According to a press report, the US Department of Justice plans to force Google to sell its Chrome browser in order for the tech giant to comply with antitrust laws. The Ministry will ask the competent judge to issue a relevant decision, as reported by Bloomberg.

Last August, in a case regarding a possible violation of competition law, a US court ruled that Google has an illegal monopoly over online searches and the ads that appear there to users, which it maintains by paying billions to various payments. Google reportedly paid 26 billion dollars to companies manufacturing electronic devices, so that the devices that will be produced will automatically display Google’s browser. In order to damage Google’s market power, the judges are willing to take drastic measures – hence their intention to force Google to divest Chrome.

For the first time in years, the US thus accuses a company of having an illegal monopoly and demands that it suffer adverse consequences. Google – or rather Alphabet, the parent company – has announced that it will appeal.

Chrome is very important to Google

Losing Chrome would be a serious setback for Google. Although 90% of internet searches worldwide are performed through Google, over 60% of them are performed through Chrome. And within this browser, Google advertises its products and wins customers for the services it offers, such as for example Gmail.

Chrome is also the most important part of Google’s core business: selling online ads. Through Chrome, Google can clearly collect more data about users – about the pages they visit and their searches, for example. In this way, Google is increasingly improving the targeting of ads based on user behavior.

What will happen to Google if it loses Chrome?

Being in the advertising business is very important to Google and Alphabet – in 2023 Alphabet had more than $230 billion in advertising revenue.

That’s why Nils Zembach, an expert on internet and digitization issues, points out that “if it loses Chrome, Google will face serious problems. As it stands, however, Chrome is an integral part of Google’s business model, so it could hardly survive without the company.” Such a development would be a serious test for Alphabet, but “also for the market”, as Zembach explains to DW.

Ulrich Miller of the antitrust organization Rebalance Now, for his part, welcomes the US decision. If Google is forced to part with Chrome, Miller believes the company’s ad business will be curtailed, which could lead Google “to refocus more on the quality of its services.”

A historical trial

The court’s decision will be historic in any case. American competition law has existed for over 100 years. Already in 1911, the antitrust regulatory framework had broken up Rockefeller’s Standard Oil oil monopoly, while it contributed significantly to keeping the corporate giants of the 1960s and 1970s from getting out of control. In the 1980s, however, the neoliberal Chicago School argued that the concentration of power in a market is acceptable, as long as the respective business is efficient. And since then, antitrust measures have been increasingly restricted.

Nevertheless, in 1982 it was decided to dissolve the telecommunications group AT&T – and in fact in 2001 Microsoft almost had a similar fate, which nevertheless managed to overturn the first court decision in the appeal trial.

Edited by: Giorgos Passas