Nothing about this needed to be a browser. It exists because getting the web dependent on Google products wasn't enough — ads, single sign-on, video hosting, AMP, search. They want to supplant it entirely, transforming the user experience from interaction with many Google-dependent entities into a monogamous relationship with a single entity: Google.
This is the culmination of the fragile "partnership" arc between the open web and Big Tech: fattened up with fast-tracked non-standard technologies and subsidized services, bastardized with ads, strip-mined by AI, and discarded in favor of this everything app, promising you an imitation of nearly every stolen work, with a minimal reduction in resolution and quality.
And when the web becomes superfluous even as a vehicle for extraction, what will happen next? ISPs serving only Google's IP range, with maybe Amazon and Microsoft included in the plan? Cheap consumer devices remotely attested to reject all non-Google software — Chrome and Google Play (even with developer attestation) deprecated as loopholes to arbitrary code execution. You will enjoy your Paramount-licensed AI-generated movies by Google, learn with an interactive GooglePedia that now only makes up facts 30% of the time, and "code" with Google Gemini, without access to even the shell inside its container — for your safety.
It doesn't even have to be significantly profitable. This plan could quarter Google's global revenue and they'll still see it through. They want to alienate you from computing, from art, from other people, because then you'll be a more submissive consumer. The end goal is the elimination of human culture as a threat to the oligopoly.
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