Presuming the US government gets its way, and Google must depart ways with their Chrome internet browser, I think the end result has not been thought out well.
My guess is that part of the deal will be that Google cannot buy the default search engine role from the new owners, or else there is no point.
The only realistic forms of revenue for a web browser are getting paid by the default search provider, or by selling the browser (outright or subscription) to the end users. Nothing else is feasible.
I doubt people will pay for it, when there are other free options out there that perform just as well. So that leaves the search engine.
There aren’t many search engines! Microsoft’s Bing is the main one, and pretty much the only one with its own index in English. DuckDuckGo is powered in the most part by Bing. Yahoo is Bing.
Any investor that buys Chrome with the intent to get an income from Bing will be disappointed, because they don’t have much ability to bargain. Bing can demand any low price they wish, because without Google as competition it is a field of one.
Also, what happens to ChromeOS? I’m guessing it is bundled in with Chrome.
Also, what about Chromium, the open source code that Chrome runs on? I would expect that Microsoft buys it, and the staff involved, because Microsoft Edge runs on it so they have a vested interest. It will need to remain open source.
Here’s my pick. As long as AI is still running hot and getting unlimited funding, Perplexity AI — the best AI powered search engine — will buy Chrome. Because it doesn’t have indexed search results, it will make a deal with Bing to supplement the results. They will change their corporate name to Chrome. If another AI gets better results, they’ll combine forces.
To Chrome something will become a verb to ask AI
