I can make up numbers too!
Chrome shouldn’t be worth more than an IMAP client. If it is, then the web should be torn down and built anew.
IMAP is an incredibly simple protocol compared to the sum of all the protocols that are needed to implement a web browser.
A web browser also has to be way more performant.
Both an IMAP client and a web browser have to be reliable and secure. However achieving so in a system as complex as a web browser is incredibly expensive.
Web browsers are almost as complex as operating systems.
Complexity, performance, reliability and security on that level are expensive. You would be delusional to think a web browser should be worth as much as an IMAP client.
You would be delusional to think a web browser should be worth as much as an IMAP client.
This is a problem with web browsers and that set of protocols, not with my comparison.
You still ultimately run networked sandboxed applications in a web browser and view hypertext, it’s an unholy hybrid between two things that should be separated.
And it was so 20 years ago.
For the former Java applets and Flash were used a lot, as everyone remembers. The idea of a plugin was good. The reality was kinda not so much because of security and Flash being proprietary, but still better than today. For the latter no, you don’t need something radically more complex than an IMAP client.
I think Sun and Netscape etc made a mistake with JavaScript. Should have made plugins the main way to script pages.
IMAP
Speaking of something that needs tearing down and building anew, email is a good candidate for that.
Speaking of such things, an email client or an email server are never as monopolistic as Chrome.
So maybe email is a good candidate for something that should be torn down and built anew right after the Web.
Also email doesn’t have to be destroyed entirely, it’s very modular.
Where they had UUCP paths, and now have addresses in some services, just need to have John Doe <3cec7f8c438fa578dbd3a1557b822df469490a12>, with 3cec7f8c438fa578dbd3a1557b822df469490a12 being a hash of “johndoe” here and a hash of his pubkey in reality, and his pubkey can be retrieved from some public directory.
And have the letter signed by it (and encrypted possibly, though this of course would hurt server-side solutions of spam problem).
Frankly they can have a common replacement, in my humble opinion. When separating identities from servers, one can do the same with websites. How is a newsgroup fundamentally different from a replicated website collaboratively edited? If a letter can have a universal identifier, what prevents one to put a hyperlink to it? If we need scripts, what prevents us from having them in a letter’s content? If we need to reach a server by hostname and IP, what prevents us from doing just that from a letter, just the letter being the primary point of entry?
I just think that the old “vector hypertext Fidonet” joke is not so dumb, if you think what it could literally mean.
That’s how you get monetized spying enshittified email. Do you want monetized spying enshittified email?
Like Gmail?
Is that different from the unencrypted email we have now that is 99% spam and the other 99% are delivery problems due to anti-spam technologies?
Ah yes, the most original article headline:
<thing stated as a fact>
<oh NVM its just something someone said>
All business and product valuations are basically guesstimates
Not all of them, some are averages of many people’s guesstimates.
Chrome is worth $49 Billion, this asshole on the internet guesstimates.
Given the core of the product is open source (see chromium) I find it really hard to believe that the brand is worth that. Google could sell it for an amount and release Android Internet and it will do almost exactly the same thing. And users I suspect won’t care. Google needs broken up for sure, but the browser brand makes little sense to me being separate
Well, the relationship between Chrome and Chromium in this situation is… interesting and a big question mark.
Presumably whoever owns Chrome will by default have a remarkable amount of influence on the ongoing direction of Chromium, just by way of having a massive dominant position over the market overnight. Chrome is not just plain Chromium as it is.
Given that the sale of Chrome would be fundamentally a regulatory constraint it’s also a given that Google would not immediately attempt to re-enter that market (or if they did that they would get a swift spanking all over again).
So yeah, Chrome is probably valuable. How well you can monetize it decoupled from Google’s advertising business proably depends heavily on who you are. Meta or Microsoft could do that very well, but then they’d be in the same regulatory danger zone Google is. DDG, Brave, Opera or Mozilla would definitely benefit but probably wouldn’t be able to afford it.
