The US v. Google antitrust case may be frustratingly shrouded in secrecy, but occasionally we get some fun nuggets. The quote above comes from an internal email sent by Google’s Jim Kolotouros, VP of Android Platform Partnerships. “Chrome exists to serve Google search,” he writes. “If it cannot do that because it is regulated to be set by the user, the value of users using Chrome goes to almost zero (for me).”
I’m not sure why this is supposedly either surprising or malevolent. Google spends a significant amount of money on developing Chrome and then gives it away for free; clearly they must be making money off of it in some other way. Their usual approach to making money off of things they provide for free is to show the users ads, and defaulting to Google search is how Chrome does that. I don’t think this is any different from saying that YouTube or Gmail exist to serve Google’s ad business (which they clearly do).
What’s funny to me is that I’ve heard of companies that really do provide a free version of their product without ads or any other way to make money off of it directly. Their goal is to protect their enterprise version of the software (which is not free) by reducing people’s motivation to make an open-source competitor. I could see Google maintaining Chrome without their search engine as the default in order to prevent someone else from creating a popular browser which does have a default search engine that isn’t Google’s, but that actually seems more anti-competitive…
I think your second half is bang on the nail for the missing part of this story. It is not just to drive search directly, it is also to control the browser market long term.
That’s what Microsoft did very successfully with Internet Explorer too. They have it away for free and bundled it with Windows, killing all competition and then used that to leverage MSN. They also didn’t follow standards and through market dominance shaped the internet.
Google sort of follows standards but they have also forced through proprietary standards or have broken code which is why some websites don’t work well in Firefox or Safari even now.
Chromium may be open source but it is a tool used by Google to control and dominate the internet.
Apple is exactly the same with WebKit - they talk about privacy and security but the real motivation is surpressong alternate routes to the internet from their devices whic then keeps iron control over payment methods particularly in iOS. Yet people in the apple eco system buy into the narrative that the one piece of software you’re not allowed in iOS is a non apple web browser, as if that is an acceptable approach. It’s just another manifestation of anti competitive behaviour and the power and money you can get by “free” software.
To be fair, with Apple it’s kind of both. Because they make a large chunk of their gazillions off hardware, they can make privacy part of their platform and mean it.
Whereas with Google, trolling your private information to sell you more stuff is all they are, and everything else serves this.
It may not be perfect, but in my opinion it’s ok to view the former as a better option than the latter. If convenience and integration are also important to you.
it really frustrates me how Apple stole Konqueror from KDE and branded it as safari and now treats it like its own browser that’s supposedly more private than the open source work it’s based on