That’s fair - I should have said major browsers to be more clear. Edited above.

The overwhelming majority of development to Chromium is done by Google and not the open source contributors to the project. Maintaining a browser is not something that can be done for free as a hobby. It requires an army of full-time developers to sustain.

Given all of the major browsers except Firefox are using Chromium, the best case scenario for spinning off Chrome is that Microsoft would pick up the lion’s share of development to keep Edge up to date.

This is the same reason that all of the major Linux distributions have large foundations to support them.

The DoJ would do less harm to the internet if they just forced Google to sell off Search instead. Then they’d be an advertising and cloud services company that happens to maintain a major browser to serve their ads.

This is the right take. This move would be so deleterious to the way the internet works on a foundational level at this point, it’s almost ridiculous. It would impact the world less if the courts forced google to sell off Search.

The idea of who might have the assets to acquire this company and be an organization that would be preferable to Google maintaining control of Chrome doesn’t conjure many candidates. The best case scenario would be Microsoft, and they aren’t buying a browser company.

Completely agree with you, fuck Google, fuck their monopolistic business practices, fuck their increasingly surveillance driven operating model, and fuck their gutless leadership for allowing their company to be reduced to an advertising enshittification factory after becoming so deeply ingrained in the way the internet is used that it became a verb.