Forced sale of Chrome on cards in big threat to Google
The US Justice Department (DOJ) wants to force Google to sell the Chrome browser as part of a remedy for its illegal search monopoly in a move that would undermine its control over search defaults and first-party data collection.
The DOJ began arguing for the forced sale Monday, US time, to the judge who last year made the momentous decision that Google had in fact built an illegal monopoly in search. Judge Amit Mehta is now hearing three weeks of arguments about remedies for that monopoly.
The DOJ submissions also include an end to search default deals that see Google paying billions to the makers of other browsers and devices, and opening up access to some of its data.
“This court has an opportunity to remedy a monopoly that has controlled the internet for today’s generation and restore competition for decades to come,” DOJ lawyer David Dahlquist told the court, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.
The case is separate to a ruling last week – in a different court – that found that Google had built monopolies in ad serving technology.
The forced sale of Chrome would be a decisive intervention. The browser enjoys global majority share of 64% compared to 21% for Apple’s Safari and 2% for Firefox (Similarweb data). In Australia, Chrome has a smaller majority (around 50%) and Safari has a bigger presence (34%).
Chrome surged to dominance in the early 2010s, beating Microsoft’s Internet Explorer for share in 2013 and achieving a global majority in 2017. Chrome’s usefulness to consumers hinges on its seamless integration with the free G-suite of productivity apps and its influence over standards.
Chrome uses Google Search as a default, with any query typed into the address bar going straight to Google’s lucrative search product (which overall clocks up several billion searches every day). While Google gets that for free with Chrome, it pays around US$20 billion a year to Apple for a similar leg-up in Safari.
Chrome’s dominance allows Google to collect browsing history, device, location and click behaviour of billions of people. A forced sale of the browser would hurt Google’s ad targeting, and if combined with a ban on search defaults could potentially undermine the search traffic that is already existentially challenged by AI.
Why is a US government agency telling me what i know? And dont care about. Google built a mousetrap now these fools are saying the whole world is regulated by them and they want the mousetrap inventor to stop making great traps.
The USA is the worst country now.
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