This has already been discussed extensively in prior threads, but the biggest question is, how does a spun-off Chrome get funded?

Chrome/Firefox/Safari all cost hundreds of millions of dollars a year to maintain. Currently, Safari and Firefox both make essentially all their revenue through default search agreements. Chrome, Edge, and now Brave are produced by companies that also own the search engines, so they're essentially a loss-generating product, that exist because they cancel out distribution costs that Google and Microsoft would otherwise have to pay other browsers.

But the DOJ order is also asking to ban payments between search engines and browser makers: > As detailed in Section IV, the PFJ prohibits Google from providing third parties something of value (including financial payments) in order to make Google the default general search engine or otherwise discouraging those third parties from offering competing search products

With that revenue gone, the only real options to fund a browser are:

* Directly charge users for it. This is effectively a non-starter, because the vast majority of people aren't willing to pay for it.

* Insert ads or sell user data - users also hate this, it's probably not legal in the EU, and it may not be legal in most of the US in the future either.

* Use the browser as a platform to push some product that does make money - a non-Google search engine? A social network? An LLM interface?

Alternatively, a narrow reading of the proposed order is that this only applies to Google. In that case, perhaps Bing or OpenAI takes over all the distribution agreements and becomes the top search engine. Whether that's better for consumers seems fairly questionable.

Page 12 is also very interesting to me personally, as it contains orders mandating the opening of Google’s search index to their competitors. I had been wondering if that would make it in there and am happy to see it land.

Google's response: "DOJ’s staggering proposal would hurt consumers and America’s global technological leadership" https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/public-policy/doj-s...

This will quietly die off after Jan 20. Nothing to see here.

Discussion (1171 points, 2 days ago, 1387 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42177767

To ask the judge to force Google to spin off Chrome.

The judge still has to agree to it.

I wonder what’s going to happen to ChromeOS

As usual DOJ is late to the party. Google is already facing competition and as it falters, the doj will use this as 'evidence' it was effective.