The Google/Chrome case: new “browser war” would be good news

The US Department of Justice intends to force Google to sell Chrome, the most popular browser in the world. This potentially transformative move would be part of the solution to Google's widespread dominance of web search. It is worth remembering that, in August, judge Amit Mehta, ruled that Google exercises an illegal monopoly over the search segment.

Although the news agency Bloomberg quote an analyst who estimates that Chrome could sell for $15 billion to $20 billion, it's not quite clear why it would be worth so much to anyone other than Google itself.

The company benefits tremendously from Chrome's popularity to serve ads to billions of people – one of the assets it has used to become the most powerful force in the digital advertising industry. That's actually a big part of why Google is in trouble with the DOJ to begin with.

Few companies could make a similar business model work: Amazon, Meta, Microsoft. But would any of them be willing to spend a large amount of money on Chrome?

Or could someone buy the browser and make a deal with one of these companies, like the one that makes Google the default search engine on Safari and leaves Apple swimming in cash?

Given the pace of progress in major antitrust cases in North American courts, we could have years to speculate about these possibilities before anything actually happens – that is, if, in the meantime, Google doesn't find a way to free itself from the obligation to sell Chrome.

At least the prospect of a major upheaval in the browser business at least gives us an excuse to reflect on how boring it has become. Chrome and its main competitors – Safari, Microsoft Edge, Firefox – are all good. Just good.

It's been years since any of them demonstrated any relevant innovation, perhaps in part because browsers from Google, Apple and Microsoft are all necessary parts of platforms like Android, iOS and Windows, rather than businesses in their own right. They are a means to an end, and that's it.

In recent years, no new major competitors have emerged to reignite the browser wars.

But browsers don't have to be so boring. In fact, there have been several moments over the past three decades when they have been showcases for vibrant competition and brilliant ideas. There have been three such periods so far, which I call the Browser Wars 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0.

– Browser Wars 1.0: involved the competition, in the 1990s, between Netscape Navigator (the first navigation giant) and Microsoft's Internet Explorer. That battle became fodder for the landmark antitrust case against Microsoft, although Navigator was all but dead by the time the DOJ and the company reached a settlement in 2001.

– Browser Wars 2.0: pitted Internet Explorer against Mozilla's Firefox, the (open source) successor to Netscape that made a huge dent in the market share of Microsoft's browser simply because it was a much better product.

– Browser Wars 3.0: It started when Chrome entered the market in 2008, competing with both Explorer and Firefox and eventually surpassing both.

In each case, all competitors underwent rapid improvements. Chrome, for example, emphasized the speed and minimalism of the interface, which was a revelation at the time. This inspired other browsers to get rid of the excess, which was good for everyone.

But that was a long time ago. Today's Chrome doesn't feel nearly as snappy as the original, and no new major competitors have emerged to reignite the browser wars.

As the big browsers settled in, small-company newcomers kept innovation alive. For example, Arc is a browser full of “fresh touches.” My colleague Jared Newman loves Vivaldi.

Like Edge, Arc and Vivaldi are based on Chromium, the open source version of Chrome's technology. Google has every reason to invest in this platform, which has made the creation of alternative browsers much easier. A new Chrome owner may or may not devote as much attention to it.

Even Firefox, which uses its own rendering engine in place of Chromium, depends on Google's largesse: most of the revenue for the Mozilla Foundation (the browser's creator) comes from paying Google to be Firefox's default search engine, similar to its relationship with Safari.

Perhaps a mandatory sale of Chrome would generate a truly unexpected result, which would make the browser once again a hotbed of news – for example, if OpenAI bought it and transformed it into a product focused on artificial intelligence.

If not (which is very likely), I hope some other development shakes the segment out of its current doldrums. We spend too much time on the internet for browsers to be so boring.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Harry McCracken is Fast Company's technology editor based in San Francisco. In past lives, he was editor of Time, founder and editor… find out more

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