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.
I don’t think they are. That fork then immediately finds itself in the same position as other engines, where now the fork is going to need to keep up with whatever Google is adding to Chromium.
You might then think, “Then the fork can just pull from upstream.”
Okay, so then:
a) Your fork probably isn’t differentiated enough to matter; and more importantly
b) Google is still effectively calling all the shots!
Even more so the fact that Brave was able to build an alternative ad network on top of Chromium.
Call me when a Chromium fork displaces Chromium.
You wrote:
> The fact that both Brave and Vivaldi were able to disable Google's FlOC within a very short period of time
Okay, they disabled some stuff. That isn’t a fundamental divergence from the upstream project.
The original argument was that Google wouldn’t control the web in a Chromium monoculture because anybody can just fork it.
I disagree. My argument has two prongs:
1. A Chromium fork can only sever itself from Google’s control if it is not taking patches from upstream (ie, Google). I’m particularly thinking about the most consequential pieces: web APIs, not Google ad tech. That’s going to require an army of developers who now are immediately thrust onto the web API treadmill.
2. If a Chromium fork’s market share is tiny, how is it going to displace Google’s influence on the direction of the web? It isn’t. Everybody will still be coding against Google’s Chromium.
Because market share can change. Its a statement of the past when we are talking about the future.
Put another way, would Google have had an easier time building Chrome and Chromium if IE had been 100% open source when Chrome was started?
Remember, it wasn't that long ago that IE dominated, and MS still has many of the same advantages now that they had back then.