In today’s Finshots, we tell you why OpenAI, PerplexityAI and Yahoo are lining up to buy Google Chrome and who’s most likely to end up owning it.

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The Story

There’s a 47% chance that Google could be broken up this year. At least, that’s what Kalshi, a US based prediction market, is betting on.

And unless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably know that Google’s been at the centre of quite a few antitrust storms lately.

Last August, a US federal judge ruled that Google had abused its dominance in the search business by pressuring companies including Samsung, Motorola and Apple into keeping Google as the default search engine on their browsers and devices. The court said this was not just clever business, but illegal.

Fast forward to now, and Google’s back in the hot seat.

This time, the US government and 17 states have accused it of monopolising the digital advertising world. In simple terms, Google was found to unfairly control publisher ad servers — the tools websites use to sell ad space and ad exchanges — the marketplaces where advertisers and publishers trade this ad space.

On top of that, Google was caught “tying” its products together. Meaning, if you used one Google tool, you were almost forced to use another, instead of picking competitors’ products.

And the court agreed.

Now, there will be fresh hearings to figure out exactly what consequences Google deserves. And yes, that could include forcing it to sell parts of its ad tech empire.

In short, Google’s been officially called an illegal monopolist. Twice. In less than a year.

But what’s all the more interesting is that even though Google isn’t up for sale just yet, companies like OpenAI, Perplexity and Yahoo are already circling around, hoping to grab a piece of it. Especially one very shiny piece — Google Chrome.

Why’s that, you ask?

The simplest reason, as you might have guessed already, is reach.

See, Chrome isn’t just any browser. It rules the internet by owning a whopping 65% of the browser market. Compare that to Apple’s Safari sitting at 18% and Microsoft’s Edge struggling at 5%, and you’ll see why Chrome is the real prize here. Whoever owns Chrome would instantly get access to its 3.3 billion users.

And that kind of power could mean different things to different buyers.

Take OpenAI, for example. ChatGPT, their star product, is a large language model (LLM) trained on mountains of text, making it brilliant at generating conversational responses. But here’s the thing. ChatGPT doesn’t run on its own search engine. It still needs access to real time search data — the kind of fresh, live information that Google’s search engine has.

The problem though is that, right now, OpenAI doesn’t have direct access to Google’s massive search index, which is simply the giant database of web pages Google pulls results from when you search. Nor does it have access to Google’s special tools (APIs) that developers use to tap into Google’s search power.

Google, naturally, keeps all of that inside a walled garden because why would it hand over its competitive edge to a rising AI rival?

And that’s a big problem.

Without full access to the latest information, OpenAI has to find other ways to update ChatGPT. That sometimes means relying on older or less complete data, which is what it wants to change.

It dreams of being able to use its own search technology to answer 80% of queries some day. But that’s still years away.

So in the meantime, owning something like Chrome could be a game-changer. By controlling Chrome, OpenAI could deeply integrate ChatGPT into the browser, making it the built-in assistant and the default search tool. Every new tab opened could be ChatGPT powered.

Plus, think about the goldmine of data they’d get — billions of tabs opened, searches made and links clicked. Every interaction would feed back into continuously fine tuning and upgrading its AI, making it smarter and faster over time.

So you could say that it would supercharge OpenAI’s ambitions practically overnight.

On the other hand, Perplexity could be happy to buy Google Chrome for similar reasons. But there’s another layer to it. It probably wants to be the next Google. Yup, no kidding!

Perplexity is building their own browser called Comet, not just for fun, but for a very strategic reason ― to track what users do even when they’re not inside the Perplexity app.

Why?

Because knowing what you do across the web gives them much richer information about you.

And with better data, they can show you better and more profitable ads.

To put it in the words of Perplexity’s CEO, Aravind Srinivas himself: If they only look at the work-related questions people ask inside the Perplexity app, they don’t learn much about users personally. But if they see your shopping habits, your hotel bookings, your restaurant searches — they get a much deeper sense of who you are.

And he believes that people won’t mind this kind of tracking too much, as long as the ads they see are more relevant and useful.

But let’s be honest. That doesn’t erase the bigger concern here.

Handing over such a vast sea of personal data to fast-growing AI companies could open up a whole new level of privacy risks. Risks that might actually be bigger than the ones we worried about when Google was doing the collecting.

As Paddy Harrington, a senior analyst at Forrester, puts it beautifully: “this is not as simple as selling off a product; it’s a complete platform. And it’s moving from Google, where data collection is about selling ads, to OpenAI, where data collection is about training AI to then sell to a ridiculously wide variety of purposes. A ‘devil you know versus the devil you don’t know’ sort of deal.”

And finally, there’s Yahoo.

Over the years, Yahoo has had not one, but two chances to buy Google in its early days. Once in 1998 for just $1 million, and again in 2002 for under $5 billion.

Fast forward to today, and just Google Chrome alone could be worth a jaw-dropping $50 billion, according to Bloomberg.

Yet, despite the hefty price tag, Yahoo might still be tempted to make a move because Yahoo’s share in the search market is barely hanging on at 3%. And it probably believes that snapping up Chrome now could finally fix its past mistakes. And maybe, just maybe, catapult its market share into double digits.

But if you take a closer look and start playing the elimination game on who’s actually capable of buying Chrome, Yahoo might be the first one to drop off the list.

Sure, it’s backed by Apollo Global Management, the same folks whose subsidiary AOL once owned Netscape.

But frankly, Yahoo has been pretty distant from the real action in search tech for years. They’re still internally testing a prototype browser at a time when AI models are out there doing deep research and answering queries in seconds.

In short, even if Yahoo bought Chrome, there’s a real risk they wouldn’t know what to do with it or worse, they might not evolve it fast enough to keep up in the age of AI.

Compare that to Perplexity and OpenAI, which are already scaling up massively and gunning straight for Google’s dominance and it’s clear the real race might be between the new-age AI players. They’re motivated, they’re moving fast, and they have serious backing — Microsoft for OpenAI, and heavyweights like NVIDIA and Jeff Bezos behind Perplexity.

For now though, we’ll just have to wait and see if these trials actually break up Google or if it’ll manage to appeal and keep precious Chrome safely under its wing.

Until then…

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