OpenAI wants to buy Chrome. Perplexity wants to buy Chrome. Yahoo! wants to buy Chrome. Heck, Micro.blog would also love to buy Chrome (if we had a budget). If Google has to spin it out, could be an interesting shift for the open web.

@manton Maybe we can do a Kickstarter for Micro.blog to buy Chrome? Non of these others seem like much of an improvement on Google
Unsure if it’s a positive one if Google isn’t the one who has to keep pushing it forward themselves anymore since they stop making the thing that accesses it.

@manton.org Unsure if it’s a positive one if Google isn’t the one who has to keep pushing it forward themselves anymore since they stop making the thing that accesses it.

@marv51 That would be amazing but I think we would need a billion dollars. The highest Kickstarter ever was “only” in the tens of millions of dollars.

@cliophate.wtf I don’t really have an opinion yet on whether it is positive or negative. Without Chrome, it will be important for Google to keep sending truckloads of cash to Apple and Mozilla for the default search engine, so that’s another wrinkle.
@cliophate.wtf I don’t really have an opinion yet on whether it is positive or negative. Without Chrome, it will be important for Google to keep sending truckloads of cash to Apple and Mozilla for the default search engine, so that’s another wrinkle.

I’m not sure I buy the theory that divesting Chrome meaningfully increases competition in any market. Maybe they should just make Google give a few billion dollars to Mozilla. Or if the market we care about is ads, spin off part of the plumbing rather than the front end.

@ffmike I’m not sure either. It would be a big shake-up, but how is hard to predict.

@manton So stupid. Forced sale to another abusive owner would make things even worse. It needs to be publicly owned.
