Google Should Still Be Forced To Shed Chrome, Advocacy Group Argues (yahoo.com) 25
"Google should be required to divest the Chrome browser, and prohibited from paying Apple to distribute Google's search engine, the nonprofit advocacy group Public Knowledge argues in a new court filing," MediaPost reports, citing a friend-of-the-court brief filed Tuesday in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals:
The group adds that "independent ownership" of Chrome "would open the distribution channel Google controls and allow Chrome to serve browser users when it makes privacy decisions and determines how to integrate search and (artificial intelligence)..."
In September 2025, [U.S. District Court Judge] Mehta issued a remedies order that requires Google to share some data about users' searches with "qualified" competitors and to provide syndicated search results and ads to those competitors. The order also prohibits Google from entering into exclusive distribution contracts for Google Search, Chrome, Google Assistant and the Gemini app for six years, but allows the company to continue to make payments for search-ad revenue or distribution to Apple, Mozilla and others...
Google recently appealed Mehta's order. The company argued in its written brief that it "prevailed in the marketplace fair and square," adding that Apple and Mozilla "sensibly chose" Google as the default search engine "because it gave their users the best experience," and because Apple and Mozilla would earn the most ad revenue through the deals. The [U.S.] Justice Department and states countered to the appellate court last week that the liability finding should stand, and also argued that Google should have been banned from paying Apple and Mozilla for placement as the default search engine on their browsers.
[Antitrust enforcers had originally asked the judge to order Google to divest Chrome, but he's already rejected that request.] The government did not argue in its appellate papers that Google should be forced to sell Chrome. But Public Knowledge independently contends in its friend-of-the-court brief that divestiture would benefit consumers... "Divestiture would place those decisions with an institution whose success depends on serving browser users primarily...." The group is calling the appellate court's attention to Google's April 2025 decision to preserve tracking cookies — a reversal from its earlier plans to block third-party cookies by default. "Google is in the position of both deciding Chrome's tracking rules while running the advertising business affected by them," Public Knowledge writes. "An independent Chrome could make those decisions on behalf of users alone."
But Firefox developer Mozilla filed its own friend-of-the-court brief Thursday warning Firefox could be forced to "exit the browser and browser engine markets" if it can't receive payment from Google for distributing its search engine, according to a later report from MediaPost: Federal and state antitrust enforcers recently asked the appellate court to reverse the portion of Mehta's order that allows those payments to continue. But Mozilla counters in its new friend-of-the-court brief that Mehta's decision regarding those payments was supported by the evidence --including a study it conducted concluding that its revenue would "decline dramatically" if forced to replace Google with Bing as Firefox's default search engine... Google is expected to file new arguments with the appellate court next month.
In September 2025, [U.S. District Court Judge] Mehta issued a remedies order that requires Google to share some data about users' searches with "qualified" competitors and to provide syndicated search results and ads to those competitors. The order also prohibits Google from entering into exclusive distribution contracts for Google Search, Chrome, Google Assistant and the Gemini app for six years, but allows the company to continue to make payments for search-ad revenue or distribution to Apple, Mozilla and others...
Google recently appealed Mehta's order. The company argued in its written brief that it "prevailed in the marketplace fair and square," adding that Apple and Mozilla "sensibly chose" Google as the default search engine "because it gave their users the best experience," and because Apple and Mozilla would earn the most ad revenue through the deals. The [U.S.] Justice Department and states countered to the appellate court last week that the liability finding should stand, and also argued that Google should have been banned from paying Apple and Mozilla for placement as the default search engine on their browsers.
[Antitrust enforcers had originally asked the judge to order Google to divest Chrome, but he's already rejected that request.] The government did not argue in its appellate papers that Google should be forced to sell Chrome. But Public Knowledge independently contends in its friend-of-the-court brief that divestiture would benefit consumers... "Divestiture would place those decisions with an institution whose success depends on serving browser users primarily...." The group is calling the appellate court's attention to Google's April 2025 decision to preserve tracking cookies — a reversal from its earlier plans to block third-party cookies by default. "Google is in the position of both deciding Chrome's tracking rules while running the advertising business affected by them," Public Knowledge writes. "An independent Chrome could make those decisions on behalf of users alone."
But Firefox developer Mozilla filed its own friend-of-the-court brief Thursday warning Firefox could be forced to "exit the browser and browser engine markets" if it can't receive payment from Google for distributing its search engine, according to a later report from MediaPost: Federal and state antitrust enforcers recently asked the appellate court to reverse the portion of Mehta's order that allows those payments to continue. But Mozilla counters in its new friend-of-the-court brief that Mehta's decision regarding those payments was supported by the evidence --including a study it conducted concluding that its revenue would "decline dramatically" if forced to replace Google with Bing as Firefox's default search engine... Google is expected to file new arguments with the appellate court next month.
Side effects (Score:2)
I would like all payments from search engines to to end (and each browser stand on it's own). But, Mozilla itself has stated that that remedy will likely end Firefox as a viable browser (as they depend on Google's payments to survive). Sometimes the evil you know is more palatable than the evil you don't know, and I would like to see Firefox survive at least a little longer.
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The ideal scenario would be shutting down the Apple relationship but keeping the Mozilla.
Lots of laws only apply to entities of certain sizes, it wouldn't be impossible. Or they could frame it like a lot of the app store rules that have been passing, Apple is a platform/ecosystem provider, Mozilla is not.
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Mozilla could always require user pay, at least for enterprise installations. I mean, I don't pay for it, myself, but I use it. It seems to me that whole free browser schtick is a means to discourage new entries. It is hard to make a living if your competition has a $0 price point.