Because we’re on this timeline the more likely outcome is Elon Musk buys it and we go into another round of seeing the shambling, zombified corpse of a thing stumble forward for years while shedding fascist propaganda. I’m trying to decide if Bezos buying it puts us in the regulation danger zone scenario or the shambling fascist zombie scenario. Both?
It’s not only about the brand, it’s about the installed base. You have hundreds of millions (billion plus?) of users who use your application every day for a wide variety of tasks.
And if you start fucking with them then they will all go to Google’s new browser. Just like the old one. Not all, but you get the picture. Chrome isn’t worth $50bn to anyone but Google
That is a possibility.
However, I think in this particular case, the DDG CEO is better qualified than me or you to evaluate the value of Chrome. I can’t think of any reason for Weinberg to promote an inflated valuation for Chrome.
CEOs are weird. DDG might be a privacy champion but it is still a for profit company. Meaning Weinberg wants to make bucks too. If Chrome is worth $50bn what does that make ddg worth? If Google get slapped with an anti-trust and forced to break up, who might benefit from the big bucks that might be floating around? And ever noticed how CEOs tend to fail up? Fluffing google is a nice advert for the next head of google search here.
Show me monetisation strategies, and hence value per user for the installed base if you want to claim that kinda figures imo
I agree with you, I may be even more cynical than you with respect to senior executives’ public statements and corporate PR.
I just don’t see a clear motive for the DDG CEO to inflate the valuation of Chrome. The examples you cite seem a bit far fetched (to me), I could be wrong of course.
I am opposite to this.
Present day Google IS chrome and as much as i am disgusted by them and want them broken up forcing a sale of chrome does not make sense and could actually spiral into the collapse of the company. (Don’t threaten me with a good time)
All internet platforms want a… well platform to have users on. An interface/environment that in its most profitable form can be plastered with ads.
For the google of old this used to be its search engine website.
But it sucks now, the web has kept growing and most people only need a different tiny fraction of it.
Yes its dominant, but its getting increasingly bad and will get increasingly useless as we start using smarter ai to filter (not re-generate) the web to our needs.
This is why openai wants to buy chrome, they want to replace all that google was with themselves.
Google also have their workspace platforms but there are no standalone apps. They are inherently designed for in browser use.
All of this means it makes a lot of sense they have a clear incentive to want to control the browser. Because its the frame that contains almost everything they do.
Compare that with microsoft, who owns the majority of operating systems, the entire office platform, and is also still competing with a search engine. And they still get to integrate edge like a glue no one asked for?
Burn both these corpos but the logic applied here makes no sense.
I am purposely ignoring all the other projects, robotics, Because honestly half of them never get to product and they don’t really effect the identity of theirs business as much.
If anything it would make more to sell these other projects like autonomous cars, you know they are just going to try take over taxi services first and delivery services second if they get to keep that.
Only if they monetise the hell out of it and sell people’s data.
Of the companies that might buy Chrome, I hope DuckDuckGo gets it.
I hope no one gets it. It should be its own separate company.
*It’s should be its own separate non-profit.
FTFY
Interesting definition of “fixed”.
Exactly, I don’t understand why so few articles covering the trial suggest Chrome going independent as an option.
I’d say nationalize it, but considering the “nation” in question, maybe extremely not that?
Because the articles are written by capitalists for capitalists to manufacture consent for capitalism. Of fucking course they’re going to downplay or ignore the Free Software/non-profit aspect of it!
Weinberg described his estimate as a “back-of-the-envelope” calculation, based on Chrome’s vast user base and global reach – a figure that far exceeds previous estimates, such as the $20 billion valuation offered by Bloomberg analyst Mandeep Singh last November. Weinberg added that such a price tag would be well beyond DuckDuckGo’s financial capabilities, remarking, “That’s out of DuckDuckGo’s price range.”
