[43920]

This has already been discussed extensively in prior threads, but the biggest question is, how does a spun-off Chrome get funded?

Chrome/Firefox/Safari all cost hundreds of millions of dollars a year to maintain. Currently, Safari and Firefox both make essentially all their revenue through default search agreements. Chrome, Edge, and now Brave are produced by companies that also own the search engines, so they're essentially a loss-generating product, that exist because they cancel out distribution costs that Google and Microsoft would otherwise have to pay other browsers.

But the DOJ order is also asking to ban payments between search engines and browser makers: > As detailed in Section IV, the PFJ prohibits Google from providing third parties something of value (including financial payments) in order to make Google the default general search engine or otherwise discouraging those third parties from offering competing search products

With that revenue gone, the only real options to fund a browser are:

* Directly charge users for it. This is effectively a non-starter, because the vast majority of people aren't willing to pay for it.

* Insert ads or sell user data - users also hate this, it's probably not legal in the EU, and it may not be legal in most of the US in the future either.

* Use the browser as a platform to push some product that does make money - a non-Google search engine? A social network? An LLM interface?

Alternatively, a narrow reading of the proposed order is that this only applies to Google. In that case, perhaps Bing or OpenAI takes over all the distribution agreements and becomes the top search engine. Whether that's better for consumers seems fairly questionable.

[tsimionescu]

The most likely answer is that it will take the Linux model, with a foundation put together to fund Chrome's development. Then all of the parties interested in people having access to the Web, including Google, will have an incentive to fund this without requiring it to push their specific products.

[josephg]

Chrome currently has far more paid full time engineers than the linux kernel does. I struggle to see how they get paid - except again, by charging search engines to be the default browser or something.

[timschmidt]

One minor nit, it will be all parties interested in influence over future web standards and their eventual implementation.

[inopinatus]

There's always the Opera model: attempt to sell inserted ads, fail, sell it to a Chinese holding company, and have future development funded by the Russians. What could possibly go wrong?

[ZuBB]

Can you please share a details about the part related to Russians? I used to be big fan of Opera browser, but don't follow theirs recent news

[dehrmann]

> Currently, Safari and Firefox both make essentially all their revenue through default search agreements.

Safari is funded by Apple's hardware sales. It can afford to develop its own browser because it's table stakes for devices and gives Apple the ability to do deeper integrations and targeted performance optimizations. The search revenue is the cherry on top.

[jsnell]

> Alternatively, a narrow reading of the proposed order is that this only applies to Google.

That doesn't seem like a narrow reading, but the only possible one. How could the order be applying to deals strictly between companies neither of which was the party of the lawsuit? That doesn't seem like anything that could possibly be within the court's powers.

[friendzis]

> Chrome/Firefox/Safari all cost hundreds of millions of dollars a year to maintain.

The reason? Infinite[1] complexity. To Google that is a feature: as long as they can outspend competitors, they can control the complexity in their favor.

The question should not be "how do we fund development of operating system in a trench coat?", but rather "how much do we actually need to fetch and render HTML?" and the answer is in the ballpark of single digit FTEs.

In theory, we should expect browser complexity to converge on available funding, with the upside that webpages created two hours ago would continue working. In reality, some foundation, funded by majority chromium supporters, will be set up and distribute compensation for Google employees working on open-source Chromium "totally on their free time, mr. prosecutor".

[1]: https://xkcd.com/285/

[wbl]

Parity with other application platforms demands more than just showing static HTML. Imagine the world with no XMLHTTPRequest because Microsoft wasn't allowed to innovate on the web.

[montag]

> "how much do we actually need to fetch and render HTML?" and the answer is in the ballpark of single digit FTEs

Sorry, but we're not going back to Lynx...

[BrendanEich]

> the DOJ order is also asking to ban payments between search engines and browser makers

The remedy document does not ask this.

