Technology

There are still Trump critics on YouTube.

It's not done yet. I highly doubt it ever will be either.

I must say that, as a European using a Firefox fork for my daily browsing while waiting for Ladybird, I don't see that outcome as completely negative: Google, somehow, in America has kept a completely unjustified good vibes feeling surrounding itself, while Thiel is much more evil in the public eye.

If Chrome is associated with him in anyway it can become a more lucid image of itself.

Please, do it! That's going to eviscerate Chrome's userbase and push these Chromium browsers to fork so fast it'll make his head spin.

Look at all their lips. See how they look like they are ready to kiss or suck something? Now look at Pichai. Just smiling instead of getting ready to receive a load. He bent the knee, but not far enough.

I'll go and risk "shade of skin". He is also smiling an looks a little less as a Bond villain, but I go with the shading.

Chromium is already there and companies like Microsoft have their own forks so... Yeah I think there's no point of buying Chrome.

Sell it to IBM so they can end all support lol

Google’s ad network and YouTube are pushing the agenda more than pretty much everyone.

X Chrome

Ughhhhhhh

ByteDance shell company Chrome.

Who inherits the power over the single browser used by most of the world remains to be seen though.

Probably Musk or Thiel.

But Chrome is already just Chromium with some binary blobs. Chromium itself even has sync and Google services at this point.

Besides, what would that change in regards to who develops it?

I don’t really get what selling Chrome and Android would accomplish.

There was a leak of Google's old page ranking algorithm (not PageRank, but how they change the order of results on search) - it looked like they used a bunch of signals from Chrome about the amount of time users spend on a page, how quickly they go back, etc. Chrome gives the search side of the business an advantage.

Conversely, Android feeds a bunch of extra data to the ad business about what people do in real life.

Both products give the rest of Alphabet a significant advantage over their competitors, and make it harder for new entrants to get a foothold.

requiring Google (and Facebook) to spin off their ad network businesses

That is their business. Everything else exists to bring more value to that business:

• AOSP - ads in the browser (search engine) and app store
• Chrome - ads in the search engine, and nudge people toward other Google products to hoover up data to serve more ads

And so on. Google and Meta are ad companies that drive traffic to their ads through software services.

The point in forcing them out of certain businesses is to open them up to more competition. They can keep ad margins high due to sheer volume of eyeballs coming from their other services. Gutting those services means they need to provide better value to stay competitive.

Idk if it'll work, but stripping out the browser is likely good overall for the open web.

Spinning them off into their own independent companies would make more sense than a sale to another party.

Google gets to control the source code, what additions are added, and what features don't get into it.

Yes technically some organization could fork it and then maintain a fork themselves. But it's a huge undertaking that almost nobody has the money to fund. Browsers are free so there's really not a lot of monetization schemes for browsers.

So nobody as far as I know has really been able to maintain a hard fork of chromium for very long. Remember, every change you make then has to be maintained by you and then you have to keep it up to date with the chromium master tree while also keeping all of your changes compatible. It is a big undertaking almost as big as modern operating systems. Browsers are just too complicated so Google in this position does still have a monopoly that's very hard to fight.

Almost all browsers other than Safari and Firefox are based on Chromium, which gives Google a ton of control.