DOJ, let Google keep Chrome

The Consumer Choice Center is out with a press release questioning the government’s request that Google sell Chrome as a result of its monopoly in search. This as the remedies phase of US v. Google begins.

Yael Ossowski, Deputy Director of the Consumer Choice Center, said:

There has never been a more vibrant and competitive time for Internet browsers. From privacy options like Mullvad, Apple’s Safari, or the various open-source forks of Firefox, there is literally no world where consumers are forced to use any browser. Added to that, most other browsers use open-source code from Google’s Chromium project, which will no doubt be put in jeopardy. The DOJ is continuing to advance an ideological campaign that ignores consumer choice and makes a mockery of antitrust law.

One might consider the CCC the megaphone for the promarket business set, but their point stands: Google has been a good steward of the Chromium project, and as a result, we have a multitude of browsers based on Chromium, fast web browsing as a result of Blink (the page rendering engine) and V8 (Javascript), and the Node.js platform, based on V8, for running server-side JavaScript using nonblocking, asynchronous I/O, allowing a server to handle multiple tasks simultaneously without waiting for each one to finish.

The technical supremacy of Chromium is evident in the current browser market: while even Microsoft’s Edge browser is Chromium -based, so too are Brave, Opera, and Vivaldi. Meanwhile, the Mozilla Foundation recently upgraded its Gecko rendering engine with its much faster “Quantum” upgrade, but few third-party companies use its open-source for page rendering or JavaScript.

Even assuming the Chromium open-source project would be separated from the sale of Chrome, which Chrome buyer might continue meaningful open-source contributions? A Microsoft would likely maintain or even enhance Chromium's open-source development. Matured from its Linux-bashing salad days, Microsoft is now an open-source evangelist, including its significant involvement with Chromium through the development of the Edge browser.

An Amazon, however, might use open-source more opportunistically. While Amazon and AWS rely on open-source technologies extensively, the company has faced criticism for its focus on internal use and monetization over community collaboration. Amazon has been known to fork open-source projects, such as Elasticsearch and Redis, for its own services without significantly contributing back to the community. This is especially concerning with Chromium’s V8 JavaScript engine and the future of Node.js.

Further, as Chrome is a free product, its value is as distribution channel for services, such as by controlling search, collecting user data, or integrating an ecosystem more deeply into users' daily internet activities. Those are the exact reasons Google must divest it.

Faster than any legal remedy, internet search is undergoing an AI-driven paradigm shift, and users’ entry-points to the internet will increasingly shift from search engines to large language providers’ prompts and chatbots. A Chrome divestiture turns one of the few positives of Google’s current dominance into a negative, and that’s no success.