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.

> 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.

[1] https://lmarena.ai/

[2] https://blog.google/technology/developers/gemma-3/

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.

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.

> 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).

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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

Yeah, let’s put Trump in charge of the most popular browser in the world. What could go wrong?

> Forced to be FOSS, put into maintenance mode and offer it as a truly user-focused browser

All things that are right up DOGE's alley /s

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.

They could just split DV360 from Google Ad Manager and Google Ad Exchange.

> 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

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