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Business model is the same as Firefox: Google pays to be the default search engine.

The economics are identical to Chrome being within Google. The differences are three-fold:

- Bing, DDG, OpenAI, and others can compete to pay for placement

- There can be no central directives to shove things like Manifest V3, weird data sharing, or DRM down our throats

- Google has no incentive to favor Chrome over Firefox or Edge in its web offerings

In other words, if a business is split, the same economics work, but without all the shady, anti-trusty stuff. It's an independent company, without linked chains of corporate control.

I think it most serves Google's interests to set up a second nonprofit similar to Mozilla to manage this, perhaps with more of a consortium model. Whatever Google can sell Chrome for is less in its interests than maintaining that the new Chrome will not be used against Google the way Google used Chrome against competitors.... If DDG were to end up with ownership of Chrome and switch from Google Search to DDG, I think Google would be pretty unhappy, while DDG's market cap of 75M versus Google's of $2T -- 2000 times higher -- would even out a little bit.

One of the key points is that the EXACT SAME economics and business model can be evil and anti-trusty or good and fair depending on chains of control and collusion. If there is a colluding consortium (whether by backroom deals or by having related products in the same place), new competitors won't come in since they know they'll be crushed unfairly. Same economics without backroom deals, and you've got market competition.



> Business model is the same as Firefox: Google pays to be the default search engine.

How do you image that working? Google is already banned from paying Apple to be the default search engine, so why would they be allowed to pay Chrome?


They are no more already banned from that than they have already been forced to divest chrome. None of this is final.


If Meta buys Chrome (which is a real possibility) why do you think they will not try to push similar stuff like ManifestV3 ?


Well, they won't be as effective given Google's absolute dominance in web properties and the reach of its surveillance advertising network. When Gmail or Docs mysteriously breaks in Firefox for 3 days peeling off 10M more Firefox users for Chrome, the web suffers. Meta won't be able to do nearly as much of that given their major effort is all in apps and barely on the web any more.




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