Monopoly - Chrome for Sale? - X-Industry

The US Department of Justice is reportedly seeking to force Google to sell Chrome, according to Bloomberg. Prying the browser from the rest of the company is only one of the measures the DOJ will ask the courts to enforce, following a ruling that the company maintained an illegal search monopoly. While ripping Chrome from Google might seem a relatively simple measure, there are a huge number of complicating factors that make it a trickier operation than it might first appear, factors that could both harm consumers and the wider browser industry.[1]

The Law - In the United States, antitrust law: The Sherman Act, is a collection of mostly federal laws that regulate the conduct and organization of businesses to promote competition and prevent unjustified monopolies. This was a major issue with the powerful railroads and the booming oil industry of the early 1900’s. The owners of these industries were called robber barons.[2] The three main US antitrust statutes are the Sherman Act of 1890, the Clayton Act of 1914, and the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914. These acts serve three major functions. First, Section 1 of the Sherman Act prohibits price fixing and the operation of cartels and prohibits other collusive practices that unreasonably restrain trade. Second, Section 7 of the Clayton Act restricts the mergers and acquisitions of organizations that may substantially lessen competition or tend to create a monopoly. Third, Section 2 of the Sherman Act prohibits monopolization.[3]

Splitting Chrome from Google may be no easy task - The Chromium Complication: First, it’s worth explaining the function of Chrome. Chrome is a browser built on the open-source Chromium browser engine. Anyone can build a browser using Chromium, and many companies have, including Microsoft Edge, Vivaldi and The Arc browser. Those browsers naturally share many of Chrome’s features, such as the ability to install extensions from the Chrome Web Store.

Some legal experts claims that the DOJ cannot force Google to sell Chromium because it does not own it. What you would in effect be selling is the Chrome user base, the hundreds of millions of people who use Chrome on a daily basis, rather than the underlying browser technology. Nevertheless, Google and its developers are by far the biggest contributors to the Chromium project. They have created much of the existing codebase and largely set its direction. If Google were forced to sell its browser, it would throw doubt over the long-term future of Chromium.

The questions are: Would Google also be forced to transfer the developers as part of the sale? Would other contributors, such as Microsoft, be forced to step up to fill the gap left by Google’s development team? Would it effectively be handing control of the Chromium project from one monopolist to another?

Who Gets the Chrome User Data? Today’s web browsers collect an enormous amount of personal data. They store your favorites, your browsing history, your usernames and passwords, and a lot of cached data that is very valuable to advertisers. So, if Google is forced to sell Chrome, who gets control of that data? Yes, it is relatively trivial to transfer some of that data from one browser to another, but it would cause significant consumer disruption if you were forced to start with a clean browser install with another owner. Some believe this might not necessarily be a bad idea.

The login process is another complication. Currently, you log in to Chrome with your Google account. That presumably would not be permitted under a new owner, meaning users will need to create a fresh account with the new Chrome proprietor, with all the friction, hassle and potential for fraud that creates.

Who Would Buy Chrome? Then there’s the matter of finding a buyer. There’s no doubt acquiring a user base counted in the hundreds of millions would be an attractive proposition, but it would likely come at an extremely high price that few companies could afford. Microsoft might seem like the obvious candidate, especially given it already has a Chromium-based browser, but given its own history with competitive abuse of the web browser it seems unlikely that would be approved. Meta would be another strong candidate, but its dominance of the social media space might create another competition issue. Other rival browser makers would either have little incentive or insufficient resources to acquire Chrome. Apple already has Safari and would face increased anti-competition scrutiny of its own, even if it did want to acquire Chrome. Firefox-owner Mozilla is cash-strapped (it recently laid off 30% of its workforce) and already dependent on Google for much of its funding. Given the DOJ is also pushing for a ban on Google striking exclusive deals with browser makers to be their default search engine, Mozilla’s future finances are on an even shakier footing.

The other browser rivals are largely minnows who would surely struggle to find the resources to buy Chrome. None of this is to say that separating Chrome from Google should not happen, but it is by no means a simple job if the DOJ does get its way. Many believe that many of the big tech giants do indeed hold a tight monopoly over the industry.

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