What the DOJ’s breakup of Google would mean for Chrome and the internet

Google’s parent company saw its stock fall over 5% Thursday morning after the Justice Department said it would try to force a sale of the company’s Chrome web browser, a move that if successful would upend the internet economy and cut into Google’s immense power.

In a court filing late Wednesday, the Justice Department said Google “must promptly and fully divest Chrome” to a buyer approved by the DOJ. It is one of multiple remedies proposed by U.S. prosecutors, following a federal judge’s August ruling that Google has an illegal monopoly on internet search.

Other Justice Department proposals include preventing the company from paying other companies such as Apple to set Google search as the default in their phones, browsers and apps; requiring Google to share its massive list of websites with competitors to help them compete with it; and giving online publishers an easy way to opt out of having their content used to train Google’s artificial intelligence models.

Google now has the chance to present a counterproposal to be considered by the same judge who found the company guilty of being a monopoly. Hearings will start in April before the judge decides a final course.

The company has also said it will appeal the initial monopoly ruling. And it’s unclear how the incoming Trump administration will take up the case. The president-elect has accused Google of being biased against him but also indicated that his government will be friendlier to corporations and mergers.

Here’s a rundown of what the world might look like under the changes the government is asking for.

Chrome

Google doesn’t make money directly from Chrome, but it is crucial to the company’s business because the web browser serves as a portal that keeps users engaged with cash cows such as Search and YouTube. Without its browser, the company could see traffic and revenue from those services dip.

Extracting Chrome from Google’s empire would increase competition in the web browser space, said Damian Rollison, director of market insights at SOCi, an advertising technology company. Although Google’s browser is the most popular, it has well-established competitors including Apple’s Safari, Microsoft’s Edge, Firefox and DuckDuckGo.

“Plenty of reasonable alternatives exist,” Rollison said. “All of these would likely benefit from a market where Chrome is no longer propped up by membership in the Google family.”

If Google is required to sell Chrome, finding a buyer for what would be a multibillion-dollar company could be challenging. Some potential buyers would raise new antitrust questions.

“If Microsoft owns it, they just direct people to their search engine and you have the same problem. If Amazon owns it, it just reinforces their monopoly in commerce. If it’s independent, then it likely starts really mining people’s data to make money,” said Ari Paparo, a veteran online advertising executive who now runs ad industry media company Marketecture.

Paparo said a more neutral option could be for Chrome to become a nonprofit like Mozilla, which owns the Firefox browser.

Android

Google’s Android operating system is used on the majority of mobile phones worldwide and tightly integrated with its other services – including Chrome. That gives the browser a prime spot on billions of cellphones, and if Chrome is split from Google then Android could see major changes.

Using or setting up an Android phone could become more complicated but also open opportunities for Google’s rivals.

Other browser makers could have a chance at putting their own products into a central role on the device in consumers’ pockets. Apple could benefit if removing Chrome makes Google’s operating system less attractive to some phone buyers.

Search

Google’s search engine is one of its biggest sources of revenue thanks to the ads that appear on result pages. In 2023, the search segment of Google’s business, which also includes ads on products including Gmail and Google Maps, generated $175 billion – 57% of all Alphabet revenue.

Sustaining that cash flow requires keeping people coming back to Google Search, and the DOJ case was motivated in part by the fact that competitors have struggled to pull web users away from it.

The agency now proposes that Google be barred from paying companies such as Apple or Samsung to make its search the default on their devices – Apple alone receives billions each year from Google.

It also wants the search company to be forced to give smaller rivals a hand by selling access to its web index – the giant database of websites and online content that Google constantly updates to keep its results fresh.

M.G. Siegler, a former partner at Google’s venture capital arm who is now an independent investor and writer, says barring deals that make Google Search a default seems like the most likely remedy to be put into force.

But companies such as Apple could still choose to use Google without paying for it. “It would only really change things if someone else is installed as the default,” Siegler said. The “wild cards” could be AI companies such as OpenAI improving their own search chatbots quickly enough to be able to replace Google on iPhones and other platforms, Siegler said.

Under DOJ’s vision for the future of Google, those competitors could also pay a “marginal” cost to access the company’s search index. The arrangement might look similar to how telecom companies that own physical cell towers are forced in some countries to give access to their towers and wires to competitors to make the market more competitive and lower prices for consumers.

Competitors that tap into Google’s index might use it to create different kinds of search engines targeting different markets or consumers. Some might charge a subscription fee instead of collecting user data or showing ads, while others might focus on search for shopping or social media.

AI

Google’s leaders have made clear that AI is their top priority, rolling out a chatbot called Gemini to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and revamping search results to showcase AI-generated answers. The DOJ’s proposals for fixing Google have taken that into account.

Like its AI rivals, Google’s AI-generated answers depend on repurposing content it has collected online. The DOJ proposes that internet publishers be allowed to opt out of having their content scraped and summarized in Google’s AI answers, without being penalized by having their sites removed from conventional search results completely as the company’s current policy requires.

That change could give publishing companies more bargaining power over Google as they try to navigate the changes AI is bringing to the internet, perhaps forcing Google to pay for some of the data its AI answers draws on. If many publishers choose to opt out, the company could see its AI helpers become less useful, and more vulnerable to competition.