, Columnist
Perplexity’s Bid for Google Chrome Is Mostly Mischief
The $34.5 billion offer is less a serious bid and more a serious attempt to meddle in Alphabet’s antitrust case.
The browser wars, enhanced by AI.
Photographer: Gabby Jones/Bloomberg
If you’re fighting an antitrust lawsuit that might end up breaking your company into pieces, one defense is to argue that those pieces would wither away if separated from the mother ship, thus creating a worse outcome for the consumer.
That’s what Google has been doing in the face of Department of Justice calls for it to sell Chrome, its market-leading web browser, as part of the remedies for its monopolistic behaviors involving its search business. The company wrote on its blog in May: