[mritun]

“Divesting” Chrome does not even make much sense. Divestment means owner must sell the assets to an unrelated party so $$$ must trade hands in exchange for something of value.

Here is me “thinking aloud”, I don’t have that kind of money to buy Chrome.

Assuming someone has the funds to buy Chrome, they will end up buying the IP and brand. The IP is copyright on the code which is mostly open source, proprietary Google services integration bits, and then the brand.

I can see value in buying the patents & copyright to the codebase and taking it private to build a proprietary State of the art browser to sell or bundle for free with Ads.

Nobody is going to pay for a browser in 2025 so Mritun’s Chrome (my brand - I can’t call it Google Chrome anymore) is going to be ad supported. I might have to think of paid V8 runtimes like Mritun’s Electron and Mritun’s NodeJS to extract maximum value from my investment.

All in, in these high interest-rate environment, I do not see someone buying Chrome to fund it for free - however a lot of ecosystems depend on Chrome, so the best bet would be to use copyright and patents to go after the users. If I have money, I can totally see buying Chrome for approx $100M and then going after monetization.

[drivingmenuts]

A lot of the value of Chrome is in the expertise of it's developers - so whoever buys it better get those devs or they're not going to get far.

Might not be necessary, though. A quick transfusion of cash to our sitting President will bring that action to a screeching halt.

[xnx]

There is soooo much scummy surveillance and data stealing that a nefarious owner of Chrome could achieve. People say Google is "evil" but that isn't a fraction of the total tracking and wholesale private content harvesting a different owner would monetize.

[mritun]

Frankly there isn’t much money in surveillance - with the “Google” and the four colors gone I doubt the “Chrome” brand is going to be worth much. “Blackrock Private Equity LLC Chrome” just does not have the ring.

The money is in Chrome patents and copyright. One can go to town and blitzkrieg the NodeJS ecosystem which has super deep pockets. SCO will look baby-talk.