00:00 Speaker A
Well, the Justice Department wants Google to sell its Chrome browser, and potentially its Android operating system among other remedies. Some companies have already expressed some interest in buying in Chrome buying Chrome, if it does indeed go up for sale. For more, we’ve got Yahoo Finance’s Alexis Keenan who, as always, has been pouring through the court filings. What have you found, Alexis?
00:25 Alexis Keenan
Yeah, Julie. So the interest in acquiring the internet’s most popular browser, that came in some testimony in court in the remedies phase that is in trial now, that the DOJ won against Google last year. And so this remedies phase, it’s really meant to help the judge figure out how to restore competition in search. So there was some testimony from Google’s competitors. We had executives from AI powered search startups. You had perplexities executives, Microsoft backed OpenAI’s executives, all expressing interest in Chrome. We also had Yahoo’s own general manager for search, Brian Provost. He told a judge that the, uh, company would like to put in a bid for Chrome. That is if it is put up for sale. And that would mean a judge orders it be put up for sale and divested from Alphabet’s Google. Now, today you also had vice president, a vice president, uh, at Microsoft Bing, testifying that the key to search is really distribution. So that’s where Chrome comes into play. Uh, the testimony was that, you know, these companies, these search competitors to Google search, they want their own data. They don’t want to have to rely on necessarily Google’s index. So there’s a lot of debate about the impact of what a Chrome sale would really mean for Google. Google, uh, for their part, they say that it would hurt consumers, it would hurt the economy, it would hurt innovation, that it would risk, uh, the fact that Chrome’s underlying open source technology could be shuttered by a third party, a new buyer, and also that the privacy and data security that Google provides, that could be jeopardized too. Now, I spoke with a data scientist who said that he disagreed. He thought that Google could easily withstand a Chrome divestment, that really traditional search, he said, was a dying market in a couple years, one to two years time that everyone will have shifted to AI powered search. And that Chrome, once it’s decoupled, if it’s decoupled from search, but that makes Chrome just inherently less valuable from the get-go, and it really hastens the demise of that traditional search. Now, that all would be maybe a much bigger problem though, because another thing the DOJ has on the table is wanting to limit how Google uses its own AI to boost up its own products. Uh, they want to there to be some sharing there with competitors. So a lot is in the mix here, but, uh, we continue to watch the testimony as it comes down the remedies phase here, and the judge’s decision is expected following the testimony in August this year.
