Microsoft just did whatever they wanted with the web "platform", and so will Google.
In Microsoft's case what they wanted was nothing. They weren't a web business, saw it as a threat to their platform leverage, and so just left it abandoned and stagnant for years.
Google is simultaneously better and worse: they won't leave it stagnant because the web is their platform, but on the other hand they have a lot more to gain by abusing control of it.
We already have a number of Chromium based browsers that go against some of Google's most fundamental interests (e.g Brave).
Costs matter, and Web development costs are high. Google benefits from coordination, funding, and one migh presume, cost advantages, which would be exceedingly difficult for any comparable US or EU effort to match.
Development in lower-cost-of-living regions, perhaps most viably China, might pose an alternative.
Open source is that option. The economics of starting from scratch vs starting from Chromium's latest commit are fundamentally different.
I'm not saying that it's easy, only that it is not remotely comparable to the IE situation.
MSIE was bypassed not by a code fork of MSIE (itself originally based on the Spyglass browser, which was a fork of the NSCA's Mosaic codebase), but by independent implementations of an HTML-standard parser. Microsoft had some influence over Web development (noteably through ActiveX) but far less than Google has now.
My point is that Open Source of itself is not sufficient, and moreover simply is not viable. Glibly asserting that it is ... is utterly unrealistic.
Though the alternative of forking a Web-like markup and transport, as Gemini is attempting to do, is one option. For other technologies which have become sufficiently baroque, similar worse-is-better alternate paths have been pursued.
Otherwise, this is an antitrust issue, and Google very badly need busting.
And I didn't claim that it was. My point was merely that Chromium being open source changes the equation pretty fundamentally compared to the IE situation.
Whether it's enough to make a Chromium monopoly consistent with an open web, I really don't know. There are very good reasons to be sceptical.
So you’re not claiming open source is sufficient but you are seemingly defending it is a better situation.
While I and some other commenters are signaling we don’t think the situation is better.
To me the fundamental part of the equation is outsized power and influence. Being open source or not is part of the equation, but not as close to as fundamental as the core issues with this. This is made much much worse now than 20 years ago with the costs to get your own browser going so much higher. Which leads back to the outsized power being the fundamental issue.
Open source can even be argued to be a benefit to Google retaining power. Having enough attention diverted to the possibilities of open source when Google has only monumentally gained from open source with paltry benefits that are usually brought up as defenses against its power. Like AOSP mattering because China doesn’t use Google’s Android and some other irrelevant projects.
Any fundamental differences so far are giving Google and any other major central powers more power.
It is very permissively licensed, and Microsoft’s Edge is so successful and Microsoft is contributing a ton upstream. In a few years time they will have de-facto equal say over where the codebase goes. If Google disagrees too much, we will in fact see a fork.