What other concessions has Mozilla had to make to stay afloat, I'm sure default search engine isn't the only revenue stream, What else do you suppose corporate donors expect for their money? I find the user experience is degrading
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Mozilla didn't develop the original code for their browser. It was donated to the world, free of charge, by Netscape (who took the ideas from a university). So the code that Mozilla has been working on (and rewriting several times) was licensed to them freely, and there is a continuous chain of ownership going back dec
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Mozilla could also simply become un-captured, and instead of a giant paycheck machine for managers and executives, it could go back to being an association of developers with a common interest. Supported by individual donations.
The budget would be smaller, but the output might increase in quality. And the number of new lines of code that are just feature thrash could potentially be reduced.
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I feel that everything that should or could happen with browsers if divesting really happens is absolutely speculative. Maybe it's for the best, maybe not.
I, myself, have some fear of a new browser war, with standards getting thrown out of the window.
But we have really no way to know any of this in advance.
Google isn't going to let that one go easily (Score:3)
That's how they spy on everyone and generate ad revenue. But the fed really needs to do better on monopolies. They are too powerful.
No good outcomes for Chrome here. (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's just game out how divesting would go.
1. Chrome is bought by another megacorp (e.g. Microsoft) and is then equally used to screw over users.
2. Chrome is bought by a medium-sized company that fails to recognize the level investment it requires and they make bad choices or sell it to someone else.
3. Chrome is bought by a small company that MUST make money from Chrome and adds a bunch of shitty stuff to it and Chrome starts dying.
The best outcome you are going to get is Chrome dying a slow death and most people fleeing to other chromium forks which likely mean Microsoft absorbing most users. Given what they have written about why to divest, it seems they are hoping for a nonexistent possibility where greed is not the driving factor.
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4, OSS comminity developed model, like Firefox or Debian. But fundrasising would be hard, FF only survived so far because of Google's money in the first place (search engine placement).
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Forcing Chrome to be trashed would be one of the best things to happen to the internet. Google's ludicrous monopoly leading to the entire ad industry powering the majority of the internet breaking down because Google just vibes that AI overview is cool bro gets broken in two, and as a bonus the ignorant like you are forced to discover there's vastly better browsers out there than fucking Chrome. Everyone except the trillion dollar worthless shitholes win, even if it makes some vaguely uncomfortable for 10 minutes in doing so.
It will become an edge monopoly in no time
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Maybe Chrome should be a government run open source project. Non profit but well funded. Dedication to standards compliance. More modular architecture so that all the Google specific stuff like sync can be swapped out at runtime and people have a simple, easy choice of provider.
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Maybe Chrome should be a government run open source project.
Which government? The US (relevant as it's where Google is located) does its best to do everything through contractors. It would have to be through some international body, like the United Nations. I can't imagine that not slowing development to a crawl and leading to some other corporate browser taking over and creating the same problem all over again.
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Here in the UK the government would set up an independent corporation, owned by the government but not directly controlled by it, to oversee Chrome development. It doesn't even have to be government owned, like the BBC. Isn't PBS like that in the US?
We are realizing that for all the issues with such corporations, they are better than the alternative. We tried it with water and energy, with trains and busses, and it's been a total disaster. They are coming back into public ownership now.
Let them keep Chrome (Score:2)
Let them keep Chrome but get all of the chromium developers and Alphabet (and subsidiaries) employees off of standards committees.
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Then you get an Internet Explorer situation in which Chrome implement features without standards and everyone has to reimplement not standardized features in a compatible way.
Big techs' "browser problem" (Score:3)
But I've also lost patience with Mozilla, their managers and devs are struggling to keep up with modern browser standards and the amount of security holes in Gecko, while wasting donator's money on redesigns, widgets and football team sponsorships so it looks like Chromium will be even more entrenched.
The browser industry is incredibly toxic, with browser memory usage coming under increased scrutiny in the ram crisis. We need to critically evaluate the HTML, Javascript, CSS and the other standards in the browser katamari and start having some common sense because right now the browser is the most dangerous component of an operating system.
I've been commenting on the browser industry since before Mozilla even brought out Phoenix and before Safari came to MacOS X, we have created a monster with browser tech.
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This is like the little red hen here, but KDE and Mozilla did all the initial hard work, and Apple, Brave, Google, Microsoft and Opera hijacked it all to add advertising and tracking, with security holes that are now being ultra-exposed by new AI vulnerability finders.
This is worth repeating. In addition, Google pushed people hard to install Chrome by nagging you every time you visited one of their websites.
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Imagine khtml would have been GPL.
What of Apple? (Score:2)
Google is not a very good competitor to Apple, but crippling Google will make Apple's market dominance worse faster.
If you are going to fight trusts, don't create a bigger one while doing so.
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Free Android from Google .
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Android + ChromeOS + Chrome + Fitbit + Play Services + Docs + enough money to survive for a while without advertising and switch revenue streams (Android/ChromeOS licensing, Play Store, possibly first party hardware sales as well but I'd rather not have another mostly vertically integrated ecosystem ... in my opinion Chromebook hardware development is how they should handle phones too). The company would need almost everything which makes up the Google ecosystem to compete with Apple. E-Mail and calender is
Back to the Open Source (Score:2)
Firefox should "exit the browser market" and become a contributor driven open source project again without CEOs who earn millions. Other projects work on small(er) budgets as well, why does Firefox need to be a huge corporation instead of a open source project? They even did things like donating to other projects. Fine if they have the money, the smaller projects had use for it, but why does Mozilla have so much money left to donate if they tell use they starve? Firefox problem is not Google, but their misg