Yahoo has said it is ready to buy Google’s Chrome browser if a court orders Google to sell it as part of a US Justice Department antitrust case over the company’s dominance of the search market. About this informs The Verge.
Brian Provost, general manager of Yahoo’s search division, noted that about 60% of all searches come directly from the browser’s address bar.
“Browser ownership is critical to competition in search. Yahoo has been actively developing a prototype of its own browser since last summer“, the Provost emphasized.
According to his estimation, the creation and testing of his own browser will take from 6 to 9 months. At the same time, he emphasized that the acquisition of Chrome will allow us to reach the necessary scale much faster. According to him, Chrome is the most important strategic player on the Internet, and combining Yahoo’s search engine with Chrome’s large distribution network could help the company increase its market share from the current about 3% to double digits.
The U.S. Department of Justice is asking a court to break up Google, forcing the company to sell Chrome, which is the main channel that sends users to Google’s search engine and strengthens its dominance. In addition to Yahoo, interest in acquiring Chrome was also expressed at the hearing by other industry players — including AI search companies Perplexity and OpenAI. At the same time, DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg noted that his company would not be able to afford such a purchase.
Apollo, which owns the rights to the Netscape brand — the legendary browser that became the focus of a landmark antitrust case in the late 1990s — currently has no active product under the brand. Netscape is no longer a working product.
