Google gained control of the web by populating the world with Chrome/Chromium and wants to strong arm the web as a whole through it. Climbing the ladder and pulling it up from underneath them, with their fisted approach to Manifest V3 the beginning salvo.

For Google it’s just another day in the office.

Wikipedia has done well for itself using donation runs and grassroots support, so if there are ways for instances to do similar the decentralized nature of this will work out ok.

Elsewhere the issue is many of these large services have grown to the size of effectively being a public good, but good luck maintaining a public good in a profit generating way as a private company seeking the next quarter’s growth.

Being “open source” seems to be lead people to think it is altruistic or good for the community as a whole.

Being open source is really just a categorization. A fully for profit organization can make something valuable open source and then leverage that for commercial reasons (like building highly monetized additional code on top).

It is in Google’s best interests for Chromium to dominate the web even if it is open source due to Chrome’s broad reach and Google’s heavy leverage of the web for revenue, like its ad services.

It is shortsighted to see what is happening and then go “well I don’t see a problem”.