I hope Google loses Chrome – but it’d get very, very messy

After months of speculation, including by yours truly, the U.S. Department of Justice has doubled down on its recommendation that Google be forced to divest itself of Chrome in punishment for operating an illegal monopoly. Personally, I can’t wait.

How we got here

It was over six months ago that the DOJ won its four-year suit against Google, which was found in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta found that Google had intentionally created and maintained an illegal monopoly by using agreements that forced its business partners to use Chrome and Google Search. Google’s own Android operating system, in conjunction with its search agreements with Apple for the iPhone and iPad, cemented its unassailable position as the mobile web boomed.

Initially there were a lot of options on the table. The Department of Justice considered forcing Google to sell off or otherwise get rid of Chrome, Google Search, Android, or some combination of all three. Google appealed — indeed, might still be appealing, considering the slow pace of these big intersections between business and law.

There was also a big question mark over whether any of this would matter: August 2024 was before a business-friendly Donald Trump won a second presidential term, and before Google “donated” a million dollars to him and sent CEO Sundar Pichai to the inauguration. Pichai visited the president-elect at his Mar-A-Lago residence before Trump assumed office, and the company has also abandoned its diversity and inclusion staffing goals to align with Trump’s directives, in the explicit hope of preserving contracts with the U.S. federal government.

Google

All of these would be questionable moves for a company in the middle of the biggest antitrust case since AT&T in the 1980s. In 2025, it appears to be standard practice — Google wouldn’t be the only company that saw its legal troubles disappear after donating to a politician. But it hardly matters. The DOJ, now firmly under the thumb of the Trump regime, is still insisting that Google get rid of Chrome, but not Search or Android. Google’s attempts to curry favor seem to have failed, as the Republican-controlled Congress is also looking to get a few good licks in.

We’re probably still months away from this getting a final, definitive resolution and the approval of a federal judge, with Google no doubt exhausting every official and unofficial avenue to stop it. It isn’t the triple disaster that the big G was dreading, but the Chrome browser is still an essential part of the company’s strategy. Proceeding under the assumption that Google will indeed be forced to give up Chrome, there are a lot of ways that I think this will be a positive for users like you and me.

Google doesn’t deserve to keep Chrome

Judge Mehta declared that “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly.” That was already blindingly obvious to anyone who looked at a search market analysis. Google holds a 90 percent share today, with the closest alternative being Bing at under 4 percent, and that’s almost certainly due to Microsoft aggressively shoving it into every corner of Windows. Other competitors like Baidu and Yandex operate in regions where Google does not, China and Russia, respectively.

But there’s an important distinction between a monopoly and an illegal monopoly, as determined by the Sherman Antitrust Act. If you sell the only EVA space suit for turtles, than you have a monopoly on turtle space suits…but that’s not illegal. Google, it has been determined, intentionally engineered and maintained its monopoly state. It used corporate partnerships and its status as the owner/maintainer of Chrome and Android to make it effectively impossible for a competitor to gain ground, and hid or destroyed evidence to make it harder for investigators and litigants to prove it.

Michael Crider/Foundry

All of this was in aid of keeping Google the de facto search on the internet, an invincible juggernaut of digital advertising, one of the most valuable and powerful technology companies on the planet. That’s what finally pushed it over the edge here. And it’s worth pointing out that these moves helped Google obtain a 65 percent share of the browser market and 70 percent of the mobile OS market, too.

Again, none of this is shocking, and it’s not even necessarily concerning from the perspective of an individual user. It’s all but impossible to use the modern internet without interacting with companies like Google, Amazon, Meta/Facebook, and Microsoft, and having your personal info sold to a thousand different data brokers.

But speaking as a computer and smartphone user, not a commenter on public policy and the governance of America’s technology sector, I have plenty of reason to take issue with Google’s handling of Chrome in particular. Chrome seems to have become fundamentally worse as a browser over the last few years. It’s always been a RAM hog compared to alternatives, but the speed that won so much praise when Google debuted it way back in 2008 seems to have slipped away — though that might also be because the web is just a lot heavier these days.

Joel Lee / Foundry

Google’s more deliberate choices aren’t without problems. It seems to have hamstrung ad-blocking extensions with the latest standard update, something that’s only just recently come into effect for most users. Google says that the Manifest V3 update is to improve performance, security, and privacy…but developers disagree, strongly. The creator of the popular uBlock Origin refused to hobble his extension, and created a “Lite” version rather than comply.

I won’t say that Google is lying…but the idea that one of the biggest advertising companies on the planet intentionally made a software design choice that makes blocking advertising harder on the biggest browser would hardly be surprising. After all, it’s been more than ten years since Google released Chrome for Android, and it still doesn’t support third-party extensions, something that both the desktop version and other Android browsers can do. I wonder why…when one of the first extensions most users load up is some kind of ad blocker.

Google has made plenty of other choices that give users like me reason to complain, like mismanaging YouTube, making Google Search worse and worse, and pushing questionably necessary “AI” into all aspects of its business. Its hoarding (and sharing) of personal data is a cornerstone of today’s web advertising. In short, the idea of Google being divorced from Chrome and the browser market isn’t one that brings a tear to my eye, no matter how we get there.

We’re in for some chaos

That being said, I’d be a fool if I didn’t foresee a lot of problems coming out of a breakup. Chrome isn’t just Chrome, and hasn’t been for a long time. Whatever its sins, Google has done tons of open source browser development via the Chromium project. Chromium now forms the code base of most of its Chrome’s alternatives, including Microsoft’s Edge, Opera, and my own new browser bestie, Vivaldi. In fact, of the browsers with more than 1 percent of the market, only Firefox and Apple’s Safari are not based on Chromium.

Chromium is also the basis of ChromeOS, Google’s alternative to Windows. While it’s nowhere near as successful as Android, Chromebooks form a substantial chunk of the market, particularly for entry-level machines and large-volume sales to schools and other big, centralized organizations. ChromeOS is still well behind MacOS, even Linux (and I think the Steam Deck is a big part of that), but without it a lot of people would be trying to run Windows on laptops that really can’t handle it.

CC Photo Labs / Shutterstock.com

So yeah, if Chrome and Chromium disappeared tomorrow, we’d be in for a big shakeup in the browser space and beyond. Exactly what’s going to happen to Chromium (and by extension, ChromeOS and Chromebooks) might be the biggest variable in this situation. It seems unlikely that Google will continue to pour millions and millions of dollars into the development of an open source platform for which it is no longer the primary benefactor.

Maybe it’ll switch Chromebooks over to Android for a safe haven, and let some other company take over Chromium. That would still hurt a lot for Google, and cause headaches for every other browser developer. But it wouldn’t be the end of the world…and we’d see some competition that’s been sorely lacking in this space for over a decade.

But which company would be the first in line to take over Chrome? That’s not hard to guess.

A big chance for Microsoft

Microsoft not only has a lot of history as both a backbone of the internet and a browser developer, it has the deep pockets necessary to take over a business as big and unwieldy as Chrome. And I’m betting Microsoft would absolutely leap at the chance to do it — after all, it’s been not-quite-forcing Windows users to deal with Edge for years.

Imagine the branding coup that would be “Microsoft Chrome” pre-installed on every new Windows laptop. If nothing else, it would save Microsoft the trouble of faking those Bing search results and support pages. Speaking of Bing, Microsoft would be in a position to use (or abuse, depending on whom you ask) Chrome to grow Bing search, using some of the same techniques that Google has with a browser in its back pocket.