Google faces pressure to sell Chrome over search monopoly

The Department of Justice (DOJ) plans to ask a judge to order Google to sell its Chrome browser, Bloomberg reported. This browser, used by more than 61% of users in the United States according to StatCounter, is a key component of the company’s advertising business, as it collects data from registered users to optimize ads, its main source of income.

In addition to the sale of Chrome, the DOJ proposes that Google decouple its Android operating system from other products such as the search engine and the Google Play store, currently offered as a package. These measures seek to create a more competitive environment in the market and guarantee greater control for advertisers over where their ads appear.

The August court ruling, led by Judge Amit Mehta, determined that the owner of the search engine violated antitrust laws in the search and digital advertising markets. The current proposals could also affect its artificial intelligence product, Gemini, designed to evolve from a chatbot to an assistant that interacts on multiple platforms. This would directly impact the company’s business model, including how it licenses data to train its artificial intelligence models.

The DOJ is also proposing a separate sale of click and query data, which would allow new competitors to build their own search indexes. Currently, the company restricts the use of syndicated results on mobile phones, limiting the options for other search engines to compete on equal terms.