Because the new Internet Explorer is Chrome-wannabe

Because Firefox exists. And anyone can use Chromium to compete with Chrome fairly rapidly.

It’s not the new IE. In my mind it’s worse than the new IE because it achieves similar goals as the IE abuse but without necessarily doing anything illegal.

Mozilla and Opera existed at the time, as well as a bountiful amount of IE shells which essentially acted as the Chromium derivative equivalents. Outside of Chrome (technically) shipping the same binaries across all the platforms it supports, and using scope creep in a more subtle way compared to 90s-era IE, I don't see how the situation is materially different between now and then.

This is not exactly right. Netscape Navigator was the original browser. Microsoft invested a lot of money to bring IE up to par and exceed Netscape’s capabilities. And once they wiped out Netscape they coasted and used IE as a Trojan horse to control the web. It was after IE6’s stagnation that Firefox was spun out of Netscape and took some time to compete. Firefox was first released in 2004 and IE6 in 2001. Opera which had been around was proprietary. To the extent they were interested in making the internet a better place it was only to serve their company interests.

Thars very different from the situation we have now where Firefox is well known and open source, and even Chromium’s open source so it can be leveraged by better stewards of the internet.

Don’t get me wrong. My argument is not that Google is better than Microsoft. My argument is simply that the situation we’re facing right now is very different from the IE era. If anything, I’m arguing that the Chrome era is worse because of how much more insidious Google’s actions are.

It was easy for the EU to essentially eliminate the IE threat by forcing MS to unbundle IE and for Firefox (and later chrome) to replace IE purely on the basis of providing a better software. Replacing Chrome on the other hand is a very different kind of problem that is possibly much harder.

Firefox is barely surviving. Skinning Chromium hardly counts as competing with Chrome.

I agree with you that Chrome is even worse than IE ever was. Mostly because Google is much smarter than MS was when it comes to ensuring market dominance. It will be much harder to dethrone Google, simply because Chrome is a much better product.

Chrome is not baked into the operating system.

Maybe not yours, but it's baked into the operating systems used by billions of phones (Android) and millions of kids/others with generally lower tech literacy who may not have great context on the privacy implications of these changes (ChromeOS)?

Because it's been less than 6 years since the last Chrome update. Probably less than 6 weeks even.

I'm not a fan of Chrome though. But the problems with Chrome are not identical to the problems of IE.