Judge Amit Mehta ruled with the United States Department of Justice (DOJ), finding that Google has monopoly power in the search and advertising markets. This finding is hardly a shock. It has been an open secret for years that Google pays Apple an astronomical amount of money each year to ensure that Google search is the default in Apple's Safari browser. In 2022 alone, Apple paid Google over twenty billion dollars. While I have no qualms with the ruling, the Department of Justice is overreaching in a few of their suggested remedies.
A forced sale of the Chrome browser would do little as a remedy toward reducing Google's monopoly power and raises logistical questions about how such a deal would be structured, given that any sale hinges on finding an interested buyer. Companies that could realistically afford to purchase Chrome, such as Amazon, are facing antitrust scrutiny.
Despite their simple appearance, web browsers are incredibly complex applications that must adhere to a myriad of continually evolving web standards. These high development and maintenance costs are the reason most browsers are only one piece in a company's application portfolio – it's extremely difficult to monetize a browser directly without linking it to other services. Therefore, any company that could purchase Chrome would face the same ugly monetization incentives – such as aggressively selling user data to third parties – that we currently have.
Chrome is built from Chromium, an open-source software project created and largely maintained by Google that serves as the backbone of many popular web browsers, including Microsoft Edge. Would Google still be permitted to maintain Chromium, and if so, what is stopping Google from forking the project and creating another browser?
This remedy proposed by the DOJ fails to directly address the lack of competition in the search market. The lack of competition is rooted in the deals Google has made with other companies to keep Google search the default – and often only – search engine on many platforms.