Monopolies aren’t illegal. Anticompetitive business conduct is.

It seems like everyone and their dog wants to buy Google Chrome after Google lost the search antitrust case last year and the Justice Department named a breakup as one of its key remedies. I wrote shortly after the company lost the case that a Chrome divestiture wouldn’t actually fix the monopoly issue because Chrome itself is a monopoly, and simply selling it would transfer ownership of that monopoly to another company overnight. And if Chrome spun out and became its own company, it wouldn’t even last a day because the browser itself lacks a business model. My bottom line in that November piece was that Google ultimately makes nothing from Chrome and that the real money-maker is Google Search, which everyone already uses because it’s the best free search engine on the web. The government, and Judge Amit Mehta, who sided with the government, disagree with the last part, but I still think it’s true.

Of course, everyone wants to buy Chrome because everyone wants to be a monopolist. OpenAI, in my eyes, is perhaps the most serious buyer, knowing the amount of capital it has and how much it has to gain from owning the world’s most popular web browser. Short-term, it would be marvelous for OpenAI, and that’s ultimately all it cares about. OpenAI has never been in it for the long run. It isn’t profitable, it isn’t even close to breaking even, and it essentially acts as a leech on Microsoft’s Azure servers. Sending all Chrome queries through ChatGPT would melt the servers and probably cause the next World War because of some nonsense ChatGPT spewed, but OpenAI doesn’t care. Owning Chrome would make OpenAI the second-most important company on the web, only second to Google, which would still control Google Search, the world’s most visited website. The latter half is exactly why it doesn’t make a modicum of logical sense to divest Chrome.

What would hurt Google, however, would be forcing a divestiture of Google Search, or, in a perhaps more likely scenario, Google Ads, which also works as a monopoly over online advertising. I think eliminating Google’s primary source of revenue overnight would be extremely harsh, but maybe it’s necessary. Google Search has become one of the worst experiences on the web recently, and I wouldn’t mind if it became its own company. I think it would be operated better than Google, which seems aimless and poorly managed. It could easily strike a deal with the newly minted ad exchange and platform that would also be spun off into an attractive place to sell ads while breaking free from the chains of Google’s charades. That’s good antitrust enforcement because it significantly weakens a monopoly while allowing a new business to thrive independently. Sure, Search would still be a monopoly when spun off by itself, but it would have an incentive to become a better product. Google is an advertising company, not a search company, and that allowed Search to stagnate. This is why monopolies are dangerous — because they cause stagnation and eliminate competition simultaneously.

I’m conflating both of these Google cases intentionally because they work hand in hand. Google Search is profitable because of Google’s online advertising stronghold; Google can sell ads online thanks to the popularity of Search. The government could either force Google to sell one or both of these businesses. Both might be too excessive, but I think it still would be viable because it would force Google to begin innovating again. Its primary revenue streams would be Google Workspace, YouTube, Android, and Google Cloud, and those are four very profitable businesses with long-term success potential, even without the ad exchange. Google would be forced to do what every other company on the web has been doing for decades: buy and sell ads. While it wouldn’t own the ad exchange anymore, it could still sell ads on YouTube. It’s just that those ads would have to be a good bang for the buck because they wouldn’t be the only option anymore. If an advertiser didn’t like the rates YouTube was charging, they could go spend their money on the newly spawned independent search engine. This way, Google could no longer enrich its other businesses with one monopoly.

All of this brainstorming makes it increasingly obvious that forcing Google to sell Chrome does nothing to break apart Google’s monopoly. It only punishes the billions of people who use Chrome and gets a nice dig in at Google’s ego. I’m hard pressed to see how those are “remedies” after the most high-profile antitrust lawsuit since United States v. Microsoft decades earlier. Chrome acts as a funnel for Google Search queries, and untying those is practically impossible. This is where the Justice Department’s logic falls apart: It thinks Search is popular because of some shady business tactics on Google’s part. While those shady practices — that Google definitely indeed did, according to the court — may have contributed to Search’s prominence, they don’t account for the successes of Google’s search product. For years, it really did seem like magic. The issue now is that it doesn’t, and that nobody else can innovate anymore because of Google’s restrictive contracts. The culprit has never been that Google Search is popular, Google Chrome is popular, or that Google makes too much money; the issue is that Google blocks competition from entering the market via lucrative search exclusivity deals.

Breaking up Google is a sure-fire way to eliminate the possibility of these contracts, but bringing Chrome up in the conversation ignores why Google lost this case in the first place. While Chrome might have once been how Search got so popular, it isn’t anymore. People use Google Search in Safari, Edge, Firefox — every single browser. If Chrome was a key facet of Search’s success, that isn’t illegal, monopolistic, or even anti-consumer. It’s just making a good product and using the success of that product to help another one grow, also known as business. Crafting a search engine and a cutting-edge browser to send people to that search engine isn’t an exclusivity contract that prevents others from gaining a competitive advantage, and forcing Google to sell Chrome off is a nonsensical misunderstanding of the relationship between Google’s products. The core problem here is not Chrome, it’s Google Search, and the Justice Department needs to break Search’s monopoly in some meaningful way that doesn’t hurt consumers. That could be calling off contracts, forcing Google to sell Search, or forcing it to open up its search index to competitors. Whatever it is, the remedy must relate to the core product.

