If Google is forced to give up Chrome, what happens next? When Donald Trump entered the White House, I expect Google thought its worries were over. A million-dollar "donation" for the inaugural ball, some face time between Sundar Pichai and Trump – and President Joe Biden's pesky Department of Justice (DoJ) demanding Google divest itself of its Chrome web browser would all be forgotten …
Asking Google to sell off Chrome is stupid. Stopping them from getting that monopoly made sense, but that ship has sailed - and regulators did fuck-all. Even when Google were distributing it like malware and using their search monopoly.
Regulators need to be realistic. Chrome doesn't make any money directly. If it's really worth the insanity of $50bn (which it isn't) then that's because someone else is planning to use it to build a monopoly. Using this "remedy" just creates another problem in the immediate future. Plus, what insane message does it send, if government regulators are selling on a couple of billion users, and their data, off to someother company? Finally this could create a massive regulatory bunfight? What if the US regulator approves a sale of Chrome to someone, and then the EU regulator pops up and nixes that on competition grounds?
For Trump, it's surely much better to keep Google sweating, to keep them quiet and compliant. Putting in more donations to his pet projects. Once he makes them his enemy outright, then the gloves come off, and they can fully help the other side. Better to keep the sword of Damocles hanging over their head for the next few years, surely?
Personally I think the author might have read this wrong anyway. Why should Google sell it? If it's really worth that cash, it's worth it to a competitor who might become a threat to Google. So why should Google not just win some browny points by giving it away for free - to say the Linux foundation? On the lines of, if I can't control it - then nobody else can have it either.
Asking Google to sell off Chrome is stupid. Stopping them from getting that monopoly made sense, but that ship has sailed - and regulators did fuck-all. Even when Google were distributing it like malware and using their search monopoly.
That's how regulation works, it stops something after the fact and the improvements take a while to filter through.
But to not bother is just forcing the internet down IE6 mark II.
No thanks.
Chrome doesn't make any money directly. If it's really worth the insanity of $50bn
I dunno, control over the source code that browses the internet seems fairly valuable. Especially if you have a business built on data collection and advertising. I can see that contributing to a few bn of yearly revenue. (Especially when you controll all the levers in the black box that works out how much people owe).
There's a reason MS wanted the IE monopoly to continue (okay, that was more tied to getting Office everywhere, but it's the same underlying proposition).
FIA,
I didn't say, don't bother. Google have multiple monopolies in different industry sectors, that they've gained from their initial search and advertising monopoly. Either by using that to subsidise all the spending to create another monopoly (say with Android) or directly leveraging it to help gain a monopoly (as they did with Chrome).
Obviously regulators have to work retrospectively - but once Google were using their various websites (including their search page) to tell you they didn't work properly without a "modern browser", and here's a download link to Chrome - that was the time to spring into action. Or even just to wheeze into action, all that happened over a decade ago. Plus you got the free download of Chrome you didn't ask for when updatin various other bits of software - which then made itself default browser.
Obviously one remedy would be to make Google sell Chrome. But if people really are talking about $50bn to buy it, then those people are going to be exactly as much of a threat to the market as Google are. So a different remedy should be looked at, in preference. Otherwise we risk making things worse.
Perhaps the better thing to make Google divest would be Android. That does more damage to their monopoly, and that actually makes profits, so rather than selling it, they could just spin it off as a private company.
Or, force Google to charge for Chrome, so alternatives, like Firefox, can actually afford to produce a browser - going free is how Microsoft were able to destroy Netscape originally.
Going free was also what allowed Android to destroy Blackberry. i.e. leveraging their search/advertising monopoly profits to enter another market and take it over, because they didn't need to make any profit.
Regulators can't act on abuses that haven't happened yet - this isn't Minority Report. But equally there's no requirement for them to do something obviously stupid either.
SVG is hard to implement and browsers still have not implemented it 100%
so any "owner" of the end viewing software gets to dictate how things are "rendered" so what the servers (those sending adverts or pretty pictures) gets to say, use and track
use standards like SVG (secure version) rather than canvas where google/bing/yahoo/cloudflare/Fastly/PageCDN can not track track you...
https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-svg-tiny-ps-abrotman-04.html
Obviously one remedy would be to make Google sell Chrome. But if people really are talking about $50bn to buy it, then those people are going to be exactly as much of a threat to the market as Google are. So a different remedy should be looked at, in preference. Otherwise we risk making things worse.
