In the related submission on this topic [1], the author makes this argument in a lot more detail, that it's essentially impossible to make a Linux fork sustainable without massive investment that no one can realistically obtain.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43036904

I’m not sure why this would be true, unless you’re willing to cut back significantly on features. Google already spends quite a bit of effort on performance improvements, and most manufacturers aren’t exactly known for being able to produce high-quality software.

There have been a couple projects that have tried to make phones based on pure Linux (Librem, Pinephone). Their performance is limited a lot by not having good CPU options, but it doesn’t seem like they’ve been able to achieve much performance improvement on the software side either.

> To determine if Stripe Connect is available where you are, could you let me know your country? If you prefer, I can also look up Stripe's support availability based on the country linked to your query.

[me] yes, do that

> Yes, Stripe Connect is available in [my country], including [my city].

I agree that if Google was paying a browser for something other than default search placement, that would likely fall outside the scope of the proposal. But historically, default placement = traffic, and is also the only leverage the browsers have - ie if Google wasn't the default, Google would only get users who explicitly selected it, and if Google knows all of their users are actively selecting them already, they have no reason to pay extra for that traffic.

API access seems like a good alternative way for Google to monetize, but it doesn't solve the problem of providing funding for browsers (except in your case, since you're combining a search engine and browser in one company). Or am I missing something?

Chrome/Firefox/Safari all cost hundreds of millions of dollars a year to maintain. Currently, Safari and Firefox both make essentially all their revenue through default search agreements. Chrome, Edge, and now Brave are produced by companies that also own the search engines, so they're essentially a loss-generating product, that exist because they cancel out distribution costs that Google and Microsoft would otherwise have to pay other browsers.

But the DOJ order is also asking to ban payments between search engines and browser makers: > As detailed in Section IV, the PFJ prohibits Google from providing third parties something of value (including financial payments) in order to make Google the default general search engine or otherwise discouraging those third parties from offering competing search products

With that revenue gone, the only real options to fund a browser are:

* Directly charge users for it. This is effectively a non-starter, because the vast majority of people aren't willing to pay for it.

* Insert ads or sell user data - users also hate this, it's probably not legal in the EU, and it may not be legal in most of the US in the future either.

* Use the browser as a platform to push some product that does make money - a non-Google search engine? A social network? An LLM interface?

Alternatively, a narrow reading of the proposed order is that this only applies to Google. In that case, perhaps Bing or OpenAI takes over all the distribution agreements and becomes the top search engine. Whether that's better for consumers seems fairly questionable.

> As set forth in Section IV, the PFJ prohibits Google from offering Apple anything of value for any form of default, placement, or preinstallation distribution (including choice screens) related to general search or a search access point.

[1] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.223...

Sure, you can look at all the words on the package and ingredients and figure out if something probably contains allergens, but the point of the rule is that it gives you one standardized line of text that you can read and be 100% certain whether something is safe for you to eat or not.

A bunch of the larger / better-funded systems are also moving to just accepting credit cards directly on the readers, which is even easier.

Cloudflare used to do (or maybe still does?) this with their free certificates as well.

> Please don't do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or exclamation points, or saying how great an article is. It's implicit in submitting something that you think it's important.

Obviously more supply is an important part of this too though.

I lived in Birmingham for a while (admittedly not in the downtown), and this was not my experience at all, nor have I ever heard this from anyone else I knew, including people that did live downtown. Obviously, there are better and worse areas like everywhere else, but most of the city is basically fine IMO.