Another great article from 404 Media highlighting the power that the tech giants have amassed over how how we use the internet.
This brings me, I think, to the elephant in the room, which is the fact that Google has its hands on quite literally every aspect of this entire saga as a vertically integrated adtech giant.
This extreme power over the adtech and online advertising ecosystem is one of the subjects of an FTC antitrust suit against Google.
Imo this extends to chromium too. Google owns the source code and can pull it whenever they want. Sure, chromium browsers might be able to putter along for a little bit, but my understanding is that the reason why we’re now at Chrome/Chromium vs Firefox vs Safari is because Google shits out so many new “”“standards”“” and “features” that you need a large team to keep up. It’s supposedly why browsers like Opera switched to using chromium instead of trying to maintain their own source code.
This is a feature, not a bug.