Google Chrome and antitrust: Will a new owner solve the browser’s privacy problems?

The Department of Justice asked a judge this week to break up Google. Chrome? Sell ​​it off. Android? Same. Paying other companies to make Google Search the default? Cut that out.

If the DOJ gets everything it wants, the entire technology industry would tilt on its axis. The internet, as we know it, would change.

Which got me thinking: There are a lot of Google services that are hard to quit, especially Google’s ubiquitous search and, if you’re not an iPhone person, Android phones as your default option. But Chrome? It’s historically bad at privacy, and it’s hardly the best browser.

So why wait for a judge to decide, when you can remove Chrome now and lessen Google’s stranglehold on your digital life?

Plenty of other browsers, including Apple’s Safari and Mozilla’s Firefox, work just as well as Chrome and do not collect massive amounts of your data in the process. At the very least, you should wonder why you’re using Chrome, and whether that has anything to do with Google’s illegal monopoly over the search industry.

It will take years before we know the outcome of Google’s big antitrust cases. (Yes, there are two: This one about Google’s illegal search monopoly, and there’s another about Google’s alleged monopoly in the online advertising industry). Google might not have to sell off Chrome and Android. Indeed, Google said on Thursday it does not want to do this. But there’s a very good chance Google will be forced to stop paying for the exclusive right to be the default search engine in browsers like Firefox and Safari, two legal experts told me.

Regardless of the outcome, you do have a choice about how you access the web. Try removing Chrome. If it doesn’t work out, you can always come back — Chrome, in some form, isn’t going away. It might even get better if Google ends up being forced to sell it off.

The case against Google, briefly explained

If you’re a Chrome user, the first thing you probably do when you open a tab is type a query into the box at the top of the browser. This initiates a Google search that returns a bunch of blue links, and before you know it, you’re learning everything you ever wanted to know about fennec foxes or whatever.

Frankly, if you’re a Safari or Firefox user, the experience is probably the same. Google currently owns around 90 percent of the US search engine market. There are a lot of reasons why that’s true, and according to the DOJ and a long list of state attorneys general, the ways Google has maintained that dominance is also illegal. They sued Google in 2020, during the first Trump administration, and argued that the company violated federal antitrust laws by maintaining a monopoly over search and search advertising markets. (This followed a separate 2023 lawsuit that alleged Google of using anticompetitive conduct to maintain a monopoly over online advertising technology. That case is ongoing.)

In August, Judge Amit P. Mehta did not mince his words in his ruling on the search engine case: “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly.”

He ruled that by paying companies to make Google the default browser in their browsers, Google illegally asserted its dominance over its competitors. The ruling also said that, thanks to its massive market share, Google has driven up rates for search ads. The fact that Google also owns both the most popular web browser, Chrome, and mobile operating system, Android, has further cemented its ability to steer more and more users towards its search monopoly.

Think about it: For many people, Chrome is their main gateway into Google’s empire. And Google is their gateway to the internet as a whole. This is good for Google, because as you’re searching for stuff and browsing the web, it’s collecting data about you, which it then uses to sell targeted advertising, a business that generated $237.9 billion for Google in 2023.

“It’s not illegal to have a monopoly,” said Mitch Stoltz, IP litigation director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “But it is illegal to leverage one’s monopoly power to maintain that monopoly, basically to stay a monopolist by means other than simply having the best product.”

There’s little reason to believe Google will stop being synonymous with search any time soon, regardless of how good its search engine is and despite recent attempts from companies like Microsoft and OpenAI to make AI-powered search an innovative option. Google’s mobile operating system is on about half the phones in the US, and 2 out of 3 people use Chrome to access the web.

So it’s not terribly surprising that the Justice Department wants Mehta to break up Google. While we don’t know what Mehta will do, we do know that this won’t be resolved any time soon. While Google will probably have to kill its sweetheart deal with Apple, which is worth as much as $20 billion, it seems unlikely that Google will have to sell Chrome and Android. If the issue is that Google could exploit those products to suppress rival search engines, the judge could simply order Google not to do that, according to Erik Hovenkamp, ​​a professor at Cornell Law School.

“If Google abides by that, then it gets to keep Chrome and Android,” Hovenkamp said. “A judge is not going to want to break up a big company that generates a lot of popular products, if he thinks that there’s a less intrusive remedy that would eliminate the bad conduct.”

And again, Google really doesn’t want to sell off Chrome and Android. Google said in a blog post in October, “Splitting off Chrome or Android would break them — and many other things” and would “raise the cost of devices.”

