Google Kinda Gives Chromium Away Because… Antitrust

From where we sit, Google’s “giveaway” of its open source Chromium assets is basically a ruse to convince the feds that the company isn’t an intentional monopolist… or that if it was, it’s changed its ways.

Many aspects of the Linux Foundation’s latest new project, Supporters of Chromium-Based Browsers are convoluted, starting with its name. However, despite Google’s unstated agenda, this move benefits both open source in general and browser developers in particular.

Announced on Thursday, the new project’s purpose is to fund development and maintenance of the Chromium code base, and says that the project will benefit “industry leaders, academia, developers, and the broader open source community.”

“With the launch of the Supporters of Chromium-Based Browsers, we are taking another step forward in empowering the open source community,” Jim Zemlin, the executive director of the Linux Foundation said in a statement. This is basically what Zemlin says about any Linux Foundation project, and in this case it’s pretty much true, at least from the perspective of the Linux Foundation.

“This project will provide much-needed funding and development support for open development of projects within the Chromium ecosystem,” he added, which is also true, but with something of a spin for Google’s benefit.

Chromium, of course, is the software behind Google’s Chrome browser — the most used browser on the planet — as well as the base of practically all other browsers that aren’t Firefox or Safari. Well, actually Safari is based on Chrome in a way. It’s based on WebKit, while Chrome is based on Blink — which is also based on WebKit.

Although vanilla Chromium and Chrome are a lot alike, they’re not one and the same. For starters, by default Chromium isn’t integrated into Google services (which some might considered a selling point) and doesn’t ship with automatic update capabilities. In addition, Chromium is missing codecs for H.264 video and AAC audio formats, which aren’t free for commercial use, and is missing Google’s Widevine DRM module.

The Chromium Developer Community

Even though Google pretty much owns Chromium’s code, there’s already a large number of projects using it — and contributing code upstream.

Unless you default to Firefox, chances are you’re using a Chromium-based browser. Just about every Linux distro offers an open source browser using Chromium’s name and code, for example; and KDE’s Konqueror browser, by way of the QtWebEngine, is ultimately Chrome-based; as is GNOME Web, in a roundabout way that eventually takes it through WebKit.

There’s no shortage of commercial browsers with exposed Chromium/Chrome roots either.

Vivaldi is basically Chromium in a proprietary wrapper that brings a lot of added features to the table. Brave, another browser offering features that vanilla Chromium does not, is totally open source, but mixed with more cryptocurrency propaganda than some people can comfortably ignore. Opera, currently owned by a China-based company but which was started by the same people that currently develop Vivaldi, is also in the Chromium camp. Its browser originally ran on its own proprietary Presto layout engine, but switched to Chromium in 2013.

As already indicated, and germane to this story: Mozilla’s Firefox browser isn’t based on Chrome or WebKit, but does depend on a river of cash from Google to survive, and that river is probably about to dry up. Payments from Google to make it Firefox’s default search engine have amounted to something like $400 million annually for the last several years. That’s not as much as you think it is. It pays Apple multiple billions for the same purpose.

What the New Project Is Supporting

Chromium has been open source from its beginning in 2008, licensed under the BSD 3-clause license, but for the first 12 years Google kept the code completely under it’s control. It could be used, modified, and distributed, but no changes could be sent upstream, and users had no input into the directions the project was taking. This changed in 2020, when Google opened the door and allowed outside developers to contribute to the project for the first time.

In many ways, the new project is only a logical next step. In its announcement on Thursday, the foundation said, “Supporters of Chromium-Based Browsers will provide a neutral space where industry leaders, academia, developers, and the broader open source community can work together to support projects within the Chromium ecosystem.”

According to the Linux Foundation, existing Chromium projects will remain under their current governance structures, and only new Supporters of Chromium-Based Browsers projects will be housed under the Linux Foundation’s umbrella.

The foundation also offered a short list of companies that have donated funds to kick-start this project. In addition to Google, they include Opera, Meta, and Microsoft.

“As one of the major browsers contributing to the Chromium project, Opera is pleased to join the Supporters of Chromium-Based Browsers and to lend our efforts towards the development of the open-source ecosystem,” said Opera’s EVP of browsers, Krystian Kolondra. “We look forward to collaborating with members of the project to foster this growth and to keep building innovative and compelling products for all users.”

What Google Has at Stake

This is where it starts to get convoluted and agenda ridden, because I’ll guarantee you that Google’s not kicking in some bucks — and likely giving up a considerable amount of control over a project — out of a sense of altruism. Forming Supporters of Chromium-Based Browsers as a Linux Foundation project is a page out of Google’s playbook for dealing with the Justice Department’s antitrust actions against it, which in August resulted in Google being ruled to be a monopolist by U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta, which immediately opened the door to a potential breakup of Google into smaller companies.

As a result of that ruling, in November the Justice Department asked the judge to level the playing field in the internet search arena that Google dominates, by ordering Google to sell its Chrome Browser, and maybe even its Android mobile operating system. In addition, the DOJ wants the court to force Google to stop paying makers of competing browsers — Firefox, for instance — to make Google their default search engine.

Google’s response in December was to recommend something much less heavy-handed. In its opinion, instead of breaking up the company, all the court needs to do to level the playing field is to regulate the distribution deals it makes with browsers, mobile device makers, and wireless carriers. Google’s recommendation also wouldn’t end revenue sharing — the practice of giving browser developers a cut of the money it makes for searches from their browsers — which is what’s been keeping Mozilla rolling in clover, even with a user share of 3% and falling.

Judge Mehta is expected to make a ruling as early as April, although Google has already indicated that it’ll file an appeal no matter what the outcome.

It doesn’t take much of a rocket scientist to see that Google’s latest move is a play to appear to be supporting competition in an attempt to keep the feds from doing too much damage to Google’s $175 billion search business.

It’s interesting that Microsoft and Meta are both contributors to this project, since both companies are facing antitrust actions of their own.

“This initiative aligns with our commitment to the web platform through meaningful and positive contributions, engagement in collaborative engineering, and partnerships with the community to achieve the best outcome for everyone using the web,” Meghan Perez, the VP of Microsoft Edge said in a statement.