The Justice Department, or really anyone who cares about this case, must understand that Google Search is overwhelmingly popular because it’s a good product. The way it bolstered that product is at the heart of the controversy, and eliminating those cheap-shot ways Google continues to elevate itself in the market is the Justice Department’s job, but ultimately, nobody will stop using Google. Neither should anyone stop using it — people should use whatever search engine they like the most, and boosting competitors is not the work of the Justice Department. Paving the way for competition to exist, however, is, and the current search market significantly lacks competition because Google prevents any other company from succeeding. That is what the court found. It (a) found that Google is a monopolist in the search industry, but (b) also found Google has illegally maintained that monopoly and that remedies are in order to prevent that illegal action. It isn’t illegal to be a monopolist in the United States, unlike some other jurisdictions. It is illegal, however, to block other companies from fairly competing in the same space. The Justice Department is regulating like being a monopolist is illegal, when in actuality, it should focus its efforts on ensuring that Google’s monopoly is organically built from now on.

Part of the blame lies on Google’s lawyers, but it isn’t too late for them to pick up the pace. They can’t defend their ludicrous search contracts anymore, but they can make the case for why they shouldn’t exist anymore. If we’re being honest, the best possible outcome for Google here is if it just gets away with ending the contracts and is allowed to keep all of its businesses and products. That’s because it doesn’t rely on those contracts anymore to stay afloat. Google’s legal strategy in this case — the one that led to its loss — is that it tried to convince the court that its search contracts were necessary to continue doing business so competitively, when that’s an absolutely laughable thing to say about a product that owns nearly 90 percent of the market. Judge Mehta didn’t buy that argument because it’s born out of sheer stupidity. Instead, its argument should’ve begun by conceding that the contracts are indeed unnecessary and proving over the trial that Google Search is widespread because it’s a good product. It could point to Bing’s minuscule market share despite its presence as the default search engine on Windows. That’s a real point, and Google blew it.

If Google offers the ending of these contracts as a concession, that would be immensely appealing to the court. It might not be enough for Google to run away scot-free, but it would be something. If it, however, continues to play the halfwitted game of hiding behind the contracts, it probably will lose something much more important. As for what that’ll be, my guess is as good as anyone else’s, but I find it hard to imagine a world where Judge Mehta agrees to force Google to sell Chrome. That decision would be purely irrational and wouldn’t jibe with the rest of his rulings, which have mainly been rooted in fact and appear to have citizens’ interests first. Moreover, I don’t think the government has met the burden of proving a Chrome divestiture would make a meaningful dent in Google’s monopoly, and neither do I believe it has the facts to do so.

The contracts are almost certainly done for, though, and for good reason. In practice, I think this will mean more search engine ballots, i.e., choice screens that appear when a new iPhone is set up or when the Safari app is first opened, for example. Most people there will probably still pick Google, just like they do on Windows, much to Microsoft’s repeated chagrin, and there wouldn’t be anything stopping Apple and other browser makers from keeping Google as the default. I wouldn’t even put it past Apple, which I still firmly believe thinks Google Search is the best, most user-intuitive search engine for Apple devices. If Eddy Cue, Apple’s services chief, thought Google wasn’t very good and was only agreeing to the deal for the money, I believe he would’ve said so under penalty of perjury. He didn’t, however — he said Google was the best product, and it’s tough to argue with him. And for the record, I don’t think Apple will ever make its own search engine or choose another default other than Google — it’ll either be Google or a choice screen, similar to the European Union. (I find the choice screens detestable and think every current browser maker should keep Google as the default for simplicity’s sake, proving my point that the contracts are unneeded.)

I began writing this nearly 2,000 words ago to explain why I think selling Chrome is a short-sighted idea that fails to accomplish any real goals. But more importantly, I believe I covered why Google is a monopolist in the first place and how it even got to this situation. My problem has never been that Google or any other company operates a monopoly, but rather, how Google maintained that stronghold is disconcerting. Do people use Google Search of their own volition? Of course they do, and they won’t be stopping anytime soon. But is it simultaneously true that the search stagnation and dissatisfaction we’ve had with Google Search results over the past few years is a consequence of Google’s unfair business practices? Absolutely, and it’s the latter conclusion the Justice Department needs to fully grok to litigate this case properly. Whatever remedy the government pursues, it needs to make Google feel a flame under itself. Historically, the most successful method for that has been to elevate the competition, but when the others are so far behind, it might just be better to weaken the search product temporarily to force Google to catch up and innovate along the way.