For those who might have missed the story, Google lost the DOJ lawsuit last year, and Judge Amit Mehta ruled that the tech giant had a monopoly in search. As a result, the DOJ is now pushing for a breakup by forcing Google to sell the Chrome browser to another company. While Chrome's future still looms in uncertainty, Parisa Tabriz, the General Manager of Google Chrome, has stepped in to defend Google's authority over Chrome.
Parisa Tabriz testified on Friday in Washington federal court, insisting on Chrome's deep integration and its "interdependencies" with the Google ecosystem. The head of Chrome added that Google is the only company that can "offer the level of features and functionality that its popular Chrome web browser has today."
"Chrome today represents 17 years of collaboration between the Chrome people," Tabriz said. "Trying to disentangle that is unprecedented." She added that some vital Chrome features, like safe browsing and notifying users about compromised passwords, rely on shared Google infrastructure, and it might not be possible to recreate it somewhere else.
While the Chrome browser was built based on the open-source Chromium Project, Parisa Tabriz says Google has contributed more than 90 percent of the code for Chromium since 2015 and that the tech giant "invests hundreds of millions of dollars into Chromium." Google Chrome is currently the most popular web browser globally, holding over 66% market share.
In addition to selling Chrome, the DOJ has demanded that Google share its collected data with competitors. The agency is also seeking a court order to prohibit Google from paying for search engine defaults, including the company's own AI products like Gemini. This ban could also have far-reaching implications for Google's deal with Apple to secure the default search engine position for Google in the Safari browser.
From a technical perspective, a Chrome sell-off might seem feasible, but the browser's integration with the Google ecosystem is hard for another owner to recreate. So far, OpenAI, Perplexity, and Yahoo have expressed interest in buying Chrome in case Google is forced to sell it.
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