Google's Chrome Antitrust Paradox

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how Google's Chrome browser acts as a strategic tool to reinforce Google's dominance across multiple markets, raising antitrust concerns and proposing regulatory remedies.

Contribution

It reveals Chrome's role in Google's market strategy, challenging the notion of it being a neutral platform and suggesting specific antitrust interventions.

Findings

Chrome is used to reinforce Google's market power in advertising and publishing.

Google employs coercive and self-preferencing practices through Chrome.

Proposed remedies include behavioral, structural, and divestiture solutions.

Abstract

This Article examines Google's dominance of the browser market, highlighting how Google's Chrome browser plays a critical role in reinforcing Google's dominance in other markets. While Google portrays Chrome as a neutral platform built on open-source technologies, this Article shows that Chrome is instrumental in Google's strategy to reinforce its dominance in the online advertising, publishing, and browser markets. The examination of Google's strategic acquisitions, anticompetitive practices, and implementation of so-called "privacy controls" underlines that Chrome is far from a neutral gateway to the web. Rather, it serves as a key tool for Google to maintain and extend its market power, often to the detriment of competition and innovation in the digital economy. This Article illustrates how Chrome not only bolsters Google's position in online advertising and publishing through practices such as coercion and self-preferencing, but also leverages its advertising clout to engage in a "pay-to-play" paradigm--the cornerstone of Google's larger strategy of market control. It also outlines potential regulatory interventions and remedies by drawing on historical antitrust precedents. Lastly, this Article proposes a triad of solutions motivated by an analysis of Google's abuse of Chrome, including behavioral remedies targeting specific anticompetitive practices, structural remedies involving an internal separation of Google's divisions, and divestiture of Chrome from Google into an independent organization. (Abstract abridged for arXiv. Full abstract available in published version.)