Chrome's Rise to Browser Dominance
Following a landmark antitrust ruling in August that came to the conclusion that Google maintained an illegal monopoly in online search, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a document on Wednesday detailing the suggested remedies to break up that monopoly. The filing includes a broad range of requirements that Federal Judge Amit Mehta could impose on the search giant, with the biggest bombshell undoubtedly being the forced divestiture of Chrome, Google’s market-leading web browser.
“Google must promptly and fully divest Chrome, to a buyer approved by the Plaintiffs in their sole discretion, subject to terms that the Court and Plaintiffs approve,” the DOJ’s proposal reads, as it seeks to “unfetter the monopolized markets from Google’s exclusionary practices, pry open the monopolized markets to competition and remove barriers to entry.”
Google responded on Thursday, calling the proposal "staggering", "extreme" and "wildly overboard". "The DOJ chose to push a radical interventionist agenda that would harm Americans and America’s global technology leadership," the statement reads, adding that the company would file its own proposals next month and make its case in court next year.
When Google announced the release of its own web browser Chrome in 2008, many people asked themselves why Google was building a web browser. In retrospect, the better question would have been, why Google hadn't built a web browser earlier. After all, the company's entire business was people using a browser to access Google's services, most importantly Google Search.
As a matter of fact, the plan to make a Google web browser had existed for years, Google's CEO Eric Schmidt just hadn't considered his company ready to enter the resource draining 'browser wars'. By 2008, Google was making billions of dollars a year and had finally matured enough to go head to head with Microsoft and it's market dominating Internet Explorer. On September 2, 2008, the first official release of Chrome was published and the open-source browser began its steady climb through the ranks. It took less than five years for Chrome to become the world's most popular web browser, overtaking Microsoft's Internet Explorer which had utterly dominated the market when Chrome was first launched. According to StatCounter, Chrome's cross-platform market share currently stands around 65 percent, more than triple that of its closest competitor Safari.