Yahoo is reportedly preparing to acquire the web browser if a US federal court orders its sale in an antitrust case
Yahoo is ready to buy popular web browser Chrome if a US federal court orders the current owner, Google, to divest from it in an anti-monopoly lawsuit, Bloomberg has reported.
According to the outlet, the general manager for Yahoo Search, Brian Provost, testified at Google’s trial in Washington on Thursday, stating that Chrome is “arguably the most important strategic player on the web” and that his company estimates that the browser’s sale prices would be in the tens of billions of dollars.
“We would be able to pursue it with Apollo,” Provost said, referring to Yahoo’s parent company – Apollo Global Management.
Provost’s testimony came as part of a three-week hearing against Google to determine how to get the company to remedy its overwhelming dominance in internet search, in which Chrome plays a major part, according to the US Department of Justice. The trial began on Monday following last year’s ruling by a US judge that Google had illegally monopolized the internet search market.
Google attorney John Schmidtlein has dismissed the government’s proposed remedies as “extreme” and “fundamentally flawed,” arguing that the company won its place in the market “fair and square.”
Schmidtlein suggested that the government’s demand that Google sell off Chrome would “reward competitors with advantages they never would have earned in a market where Google competed.”
Other contenders to take Chrome off of Google’s hands include ChatGPT developer OpenAI and AI search engine Perplexity.
As reported by TechCrunch, Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas has admitted that his company wants a web browser to help further develop its AI model, and “get data even outside the [Perplexity] app to better understand you.”
“Because some of the prompts that people do in these AIs is purely work-related. It’s not like that’s personal,” he explained on the TBPN podcast.
“On the other hand, what are the things you’re buying; which hotels are you going [to]; which restaurants are you going to; what are you spending time browsing, tells us so much more about you,” he added, noting that this information could be used to build a better user profile and “show some ads” in the ‘discover’ feed.
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