Perhaps the better thing to make Google divest would be Android. That does more damage to their monopoly, and that actually makes profits, so rather than selling it, they could just spin it off as a private company.
Yeah, the $50Bn valuation is insane. Obviouly you're buying the userbase - I know everyone says that it's impossible to build a full-featured browser engine these days (and in fairness, MS dropped EdgeHTML as too much effort), but I reckon - and I'm spitballing here - that a billion quid would do it. Two at a push.
Spin off Android into a company that needs to make a profit and can't derive cross-subsidy from the Alphabet family, nor benefit from app bundling. Make them license themselves out to manufacturers on the same basis as Jolla/Sailfish OS.
Re "Regulators can't act on abuses that haven't happened yet "
Yes the bloody can! Sensible anti-trust regulation can and should be simple laws.
People act like it's only illegal if you get caught and us companies act like there is no right or wrong in business. Just the outcome of court cases. This os wrong in so many senses.
Regulators can and should make sane laws and punish to prevent them being broken in the future. Companies are not humans, you can kill them as punishment. And prevent wrong doing starting new ones.
USA is very very corrupt now. But don't pretend to yourself no other world is possible.
Google do a very good job of keeping Chrome secure and fixing security issues. Do you think anyone else will be this good? It took Brave 4 weeks to merge the upstream zero day, putting their users at serious risk. This doesn't get reported of course, as Brave and DuckDuckGo get protected status by the tech media, and Google are of course evil, as that is where the click $$$ are.
Stopping them from getting that monopoly made sense, but that ship has sailed - and regulators did fuck-all. Even when Google were distributing it like malware and using their search monopoly.
This is fundamentally the issue. Breaking up Google post-facto is still arguably the right thing to do (although arguably they should be selling AdSense as the priority), but the issue we have is that anti-trust bodies are so weak and under-resourced that their findings are always years after the fact, and their attempts to patch the damage aren't going to bring back the startups that have been squashed in the process.
Such has been the case for Microsoft's multiple infringements, and even for non-tech cases like the UK Dairy product price fixing scandal (in which supermarkets and processors colluded to fix prices of milk and some dairy products. Case opened in 2004 alleging consumers had overpaid by £270m and finally closed in 2011 levying fines of... £49m. So seven years and a paltry "remedy" that's basically a cost of doing business - after all, the offenders retained £220m of their ill-gotten gains, which some might call "proceeds of crime").
Rather than having it bought by a necessarily large and well-funded tech company which will immediately start abusing users for its own ends, why not set it up as a separate independent company? Most of the cost of maintaining a browser is actually maintaining the engine, which in this case is Chromium and maintained separately, with many different companies contributing, in their own interest, and I doubt that Google would stop contributing either.
It is probably not difficult for Chrome to find sources of revenue. The first coming to mind is of course a sliver of ads shown on the browser from all major ad publishers, with some checks ensuring that these deals are non-discriminatory.
"why not set it up as a separate independent company?"
Google (if forced) would do what makes it most money. They'll evaluate spin off (essentially an IPO) compared to selling to whoever has got deep pockets. They'll also listen to their investors (a little bit) as to whether those investors want cash, or to have shares in a standalone ChromeCo.
My guess it that a standalone ChromeCo has notably less value to existing investors than it does to some deep pocketed, VC-fueled AI company, and that current investors would want to get their hands on a bag of cash, in which case the best option is to sell it. Let all the AI techbro outbid each other, take a handsome prize, and then laugh when the winner finds the sums don't add up.
Like a badger,
Obviously Google could sell Chrome, for ludicrous sums. That might please short-term shareholders. But allowing some huge AI company, who want to steal their search and advertising monopoly, to get instant access to all the web traffic of a couple of billion Chrome users - and then be able to tweak Chrome to redirect all their searches - might be very expensive indeed. $50bn is only a couple of quarters of Google revenue - for which they might risk the whole company. They still make 90% of their profits from sticking adverts next to search. Lose that search monopoly and the whole rest of the company is buggered. Getting paid $50bn could be a very expensive mistake.
This is why Google have significantly invtested in their browser and mobile phone monopolies. Because they're the moat that guards the actually (hugely) profitable search / advertising monopoly.
