The Case Against Spinning Off Chrome
This past summer, a U.S. district court declared Google a monopolist. On Wednesday, the Department of Justice filed its proposed remedy. This plan—the government’s “proposed final judgment,” or PFJ—must be approved by the judge who is overseeing the case. But it outlines changes the government believes would be sufficient to loosen Google’s grip on the search market.
Notably, the DOJ has proposed that Google sell off its Chrome web browser—which currently accounts for about two-thirds of the browser market—and stay out of that business for five years. That proposal may seem righteous and effective, and stripping Google of its browser does make the government look bold. The proposal also seems to right a cosmic wrong from more than two decades ago, when the DOJ tried (and failed) to get Microsoft to unbundle its own Internet Explorer browser during a prior antitrust enforcement. This time around, the government’s lawyers insist that wresting Chrome from Google’s mitts is necessary to prevent Google from setting a default search engine for the majority of internet surfers, and pushing those same people to other Google products too. (By the same logic, the PFJ prevents Google from paying rivals such as Apple for default-search placement.)
This is a mistake. Google’s control of Chrome has surely benefited its market position and its bottom line. But Chrome might remain a boon for Google even if it’s under outside ownership. Instead, why not force Google to strip Chrome of its Google-promoting features, and let the browser be a burden rather than a tool for market domination?
In August, I argued that declaring Google a monopoly might not matter, because the company had already won the search wars. Searching the web effectively via text typed into input boxes was Google’s first and perhaps only innovation; the competitors that arose—DuckDuckGo, Bing, and so on—offered their own takes on Googling, which became the generic term for searching the web. People returned to Google because they wanted to, not just because the company had strong-armed them.
Google did incentivize competitors to maintain that status quo. Mozilla’s Firefox browser offers a case study. The foundation’s most recent annual report lists $510 million in royalty revenue for 2022, some of which surely comes from Google in the form of referral fees for Google searches. The PFJ appears to prohibit these kinds of payments, and whatever revenue they generate for Mozilla. If those are off the table, browser companies may end up letting users choose their own default search service. But the results could ultimately look very much the same: People who like and are familiar with Google might just choose it again.
Google built the Chrome browser in part to steer web users to its services—Search (and the ads it serves), Gmail, Google Docs, and so forth. Search was, of course, the most important of these. (Chrome was the first major browser to integrate web-search functionality directly into the address bar, a design known as the omnibox.) But over time, other Google features have become more and more entwined with Chrome’s operation. When I opened my Chrome browser in order to write this article, it presented me with a user-profile screen, strongly encouraging me to log in to my Google account, which gives Google insights into what I do online. That facility also offers me seamless access to Google Docs and Gmail, because I am already logged in.
Given that Chrome accounts for so much of the web-browser market, a more effective way to quash Google’s bad tendencies might involve sabotaging its browser rather than selling it off. Instead of making Google divest Chrome, the DOJ could have it keep the browser running (and secure) while stripping it of all the features that make Google services ready to hand. Killing the omnibox would be the boldest of these acts, because search, which basically means Googling, would no longer be presented as the default act on the web. Likewise, removing the tight Google-account integration and associated benefits for Google’s services and data collection would frustrate the company’s monopoly more effectively than a spun-off browser ever could.