Google is battling it out with the United States Department of Justice currently. If things go really bad for Google, the company could be forced to sell its web browser Google Chrome or make other changes to its business.
Plenty of companies announced interest in Google Chrome already. Perplexity made a bid, Yahoo is eying the acquisition, and now it is Ecosia that also made a suggestion, according to TechCrunch.
Ecosia is a non-profit organization that is probably best known for its search engine. It is free to use and will spend its earnings on planting trees.
Unlike Perplexity, which bid $34.5 billion in cash, Ecosia is suggesting that it is getting control of Google Chrome for free. Google would retain ownership and the rights to Chrome under the proposal. Google Search would remain the standard search engine and Google would keep all intellectual properties. Ecosia would gain operational control of Chrome and development of the browser in that time.
The non-profit suggests a revenue split furthermore, with 40% of the earnings going to Google. The remaining 60% would be spend on climate projects that align with Ecosia’s general mission.
While Ecosia’s proposal may be a long shot, it would ensure that Google retains all rights and gets constant revenue from the browser.
However, whether Google will indeed be forced to sell Chrome or split it in some way from the company remains to be seen. Until then, it seems highly unlikely that Google will react to any of the offers made or comment on the offers publicly.
With these hippies in charge, Chrome will be in the grave in no time. But maybe that is a great thing.
Ecosia, in my view nourished by my experience of this search engine, is a joke. For the time being it relies on Bing for its images, videos and news search results, opens Google Maps for location queries when it could, accordingly to what seems to be its “philosophy” call Openstreetmap instead. Not only does it call Bing servers but it calls them non-proxyfied (the connection is from the user’s device, not from Ecosia, hence another scratch to privacy).
If Ecosia is a joke, its weird offer is as well and I can easily imagine a hurricane of laughs over at Google headquarters.
Ecosia is currently in the process of joining forces with Qwant and working on their own web crawler together. A browser with millions of customers already attached would be a boon for them.
The offer is weird, but it makes me think of the current agreement between Google and Firefox which is even less financially beneficial for Google.