U.S. DoJ could force Google to sell Chrome

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The United States Department of Justice may force Google to sell Chrome. The news comes a few months after the company was found guilty of maintaining an illegal search monopoly.

Well, this is not completely unexpected, I had mentioned this in my previous coverage of the antitrust lawsuit.

Google may be forced to sell Chrome to comply with antitrust laws

A report by Bloomberg (paywalled article) outlines the proposals that the DoJ will be recommending to federal judge, Amit Mehta. He was the judge who had recently deemed Google of illegally monopolizing the search market. Google is preparing an appeal against the ruling, a two-week hearing has been set for April 2025, and the final ruling could be reached by August 2025. But things are about to get much worse for Google, as the tech giant could be forced to part ways with the browser it created 16 years ago, Chrome.

The antitrust agency and States who are suing Google, will also request the imposition of some changes related to the AI industry. Dozens of companies were consulted by Government attorneys as they prepared recommendations for a remedy to make the market more competitive.

The antitrust officials want Google to license the search results and data, and allow websites options to prevent their data from being used for Google's AI products, such as the AI-generated summaries that are being displayed at the top of search results.

The report also mentions that the DoJ thought about an option to force Google to sell off Android, but pulled back from this decision. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean Android is off the radar.

Android could be unbundled

Android users will be aware that the mobile operating system bundles several apps from Google, many people view these as bloatware. Antitrust officials are working on proposals to force Google to split Android from its other products like Search and the Google Play Store. Could this mean that Android phones may offer an experience similar to AOSP (Android Open Source Project) sans Google apps? One requirement that is proposed wants Google to share more information with advertisers, and give them additional control over where their ads appear.

Naturally, Google isn't happy about these proposals. Google’s vice president of regulatory affairs, Lee-Anne Mulholland, said this "radical agenda goes beyond the legal issues in this case", and that it would "harm consumers, developers and American technological leadership.

On a side note, Google seems to be transforming Chrome OS into Android, which seems to indicate that things could be changing rapidly.

Chrome's dominance could come to an end

According to StatCounter, Chrome leads the market with a 66.65% share world-wide, with Apple Safari in second place at 18.09%, followed by Microsoft Edge at 5.26%, and Mozilla Firefox at 2.65%. Those are the global stats. Since the antitrust case is based in the United States, let's take a look at how the browser market in the U.S. is. Spoiler alert, it is not that different. Chrome is at the top with 57.38%, Apple Safari has a 29.31% share, Edge is at the third spot with 6.57%, Firefox is at the fourth place with 3.47%.

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