WASHINGTON, Nov 18 (Reuters) - The U.S. Department of Justice will ask a judge to force Alphabet’s Google (GOOGL.O), opens new tab to sell off its Chrome internet browser, Bloomberg News reported on Monday, citing people familiar with the plans.
The DOJ will also ask the judge, who ruled in August that Google illegally monopolized the search market, to require measures related to artificial intelligence and its Android smartphone operating system, the report said.
Google controls how people view the internet and what ads they see in part through its Chrome browser, which typically uses Google search, gathers information important to Google’s ad business, and is estimated to have about two-thirds of the global browser market.
The DOJ declined to comment. Google, in a statement from Lee-Anne Mulholland, vice president, Google Regulatory Affairs, said the DOJ is pushing a “radical agenda that goes far beyond the legal issues in this case,” and would harm consumers.
The move would be one of the most aggressive attempts by the Biden administration to curb what it alleges are Big Tech monopolies.
Ultimately, however, the re-election of Donald Trump to the presidency could have the greatest impact over the case.
Two months before the election, Trump claimed he would prosecute Google for what he perceives as bias against him. But a month later, Trump questioned whether breaking up the company was a good idea.
The company plans to appeal once U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta makes a final ruling, which he is likely to do by August 2025. Mehta has scheduled a trial on the remedy proposals for April.
Prosecutors had floated a range of potential remedies in the case, from ending exclusive agreements where Google pays billions of dollars annually to Apple Inc (AAPL.O) and other companies to remain the default search engine on tablets and smart phones, all the way to divesting parts of its business, such as Chrome and Android operating system.
Because Chrome’s market share is so high, it is an important revenue driver for Google. At the same time, when users sign into Chrome with a Google account, Google can offer more targeted search ads.
Google maintains its search engine has won users with its quality, adding that it faces robust competition from Amazon (AMZN.O) and other sites and users can choose other search engines as their default.
The government has the option to decide whether a Chrome sale is necessary at a later date if some of the other aspects of the remedy create a more competitive market, the Bloomberg report said.
Is chrome even viable as a standalone? Or is the objective to force another megacorp to buy it? Because I don’t think it makes sense for anyone but Tencent, Even Microsoft can’t make money on Edge and it’s baked into windows and just a chrome fork.
There are tons of chrome-based browsers out there. The real question is what would stop Google from just pivoting to Nickel, the new chromium based browser they launch 15 minutes after they sell off chrome?
And those Chromium forks very much depend on Google to fund most of the heavy lifting and development work.
I definitely feel something needs to be done about google’s MANY de facto monopolies. But we do have to understand that divesting them of Chrome basically kills Chrome and a LOT of the browser landscape.
Hell, even Firefox is very heavily funded by Google, if memory serves.
Killing Chrome will be a short-term problem but necessary nonetheless.
“Short term” implies there is a real path forward.
Of the Chromium forks, the only ones with enough revenue to consider pumping back into major development costs (because the engineers you want working on the browser ~66% of the world uses aren’t cheap) are the ones you REALLY don’t want to have controlling said browser.
People have a tendency to very much not understand that even open source projects have development costs. That is WHY there are major foundations around Linux and the like. Because a hobby project is something people can work on in their spare time. A browser (or an OS) is something that requires full time engineers. Would have to check, but I wouldn’t be shocked in the majority of community MRs at this point are also funded by companies (getting a fix or feature support in).
And the idea that, “short term” all the Chromium forks and all the community would unite to manage it themselves when they have been dependent on Google/Alphabet doing the heavy lifting for 16 years.
At best? We are looking back at the dark times where anyone doing ANYTHING “web” related needed to have like twelve different browsers installed and fix specific bugs for internet explorer and netscape and so forth. More likely? We are seeing massive stagnation and you can bet that every single blackhat (and most of the greyhats) are gonna be out for blood.
By all means, fuck Google. But people need to understand what they are asking for and what will likely happen.
I have an objection.
You can build processes so that enthusiasts would be able to combine their effort into a project that everyone can use.
Just the model Linux and Chrome and other big projects have is not that. They are complex and centralized.
It is more efficient, yes.
Maybe that’s for the best. Some frugality with using standards. Web is a planetary library more than it is a platform for applications.
The reason those problems are centralized is BECAUSE they are so complex. And because they are so high risk. Bad actors will GLADLY spend a year or two sneaking in various MRs to compromise a browser because it can potentially pay enough to never have to hack again.
