The Chrome browser will change the owner? They are willing to buy, but Google will do everything so that it does not sell
Mehta appointed two -week interrogations in April and announced the verdict at the latest in August 2025, which makes the case the first since the times of AT&T and Microsoft, in which Court is considering division digital “digestive tract” of the Internet.
Web browsers, such as Chrome, do not charge users in themselves, but strategically control the most valuable digital economy resource – people's attention and data. Chrome supports 66 percent global sessions in the world, ahead of Safari (17.6 percent) and leaving far behind Edge or Firefox.
This domination means that It is Google who decides what queries go to his engine, how the advertising views are measured and which cookies can track the behavior of Internet users. It is not surprising that in 2022 alone the company paid Apple a record $ 20 billion. Only to remain the default search engine in Safari. If Chrome belonged to another company, Google would probably pay for similar cooperation, but much more.
The earning model is quite simple: Chrome provides a permanent source of queries, and each of them increases the accuracy of targeting in Google Ads and Display Network. From $ 90.2 billion Alphabet revenues in the first quarter of 2025 as much as 78 percent It came from advertising, despite the growing participation of the cloud and equipment. Chrome is a node connecting the entire ecosystem – it collects data on interests, transfers it to advertising platforms, and then to Android, YouTube and – more and more often – also to Gemini AI.
Check also: Google “Przegląd from AI” can be the giant's biggest mistake. Destroys businesses and trust in the search engine
Adjusting pressure is growing
The EU Act on digital markets has already forced Google to introduce search engine and browser selection screens in Chrome and Android to limit the strength of the default settings. At the same time, a loud Privacy Sandbox project collapsed. After years of criticism and investigating the British CMA (Competition and Markets Authority – an independent regulatory body, responsible for promoting competition and consumer protection in Great Britain) Google gave up the plan to disable cookies of other companieskeeping the current tracking model.
For regulators, it is an argument that the giant's independent actions are not enough. That is why the American Department of Justice reaches for a more drastic means: Cutting the Chrome from the home company.
What does Alphabet have to lose? Chrome does not bring direct revenues, but allows the giant to conclude expensive and profitable distribution agreements. The company today pays, for example, huge amounts to Samsung, so that Gemini AI and Google search engine are pre -installed in the new Galaxy S25. If the Chrome fell out of the Google Services Package, the entire chain of paid default settings would be renewed – from Apple to Windows laptop manufacturers – what It could threaten the largest stream of cash in the Alphabet balance sheet.
Read also: Google recognized as a monopolist. “He deliberately undertook a number of anti -competitive actions”
Why others want to take over Chrome
Opeli, in which the manager Nick Turley testified before the court, sees the express path to billions of users in Chrome, on which he cannot count directly on Android today. Chatgpt integration “in the core of” a web browser would create de facto internet truly based on artificial intelligence, in which a language assistant becomes the default interface.
Perplexity, a young Google competitor in generative search, does not hide purely advertising motivations. The president of Aravind Srinivas publicly admitted that He wants to follow “everything that the user does on the web” to sell hyperspersonalized ads. It will introduce its own browser to the market in May, but the takeover of Chrome would give the company an immediate range and ocean of data. So he expressed his desire to take over, just like OpenAi.
In turn, Yahoo, supported by the Apollo fund, takes the opportunity to rebuild the search brand. The manager Brian Provost assessed the value of the transaction to “tens of billions of dollars” and stated that It would double the participation of Yahoo in searching with 3 percent. to two -digit values virtually day by day. Yahoo effectively monetizes online traffic and with Chrome, he could do it even better.
See also: Opeli will gladly take over a part of Google
Values, licenses and risks
Bank of America experts estimate that The Chrome brand itself can be worth 15-25 percent The capitalization of Alphabet, but its open-source Blink engine remains covered by the BSD-Google (Chromium) license. The new owner would have to pay not for the code – this one is public anyway – but for the brand, update infrastructure, relationships with suppliers and patents for integration with Android. In addition, there are issues of compliance with network standards: if Chrome stops updating their API Webextensions or Implementation of CSS, the creators of the pages and applications will immediately feel the effects.
Global expenses for internet advertising exceeded $ 1 trillion. in 2024, driving the entire consumer data ecosystem. If Chrome hits a company that will continue to optimize it under monetization, Google's participation in the cake may fall, but the pressure on users' privacy does not have to give way. Judge Mehta also considers the obligation to provide Google's part of the search engine with smaller competitorswhich could distract the scale advantage and reduce the entry barriers for some start-ups.
If Mehta actually dates sales, the Department of Justice will give Alphabet several months to select a buyer approved by the regulators. If the buyer were OpenAI, Chrome could become an experiment in browsing the controlled conversation with AI. A new, aggressive context advertising network would be created in Perplexity's hands. Yahoo would probably maintain a traditional model, but with a afterburner for its scale. Regardless of the Alphabet variant, it would lose the most important “transmission belt” between its index and advertisers. This would force costly renegotiations of contracts, e.g. with Apple and Samsung.
However, if the court was satisfied with the ban on exclusive contracts and the requirement of “selection screens”, Google would keep Chrome, but will have to fight for every default position, as is the case today in the European Union. The threat of decisions itself has opened the device manufacturers the way to harder negotiations and growing competition in the niche, which has not changed the leader since 2008.
Final conclusions? The dispute about Chrome is not only a duel for dominance in browsers, but an attempt to define, who is allowed to shape the range of information in the 21st century. Analysts compare possible effects to release innovation after the division of AT & T or liberalization of Windows after the microsoft process. Whatever the court decides, the result will tell investors and regulators around the world how far you can go in disarming of digital monopolies – And whether the concentration of data in the hands of one entity is inevitable or just comfortable.
The decision, which will be made at the latest in August 2025, can therefore redesign not only Alphabet, but also the entire advertising, search and artificial intelligence market.
Author: Grzegorz Kubera, Business Insider Polska journalist
