I personally think this decision hurts users more than anything else. We must let Google's competitors continue tracking us or else it won't be fair to them?

I don't even understand how being forced to divest Chrome will even help. Once another company owns Chrome and can remove third party cookies, Google gets the same benefit.

Google has remarkable financial influence across the four major commercial entity related browsers.

So limiting Google's control over browsers will create more competition. More competition on implementations. And also more competition in terms of features and user centric service.

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Question: Does Google really not gather information from anything but its search engine and first party apps? That would seem financially non-optimal for any advertising funded business.

I would think that sure, they log everything peopel use their search for.

But that they would also find a way to track post-search behavior as well. Google leaving money on the table seems ... unusual if there isn't some self-serving reason they would forgo that.

I am happy to become better informed.

There are only 3 effective browsers - Chrome, Safari and Firefox. I don't see how limiting Google's control will create competition. The barrier to more browsers is the massive investment needed to create one, not any action that Google is doing.

You are correct, although its more correct to say there a only 3 major browser engines, Blink (used by all chromium derivatives), WebKit (used by Safari and some minor browsers), Gecko (used by Firefox and its derivatives). Creating a browser engine is hard, so hard that even a multi billion dollar company like Microsoft gave up on doing it. And we may soon witness Gecko going away as a side effect of the Google antitrust lawsuit.