I love it. We take away their de facto standards. We increase their day job workload exponentially. And then we expect them to put in the after hours efforts to optimize page loading.
There were, you know, Torvalds-Tannenbaum and “cathedral vs bazaar” disputes either of which combined with this would show the way in the direction opposite of what Linux people consider the winning one.
Exactly about complexity and centralization and independence, even though it may not seem so.
Linux is more complex than it has to be. Its main advantage over a few other operating systems, which is hardware support, has nothing to do with its unjustified complexity in everything else.
I dunno, this seems to work against the point you seem to be making.
There’s a clear concept of what the Web is. A secure browser for that is not so complex. Also look at Gemini.
However, there’s also commercial demand for functionality which has been pushed to browsers instead of, well, anything, a Java applets alternative or Flash alternative with good sandbox, for example.
And now we can many times see that the reason this has been done had nothing to do with it being a better solution.
Just a certain company making one of the browsers had a long-term strategy of making their own competitor of Flash and Java applets (and what not, there were many other such plugins for embedded content) the standard.
Do people have to spend hours to optimize loading of an e-book? Again, there’s a clear concept of what Web is. It’d be just good tone to treat it as that and “platform for applications” as something secondary that shouldn’t impede the primary goal. Something like street traders squatting on a church square.
My position is that anything else should be embedded content handled by various plugins.
One can refactor the existing “HTML5, modern CSS with complex DOM and all that crap”, maybe even JS. functionality into a plugin based on Chrome released by Google, why not, of course removing those things from the Web itself. I know this reads as if I were smoking weed right now. But suppose that happens, you know as well as I do that people would mostly prefer websites not using that.
…
Yes. If we completely changed how the internet is structured and written AND migrated back to a plugin based economy AND completely changed the role of a web browser then a project called “Chromium” would be feasible to be maintained by a decentralized group of randos in their spare time.
This is the right take. This move would be so deleterious to the way the internet works on a foundational level at this point, it’s almost ridiculous. It would impact the world less if the courts forced google to sell off Search.
The idea of who might have the assets to acquire this company and be an organization that would be preferable to Google maintaining control of Chrome doesn’t conjure many candidates. The best case scenario would be Microsoft, and they aren’t buying a browser company.
Completely agree with you, fuck Google, fuck their monopolistic business practices, fuck their increasingly surveillance driven operating model, and fuck their gutless leadership for allowing their company to be reduced to an advertising enshittification factory after becoming so deeply ingrained in the way the internet is used that it became a verb.
An order to sell Chrome would be accompanied by an order (or consent decree) to not engage in web-engine and/or browser development.
I’d be fine with them contributing to open source browser development, but closed source proprietary requirement nonsense needs to cease.
Well the companies reliant on chromium can fund the non profit that maintains it as a stand alone org instead of Google deciding. Hell you could even argue they should fund a non profit that finances several browsers.
I have no idea how the doj thinks this could work. Do they understand what chromium is and how chrome funds it? Also isn’t Google in trouble for paying Apple to be the default search engine? What exactly do they think chrome would sell? It’s own browser native ads??? User data? I don’t like any of the alternatives here
Tough question.
I do doubt that the US would allow a foreign entity to buy it given the volume of domestic infrastructure/organizations that are reliant on Chrome. It would carry an inherent national security risk, as hypocritical as that is for the US to say.
The other problem for an independent Chrome company is that Chromium itself is an unprofitable FOSS project, and Chrome only derives value from integration with Google services (as Edge does with its Windows integration).
It’s not impossible, looking at Mozilla. But it would mean Chrome would have to become a very different kind of browser.
The Edge relationship also makes things interesting, as presumably without continued investment from Google, Microsoft would end up becoming the primary maintainers of the Chromium project.
It sounds like they have not formalized the specifics, but ‘sell off’ and ‘divest’ could mean something like breaking up Bell into a bunch of smaller companies.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System
Basically, it could look something like Chrome being mandatorily spun off as its own company, not under the Alphabet umbrella, no longer legally able to be internally funded by the rest of Alphabet.
Would this create a largely non viable standalone company?
Probably!
That’s kind of the point.
Giant Ass monopoly?
Blow it up, reset the market structure back toward a state that’s at least a bit closer to the mythical perfectly competetive free market, make some degree of actual competition exist to make the market actually responsive to consumer demands/preferences, lower the barrier entry for competitors, make innovation more likely.