This Wednesday the foundations of not only Alphabet (Google’s parent company) but also a large part of the global Internet industry could creak. The matter of discord rests on the table of Judge Amit Mehta, responsible for the antitrust litigation that pits the United States Department of Justice against the owner of the largest online search engine in the world, the Chrome browser and the Android application store, among other treasures.
The United States Department of Justice could require Google to put Chrome up for sale in the next few hours, as reported this Tuesday by the Bloomberg agency. In this way, the Mountain View giant will reduce the strength of the company’s all-powerful search engine, since most users access said search bar through the intermediation of the aforementioned browser. Furthermore, the user information that Google would access through the browser would stop feeding, not only Alphabet’s huge advertising business, but also the giant’s generative artificial intelligence.
The possible segregation of Chrome from the Google empire could bring the American multinational around 20 billion dollars (around 18.9 billion euros), according to market estimates. However, this cash could hardly be reinvested in other online companies, given the antitrust pressure suffered by the company led by Sundar Pichai.
According to data from the consulting firm StatCounter, Nearly two-thirds (64%) of the world’s Internet users browse the Internet through Chrome servicesthe most used browser in the world, along with Safari, whose global share is around 18%. From the outside, Google has not shown particular concern about a sword of Damocles that comes to continue other similar regulatory attacks on the company’s waterline. In fact, the Department of Justice is already keeping the legion of lawyers busy of Alphabet with lawsuits in practically all of the group’s businesses.
Currently, there is an open wound in the Android mobile operating system, software that shares the pie of the mobile Internet along with Apple’s iOS. In that battlefield, the American justice system has also proposed the segregation of said tool. The next services on the judicial list will be generative artificial intelligence (Gemini), the Google Play application store and even Gmail email. Lee-Anne Mulholland, vice president of Regulatory Affairs at Google, has assured that the Department of Justice “continues promoting a radical agenda that goes far beyond the legal issues of this case,” according to the Bloomberg agency.
The same sources point out that “the fact that the Government puts its thumb on the scale in this way would harm consumers, developers and American technological leadership precisely at the moment when it is most needed.” In turn, the Europa Press agency points out that Judge Amit Mehta has set a two-week hearing, scheduled for next April, on what changes Google should make to remedy the illegal behavior and plans to issue a final verdict by August 2025.
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