What a forced sale of Chrome would mean for Google
The US Department of Justice (DOJ) will reportedly ask the judge overseeing Google’s search antitrust trial to force the tech giant to sell off the Chrome browser.
According to Bloomberg, DOJ officials are expected to argue on Wednesday that Chrome amounts to a key access point for Google’s search services and a sale of the browser would help alleviate anti-competition concerns.
In addition, officials will reportedly ask Judge Amit Mehta to force Google to give publishers more options to prevent its intellectual property from being scraped by Google’s AI products, improve transparency for advertisers over where their ads will appear on search and for the Android operating system to be decoupled from Google products like search and the Google Play store, although a forced sale of Android will not be recommended.
The recommendations come after Mehta ruled in August that Google had illegally monopolised the search market.
A final ruling by Mehta is not expected until August 2025. Mehta has set an additional two-week hearing in April on the topic of what changes Google must make to remedy its anti-competitive behaviour.
DOJ officials will reportedly couch in their recommendations that the government could decide a Chrome sale is unnecessary at a later date if other concessions create a sufficiently competitive market.
Google has said it will appeal the decision.
Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google’s vice-president of regulatory affairs, has previously argued that the DOJ’s potential recommendations are “radical” and that splitting off Chrome would “break” it.
“Because both Chrome and Android help people access the web and use our products, we offer them (and their underlying code) for free,” Mulholland wrote last month. “Few companies would have the ability or incentive to keep them open source or to invest in them at the same level we do.
“Make no mistake: breaking them off would change their business models, raise the cost of devices and undermine Android and Google Play in their robust competition with Apple’s iPhone and App Store.”
Analysis: Fulcrum of monopoly power
Chrome currently has a 66% global share of the browser market, according to data from StatCounter. Its nearest competitors are Apple’s Safari (18%), Microsoft’s Edge (5.2%) and Mozilla’s Firefox (2.6%).
In the UK specifically, Chrome’s dominance is less pronounced (48%), with Safari (32.9%) and Edge (9.3%) accounting for a comparatively higher market share.
The browser is central to Google’s broader advertising business, as it allows the tech giant to track activity from signed-in users and target ads accordingly on other Google products, such as search.
Movement for an Open Web (MOW), an organisation that advocates on behalf of business leaders for a freely accessible web environment, argued in the summer that Google and Apple’s ownership of Chrome and Safari is the fulcrum on their monopoly power.
“Apple and Google through Safari and Chrome now effectively control a huge percentage of the internet’s traffic,” an essay from MOW reads. “This not only means that they now hold vast troves of data about users — which enables their advertising dominance — it also means that they have been able to shut down true competition in large areas of web functionality.”
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The competition remedy MOW suggested is separating the core functionality of browsers (ie. providing web access) from other services on the web. However, MOW notes that while divestiture is the start of this solution, it needs to be structured correctly to avoid creating another monopoly.
“If true, the rumoured DOJ proposals in the US search trial are the beginning of an effective solution to breaking Google’s monopoly,” MOW co-founder James Rosewell told The Media Leader. “What’s vital is that we don’t simply replace one monopoly with another, so any divestiture must be carefully considered.”
He added: “The idea of licensing search interaction data is also commendable — in one relatively simple step, the DOJ could create a wave of innovation in search and create new, more effective user experiences.
“Google will claim that sharing search data will violate privacy, but if the data that Google holds is so toxic that it can’t be shared, then they shouldn’t be holding it either. ”
Adtech trial awaiting verdict
Google is also in the midst of an antitrust trial over its US adtech business, with closing arguments expected by the end of this month.
A separate investigation by the UK Competition & Markets Authority provisionally ruled in September that Google has abused its dominant positions in open-display adtech, potentially harming “thousands” of UK publishers and advertisers. Likewise, the European Commission reached a similar preliminary finding in its own investigation last summer.
Analysts have suggested that, if Google loses its argument in that trial, a forced break-up of its adtech business could also be on the cards.
At The Future of Media London in October, Arete Research equity research analyst and partner Rocco Strauss posited that spinning off Google Network as a standalone public benefit corporation could be one potential remedy.
Meanwhile, finding a buyer for Chrome could be challenging, as any company large enough to pay for its acquisition and invest in its continued development would likely run into antitrust concerns of their own. Such potential conflicts of interest could mean getting a sale past competition regulators would be a challenge.
It’s plausible that, as Strauss suggested for Google’s adtech business, any spin-off of Chrome could be turned into a public benefit corporation.
MOW’s proposed remedy, for example, would see the forced divestiture of “browser engines” that could be funded via Linux-style foundation arrangements, with governance overseen by a “web browser foundation”, which itself would be accountable to sovereign antitrust bodies across the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
“As we enter the remedies stage of the battle against the platforms, it’s essential that we avoid solving for the short term,” said Rosewell. “We’re building a regulatory infrastructure for the web that needs to be fit for purpose for the next 50-plus years”.