The userbase and trademark are both very valuable. I'm guessing it would also come with some controlling positions in the chromium open source project, since those are mostly held by google by being the biggest developer and user of the project.
Good question. Chrome itself isn't a standalone business, the money generated through Chrome still primarily comes from Ads. The hardware tied to Chromebooks generates some revenue, but even ChromeOS is essentially free. They generate a tiny amount of revenue selling ChromeOS management tools in Workspace. Why not spin off an actual revenue driver like YouTube?
Logged-in Chrome users are tied to Google logins. The mind boggles at the complexity of trying to somehow separate Chrome identities from Google identities, much less explain that to the general populace for whom "Google", "Chrome" and "browse the Internet" are largely interchangeable.
No boggling required. If you want to sync your browser state or settings across computers, make a Chrome account. If you don’t, don’t. If you want to use Google, make a Google account.
We had this for ~20 years. It wasn't mind-boggling complex. On the contrary, it was much simpler: you didn't have to "log in" to a piece of software that ran on a computer you owned under a user account you already logged into.
You don't HAVE to login unless you want to share your passwords, history, bookmarks etc. between your devices. Simpler = not having those features (which most users seemingly find useful).
Presumably yes. I haven't seen any evidence to the contrary.
> and just back up my own bookmarks
Nothing wrong about that. But again.. most people don't find that to be very convenient (I'd actually bet money that that there are is magnitude or a few times more people using Safari/Chrome/etc. to sync their data automatically instead of doing it manually).
There is no value to logging into chrome with a Google account that couldn't be replicated easily with some standalone service. The fact they added google logins to Chrome still bugs me.
probably not going to be a popular take on this forum, but to me it looks like anti trust and securities laws are enforced almost randomly. Is Google a monopoly using its control to limit competition - yes but so is pretty much all of FANG and many successful businesses for that matter.
Anti trust activities are not about any one act (such as routing browsers to your site), it's more about whether the fates choose your company to end up in the DOJs roulette wheel.
This is a bad/uninformed take. The OP is about one particular anti-trust trial that ended already (with Google losing), and is in the remedies phase. The DOJ and FTC have been suing a lot of other companies over anti-trust, including the other big tech companies. Some of those are still ongoing, some haven't started yet, some have already ended.
I think the distinction is that the new Chrome company wouldn't be a "monopolist". If Chrome was a separate company and did exactly the same as Google is doing currently, there might be no problem. It's when a company "abuses" its market position to enter/capture/distort another market (or maintain the original market) is when in theory regulators have an issue. For example, free software is allowed, but when Microsoft used its dominance in the OS market to push a free browser on the world at the detriment to Netscape, regulators took issue.
The issue is that Google's dominance of the search/ad business is distorting the browser market.
This is my take, anyways (I'm not a lawyer or American).
But the DOJ wouldn't take it away. The parent comment describes exactly what the DOJ's desired outcome looks like. That's what will happen if the DOJ gets their way. It's the only possible outcome. The people praising the DOJ's decision don't understand just how stupid it is.