Google (if forced) would do what makes it most money. They'll evaluate spin off (essentially an IPO) compared to selling to whoever has got deep pockets. They'll also listen to their investors (a little bit) as to whether those investors want cash, or to have shares in a standalone ChromeCo.
Actually the current proposal is a Divestiture Trustee will divest it for them, so a bit like a company in administration they won't have any say in who ends up with the asset and the trustee's mandate is something as yet not detailed but involves creating market competition. Quite what scenario that leads most likely leads to I don't know.
So, options include…
Selling to ChatGPT so that it can slurp user data first-hand and abuse it as it sees fit
Selling to Yahoo so they can just do exactly what Google do - slurping user data. Obviously, Yahoo would completely fail, but still
Selling it to MS. Yea, right
…etc etc…
How do ANY of these possible outcomes help with anything? Yes, it would cut off Google from all that lovely user data but the evil will just get passed on to someone else
> How do ANY of these possible outcomes help with anything? Yes, it would cut off Google from all that lovely user data
Personally I don't think it will do that. Whatever entity - ANY entity - that ends up the steward of Chrome can turn around and sell user data right back to Googoyle and any other Co. that will give it money. In fact, they can provide the data to *even more* companies than before. Additionally, this may actually be fully required for them to have the funds to continue operating - it's almost a requirement to do exactly this.
The benefit (to the public) to divesting Chrome is that Googoyle doesn't have iron-grip control of the WorldWideWeb and its standards any longer: they can't force the NAT-busting HTTP/3; browsers and HTTPD's will be able to *choose* whether they want to implement HTTP/2; as browsers diversify, Cloudflare will have to stop depending on non-standard Googoyle-isms for their "I'm a REAL browser!" check that rejects non-chrome browsers; browsers could decide which features to support (webm? webp?) by means other than "Is it in Chrome? Well that forces our hand then.."; AMP required for all websites to make search rankings at all (NO ONE wanted Amp, and Googoyle eventually discontinued(?) it, or at least its requirement); and all the options of _not_ routing all of your traffic and clicks through Googoyle's spy-services for literally everything (Ungoogled Chromium).
Divesting the browser is about restoring competition to the browser market: Safari, Opera(sigh), Mozilla(sigh), PaleMoon, Dillo, Links, lynx, Brave, Edge, and all the other Chromium clones that may wish to diverge. Without Googoyle *forcing* their preferred "features" (Manifest v3) unto everyone, browser makers will have the ability to make a choice, and even enter the market at all.
Divesting the browser is an additional way to remove Chrome browser compliance from search ranking. You don't have to implement Googoyle's _required feature set_ in order to show up in the Google search list.
I fully believe textbooks will have a chapter on the "Google and Chrome Web Browser" in the future. It's a remarkable example of the perils of allowing monopolistic behavior in a market. It has destroyed privacy, destroyed choice, submarined and torpedo'd a plethora of other browsers, and made it so that Chrome the only viable option with Googoyle SpySearch the only viable search option. Likely the only reason Safari still exists *at all* is because Apple _required_ that all web browsers on iOS use the Safari engine -- something they've been sued for.
--
What kind of domains are hard-coded into Chromium? Check out: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium/refs/heads/master/domain_regex.list (this is only TLD's, not subdomains.)
Browsers have come and gone over the years, so the value of Chrome is not the most solid thing. It has obvious value *to Google* as part of their portfolio but does it have that value by itself?
Is it the engine? 'Cos that isn't the same thing; there are *lots* of browsers based on the same core, so it's hardly a special sauce.
Or is it the popularity? 'Cos how much of that is down to the product, and how much is just down to it *currently* being the default bundled browser on so many devices? Any reason for that to persist post-sale?
Or is it just the data? What is that actually worth when detached from the rest of the Google empire? What can a third party do to monetise just that bit, vs what all the other browser vendors can do too?
It might be the big dominant beast right now but once split off it could get overtaken by something else in exactly the same way predecessors did over the years. Assuming anyone still thinks supplying a browser is a worthwhile end in itself.
So maybe $50 billion is a bit much to ask for just another free browser in a crowded market not exactly flush with massive returns.
It's the data and the users. You can grab and sell the browsing history of a couple billion people [warning, this is illegal, but nobody will stop you] and send the users to places of your choosing. As long as the places you're sending them are other search engines or ad sites and not malware, you'll get away with it. That's why it's worth so much. Of course, companies will probably overvalue how much you can make by doing that, but if Google has to sell it, they'll find the one that values it highest, whether they know what they're talking about or not. If it's not, as it probably will be because I'd bet on OpenAI having the highest bid*, that's the buyer's problem.