What you cite after "> As detailed in..." does not ban any and all payments from a search engine (or only from Google) to a browser. The remedy doc is based on the antitrust case's finding that Google violated U.S. Law by abusing its monopoly through "tying", and in particular by forcing partners to lock out competitors through exclusive (default search only) deals.

This does not mean Google cannot pay for search traffic, and indeed Google has a relatively open, albeit lower-monetizing, system called Adsense for Search, which allows a toolbar to monetize -- but not a browser via queries entered into its address bar (aka Omnibus). Bing does many API deals, or did (it hiked prices last year). Brave has an API business (not yet an ads feed, just search).

[43920]

I'm having a bit of a hard time imagining what kind of payment Google could make under this structure. Do you have something in mind?

I agree that if Google was paying a browser for something other than default search placement, that would likely fall outside the scope of the proposal. But historically, default placement = traffic, and is also the only leverage the browsers have - ie if Google wasn't the default, Google would only get users who explicitly selected it, and if Google knows all of their users are actively selecting them already, they have no reason to pay extra for that traffic.

API access seems like a good alternative way for Google to monetize, but it doesn't solve the problem of providing funding for browsers (except in your case, since you're combining a search engine and browser in one company). Or am I missing something?

[BrendanEich]

Spellcorrekt got me: "Omnibox".

[reissbaker]

Unfortunately the real answer is:

* Only operating system vendors can ship web browsers. (But not Google.)

The USG in general seems to love giving Apple more monopoly power. This will effectively constrain browser development to just Apple and Microsoft, since as you note, the DOJ is also trying to regulate Firefox out of existence; and Apple has huge incentives to simply pause browser feature development (and has been dragging its feet on Safari for years).

Incredibly, this will also hamstring Android even further, since its parent company can't even make a web browser for it anymore! Only Apple, the Biden administration's favorite company, can do that kind of thing.

[modeless]

Seriously, first Apple's App Store is declared not a monopoly while the Play Store is, despite Android allowing alternative stores while iOS doesn't. Now Google is forbidden from developing web browsers while Apple is free to continue monopolizing browser engines on iOS and holding back the web from competing with native apps?

[EE84M3i]

> Directly charge users for it. This is effectively a non-starter, because the vast majority of people aren't willing to pay for it.

Chrome already has paid offerings - chrome enterprise and educational products. It's quite common for enterprise customers to subsidize free tiers.

[Malidir]

Advertising deal with google/others to pay for full time staff along with volunteers?

And the underlying chromium will be maintained by all the browser companies that are using it

[j16sdiz]

> This has already been discussed extensively in prior threads, but the biggest question is, how does a spun-off Chrome get funded?

How about... just don't fund them and let it "die"?

Everybody is using Chromium -- Microsoft, Google, Opera, Electron, etc.. Some of them will step up and fork chromium.

[ajvs]

Or just don't fork Chromium at all and Google can make the upstream their recommended browser.

[wbl]

Display ad insertion would be legal and there are definitely ways to do it all client side.

[wmf]

Just like scraping the entire Web for AI training is totally fair use? Enjoy ten years of lawsuits to prove it. Web sites would never tolerate ads being inserted that don't pay them.

[johndough]

> Directly charge users for it. This is effectively a non-starter, because the vast majority of people aren't willing to pay for it.

I would gladly pay for Firefox, but I only found a way to donate to Mozilla, which also finances many other things that I am not interested in.

> Insert ads or sell user data - users also hate this, it's probably not legal in the EU, and it may not be legal in most of the US in the future either.

Adds are legal, but "selling user data" is more tricky. Many news websites are currently paywalling access to their website unless a monthly fee is paid. As far as I know, there has been no ruling yet whether that is legal.

> Use the browser as a platform to push some product that does make money - a non-Google search engine? A social network? An LLM interface?

Firefox tried to sell a VPN product that way, but it was not priced competitively.

[nprateem]

The same way ff does. Google will pay to be the main search engine and to ensure all their Web apps continue to work performantly.

[colimbarna]

Google will be prohibited from doing that under the DOJ's proposal.