Three metals, by density

In the lightweight class, we start with gold. Gold steps into our Archimedean pool and registers a trifle over 19 grams per cubic centimeter. Eureka, and fitting that we should start here. Gold's much in the news lately, whether gilding the lily, I mean ivy, of the Oval Office or for the endless solicitations from gold sellers that this is precisely the time to buy and from gold buyers that now is precisely the time to sell. Maybe there's a modest fee to be made for someone who could please connect these guys with each other. Perhaps gold is the ideal metal to signal both wealth and uncertainty, two sides of the same coin anyhow.

There may be no gaudy without Au but its practical utility is hard to deny. There's at least several dollars of the stuff buried in the machine I'm writing this on. It's most common use in computers is as ENIG, Electroless Nickel Gold Immersion, a gold anticorrosive finish for nickel-plated copper pads on printed circuit boards. Posh as it sounds, it's only used where the alternatives are more expensive. At more than $100 a gram, that should give you a sense of how little gold is needed to get the job done and how expensive in dollars and reputation corrosion-related failures are in computers.

Gold may be at the edge of high tech but it's also very old. How old? Well, Carl Sagan star stuff old. More than that, it's been a substance known to humans for tens of thousands of years. Long before a theory of elements. So long that gods have been created in its image – see Khrysos in Greek mythology. Mercury, known to humanity for similarly countless millennia has to make do today with being named after a planet that is in turn named after a god.

Not wholly unrelated, we have plutonium in our middleweight division. It's only slightly denser than gold, at about 19.8 grams per cubic centimeter vs. 19.3. Poor plutonium is named for a celestial object, Pluto, formerly thought by Americans to be a planet, which is in turn named for an entity, Pluto, thought by ancient Romans to be a god. Pluto was taxonometrically a planet for just 76 years – shorter than the half-life of plutonium-238. We think of plutonium as mostly man-made but alchemy and astronomy are in a constant tug of war to surprise us about the nature of our universe – we discovered that plutonium can arise naturally through cosmic processes and has also arisen on Earth through naturally formed nuclear fission reactors. Relatively rare, plutonium may be one of a handful of elements that have negative value today. Think about that. Plutonium is worth even less than a free used radioactive piano (shipping not included).

Our heavyweight is chrome. Chromium the element is actually not that dense at all, at around 7.2 grams per cubic centimeter. We're not talking about the elemental chromium today. We're talking about the Chrome browser made by Google. Chrome may be so heavy, and so dense, that the whole of the internet might be thought to revolve around it. So says the US Department of Justice and others anyhow, who now think forcing Google to eject Chrome may be the surest remedy for the finding that Google has a monopoly on parts of internet search.

I have no particular opinions about this and my world view is about as obsolete as the NextCube where I first ran a browser. Today, of course, you can run NextStep inside the browser. I don't know if web browsers arise naturally through astronomical processes but it would scarcely surprise me to discover that some future heavy element Vannevarium was able to make hypertext requests at room temperature. Turingsten can probably do computations directly within its nucleus and is my vote for element most likely to get its own CVE. What does interest me is whether Google's Chrome has positive value like gold, or negative value like plutonium. I think it's the latter.

Various paywall-type wags have estimated that a standalone Chrome would be worth tens of billions of dollars – billions that companies from OpenAI to DuckDuckGo claim to be prepared to consider. Chrome may have hundreds of millions of monthly users, after a fashion, but so does PixArt Imaging. PixArt makes the optical mouse sensors in everthing from the shovelware mice bundled with corporate desktops to gaming mice that cost as much as the cheapest Chromebooks. PixArt, a hardware company, is worth around a billion dollars. Their simple business model is to design sensors and then sell them to people for money. Despite the active user base, they don't really have a business in selling your mouse movements to advertisers, or serving you ads based on your mousing history, or serving you ads on your mouse. Web browsers should be the same. What would be a Chrome business that did not run afoul of the universe of existing complaints about Google – especially about leveraging monopolies in one business area to push into others?

I can think of three. The first is a radical play in the modern software era. It's to sell Chrome to users for money. Here's a case where Chrome would have positive value. The other line of business is to ruthlessly monetize users, strip-mining as close down to their consciousness as possible to obsolete them. I think I understand OpenAI's interest here. Chrome has positive value in this case. The third is the strategic plutonium play. A buyer takes on Chrome simply in order to preserve an open web and maintain a path to users which the mobile app stores and desktop ecosystems could seek to erase. The cost of maintaining a strategic browser stockpile is akin to the Navy conducting freedom of navigation operations. Here, Chrome itself has negative value.

Is this reasonable? Basically yeah. Why else would people keep beavering away at Firefox (I'm putting a link here in case you're reading more than a few months from now and don't remember what Firefox was) but for the belief that an open web was worth preserving. Why would Apple have developed Safari more than 20 years ago if not for the risk that OS X and Apple itself could fail without an open ecosystem for the fledgling system and struggling company. Only six years earlier, Michael Dell had opined that he would shut Apple down and return the money to shareholders if he were in charge.

So who is at risk from an enshittified internet and a broken web? All of you, for starters. You're all pretty busy people. I'm not sure you have ten billion dollars between you to buy Chrome or the free time to maintain it anyway.

Intuit, maker of TurboTax and accounting software, might. Amazon might, though the enshittification is strong with that one. Epic Games might. A nation might.

Let's consider the possibility that Google might – that the reason Google continues contributing to the open-source chromium project upon which Chrome is based is that even Google recognizes that an open web is necessary. This brings us back to plutonium.

AT&T, a famous monopolist, took over management of the Sandia National Laboratories in 1949, just a few months after the Soviet Union detonated their own atomic bomb in a test. As sprawling as their local and long-distance business was they did not get into the nuclear weapons game as a way to extend their monopoly to the famous red telephone Moscow-Washington hotline. More like the opposite. Hey, that's a pretty nice monopoly you have there. Shame if anything were to happen to it. AT&T managed the lab for no fee for decades. Although it's certainly the case that nuclear war is bad for the telephone business, the "A" in AT&T is for American and that's the real reason they did it.

What if the ideal remedy for Google's monopolizing ways is to require them to retain Chrome and continue to maintain it in the public interest? Why move the piano at all?

This post pairs well with the 1999 Parton/Rondstadt/Harris cover of "After the Gold Rush".