* OpenAI is used to having billions at their disposal which the backers don't mind them throwing into the shredder. Most other companies at least sometimes have to justify spending decisions. I'm not sure how long they can continue to find credulous investors, but some of them might see a Chrome purchase as a way to get even more users, because historically, a lot of startups have benefited a lot by throwing their product in front of millions of people and getting more customers this time. Some investors have not realized that the economics of AI-driven businesses are a bit different.
“how much is just down to it *currently* being the default bundled browser on so many devices”
It is not the default browser on Windows, but pretty much everyone switches from Edge to it.
It is also not the default on Mac, and most Mac users stick with Safari.
It is the default on Chromebook, but how big is that outside the educational market? And on Android which obviously is big.
I think it's marginally more nuanced in that browsers are more complex than they need be for their declared purpose and insecure by design largely at the behest of advertising interests in general - and that includes those content-providers who've been persuaded that getting tiny fractions of someone else's advertising revenue is the only way to get paid. The advertisers need someone with both the technical clout and the market presence to persuade legislators that the sky will fall if the trade in personal data is somehow impeded - and that someone is Alphabet.
A more effective way to deal with this might be to ratchet up the privacy rules so that, instead of various established corporate entities playing ownership musical chairs, they're forced to consider a different game. I somehow can't see it happening, though.
Chrome is in effect the Google search and play services integrated version of Chromium.
There is nothing stopping those who seen great profit potential in Chrome, like OpenAI from also taking the Chromium source and creating their own OpenAI or whatever fork... I suspect most of the valuations assume that Google will be buying Chrome from them. Hence just like with TikTok there will be a queue of candidates from the major Trump backers, I would not rule Musk out, given to some in the Trump camp he has done a really good job at Twitter...
I really want to see an analysis of what Google would be forced to sell:
Chrome is just a lightweight wrapper around the open source Chromium engine. So are they just being asked to sell the name, the auto-update function and upgrade path to billions of users?
Or will they be forced to "sell" Chromium? What does that even mean?
Will there be anything to stop Google creating another wrapper around Chromium? Will they be blocked from contributing to Chromium? Or will they want to continue to fund it, if they are not gaining any benefit?
And what does this mean about the default browser on Android? Will they be forced to ship Chrome no matter how bad it gets? What about the Android webview - which is a separate package distinct from Chrome?
It's a valid point, however I think the effect would be profound.
Remember that the Chromium browser engine is already open-source. However, it's ruled rather strongly by the biggest commercial sponsor, Googoyle, with pushes-upstream to things done with Chrome.
Additionally, if Googoyle loses Chrome the browser, that would seem to mean that they lose access to the browsers -- the signing keys must be divested, the upgrade paths, etc. They can't just "auto-upgrade" all Chrome users to "The New Google Chromium" browser. So Google will lose a strong influence of Chromium, and it will largely turn to other implementors that actually have a browser: Edge, Brave, Vivaldi, etc. Google could try and straight up buy influence into Chromium, of pay for developments in Chrome, however I think this would go badly with the DOJ -- and they wouldn't be the only customer able to buy features - Microsoft and Apple would be good contenders, too.
Remember as well that losing the signing keys to Chrome would make it so that they can't auto-update the browser on Android -- packages *must* be signed with the same keys, or you have to uninstall and reinstall them.
If users start getting messages for "The New Google Chromium" browser with a no-longer-rainbow-G icon, I think a lot of them will suspect it malware and ignore it, because they use Chrome, and they've always used Chrome. Even if users *did* install it, Google previously went to effort to make their browser default, front, and center -- so if the new browser is installed, people will likely just be used to going to Chrome. Google wouldn't then be able to uninstall Chrome, that would surely be anti-competitive and rile the DOJ up about the judgement.
My worry about Microsoft acquiring Chrome is that I have a nasty feeling that it would basically go like this:-
day 1 - all is good
one month - Edge gets updates first
three months - updates stay in Edge, no port to Chrome or the open source version
six months - non-Windows versions of Chrome discontinued, use Edge instead
one year - Chrome discontinued
two years - the name Chrome is reused for a new tool in Microsoft Office. Nobody knows what it does, but it comes with the suite.
