| Hey y’all. The US Department of Justice is trying to force Google to sell its mega-popular Chrome internet browser. But first... Three things you need to know today: • Tim Cook is back in China, for his third trip this year
• Sony is cooking up a portable console to play PS5 games
• The AI boom has added more than 400% to the value of cable maker Fujikura Google’s Chrome is one of the most ubiquitous apps in the world, with more than 3 billion active users. And last week, the DOJ stunned the Alphabet Inc. company by asking a federal judge to compel the tech giant to sell off its browser. The proposal comes as part of the department ‘s recent win in the antitrust trial against Google, when the court ruled that Google held an illegal monopoly in online search. Forcing a full divestiture of Chrome, the DOJ and a list of state attorneys general argued in a legal filing, is mostly intended to enhance competition in the search market by prohibiting Google from self-preferencing its engine within the app. But such a judgment, if approved, could end up sending an electric shock through the browser market. On its own, Chrome has never been a massive moneymaker for Google. That’s never been the point. Rather, keeping consumers using your online portal makes it easy to drive them to all kinds of Google services — from Gmail to Docs to YouTube to search — which in turn drives data collection and advertising and subscription revenues. Detaching Chrome threatens to eliminate Google’s control over arguably the most important gateway to the internet. The company severely criticized the DOJ’s “wildly overbroad” proposal, which also included an option for Google to divest its Android mobile platform. Kent Walker, chief legal officer for Google and Alphabet, said in a Nov. 21 blog post that it “goes miles beyond the Court’s decision” and is part of a “radical interventionist agenda” that would ultimately harm customers and innovation. Setting aside whether a forced sale of Chrome is the right remedy or a realistic one to address Google’s monopoly, it’s worth pondering who could even afford it. Bloomberg Intelligence estimated Chrome could be valued at around $20 billion. As a loose point of comparison, what was then known as Facebook acquired WhatsApp a decade ago for around that price, when the messaging app had negligible revenue and roughly a seventh of Chrome’s user base. Evelyn Mitchell-Wolf, a senior analyst at eMarketer, speculated that US-based leaders in artificial intelligence might be interested. (Coincidentally, The Information reported last Thursday that OpenAI has considered building its own browser.) “Potential buyers for Chrome are very few,” she said. “It's likely that any company with deep enough pockets to afford Chrome is already under antitrust scrutiny.” Josh Miller, co-founder of the Browser Co., disagrees. His startup’s browser, Arc, has been battling larger incumbents like Chrome and Apple Inc.’s Safari for several years, and Miller envisions many interested bidders keen on shaking up the market. He imagines a firm like Salesforce Inc. could see Chrome as a complement to its enterprise software, while e-commerce players such as Shopify and Stripe may want it as some way to bolster their fintech reach. Miller says he’d even consider attempting to make a competitive bid for Chrome via private financing. It’s a matter of who can “be creative about business opportunity, not who will want to buy,” he says. “You'd be crazy not to take a stab.” Brendan Eich, chief executive officer of browser upstart Brave Software Inc., who helped start Mozilla in the late 1990s, warned on X that “Chrome without search ad revenue is a money pit.” Since users are not accustomed to paying for browsers — at least not since the days that Netscape retailed its Navigator program for $49 — any buyer would need to develop a replacement profit center. “Sure, there are other ways to make money with a browser,” said Eich in a follow-up email, citing Web3 offerings and premium features such as VPNs as examples. “But the big cost of Chrome, hundreds of high-priced engineers and non-trivial Google cloud infrastructure for builds and testing, must be covered. Search ads are doing that cost-covering now, and other revenue opportunities look too small or too futuristic/speculative.” Perhaps the larger question, though, is whether any Chrome acquirer could retain its billions of users without the resources of Google and slick integrations with its services — the types of conveniences that helped Chrome leapfrog Mozilla’s Firefox and Microsoft Corp.’s Internet Explorer in the 2010s. If users flee, would they jump ship to Edge, Microsoft’s successor to Explorer, or Apple’s Safari, both of which trail Chrome in market share? Or would they give a fresh look at a smaller option like Arc or Brave? To Eich, it’s way too early to tell, given the court hurdles still on the horizon and the time it’d require for Chrome to find an approved buyer and change under new ownership. “Chrome is a very large ship and would take time to turn (or to sink!),” he says. But, Eich adds, if a sale does come to fruition, he’s optimistic it’ll eventually represent “a chance for many smaller browsers to thrive.”—Austin Carr In a bland north Austin neighborhood dominated by anonymous corporate office towers, Amazon engineers are toiling away on one of the tech industry’s most ambitious moonshots: loosening Nvidia’s grip on the $100-billion-plus market for AI chips. There’s a bootstrapping vibe you’d expect to see at a startup not a company with a market cap exceeding $2 trillion. Jensen Huang received an honorary degree in Hong Kong and urged global cooperation. The US Supreme Court will hear a case relating to the FCC’s $8 billion per year spent on providing connectivity for poor people and rural residents. Crypto-based predictions market Polymarket has blocked users in France from placing new bets, amid growing scrutiny from the nation’s gambling regulator. | 