Then again, if a judge forced Google to sell off Chrome and Android, the company could be forced to make its search engine better in order to fend off competition in the search engine business. But speculating can be a fool’s errand. What we do know is Chrome, at least for another year, is a gateway into the Google ecosystem, so much so you may have even forgotten that Google is watching everything you do when you’re using its browser.

The case for ditching Chrome

If you’ve been using Chrome because it came as the default browser on your phone, you might want to try something new. If you’ve been using Chrome for 15 years because it was so innovative when it was introduced, that’s no longer the case, and you should definitely try something new.

There’s one big reason for this: Google Chrome is not the most privacy-friendly browser because that’s how the company wants it. This might seem obvious, based on the established fact that Google stands to benefit by knowing more about its users’ online activity. Critics have long argued Chrome doesn’t give its users as many tools to protect their privacy as competing browsers like Safari and Firefox. Google is also dealing with an ongoing class-action lawsuit from Chrome users who said the company collected their data without permission. That’s in addition to a lawsuit Google settled in April, when it agreed to delete the privacy browsing history of millions of people.

Then there are cookies. In August, Google broke its promise to stop using third-party cookies in Chrome. That promise dates back to around 2020 when Safari and Firefox started blocking third-party cookies due to the potential harm they cause by tracking users across the web, but Google kept delaying its plans to phase out third-party cookies as it worked to develop an alternative that wouldn’t harm the advertising industry. Third-party cookies help deliver personalized ads, which is good for business. Google ultimately built something called the Privacy Sandbox that can also help deliver personalized ads in Chrome without using third-party cookies. But just for good measure, Google still allows third-party cookies in Chrome, too.

By the way, you could argue that there’s no escaping online tracking anymore, especially when it comes to Google.

“That’s the problem: It’s insidious,” said Sacha Haworth, executive director of the Tech Oversight Project. “We don’t ask to have our data scraped and compiled and sold to the highest bidder.”

Google itself tracks users across the web using its suite of analytics tools. As many as 86 percent of the top 75,000 online websites run Google trackers. Google knows what you watch on YouTube, and although it no longer reads the contents of your messages to deliver personalized ads to you, Google does track your behavior on Gmail. Google also tracks your location and stores it in the cloud — it’s historically been so prolific at tracking phones that it became “a dragnet for the police” — although the company says it will stop doing this.

If you are concerned about your privacy, there are better browsers than Chrome. Actually, based on several collections of browser reviews, just about every other browser is better than Chrome when it comes to privacy. And they’re all free.

You’ve heard of Safari, which is the browser that comes with all Apple operating systems. Safari comes with a long list of privacy features that are enabled by default and even more you can turn on in settings. There’s also Firefox, which is an open source browser made by Mozilla that comes with its own suite of enhanced privacy settings.

But a few browsers you may not have heard of that are worth checking out include DuckDuckGo, which also makes a privacy-centric search engine. There’s Brave, which promises to block ads and load webpages faster. And there’s Edge, Microsoft’s successor to Internet Explorer, which uses Bing as a search engine and Copilot as an AI assistant.

There are actually a bunch of new, innovative web browsers that have cropped up in the last couple years. A company called, appropriately, the Browser Company has now released Arc for both Windows and Mac. It will reportedly change the way you think about browsing the web by working more like an operating system that lets you tweak and remix content. Vivaldi, which is available on all major operating systems including Android Auto, comes with a built-in email client. SigmaOS, another Mac-only option, calls itself “the new home for your internet.”

In the ’90s, Microsoft got in trouble because it bundled Internet Explorer with every copy of Windows. So if Windows was your operating system — and it was for more than 90 percent of Americans at the time — you probably used Internet Explorer. The big difference between then and now, when Google Chrome has over 60 percent of the market, is that the alternatives to Chrome are free and easy to find. You can literally click your mouse twice on this very webpage and download a Chrome replacement.

“You know, I think it’s popular,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Stoltz said of Chrome. “But people are also very just ingrained in their habits, so we also see a lot of just like, ‘Hey, just leave me alone to use Google.’”

A federal judge has already decided Google’s monopoly over the search industry is illegal. It might be worth admitting that the company a little bit forced you to use Google. And at least as far as browsers are concerned, it’s not that hard to stop.

As for what that judge will decide to do next. We’ll have to wait and see. Again, after the upcoming decisions are inevitably appealed, it will be years before we know the final outcome of Google’s antitrust cases. Some say it would be a shame for the government to waste the opportunity to crack down now.

“If we want to be serious about addressing the predatory monopoly power and abuses of Google,” said Haworth, from the Tech Oversight Project. “We have to take more extreme measures.”

Correction, November 22, 3:40 pm ET: A previous version of this story misstated which operating systems support Vivaldi. It is available on all major operating systems, including Android Auto.