> With the caveat that I'm not a lawyer, that seems like "we gave away the source code to this engine" might still count as abusing market dominance in one domain (browser) to support another (ads)?

There has to be a link. How does one influence the other?

I don't think "making sure that non-crappy web browsers exist" is enough.

There doesn’t have to be a link… there has to be a competitive market. Giving away something that someone else sells can be anti-competitive, in certain situations. For example, if the goal of Google with V8 is to create a JS engine monopoly so that they could then start charging for it — that would be anti-competitive.

If there were calls for V8 to be considered a monopoly, you’d first have to prove that there are viable competitors available and they were being harmed. And particularly — was that harm impacting consumers. Anti trust only gets involved when consumers are being harmed (usually though higher prices or lack of choice).

SpiderMonkey exists and is pretty viable for many use-cases. But, the open source nature of V8 makes it hard to argue that it was really a monopoly. If Google did anything anti-competitive in V8, other developers are free to fork it, revert the change, and distribute that version.

For that I would ask — rhetorically because I don't know the answer — what convinced Google to develop and advertise Chrome in the first place given that by Firefox already existed.

And why they went further and made the core open source: every time I've been around the "we should open source $foo" conversation, the managers have asked, essentially "what's in it for us?"

> And why they went further and made the core open source

Worth noting that Blink is a fork of Webkit, which is a fork of KHTML, which is LGPL-licensed. The engine was always open-source, there was no Google business decision to make the engine open source.

> what convinced Google to develop and advertise Chrome in the first place given that by Firefox already existed

Firefox wasn't so great back then. Google survives by the Web being great. A free, premiere browser experience means people use the Web.

> every time I've been around the "we should open source $foo" conversation, the managers have asked, essentially "what's in it for us?"

Google overflows with money, so P&L enforcement likely isn't so evident, and they might've just had some engineers saying they wanted to do it that way, and the person with approval power was probably also an engineer.

Firefox was amazing by the time Chrome was released. Google survives by selling advertisements, essentially making the web worse.

> Google survives by selling advertisements, essentially making the web worse.

This seems entirely subjective. I prefer using Lichess to Chess.com, but I would in no way think that Chess.com, with its sponsoring of full-time players, makes the game worse. Advertising-related money goes somewhere and pays for things.

"Firefox was amazing by the time Chrome was released"

Yes but it also frequently ground to a halt trying to multitask tabs. Chrome didn't so we all switched to chrome.

> rhetorically because I don't know the answer

If you have time to edit your comment: there’s a “not” missing (“not rhetorically”)