Example of why this is not mundane x.com/fedekauffman/status/1811019707165…

Not sure if this is an innocent comment or not but I'll answer earnestly. They're not, technically. They're hegemons, which doesn't make them much better. In fact, I'd argue the situation is worse. Chrome predominantly owns the web at this point. There are few contenders, and making a new browser is a lot of work (see the Verso browser). Google has the arguably unearned luxury of dictating what APIs and protocols the nebulous "web" should use, can throw a bunch of money at adding them quickly, and leave competitors struggling to keep up, effectively buying chrome's guaranteed superiority. "But there are standards committees!" Yes, but it really doesn't matter when Chrome either uses its own APIs privately on its sites[0] or just adds new APIs without any committee consideration for people to use and fall in love with and demand that other vendors add them (or something similar, such as proposing a great idea at the committee, it's accepted, and the other vendors lagging for months or even years - see WebGPU as an example). One might think "it's just a browser". Yes, but browsers are -for better or for worse - the global defacto for sending and receiving almost all of our sensitive data. Even "desktop apps" like Whatsapp, Signal, and Bitwarden all either use or have used Chromium to display their contents (via Electron). Much of the community has asserted Google owns the web at this point, and I tend to agree. It's very, very hard for smaller vendors to have much of a day these days without Google getting theirs, too. [0] x.com/lcasdev/status/1810696257137959018

People here seem to be underestimating the advantages that Google gets just because of Chrome: - When you sign in to Google, you sign in browser-wide. Google now gets all of your browsing data, perfect for advertising. (If you ever doubt it, go check out Google Takeout. You'll be shocked at the amount of data you see there.) - They have special APIs and features that they get to use, and nobody else. Only because they own Chrome. [1] - They get to move forward with enabling and pushing features that allow for more advertising: see Manifest v3, FLoC. - Google specifically serves a worse version of Search on Firefox for Mobile. You have to get an extension to get the full experience. This isn't an isolated attempt. You can see more of the same thing with Android. - AOSP (the open source counterpart of Android) is now unusable. It doesn't ship with most essential apps, including a Phone app. In previous versions of Android, all of these were a part of AOSP. - Most third party launchers/stores struggle to implement features because they are only available for Google themselves. - The signing in with Google thing from above continues here too: you sign in to Google system-wide. [1]: x.com/lcasdev/status/1810696257137959018

Breaking up their individual businesses can cause each business to have incentives that line up better with their customers / users. Example: if Chrome was separated from Google, they won't have as much of an incentive to push back against adblockers with things like Manifest V3. Or include APIs that are only available to google websites (Which it has! x.com/lcasdev/status/1810696257137959018)