Why the Government’s Google Breakup Plan Is Such a Big Deal

In August, the Justice Department prevailed in its antitrust case against Google, with a federal judge ruling that the search company is “a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly.” Now, the government has reportedly decided what it would like to do next:

Alphabet Inc.’s Chrome browser could fetch as much as $20 billion if a judge agrees to a Justice Department proposal to sell the business, in what would be a historic crackdown on one of the world’s biggest tech companies.

Cleaving off Chrome, the most popular browser in the world, was one of the likeliest consequences of a Google breakup, the other being a spinoff of Android, the most popular mobile operating system in the world. (The core subject in this case is the dominance of Google Search, the most popular search engine in the world, the popularity of which supports Google’s digital advertising business, which is also the largest in the world.) It sounds pretty simple from a consumer standpoint; to most people, Chrome is just that browser you download after you buy a new computer. In practice, though, it could prove to be spectacularly messy — and, depending on what you think the government’s goal is, quite effective.

Reading the proposed remedy framework filed by the Justice Department in October, we can get an idea of the basic argument here: “As the Court recognized, Google’s longstanding control of the Chrome browser, with its pre-installed Google search default, ‘significantly narrows the available channels of distribution and thus disincentivizes the emergence of new competition.’” Chrome, a free product, funnels users into Google Search by default and allows Google to more comprehensively track what its users are doing. Combined with a few other practices that Google may soon be forced to abandon — most significantly, paying companies like Apple to make Google the default search engine on iOS devices — Chrome clearly helps fortify Google’s business. In the government’s telling, it’s a major contributor to the “interlocking and pernicious harms” created by Google’s “anticompetitive conduct.”

This isn’t just a story about Google’s web browser, though — Chrome’s role in the economy of the internet is much weirder and more significant than that. Let’s start with the other web browsers. Chrome is a commercial product created by Google, but it’s based almost entirely on Chromium, which is free, open-source browser software available for licensing by other companies and organizations. Microsoft’s web browser, Edge, is built on Chromium. The browser Amazon uses on its tablets and other devices, Silk, is based on Chromium. Most alternative browsers are based on Chromium, including Opera, Arc, Brave, and DuckDuckGo. Major foreign browsers, including Yandex and QQ’s, are based on Chromium, too. And while the Chromium project is a collaborative, open-source, not-for-profit operation, it is primarily managed and funded by Google, meaning that the project’s priorities — what sorts of new standards and browser technologies to support or ignore — are influenced by the company, meaning that if you’re planning on building a product on the web, you’re effectively building a product around products and standards influenced primarily by Google.

Google losing control of Chrome would likely mean Google pulling resources from the Chromium project, either casting it adrift or making it the informal responsibility of a new buyer (if Bloomberg’s $20 billion estimate is anywhere near correct, the pool of potential acquirers is extremely small). It would also correspond with the chaotic reshuffling of the non-Chrome browser market. Apple’s Safari, the default browser on Mac OS and iOS, could stand to benefit in terms of raw use, but its parent company would simultaneously, as the result of proposed restrictions on search-preference deals, lose billions of dollars of annual payments from Google. Firefox, which is arguably the only major ground-up alternative to Chrome and the Chromium ecosystem, could also gain ground, but its parent organization, the Mozilla Foundation, would be at risk of total collapse given that the vast majority of its funding comes from royalties paid by … Google.

Severing Chrome, combined with ending search royalty payments, would have unpredictable consequences. In Google’s view, “the government putting its thumb on the scale in these ways would harm consumers, developers and American technological leadership at precisely the moment it is most needed.” But the scale metaphor doesn’t quite feel apt, here, in part because Google’s influence over web browsing is genuinely unparalleled — the company’s power is such that there is no single major competitor that would obviously and profoundly benefit from such actions. Perhaps we end up with healthy competition between established and new browsers, spawning a new age of innovation in one of the most important categories in software; perhaps a new monopolist emerges almost immediately. In any case, while this plan might sound tidy, it’s anything but. The government wouldn’t be tilting or rebalancing the scales here. More likely, it would be blowing the whole market apart.