Google’s Chrome Could Command $50 Billion In Forced Sale Scenario

Google is in the middle of a 3-week trial, which should lay out the steps the company has to take following its defeat in a Google Search monopoly case. One of the remedies could be the sale of Chrome.

With that being said, OpenAI already said that it would be interested in purchasing Chrome, if Google is forced to sell it. It’s not the only interested party, though, as some additional news just surfaced.

Both Perplexity & DuckDuckGo would be interested in acquiring Chrome

It seems like both Perplexity and DuckDuckGo are also interested in buying Chrome. Perplexity’s Chief Business Officer (CBO), Dmitry Shevelenko, said as much during the aforementioned trial.

During his testimony, he was asked whether any other company, other than Google, could operate (a browser as large-scale as) Chrome without compromising quality or introducing new costs.

He said “I think we could do it”, and by “we”, he means Perplexity, of course. Later on, he was flat out asked whether Perplexity would be interested in acquiring Chrome, and he said, “Yes.”

On the other hand, DuckDuckGo’s founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Gabriel Weinberg, was also subpoenaed. He said that there’s not “silver bullet remedy” to Google’s conduct, at least in his opinion.

DuckDuckGo’s CEO said that Chrome could be worth upwards of $50 billion

When DuckDuckGo’s CEO was asked if the company would be interested in buying Chrome, he did not have a simple answer. He said that he has done some “back of the envelope calculation”, and estimates that Chrome would probably be worth “upwards of $50 billion if it went on the market. And that’s just way, way out of DuckDuckGo’s price range.”

Then he was asked would DuckDuckGo be interested “if price were not an object?”, and he said “Sure.”

Neither of them had a simple answer for a solution to Google’s problem, but both of them seem to think it’s a considerable problem.

There’s something that Dmitry Shevelenko said that stuck with me. He said the following: “They ultimately are like the portal to knowledge [and] the Internet for all of us, and the constraints they have now, where if you use one Google product, you have to use all of them. You have to default to Google ones.”