Comment by sashank_1509

Google has a monopoly but focusing on Chrome seems wrong. Here’s my prediction, let us remove chrome from the world tomorrow, make bing the default search engine on all devices. How much will Googles search market share fall by?

From 90% to 80%. Maybe even 70%. I don’t see it falling below that. Does DOJ think that hypothetical market shares could be 40% Google, 30% Bing, 20-30% rest. I don’t think this is possible short of banning Google or making it extremely cumbersome to access Google (for example, making it impossible to set Google as default). Which makes this whole exercise seem pointless.

Then we also come to the realm of justice. Google built Chrome (no easy task), fair and square. Chrome is a better browser engine than that of most competitors, so much so that its competitors use the same browser engine (Firefox and Safari Exempted). (Chromium is also open source). Why should Google be forced to sell Chrome? Is the assumption here that by the default the government owns everything you make, and the fact that you get to keep something you made is because of the benevolence of the government? This doesn’t seem like a good precedent. The government can’t even justify this as some big harm to society like it’s an addictive drug. What’s the consumer harm here? Is it that Google has monopoly pricing on serving ads to users, so if any company wants to do digital marketing, they have to pay whatever price Google sets?

In the end, this just seems like a big unnecessary mess. The govt surely must have better things to do.