ext year, a court might tell Google to do anything from syndicating its search results to selling the Chrome browser. These remedies and more were included in a request last week from the Justice Department, which is aiming to break up Google’s search monopoly.

The DOJ’s proposals clued in the public to what the government really wants out of Google. Though the complaint was filed in 2020, the first phase of the trial focused only on whether Google was liable for the antitrust harms the government alleged. After Judge Amit Mehta ruled this summer that Google is an illegal monopolist in general search services and search text advertising, the government has finally laid out its plan for how to restore competition, with proposals ranging from relatively simple tweaks in business practices to large structural changes.

The remedies the DOJ is seeking “would imperil Google’s ability to compete in its core business of search and search advertising,” says David Halliday, teaching associate professor of strategic management and public policy at George Washington School of Business. Judge Mehta accepting these remedies wouldn’t be “quite as big a deal as breaking up Standard Oil, but this would be a bigger deal, I think, than breaking up AT&T.”

If Mehta accepts only some of these proposals after a two-week trial in April, Google might be in better shape. But it could still see billions of dollars shaved off its empire. And according to experts watching the case, attention-grabbing options like a Chrome sale may not be the biggest threat to Google’s power.

Selling Chrome

The DOJ says that Google should be forced to sell Chrome because, as the largest browser by market share, it serves as a critical access point for search. It’s installed by default on Android phones and captures around 60 percent of the US browser market.

The goal here is to keep Google from owning a crucial gatekeeping platform that it can use to funnel users to its own search engine and steer them away from others. In practice, the proposal raises a lot of questions about how a sale would impact the web.

There are several options for potential buyers: Rumble, the anti-“cancel culture” video platform, has already declared its interest. Bloomberg Intelligence senior tech analyst Mandeep Singh says most other big tech companies that might want it, like Amazon and Meta, would likely be blocked as potential antitrust threats. Apple might be an exception, Singh says, if the government wants to incentivize it developing a rival search engine — something Google highly discouraged with a lucrative revenue-sharing deal. (That said, Apple already owns a major browser, which would consolidate the tech market in a different way.) Depending on who buys Chrome, the court could also approve conditions that constrain how a buyer leverages it.

“There is definitely an issue about whether you’re just simply transferring a valuable asset from one company where these assets are too tightly integrated, to another company.”

Outside the standard big tech players, Chrome could also be valuable to large language model companies like OpenAI or Anthropic, where it could provide a distribution channel for their AI chatbots. “Chrome as an independent entity doesn’t generate any revenue,” Singh notes — its value lies in having a huge audience to monetize. So plugging it into another search-based product, especially if the DOJ wins other remedies like data-sharing rules, is a likely prospect.

Will this actually create a better, more competitive environment for search engines? Or will it just give another company (perhaps even a massive one like Microsoft, which works closely with OpenAI) its own anti-competitive advantage? “There is definitely an issue about whether you’re just simply transferring a valuable asset from one company where these assets are too tightly integrated, to another company,” says Shubha Ghosh, director of the Intellectual Property Law Institute at Syracuse University. DuckDuckGo SVP of public affairs Kamyl Bazbaz says the judge and DOJ “should be thoughtful about how to make sure that a sale doesn’t result in creating another space that’s hard to compete for all search engines.”

But even if a company like OpenAI can tie a browser with its search product, Singh says it wouldn’t necessarily have the same impact on the market. “When you think about the time spent on the internet as an aggregate, Google still has the most time spent,” thanks to everything from YouTube to Gmail, says Singh. That makes it a unique powerhouse for advertising — which is, fundamentally, how search engines (and likely, eventually, some AI services) make money. “You can’t replicate engagement.”

“When you think about why the ads shown on Google are so effective, Chrome is a big part of that.”

The DOJ says Google would also need to spin out its open-source browser project Chromium — which helps power the Brave, Opera, and Microsoft Edge browsers — as part of the Chrome sale. The nonpartisan Consumer Choice Center has expressed concern over this outcome, saying it could put the project “in jeopardy.” Singh seems less concerned, saying the open-source project may “take its own course,” but that’s still a significant risk for browser makers that rely on it.

Depending on what restrictions a buyer faces, Chrome could offer a huge distribution channel for whatever other products they offer. For consumers, the browser experience will likely depend on who ends up buying it — a company that already has a savvy browser-building team like Apple or a company or group without that specialized experience, like a private equity firm.

Selling off Chrome won’t necessarily mean its users stop going to google.com, whose name has been synonymous with “search engine” for decades. “I think Google Search will still be the most visited page,” says Singh. “But it’s just the ad business. When you think about why the ads shown on Google are so effective, Chrome is a big part of that.”