Or Microsoft rename Edge to Chome lite (using an identical logo), and stop updating it pushing all update effort into Chrome.
Then a year later, create Chrome Home, and Chrome business. Both with identical logos. Which are the same product, mostly, but one opens Outlook when you click on a email link and the other opens Outlook (or Outlook NEW), when you click on an email link.
A year after that they create Chrome Pro. With the same logo. Plus seven versions of Teams, another 5 Outlooks and a brand new re-release of Skype.
If the Linux Foundation don't get Chrome, which looks to me like the only option that's good for the users, perhaps they could pick up Mozilla instead? Let's face it, without Google support it's worth about threepence ha'penny. (3 1/2 pence (predecimal) for those less grey than me.)
If you don't like a AI company owning Chrome, why do you still have Chrome installed now? Google is an AI company and heavily invested in AI with their own LLM Gemini?
I honestly don't see the majority of people suddenly moving away from Chrome if OpenAI or any other AI company buys it, they have put up with years of Google slurping their browsing data to show them ads, so why would they feel any different if its now a different company slurping their data?
My fear is as the article points out that Firefox is the only popular multiple platform browser that isn't based on Chromium will be killed off by the sale of Chrome, since Google won't be able to pay to be the default search provider if the ruling goes ahead..
And that means all those forks of Firefox would die as well, as without Mozilla continuing to maintain the Firefox code base with their paid engineers, there is no way the small group of devs who maintain Waterfox and all the other Firefox forks will be able to cope with the massive task of maintaining and updating a modern web browser like Firefox as Mozilla can rn with their funding from Google.
So unless another search engine such as Bing or Duck Duck go can offer a similar payment to Mozilla to have their search engine as default on FF, its potentially going to be a Chromium browser monopoly going forwards..
Chrome being sold to some types of others might make Google even more desperate to pay Mozilla. If it's sold to someone who will replace Google with a different search engine, then Google will lose search revenue and will want more browsers to default to them. I think Google would prioritize selling it to someone who doesn't run a competing search engine and will keep Google due to popular demand, but maybe they won't get the choice.
If Google weren't dicks about it, and do things like popups begging you to switch to Chrome, then the DoJ would probably not be giving them the hairy eyeball.
"Without this money, Mozilla feels it couldn't develop and maintain Gecko"
Is that a bad thing? Would it mean they stop shitting in the soup, making random gratuitous changes to the UI, none of which are improvements?
I wouldn't be sad to see Mark Surman and the rest of those idiots selling pencils on a streetcorner.
"Is that a bad thing?"
Yes.
"Would it mean they stop shitting in the soup, making random gratuitous changes to the UI, none of which are improvements?"
No. It would mean that this was all that they did, since dicking about with the UI is much easier than the comllex business of maintaining functionality.
Given they both more or less oversaw a secession of sorts whether I was wondering whether Simon was an antecedent of David.
Apparently not if WikiP be believed unless we go back to Simon's grandfather's family in Scotland.
Learn something new every day. I didn't know that refugees from Rhineland Palatinate settled in colonial America.
I don't suppose trumpty-dumpty can be bought in the first instance but definitely not because he is incorruptible but as the ultimate in expedience he will do or say anything at the time to get what he wants without the slightest intention of following through should that conflict with his interests just five minutes later. At least the devil although devious does traditionally keep to the letter but not necessarily the spirit of his bargains made with mortals.
Other politicians make a point of delaying the display of their for sale sign until their imminent departure from political office presumably to command a higher price for their heretofore notionally unsullied services.
Chrome makes no money directly from Google, the revenue is from the ads that the data Chrome recovers uses to target users.
Google could as easily just say, screw this and just hand over Chrome to an open source Foundation and say let them provide the core browser but with a stipulation that Google is the default search engine and let the minions fight over what features they add to diversify.
No monopoly, Chrome can become many versions but retain compatibility and the potential of thousands of developers to brainstorm, it worked for Linux but this time they can fix some of the issues that Linux has from the beginning.
The theory would be that their ad business makes a bunch of money by selling ads and the rest of their business makes a bunch of money by having places for ads to go. If they were separate, then Google (services) would still make most of what they used to make and would sell ad placement to the highest bidder among advertising networks, and Google (ads) would make money by being one of those networks with a lot of customers.
