The Department of Justice is going to recommend that Alphabet sell off its Chrome browser to remedy its search monopoly, but that doesn’t mean they think it will actually happen.
“Part of this is negotiating,” Cornell University law professor and antitrust expert George Hay told Sherwood. “This is a dance.”
Basically, the DOJ is likely hoping that by suggesting an extreme remedy, Google will compromise and offer to do something much more measured: namely ditching its billion-dollar contracts with Apple and Samsung that make Google the default search engine on those phones. That pride of place has helped Google maintain its search-engine dominance — 89% market share globally, according to Statcounter — and, more importantly, the bulk of its revenue, which it gets from targeting ads off those searches.
“The chances of getting a judge to agree to something this dramatic aren’t great,” Hay said. “Most monopoly cases over past 100 years haven’t resulted in divestiture.” He noted that Microsoft, the last Big Tech antitrust case, didn’t end up getting broken up.
Additionally, asking Google to sell its browser might not even solve the issue of Google’s search monopoly, since the unlikely buyer could decide to use Google search in the browser anyway.
