In a new report, Eric Rescorla and Alissa Cooper analyze how Google’s browser, Chrome, could operate successfully as an independent entity if the court presiding over Google Search orders its divestiture.
As the United States government pursues its landmark antitrust case against Google for monopolizing the online search market, one proposed remedy has attracted significant attention and debate: the divestiture of Google’s web browser, Chrome. The question of whether such a divestiture would be technically feasible arose repeatedly over the course of the three-week remedies trial that took place from April to May. That discussion failed to answer key technical questions, and left knowledgeable observers wanting.
The divestiture of Chrome—together with its underlying open-source web browser project, Chromium—would involve transitioning control of a complex piece of software with four billion users. This is a task whose viability requires careful analysis. Our recent report, “The Technical Feasibility of Divesting Google Chrome,” finds that the divestiture is technically feasible and offers an in-depth engineering perspective on what it would take to successfully separate Chrome from Google’s ecosystem.
Our analysis shows how a non-Google entity (referred to here as “ChromeCo”) could successfully operate Chrome (referred to here as “NewChrome”) to serve the existing Chrome user base with a browser that is competitive with today’s other major browsers (Microsoft Edge, Apple Safari, and Mozilla Firefox). Much of the proof already exists in the market today: Edge, Brave, Opera, and other Chromium-based browsers successfully compete using combinations of open-source Chromium code, independent proprietary services, publicly available services, and third-party infrastructure. Firefox and Safari operate entirely independently with different browser engines and have driven major web innovations in areas such as high-performance computing, security, and privacy despite significantly fewer resources than Google.
Our analysis assumes that the court would place necessary restrictions on Google reentering the browser market after the divestiture for an appropriate time period to facilitate this transition (5-10 years or longer if search competition benchmarks have not been reached). With Google’s strong market position across Android, ads, YouTube, cloud, web services, and artificial intelligence, it would have an incentive to reenter the browser market at its first opportunity. Assuming that Chromium remains open source, it would be relatively straightforward for Google to build a new browser in the future and position it to become an immediate strong competitor to NewChrome. ChromeCo will need sufficient time to transition the Chrome user base to NewChrome and build a business from its new product while the search market responds to the imposition of remedies as a whole.
Under those assumptions about the duration of the remedy, and leaving the business case for the divestiture aside (it’s been covered elsewhere), the divestiture can succeed technically if:
- ChromeCo can replicate or replace the Google-proprietary technology currently in Chrome with existing tools, available licensing models, and proven alternatives in the market;
- ChromeCo can maintain or acquire the personnel and software tooling necessary to support a competitive browser;
- Chromium’s governance can be established independent of Google;
- Google assists in the transition of key services like software updates and data syncing to ChromeCo.
All of these are within reach.
First, there are clear paths and precedents showing how a divested Chrome can operate effectively without relying on Google’s proprietary technology. Existing Chromium-based browsers such as Edge and Brave already offer competitive alternatives without relying on any private or internal Google services or infrastructure. Chrome currently contains proprietary software components related to digital rights management for streaming video and audio/video encoding. ChromeCo would need to replace or replicate these, all of which already have either an available licensing model or proven alternatives in the market.
ChromeCo would also need to replace numerous proprietary Google services in the browser. Chief among these would be core services that users would expect of any major browser, including Safe Browsing, data syncing, translation, Chrome Enterprise, the Chrome web store, and a few others. Edge, Brave, and Firefox offer evidence that non-Google providers can build and operate comparable versions of most of these core services. One service that requires special attention is Safe Browsing, a reputation service that Google uses to protect users of search, Gmail, and Chrome from malicious websites and downloads. Google has also offered Safe Browsing to other browsers for free for decades. Safe Browsing relies on Google’s web crawling and indexing capabilities and so might well be difficult to independently replicate. It would be prudent for the court to require Google to provide either continued access or transitional support to ChromeCo in the event that divesting Chrome changes Google’s incentives to continue operating Safe Browsing.
Replacing the operational services needed to maintain the browser at scale—software updates, crash reporting, and metrics collection—would also be key.The expertise to do so, however, is not at all novel. Any serious potential Chrome buyer can be expected to be capable of building and maintaining these kinds of services.
Second, on the organizational front, it is reasonable to expect that a non-Google entity would be able to obtain the personnel, software tooling, and cross-industry collaboration needed to maintain and develop Chromium independently from Google. ChromeCo would need to recruit or retain browser engineering talent and would likely prioritize retaining as much of the current Chrome team as possible. ChromeCo would need to make attractive offers, both in terms of compensation and by offering a compelling sense of mission for those interested in contributing to an endeavor broader than a single software product: the web’s continued advancement. The relevant browser engineering expertise exists both inside and outside Google at present, with many engineers having moved from one browser vendor to another. Organizations such as Mozilla and Apple have long maintained competitive browsers without access to Google’s engineering teams. The right buyer might even find it easier to recruit than Google does, given Google’s notoriously challenging hiring process and mixed or contradictory corporate incentives when it comes to the future of the web.
Third, the open-source Chromium web browser code base is already accessible to the public, and the court’s order could ensure it remains so. While Google currently contributes the majority of the code to Chromium, other vendors and independent projects demonstrate that browsers can thrive with smaller teams and more collaborative governance models. Google is likely to significantly reduce its contributions to Chromium once it no longer controls Chrome, raising the question about how Chromium would continue to be developed and governed. There are a number of potential governance structures to choose from: ChromeCo could steward the project akin to how Google currently does, or adopt more collaborative or decentralized governance models involving other industry contributors. The potential divestiture order should take care to allow ChromeCo and the web community the flexibility needed to identify which option is best. Regardless of the option chosen, it will be critical for the court to include public interest conditions in its order to ensure that Chromium remains open source and that Google is prevented from having sole decisional authority over Chromium updates.
Finally, a transition of this scale would require assistance from Google, which the court could require. Software update mechanisms, data import from Google accounts, and continued operation of Safe Browsing and other services could all be managed through a combination of technical solutions and court-ordered cooperation from Google. The court would also need to ensure that Google provides the relevant technical and organizational documentation and software code to bootstrap ChromeCo’s operations.
In short, divesting Chrome from Google is a technically achievable remedy. ChromeCo would be able to deliver a competitive browser at global scale, provided that the divestiture is structured with appropriate court-ordered cooperation and sufficient transition time.
Authors’ Disclosures: Eric Rescorla and Alissa Cooper work for the Knight-Georgetown Institute (KGI). KGI is funded by Georgetown University and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Rescorla worked for Mozilla Corporation until 2023. His wife works for the Data Transfer Initiative (https://dtinit.org/), which receives funding from Amazon, Apple, ErnieApp, Google, and Meta. Cooper is a member of the board of The Tor Project, Inc. and previously worked for Cisco Systems, Inc. You can read our disclosure policy here.
Articles represent the opinions of their writers, not necessarily those of the University of Chicago, the Booth School of Business, or its faculty.
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