Some parts of Google would work just fine under this arrangement, for example search. Some parts wouldn't but could be kept or spun off as somewhat profitable enterprises of their own. Some things would crash and burn because they don't have enough places to insert ads to make all their money that way and they've been attached to Google (data collection) instead, or they just never made any profit but nobody noticed because all the rest did.
But could a government entity pick this up? Make it the local browser of choice as part of their local business suite to get away from locked in ecosystems?
Just thinking that this would make an amazing cornerstone for a modified product for say, the EU where the settings and data collection policies are built in.
I know, stupid thought. But….?
Chrome is dominant in desktop browsers (especially if you consider Edge to be a close cousin of Chrome) so handing that dominance to some deep pocketed company like Microsoft or OpenAI or whoever else willing to pay to get access to all that juicy data isn't solving the whole problem. If Microsoft buys it then they add their Edge userbase and it is basically all non-Mac users except for us single digit percent still sticking with Firefox or other non Chrome browsers. If OpenAI buys it I shudder to think what might be in the fine print of the clickthrough agreement about what data they feel entitled to collect on your browsing habits to feed future versions of ChatGPT.
If the DOJ's position is that Google has violated the law and must give up Chrome, then they must also believe Google has unfairly profited from the many years they have been violating the law before the DOJ was able to make/prove the case.
So rather than fining Google, make the remedy that they must create a non profit foundation to take ownership of Chrome, that is operated for the public good rather than for profiting off user data. Google would be required to fund it with enough money to operate for five years, giving it enough time to find other ways to sustain itself. Maybe it would be allowed to make short term (like a year or two) deals for default search engine (similar to Google's deal with Apple, though presumably not as lucrative) or default AI assistant, with Google not being allowed to make any deals with it for a decade due to their search monopoly.
Make them continue their agreement with Firefox for another five years as well, and hopefully they can keep going beyond that. Since Chrome is open source maybe OpenAI forks their own version that they can do data collection with, similar to what Microsoft did with Edge, and that's fine - that's what open source is all about after all. But if they diverge enough over time they could end up different browsers just as Chrome is different from Safari even though Chrome was forked off Safari's engine (and Safari before it was forked off the KDE browser's engine)
... which I may not ;-) Chromium is simply a rendering engine for web pages. Just like many other subsystems built into Android.
It provides a standard API, leaving devs to come up with the user-interface, features and user-experience.
I think there's something similar with antivirus and adblocking.
I'm not a dev so I stand to be corrected, but I'd find it hard to argue against that concept.
Because a court can't do that. Making targeted advertising illegal requires a law to be passed by legislators who aren't interested in doing that because, should one of them suggest it, they would be buried in letters from interested businesses explaining how that would cost them four trillion dollars per hour and require them to fire every employee they have. Their colleagues would not have much interest in helping get that law passed when ignoring it would be the much easier solution and many of them believe the prognostications of doom and therefore oppose it. The selling Chrome option is an option because it's permitted by laws that have already been passed. If you can convince US politicians to pass that law, your problem will be solved, but you can't, nor can you convince any other countries' politicians to do it. The closest law we have to that is GDPR, which is enforced so halfheartedly that it has little effect, and the one you're proposing is an order of magnitude more drastic.
Because the problem is not any search engine owning any browser, but the most dominant search engine owning the most dominant browser. It being owned by Yahoo isn't going to matter because, outside Japan, nobody uses Yahoo search. Until Yahoo becomes the largest search engine by market share, they wouldn't be a concern under antitrust law.
To force them to offer a browser choice menu in Android for users on initial factory startup.
Wasn't that done with Windows and Microsoft back in the day when regulators were concerned that bundling IE by default could kill off competing browsers?
Wouldn't be technically difficult and would avoid years of legal actions that an an attempted forced sell off, making lawyers rich, would entail.
Fairly decent chance that Google would accept that as a compromise, rather than losing Chrome altogether.
Interesting takes some far.
But what do people think the real reason Trump and the AG are interested in Chromium for?
Trump is not thinking "hmm too much power in the hands of the few".
Trump has no problem with monopoly power abuse.
A search engine that no longer finds facts or figures and answers with weighted AI generated responses that make no pretence to be based on fact, is a powerful tool n the hands of the post truth government.
I would happily pay to not have that on my desktop.
What else would Trump be doing here?
Trump's corruption is no longer conspiracy theory.
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