Short term no. Langer term they would use it to leverage other things like Google does. Maybe not advertising, although they do seem to be leaning on that now with ads in software.

Thinking about what companies have the adtech infrastructure to buy Chrome and make enough money the justify a bid high enough than Google just shutting it down: Microsoft, Meta/Facebook, Bytedance?

I don't see a real need for Chrome. The stuff they've done to break Adblocking makes it pretty much a dead project today. Web browser development should be open source and not for profit. There is a fair argument that it has been because of Google's funding. There's a strong argument that Chrome has existed to further Google's business and at a minimum protect it's business and ensure third parties didn't hijack all of their PPC revenue in the early days.

It is easy to foresee an outcome here where someone politically connected gets a hold of Chrome and does a lot of crap they shouldn't. The worst case outcome is unrelated to any of this, and something where we end up with government mandated garbage in a web browser. It is very possible that DRM and biometric age verification, and who the fuck knows what else thanks to AI, could be required either by the US or EU, and kill the open source web browser. That's worse than anything Google did.

This is just handing over a dominant market to another company that has already been sued for anti competitive practices in the exact same space.

Make it make sense

Would love if that also meant no more shovelware features to try and distinguish Edge from Chrome.

Why won't selling data fly?

Why not sell premium features?

Why not add affiliate codes to links?

Why not sell ads on new tab pages?

All of these are fine examples of how a not-Google Chrome could make money. They could even get paid by Microsoft or some other not-Google search for that traffic.

This isn't hard unless you're trying to make it hard to convince us all we should just give up and let Google continue running our online lives through monopolization.

Can you change the chromium license so that rebranding/embedding/electron usage is now paid. Embedding is now a paid feature starting with 10000 installations. You can make selenium paid after certain scale.

The details could be worked out. The idea is to make big corporations pay while keeping it free for users.

Of course they could. They could just cancel Chrome, shut the whole browser down and reassign all the staff, and the DOJ would be fine with that. Cancelling it, or selling while keeping 100% of the employees are in no way counter to the proposed remedies.