Why are companies lining up to buy Chrome?

Chrome could, someday, be for sale, and a few companies have already expressed interest.

Chrome could eventually be up for sale, if the US Department of Justice gets its way in the remedies trial for US v. Google. And there are already buyers lining up at Google’s door.

Any potential sale might not happen for a very long time. The remedies trial is still ongoing, a decision in that trial isn’t expected for quite awhile, and Google has already said it will appeal, which will definitely add more time to the process and could ultimately reverse a ruling where Google might have been forced to sell the browser.

But let’s say that Google does have to sell Chrome — who wants it? And why? We’re getting some of those answers from the remedies trial.

Let’s start with the why: a browser is a great way to promote your own search engine. Especially a browser that’s as widely used as Chrome. Google makes Chrome, so it obviously makes sense that Google also provides Google Search as its default way to search the web. Chrome is also the most widely used browser by a wide margin — it has an estimated two-thirds of browser market share — so that means that many, many, many more people are using Google Search instead of other search engines just because it’s the default there.

But the interest isn’t just to push search — having a browser as big as Chrome gives companies a surface to push just about anything. Owning Chrome would let a company suddenly put products in front of four billion people. If you’re an upstart trying to get traction, that’s unbeatable, especially if you’re an upstart like an AI company that’s trying to replace the default — which, right now, is Google.

Here are the eager potential buyers — at least, that we know about:

• OpenAI: ChatGPT’s head of product Nick Turley testified that OpenAI would be interested in buying the browser. OpenAI already has web search features baked into ChatGPT, so it makes sense that the company would be interested in owning a widely used browser to potentially bring ChatGPT to even more users. Also, OpenAI, one of Google’s biggest rivals, would probably be very happy to own one of Google’s prized assets.
• Perplexity: Perplexity also offers AI-powered search. The company’s chief business officer testified Perplexity would be interested in buying Chrome. It likely wants Chrome for the same reasons that OpenAI does: as a platform that gets more people to use its services. It’s also already making its own browser, which Perplexity’s CEO says will help it build better agents and help it get data outside its app to “better understand” its users (and potentially show them personalized ads).
• Yahoo: The company testified at trial that it’s prototyping its own web browser, but just buying Chrome would be a much easier way to potentially get Yahoo in front of a lot more people. At the trial, Yahoo Search General Manager Brian Provost said that actually buying Chrome would potentially cost tens of billions of dollars, but it’s something that the company could make happen with the help of Apollo Global Management, its owner.

Yahoo isn’t the only company estimating a price in the eleven-digit range; Gabriel Weinberg, DuckDuckGo’s CEO, testified that Chrome could be worth, in a “back-of-the-envelope” estimate, up to $50 billion according to Bloomberg. So should a company get the opportunity to buy Chrome, it seems likely they’re going to have to front a lot of money.

But that enormous investment could be worth it. Whoever buys Chrome would instantly own a platform with billions of users. And right now, at a moment when Google is looking vulnerable, losing its browser to a competitor would probably be a significant blow.

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