Germany's Ecosia, a nonprofit search engine, said on Thursday it has submitted a proposal to assume a 10-year stewardship of Google Chrome
That sounds clever. With a stewardship, a company without the obscene wealth that Google has could actually adopt a project normally out of their reach and influence it for good.
I wish the article went into more detail though.
This helps for context: https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/21/ecosia-has-offered-to-take-stewardship-of-chrome-and-its-not-a-bad-idea/
TLDR; If the lawsuit goes bad, and Google is forced to sell Chrome, it's a way for them to retain ownership while working with an existing partner to overcome the monopoly ruling.
Still a win win in my book.
Thanks. Yeah I think if a company like Ecosia is involved it could be win-win. But if it’s another purely capitalist outfit then it’ll probably be business as usual.
No matter how good the initial intentions, I feel like web browser development and web search under control of one single company is just too much concentration of power over the access to information to be a good thing.
As long as it's not Denethor, the Steward of Gondor, it should fine.
Are you sure? I thought Denethor was one of the first Scottish High Stewards.
Just don't let him eat any tomatoes
But do we really want someone constantly high for this?
We can't just get an open standard because corpos will attack it or try to take ownership.
I'm looking forward to the Ecosia AI being implemented in Google Chrome so I can continue to boycott both companies.
I've been using them lately and haven't seen any AI in their searches, what are you referring to?
That seems like such an odd offer. What does "stewardship" even entail?
Stewardship basically means Ecosia would manage Chrome's development and operations without owning it outright, kinda like how national parks are run by stewards who protect them while the public still technically owns them.
Seems like it allows a non profit to assume control of a company without having to pay out funds to actually purchase it. They apparently have to reinvest all profits back into the company rather than directly benefiting from it. Though the article does mention under the proposal, some unspecified portion of Chrome profits would go toward 'climate action', so there's some vague positive out of it.
Seems like it would be pretty great honestly, so I can't imagine it'll be accepted.