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Google's Chrome Worth Up To $20 Billion If Judge Orders Sale (msn.com) 32

Posted by msmash from the for-what-it's-worth dept.
Alphabet's Chrome browser could go for as much as $20 billion if a judge agrees to a Justice Department proposal to sell the business, in what would be a historic crackdown on one of the world's biggest tech companies. From a report: The department will ask the judge, who ruled in August that Google illegally monopolized the search market, to require measures related to artificial intelligence and its Android smartphone operating system, according to people familiar with the plans.

Google's Chrome Worth Up To $20 Billion If Judge Orders Sale More | Reply

Google's Chrome Worth Up To $20 Billion If Judge Orders Sale

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  • Find out phase (Score:3)

    by sinij ( 911942 ) on Thursday November 28, 2024 @09:20PM (#64978573)
    Google maliciously sabotaged ad blockers in Chrome and then rolled out zombie cookie (FLoC). They deserve all this and then some.

    • Only an idiot or China would pay $20B for Chrome. As soon as Chrome is sold the trust relationship with Google is broken. You do realize that you enter all of your passwords, banking info, etc into Chrome and Chrome is behind everyone's firewalls. I won't be using Chrome one second after it is sold.

      Buying Chrome is a malicious actor's dream come true!

      • Surely if buying Chrome is a "malicious actor's dream come true" then $20B would be the deal of the century and your comment that "Only an idiot or China would pay $20B for Chrome" doesn't make sense

        • There are two potential customers, someone who will milk the product for all the cash they can get by coating it in unwanted ads. Or the second is an entity like China who doesn't care about cost recovery instead they are after the espionage angle. Google will obviously make a new browser using Chromium as the base.

          Selling Chrome was obviously proposed by lawyers who have no clue have software works. Google is never going to pay some random purchaser of Chrome billions to forward search traffic. They will

      • As soon as Chrome is sold the trust relationship with Google is broken. You do realize that you enter all of your passwords, banking info, etc into Chrome and Chrome is behind everyone's firewalls. I won't be using Chrome one second after it is sold.

        You have a "trust relationship" with Google? You keep using Chrome because you know you can entrust Google with your passwords and banking information?

        Don't worry then: if Chrome is sold, your personal information will be just as secure as it is now.

      • They make no money from the Chrome codebase itself. Selling it would do just as you said everyone would ditch it and whoever bought it would now have just a name worth nothing without Google backing. Because it's open-source and it will just be forked.

    • Whoever buys Chrome for $20 billion will make damn sure there are no ad blockers possible. You can be damn sure of that. So in the end let's see. Google gets $20 billion and consumers lose even more privacy. A win-win, for them.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by DMDx86 ( 17373 )

        Yeah. Whatever wrongs Google may or may not be guilty of, I see no scenario (outside of some individual or non-profit with purely noble intentions putting up the $20B) where Chrome doesn't become a worse product in terms of privacy and security.

        I'm open to argument but it seems that the cure here is worse than the disease they're trying to remove.

    • The US would never let China or any non US company buy it.

  • Google has been abusing the dual monopolies of search and browser. Break it up.

  • Right now you have a browser that has, what 75% marketshare, being abused by a company that sees it primarily as a vehicle to solidify its search and other online presence and to enforce its online dominance and privacy invasions. Now they want to hand the currently dominant browser to someone else who will abuse it for what it can be abused for solely on its own merits and who will then have access to all its privacy invasiveness themselves?

    Sure. What can go wrong?

    • All I can say is, buying Chrome is a malicious actor's dream come true!

    • It's open-source with forks. If you don't like what Google is doing you use a different one. Also, that was not all Google doing Mozilla made a ton of bad moves everyone wants to forget about now. Why do think they fall almost totally off the market in the first place?

  • You can fork Chromium and rebuild the same surveillance platform that Chrome is based on it a hundred times over for $20bn.

    How do I know? Microsoft did it and it's called Edge.

    Why would anyone buy Chrome from Google?

    • The buyer gets a recognized brand and a huge customer base (and a revenue flow that is currently internal to Google). Real people outside of slashdot are not going to stop using Chrome because the owner company changed.

      • Google is never going to pay whoever buys Chrome for search traffic. They will just build another browser.

        • You seem to be unaware of the fact that Google doesn't pay any browsers for search traffic, and they make money off all browsers' search traffic, regardless.

      • Chrome on its own has no value. It's Google's way of enforcing web standards and choking out competition. Nobody will pay for Chrome as an end user, and it won't have anywhere near $20 billion in value as a source of in-browser ad revenue.

        • Mozilla killed itself with nothing to do with Google. Years behind in features folding to advertisers long before Google. Missing the mobile train entirely.

  • Let's think about this, you fuckers. If someone buys Chrome for $20 billion, how are they going to get their investment back? Logically, it has to be worse ways than Google. Because whoever buys it must have come up with ways to make at least $50 billion (most likely more than that) within a decade or so (WHY else would they buy it?). The greater the risk buying it, the more money the investors expect. I mean, you pay $1 for a lottery ticket not $1million because the probability of winning is so low. Theref

    • Well, Microsoft has thrown in-that-ballpark amount of money to OpenAI. I'm not convinced they'll get that kind of return on Bing. I wouldn't be surprised if they also get Chrome to solidify their position on the browser+search market. Sure, that would make a worse monopoly, but until they also get sued for monopoly I could very well see them going for it.

    • The only ones who would buy it are bad actors outside the USA who won't care about throwing away that kind of money to exploit the brand name.

  • ...something else for Elon to buy, "improve," and rename.

  • $20 Billion sounds like a lunatic number for Chrome; especially if you are actually trying to improve the state of the market.

    When chromium can be yours for the princely cost of forking it(or just building it with your logo on top and some light UI customizations; most of the chrome-alikes don't seem to have much interest in actually changing the browser's behavior much beyond some UI tweaks and changes to whose servers it talks to by default); the only people who would actually pay nontrivial amounts of

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