The web browser is an incredibly mature piece of software with three major implementations that are largely working in parallel to standardize and deliver the most relevant features to the web. This open source (and open collaboration) typifies why a comparison of today’s Google anti-trust case to the 90s Microsoft case is really out-of-date, the kind of spine-chilling narrative about Internet Explorer that triggers a special kind of dread in the elder millennial or young Gen Xer who remembers what ActiveX controls and Java applets are, a category surely no one would ever freely admit being part of.
But please do take a chill pill. The web monoculture means that most developers are probably writing once for Chrome, leaving Firefox and Safari as (sometimes, sadly) afterthoughts. Unlike the bad old days, the mainstream browsers are so converged, that this choice doesn’t reflect a lack of craft, the kind we may have honed decades ago which came with the pride in getting something to work right in IE 6/7, but it is likely a reasonable hedge for what are just small, mundane browser discrepancies way down the totem poll in someone’s sprint backlog that were already being solved by layer, after layer after layer of abstraction in an enormous ecosystem of free software and tools. I’m not saying we should take that for granted! It’s progress indeed to be here, and it took fighting, but it’s clear that we are far and away in a different place than “Best Viewed in IE 6” badges.
The web wouldn’t suddenly break because commercial Chrome changed hands, and most of the innovation happening on the web, if we’re being frank, is with the browser vendors integrating their services on top of the base browser. I believe this is the primary reason why there is such keen interest in the outcome, not the stability of the web platform per se. It seems to me, many web developers are hard-pressed to name the cutting edge features they really need from the web, the features within the browser engine that necessitate further real investment. Novelties like masonry layout hardly count, and I’m glad trend-chasing has given us text with gradients and blurred backdrops on every Web3/crypto/meme coin site. If anything, it is arguable that the web platform is not only stable but basically feature complete, bordering on getting too big and too complex. That’s the primary problem that will challenge not just Ladybird and the next browser implementation but the next big platform after the web whatever it is.1
In the case of Google and Chrome, the verdict is in, and it’s time to choose whether we prefer break up or federal monitoring. I don’t doubt the feds could come up with an inspector regime that would manage this situation. It would be hard, but for all the criticism of the competition authorities in the EU, their model is workable and shows signs of creating new competition. But to me, there’s no denying the elegance of divestiture. Divestiture would actually challenge the assertion that vaunted market and competition is what is giving us these particular results in the advertising markets rather than Google’s interference. For whatever the case proved about Google’s behavior, it remains a counterfactual I can’t prove moving forward, but I think it would be way more interesting to test.
The fans of free markets suddenly don’t want a market-based approach when they can instead capture and bog down regulators. Imagine if AT&T spent years bogging down the feds instead of the Baby Bells competing over fiber, the Internet, and ultimately cellular networks. Likewise, if Chrome were an independent company, the very next day, it would have several suitors competing for prominence as the gateway to the internet for so many people, it wouldn’t have to balm these negotiations with rivals, and it wouldn’t be encumbered by the conflict of interest of adding (and removing) features from the Web that support an ad business.
Chrome is how people get to the web. It would likely be a viable company on its own2, and it would likely get continued open source development support from other Chromium-based vendors. Chrome as an independent company asks almost every big tech company to think twice, but ducking from this moment with a half-measure or one that leaves Google being micromanaged by the feds over Chrome probably just means Google blames them later if Google search ends up losing the AI footrace.
Footnotes
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If Microsoft gave up on EdgeHTML to just use Chromium, and if so many “desktop” apps are just glorified Electron wrappers and not using native toolkits, how optimistic should we be really? Either about the platform suddenly getting replaced or even being differentiated by the engine of a particular vendor for fun or for profit? ⤴
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I tend to think that of the options, Google divesting Chrome into a company set up to very likely continue gatewaying Google search and services as the default is more agreeable than an outright sale to a rival who could substantially undercut that reality. OpenAI/ChatGPT is often brought up as an example in this context. I think divestiture would probably require Google to fund the default search option in Chrome with fair, nondiscriminatory terms that are functionally equivalent to what it offers Apple and Mozilla and to do that for at least a few years unless Chrome could supersede the agreement with better offer(s) from Google’s search/advertising rivals. This would be one major caveat of a divestiture where fed’s involvement is needed, and therefore it’s not a pure, “sink-or-swim” theory of market economics. It would actually be an attractive outcome to have an independent Chrome, which would have a lot of leverage in negotiations to experiment with prices and experiences with the search and advertising companies, for Google, which wouldn’t get the rug pulled out from under it, and for the AI companies, which wouldn’t select a favorite and unexpectedly arm one of them unfairly with a huge new audience they didn’t earn especially if in a fire sale. As I claimed, this looks way more interesting a dynamic and probably better for all of us than just trimming the hedges on the Alphabet estate, wouldn’t you say? ⤴