Thursday, December 12, 2024

Letter: Google’s antitrust case raises searching questions for Chrome

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Robert Armstrong ponders who might want to buy Google’s Chrome browser (Unhedged, November 22). The question, of course, arose not because Google is looking for a buyer, but because the US Department of Justice proposed the divestiture as a remedy in the continuing antitrust trial against the company.

A suitable buyer would have two things — one easy to find, one hard: money and a plan to a viable search alternative to Google’s. Money is easy, because despite Chrome being valued at up to $20bn, there are plenty of mega-corps in the US that can afford it.

Turning Chrome into a gateway for non-Google search is the tricky part. The obvious contenders are companies that already have a search engine and deep pockets. The problem is that there is only one such company: Microsoft. Giving Chrome to Microsoft would be a perverse outcome given that the company has for more than 15 years tried and failed to convince users about its search offerings.

Amazon and Apple could also be possible suitors, assuming they can expand their existing but limited search functions into a general search engine. But these companies are already in antitrust authorities’ bad books, and the court will not want to make either of them even more powerful.

Enter AI search. Chrome can be sold to an AI company with search aspirations, and of those there are plenty. ChatGPT, Perplexity and Meta are the prime candidates here.

But this is not a clean outcome either. For one thing, most AI companies have received Big Tech funding, and any competitive advantage that accrues to Chrome’s AI buyer will also accrue to their Big Tech investors, furthering their dominance, and displeasing the court.

Moreover, most AI-enabled search offerings today piggyback on traditional search engines like Google Search or Bing. There are standalone AI search tools, such as SearchGPT, but it is not yet obvious that users regard those as substitutes for traditional search engines. If they don’t, then the remedy will fail to make general search more competitive.

In the end, we go back to the classic antitrust problem: if you don’t have a good remedy, do you even have an antitrust case?

Konstantinos Stylianou
Professor of Competition Law and Regulation, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK

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