Chrome would find revenue instantly the same way Firefox and Safari do (bid out the default search engine).

So now you have the Chrome team with an even more direct incentive to maximize search volumes at the expense of a good product since that's their revenue source too.

That would be a good thing if it drove people away...

After the WEI incident chrome is pretty dang tainted to me.

I'm mostly salty that chromium made Opera go from the wonderful Presto engine to being yet another chromium clone...

> I'm mostly salty that chromium made Opera go from the wonderful Presto engine to being yet another chromium clone...

I do not know this story. How did the Chromium team force Opera to change rendering engines?

The same way Microsoft was forced to change to Chromium for Edge - Google forcing Chromium-specific features through the standardization process at a rate exhausting for Microsoft (or any other browser engine implementor) to follow in time without popular sites breaking.

This doesn't seem to be an issue for Firefox which is in the same boat.

> Chrome would find revenue instantly the same way Firefox and Safari do

As in, Chrome decoupled from Google should have 90% of revenue coming from Google/Alphabet, as Mozilla does?

90% < 100%. It is, at the very least, a start.

The world you are suggesting, where intermediary platforms take all of the revenue out of the information systems, would not be a good one.

This is pretty ironic given that you are talking about browsers taking revenue away google, which is an intermediary platform taking all the ad revenue from various publishers ...

Bing could bid for it

Google search revenue seems to do ok for Mozilla although that's not the best solution.

That would be their problem, not whoever orders it to be broken up. And frankly, that should have happened years ago.

> It's not a standalone product that has its own revenue sources.

Chrome makes a ton of money.

Google pays Apple and others billions of dollars to be the default search engine in their browser. Google gets that free now from Chrome but they get the revenue from all of those searches. Google would need to pay Chrome for that. Or I'm sure Microsoft would be willing to pay a lot if Google is not.

Google paying all of its employees to work on Chrome, or it pays Chrome to be the default search engine to a new company called Chrome so Chrome can pay its employees. What's the difference?

I think the difference is if Chrome had to stand on its own, it would be even more incentivized to drive traffic to Google for revenue at the expense of user experience.

what if, *gasp*, people paid for chrome directly?

What if google paid it's users directly for their searches.

Sounds like a joke but Bing is actually trying this.

if people paid for Chrome, Google would have to stop collecting data on its users. Google would much rather have that data than some <$20 fee. If Chrome was its own company, Google's money to be the default search engine would be more than they could earn from selling the browser. Free. Always has. Always will be. wait, that's the other data hoover.

Ask the regulators, that's one tool they use against monopolies. Like when they shattered AT&T into over a dozen pieces.

Which created the baby bell monopolies. :s

It's created AT&T all over again. Many got gobbled up by one baby bell who bought the name. Quite interesting.

Having had to deal with the ILEC/CLEC dance decades ago, the splits also did nothing to change their ‘die competitor’ attitude in any way.

>It's not a standalone product that has its own revenue sources.

The question reveals the problem.

But isn't the alternative just that chrome does? Is that better? Would you have never wanted the giant leaps forward in browsers that Google continually provides?

I don't agree it is continually, I see Chrome as already in the 'extinguish' phase. Chrome was able to make the improvements faster than competitors because - without an bottomless money engine in the form of a search monopoly - they weren't competitors at all. The price we pay for a few years of higher performance may be many more years of reduced innovation from competition.

What giant leaps? WebP images? AMP pages?

Chrome won the browser wars a decade ago, it hasn't done anything since except try to track and monetize that audience.

JavaScript and HTML rendering performance

Safari is faster and uses less memory

Chrome/Blink shouldn’t be broken off into a business, but into a nonprofit org. Lots of companies rely on both which should make funding a non-issue.

What would stop Google from simply forking Chrome again?

Maybe Chromium development could be broken off into a non-profit, but Chrome is just some Google branding on top of the open source Chromium.

If it came to breaking up Alphabet, The courts would include in their orders terms that would prohibit them just picking the pieces back up.....

Yes, exactly. Chrome dominates the browser market via money made monopolizing search ads.

Amazon dominates the webhosting market via money made from monopolizing online commerce?

I dont think this is a form of monopoly, if the only thing the dominant position gives you is money to burn.

however, if google refused to advertise another browser in their search, and instead show chrome's ads in place of say, a firefox ad, then there's huge grounds for monopoly abuse.

actually burning said money to force out competitors is absolutely problematic monopoly seeking. Burning it for other reasons isn’t.

Senator, we run ads.