business end-to-end as it does now.
But related, isn't the DOJ targeting Mozilla for exactly what I described above ... that because Google can pay so much for being the default search engine - it's not creating an environment for fair competition.
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/internet-policy/google-r...
Correct, and it's a proper moral test for Mozilla, which they obviously fail.
Why not fork it like Microsoft did with Edge?
Microsoft Edge is relying on Chromium being contiously developed by Google, isn't it? Not a hard fork that no longer receives updates from upstream.
Cause the value is in the users. The actual browser is close to worthless.
Chrome/Chromium's value is in the development momentum. You can pile up features, manipulate the entire web, and make it impossible to compete for others. This is what they're trying to buy. A fork isn't enough - there's a huge difference between a technical fork and a meaningful fork.
That's a strength of Chrome for Google. OpenAI would not enjoy the same benefits as they don't control the whole vertical. They want the 4 billion strong spyware botnet that is Chrome.
You have to control a meaningful part of the web (like the Google ecosystem) for that to work.
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Why do people think OpenAI can even afford Chrome? It's estimated to be worth $20 billion or more. Just meaningless clickbait to stay in the headlines, like "Perplexity wants to buy TikTok".
With which money, Sam?
Just shave off a few billion from that 7 trillion dollar plan. What's the big deal?
Someone elses.
Isn't it easier to buy Brave or Opera?
Please let it be Opera, I'd never consider using it anyway.
Opera is owened by a Chinese entity today. Buying it can be much harder in today's environment.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/11/business/dealbook/china-o...
It would be even easier to make a minimum effort fork of chromium. What would be the point though?
It looks to me like he's planning to make a browser himself.
Well that would be a good way to kill off Chrome and get out of the mono-browser culture.
And you all still won't use firefox, mostly for silly or dumb reasons.
As annoying as chrome can be under Google, i'd hate to imagine the dumpster fire it would become if run by OpenAi, as an "AI-first experience".
you can already expreinece this with HAVE YOU TRIED GEMINI Google's GEMINI IS HERE own ACTIVATE GEMINI produGEMINIcts
Buy stadium naming rights and we can call the high point for OpenAi.
Give it to Apache Software Foundation please, with a good grant.
Is anyone working on an Ai first phone?
I think at the least I should be able to have Ai interact with anything on my screen. And beyond that it could even code interfaces on the fly depending on the task.
Chrome is installed on (almost?) every Android phone. So they'd be buying much more than this.
Not a new "AI phone", which has to gain traction, find users, convince people to switch, compete in highly competitive (hardware( and duopolized (OS, Software) landscape.
I won't be suprised if amongst Android users, Chrome is one of the most installed apps - if only because many phones have it locked (i.e. its really hard or impossible to remove).
Maybe "Google Assistant" is installed more than chrome, IDK. But Chrome has the additional benefit that it is also installed on many iPhones. Sou Chrome would be a gateway into "making your iPhone an AI phone" too.
I have the latest S25 (regular not the oversized +) and it does a lot of AI first like things. It can see what's on the screen, summarize your day, circle to search etc.
I disabled most of it within a few days because it mostly gets in the way of normal basic things like taking screenshots or just reading my actual notifications in full.
The picture editing can be nice, but realistically there's just no need for most of its 'support', it's just clippy on your phone getting in the way.
It almost sounds as if you believe this would be a good thing.
I'd like this if it wasn't an avenue for all of my personal activities to be analyzed and sold.
Better get off the Silicon Valley hype train then, because every single company in it is valued on the basis of how complete their user surveillance panopticon is.
It kind of shows the state of Indie development over the last 2 decades that it's only the big players that can move mountains. Linux on the phone never happened, and it seems like we are all resigned to the fact that the future AI phone OS/AI browser will be made by the titans and not anyone else. Even if it came out of the open-source scene the titans just buy the damn thing.
I guess OpenAI found a use for Masa's $40B.
Honestly, Google should sell Search to OpenAI. And keep Chrome and the rest of Google. It will be contrary to what the DOJ intended. But it makes sense for Google and Open AI.
By making search an AI first experience, both behemoths will signal the new dawn of AI is here.
Google’s greatest advantage is the use of AI in drive and docs and presentation and excel and cloud services.
AI search results (not just Google's) are so frequently incorrect that this would be disastrous.
Impaired assets are still assets, although it would be funny to see what fair market value would be for a busted search engine.
> Google should sell Search to OpenAI
OpenAI can't afford to buy Search.
ugh. Would much prefer they do something separate.
The Chrome & derivatives mono-culture is going to become a problem down the line.
About 17 years too late to be AI-first.
didnt they consume the entire web to make their models? Buying chrome is an anachronism, like google buying godaddy.
ah nevermind, it's just billionaire pissing contest
I think you're missing what makes consumer companies valuable. It's all about distribution. They get way more data (usage, browsing, etc.), they get 3.5 billion users (this is the main thing) and they get to be the interface for all those people onto the web. I just don't think they can afford it.
They've consumed yesterday's web.
Why not get the user to pay the energy and processing bill for subsequent rounds?
Being able to track the habits of 3.5 billion users at source is probably quite useful, too.
Imagine using the largest browser user base as an unlockable botnet for scraping, built right into their browser itself.
why do the not just make their own GPT browser?
I don't know what's going on here but it sounds like "Hey, I want to take your wife and have sex with her". Gotta read between the lines here. I think Google has a 14% stake in Anthropic. Along with Gemini, Chrome and Android as delivery vehicles, and search. The monopoly lawsuit is about this (the advertising ship sailed long ago, so what's this really about), and there's some nasty legal talk going on here. I think if they just give up the Anthropic stake and promise to allow any AI provider in chrome, then this nonsense will all end.
/tinfoil
If there's one thing that might help save firefox, it would be OpenAI ruining Chrome by adding a bunch of AI slop into it.
Crafted by Rajat
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