Perplexity’s bid for Google Chrome is mostly mischief

IF YOU are fighting an antitrust lawsuit that might end up breaking your company into pieces, one defence is to argue that those pieces would wither away if separated from the mothership, thus creating a worse outcome for the consumer.

That is what Google has been doing in the face of Department of Justice (DOJ) calls for it to sell Chrome, its market-leading Web browser, as part of the remedies for its monopolistic behaviours involving its search business.

The company wrote on its blog in May: “DOJ’s proposal to break off Chrome – which billions of people use for free – would break it and result in a ‘shadow of the current Chrome’, according to Chrome leader Parisa Tabriz. She added that the browser would likely become ‘insecure and obsolete’.”