It was August 5th, 2024 when a federal judge in the US decided that “Google acted illegally to maintain a monopoly in online search”. Then November 20th, 2024 when “The Justice Department and a group of states asked a federal court late Wednesday to force Google to sell Chrome“.
It hasn’t been forced yet and I have no idea if it will be. I’m just a barely-informed but fascinated observer here.
It’s fair to call it a rumor, but there is writing saying it could sell for $20 billion.
Time for some arm-chair businessing.
Yes, Chrome is an amazing software product. Yes, it has an incredible amount of users. Yes, those users probably log usage statistics that most software products would drool over.
But also: it’s a massive liability.
Users don’t pay for Chrome. There aren’t ads in Chrome. There is no direct business model for Chrome. Unlike Safari and Firefox, nobody writes checks to Chrome to make a certain search engine the default.
The value of Chrome is all tangential — it provides value to Google. Whoever buys it does not inherit that same tangential value, they would need to redirect what little of it they can somewhere else, likely fighting against the natural flow that has been baked into it since the beginning.
Conservatively, it will take several hundred people to operate it. So call that $20m a year minimum1. And what are the costs of distributing it? Chrome is a couple hundred MB in size. Just the bandwidth for that alone in the numbers it is downloaded is non-trivial.
So some company buys an app for an astronomical amount of money, which has no direct business model and a huge amount of ongoing cost and just hope they can figure out how they can make that work? It just seems highly unlikely.
It’s nice to see this: Linux Foundation Announces the Launch of Supporters of Chromium-Based Browsers. It feels like it’s in response to all this. Uh oh what if Google is forced to sell Chrome, we’d better line up a bunch of people (and money) who say they’ll continue supporting the open source underpinnings.
I’m no big business apologist, but I do tend to think if you build a search engine, then you build a browser and it defaults to that search engine… that’s fine? And if the problem is about paying other companies to be the default search engine, then have them stop doing that (sad day for Mozilla). In general, I think a forced sale of Chrome itself is a big ol’ net negative for the web, even if it would be a (happy day for Mozilla).
- The real answer for annual operating costs is in the billions, but even ultra conservative numbers here paint a picture that this is not a tenable prospect for almost any buyer. ↩︎
The only sort of entity Brian and I have been able to think of that would be able or willing to buy it is a nation-state or a company that’s the arm of a nation-state. But we can’t see a US judge allowing that sort of sale, so that only leaves us with Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, or Mark Zuckerburg buying it with their pocket change and then firing everybody they deem a “DEI hire“ or “too woke”.
I guess Tim Apple and Satya Microsoft are off the table as they’d have the same monopoly concerns?