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MONOCHROME

Google may have to sell off Chrome — but who could buy it?

Forcing a sale of Google Chrome could weaken Google’s stranglehold on search.

11/19/24 9:50AM

“Which lawyers did Microsoft use for its antitrust case in 2000” — Google execs this morning, probably.

Done searching

According to a report from Bloomberg yesterday, Department of Justice officials are planning to recommend that Amit Mehta — the US District Judge who ruled in August that Alphabet’s search giant holds an illegal monopoly over the market — force the company to sell off its Google Chrome browser, impose data-licensing requirements, and implement measures around the company’s Android operating system and burgeoning AI efforts.

Those recommendations show just how serious America’s antitrust authorities are about cracking down on Google’s dominance in the world of looking stuff up online. It’s the biggest antitrust action against Big Tech in the US since the United States vs. Microsoft Corp. case more than two decades ago (spoiler: Microsoft wasn’t broken up).

According to Statcounter, Google Chrome has a 67% share of the global web-browser market — way ahead of the next biggest competitor, Apple’s Safari, the default browser on every iPad and iPhone (unless users switch their settings). Though Chrome isn’t a huge money spinner in a direct sense, being free to download and use, it’s a phenomenal source of traffic for the search engine itself, which makes plenty of money (some $49 billion last quarter). On Chrome, users are sent straight to google.com by default when they search, and Google gets data on what logged-in users are doing, helping its targeted-advertising efforts.

Google Chrome market share — Sherwood News

Gatekeeping gateway

While Chrome was never really the product at the heart of the DOJ’s lawsuit, which was first launched under the Trump administration in 2020, the browser plays a massive part in the crux of the case — Google’s total domination of search. According to website-intelligence platform Similarweb, google.com has a staggering 93% share of American web searches.

Google market share searches (Similarweb) — Sherwood News

That level of domination, as antitrust expert George Hay simplified for Sherwood News in the wake of the August ruling, amounts to a monopoly which Google monetizes with advertising and cements via exclusive deals with the makers of Apple and Android devices. Thanks to unsealed court documents, we know that Google paid Apple an eye-watering $20 billion in 2022 alone to be the default search engine in Apple’s Safari browser. If Chrome was owned by someone else, Google would presumably have to pay to be the default search engine in a similar fashion.

The obvious complication with forcing Alphabet to sell Google Chrome is that it’s really big. There’s not that many companies that could afford and make use of an internet browser that has hundreds of millions of users and, from the small pool of competitors that could (e.g. Amazon, Microsoft, Apple), which of them would be impervious to the same monopoly charges further down the line? While such recommendations might work in theory, breaking up Google in practice, as Rani Molla observed in August, will prove hard to do.

Chris Stokel-Walker

Bot bias

6/17/26

Companies are getting AI chatbots to smear their competitors

The race to influence AI chatbots is leading to some companies to adopt shady competitive tactics.

Tom Jones6/17/26

Prediction markets have, predictably, been given a boost by the summer of sports

Major platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have seen huge upticks in users of late, thanks in no small part to what’s felt like a recent sporting smorgasbord, with major competitions across hockey, basketball, and soccer soaking up fans’ time (and spending, clearly) at the outset of summer.

While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

2026 World Cup Reverses Seasonal Lull for Sports Betting Apps

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

South by Southwest Conference and Festivals

Gold Tesla Cybercabs are piling up, but they’re not picking up passengers yet

Low-volume production started in April. Now people are noticing them more and more in the wild.

Rani Molla6/15/26

Millie Giles

TAKING ACCOUNTS

6/15/26

Britain announces social media ban for under-16s starting early 2027

The UK government plans to use the same model for the restrictions as Australia — but how successful has that case study been so far?

UK Prime Minister Announces Under-16s Social Media Ban

Jon Keegan6/15/26

Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5