This is a good take. Also hints at why Peter Thiel's thesis on tech monopolies in a dynamic world is correct; i.e. that they aren't necessarily bad. A lot of the value in big tech comes from scale and integration and is inherently not sensible to have a thousand mom and pop shops do it and keep the same value. To the extent that Google is doing anything nefarious as a monopoly with integration, any other company who is willing to value Chrome at any significant price is inevitably going to need a scaled product to tie this to and accomplish what Google did with Chrome. They cannot pull this off on their own even though the open-source Chromium exists, because Google is actually better than them at maintaining a browser ecosystem. I am certain they will do a worse job at owning Chrome, especially considering Google has shown a good faith effort in shipping a browser and keeping the engine open source.

Ironically, this whole saga is happening at the same time the "Google search business is under attack" is at its peak in the news media.

Yes this is a strange rumor.

Firstly, Chrome without Google is Chromium. So are we considering that they sell off Chrome, or Chromium? I can't see how Google sells off Chrome and remains Google.

It seems a bit absurd for Google to sell off Chromium and then some other tech giant gets to "own a F/OSS project". I mean, yeah, you own a browser but everybody else is still downstream, including Microsoft, and contributions are open-source, so what do you really own?

If we're really talking about Google selling Chrome itself, then what good is that? Anyone else owning Chrome wouldn't make it the same. Google users rely on Chrome to use Google! Like, that's how I sign in -- through the browser -- and use Workspaces -- through the browser -- and so many other webapps, such as Photos or Contacts or Calendar. And here we've got ChromeOS and Chromebooks widely deployed. That's Chrome too. How to separate Chrome from the Goog? Are you proposing a breakup like the Baby Bells or something?

It's nearly absurd at this point to separate Google from their Chrome. It would be like telling them they can't have Android. But like, that's simply a layer in their tapestry of services. You're going to pull on that thread for what reason?

The article ignores Firefox switched the contract to Yahoo as the default search provider from 2014-2017, in complete absence of any requirement to do so. Even if everyone did keep using Google, having Chrome be funded externally through search revenue rather than internally still frees the browser from a lot of over-alignment with other Google desires (e.g. ad blocking, ad APIs, promoting of the Google browser on unrelated Google services).

All that aside, the article doesn't really make much of an argument as to why 3 billion current users shouldn't be worth lots of money to someone wanting to try to monetize (even if the author doesn't see a good monetization opportunity). It, instead, focuses on why the Google integrations Chrome had are what made it popular. One of the biggest differences between Google selling Chrome and any old chromium fork is precisely that the "other" browsers no longer have to try to compete with Google's own browser to get users to monetize.

I agree with the article that it’s difficult. What if Google was still allowed to distribute their apps via embedded Chromium, but were not allowed to ship the Chrome derivative as a full-fledged browser?

That may still leave them some incentive to participate in its development since many of their web apps are optimized against Chromium, but they are not allowed the business advantage of the technology as it exists today.

The would-be acquirer, I guess, would be forbidden from duplicating the business model. The logical question is, well how would that acquirer make any money?

My hunch is that Chrome would just become a dead brand and the browser engine could live on as an embeddable technology. That still might provide value to a would-be owner, but they would make their money off of products making good use of the browser engine and not the engine itself.

Having a world class browser engine is valuable to application development still. It has core value, just not as a vehicle for making money in a standalone way.

Maybe it’s hard to make sense of because monetizing a browser directly is, and arguably always has been, kind of… stupid.

The answer might be found to looking at something like Deno Deploy. They realistically can’t monetize the language/runtime because it doesn’t make any sense. They capture commercial value by offering to run your code in a seamless way.

I don’t know. Maybe an AI company is a decent fit - they can run it as an agent/scraping service and make money that way. An automotive company could buy it and sell an optimized version for Infotainment systems for other car manufacturers as well. There’s money to be made off of selling it as a platform, but probably not as an Internet browser.

I’m sure Google itself could have thought of a billion other ways to make money off it but they were just too lazy to dream it up because it wasn’t aligned to their core business.

IMO the value is in the user base (imagine switching 3 billion people to ChatGPT overnight) and I don't understand why Gruber says the users can't be sold.