The mere existence of a competitor is not the spirit of antitrust.
Look at what Google does with Chrome and how it harms the internet, they literally just disabled an ad blocker and then offered a new tier of ad free Youtube for $8 a month.
Then think about the power it gives them for tracking, remember they tried to replace tracking cookies with their own standard?
The counterpoint would be anyone can fork Chrome and put an adblocker back in (ie Brave).
I worry as part of Google, chrome is just an open source project with profit as a secondary motive, while as it’s own company they’ll probably try to make it more profitable and it’ll become worse and closed down.
That's the same argument as with Android - its open source, anyone can fork it and change whatever they don't like!
And its flawed in the same way - first its not fully open source (IIRC Crhome has some proprietary bits that are not in Chromium, same with Android+Google Play services vs AOSP) but good luck maintaining your fork for any length of time!
Google is in full control of both Android and Chromium with all decisions happening behind closed doors with zero leverage for anyone from the outside to influence those decisions. So as with Manifest v3 now and many similarly bad decisions for Android, once Google selects a course, it will be harder and harder over time to keep your changes if you still want the end result to look like what the users will see as Chrome/Android.
And I would say with a browser the pressure to update would be even greater & thus its even harder to keep any signifficant custom changes.
On the one hand you're positing that Chrome can just live on independently from Google. That 's what "anyone can fork" means to me. Forking is not just copying the code, but maintaining the project and keeping it relevant
On the other hand you worry that Chrome can't go on without Google, as it currently doesn't bring enough money and needs to be a market abuse tool to justify the costs.
In a very real way, I think if the situation is unsolvable letting Chrome die and be born again could be the only long term solution. It would be painful, but we're already bleeding.
If it's so unprofitable why have they spent, what, nearly a year now in court trying desperately to keep it? Have you genuinely never heard of a loss-leader?
Across their entire buffet of products, many of which are free at point of use like Chrome is, they advertise Chrome. That the internet is better with Chrome. That their products are better with Chrome. Do you really believe this is genuinely just because they also make Chrome, and are jazzed about that fact?
The fact that they're working so hard to keep it tells me it's an even better idea to make them sell it.
So many problems would be solved if the selling of data about people was regulated to a degree that it ceased to be profitable. Many "free" things would go away, but none of those are actually free, the price is just hidden.
Look at what Google does with Chrome and how it harms the internet, they literally just disabled an ad blocker and then offered a new tier of ad free Youtube for $8 a month.
Then think about the power it gives them for tracking, remember they tried to replace tracking cookies with their own standard?