The DOJ Demands That Google Cease Innovating

The Department of Justice (DOJ) is presently demanding that Google sell Chrome, the world’s most popular internet browser. Oh wow, not again…

Traveling back in time, as late as 2002 Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) could claim 94 percent of the web browser market. Which was the problem, albeit not for consumers, but for Microsoft. Just as Google’s innovative, market-beating ways are attracting the attention of antitrust ankle-biters in the present, so did they for Microsoft in the past.

The simple truth is that the DOJ is always on the warpath against businesses possessing the temerity to not just meet the needs of consumers, but lead them. For providing consumers with much more than they ever imagined they wanted, Microsoft’s reward was a demand from the DOJ that it separate IE from the Windows software packages it was selling to highly-eager consumers.

Consider for a moment the time in which this odd decree came down: the late 1990s when internet use was soaring, and when the people (a.k.a. the marketplace) had overwhelmingly chosen IE as their preferred path onto an internet that they couldn’t get enough of. The DOJ’s decree was the equivalent of federal bureaucrats demanding that GM sell its cars without an engine inside.

If as you’re reading this you’re puzzled by the then and now of the DOJ’s actions, rest assured that Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates was too. As Gates asked in frustration amid the attacks on his company, “Are we allowed to continue to innovate in products, and in Windows itself?”

Google’s executives and shareholders must be wondering the same. Fully aware that they’re competing in the most competitive of competitive business sectors (see the valuations of Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple and other technology companies if you’re confused), Google executives and employees get up every day aggressively in search of ways to remain relevant and essential in a marketplace well-populated by Google’s would-be replacements, yet they’re now being told that if they succeed in meeting and leading the needs of consumers, their reward will be lawsuits from the DOJ demanding that they sell the assets that have brought the company so much popularity in the first place.

Seriously, why innovate if you’ll be forced to sell what you’ve created at a discount? To which some might be asking what’s meant by discount. The answer is very simple: no buyer of Chrome would pay full price assuming a sale of it by Google in light of market knowledge that the sale would be coerced.

All of which raises another point, followed by a question. It was the genius within Google that made Chrome so valuable, get it? To then pretend that Chrome would still be Chrome if not owned by Google insults common sense. Lest we forget, it was once again the genius within Google that made its browser so popular, at which point the DOJ is going to force a sale to those Google and Chrome beat in the marketplace?

What makes the DOJ’s actions comical, sad, and pointless at the same time concerns a bit of news from yesterday. It turns out OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, is considering releasing its own web browser. Will it succeed, as in will it vanquish Chrome?

Without knowing the answer to the above, it’s easy to say that a competition between Chrome and OpenAI would almost certainly redound to the consumer, which is the point of markets in the first place. Let’s just hope it happens. Seriously, could you blame OpenAI for passing on the competition with full knowledge of what happened to the last two web browser champions?