Last August, the American justice system determined that Google exercised a true monopoly through its search engine, through which more than 90% of queries pass worldwide. Lawmakers are now considering several avenues to restore a semblance of balance, including a particularly extreme one: forcing Google to resell its essential Chrome browser, whose market share exceeds 65%. An interesting prospect for other representatives of Big Tech... starting with OpenAI, which seems to see a real opportunity.
This is in any case what Ars Technica claims, based on the testimony of Nick Turley, ChatGPT's product manager. During his hearing before the Department of Justice, the interested party initially mentioned other avenues for limiting Google's dominance. For example, he proposed forcing the Alphabet subsidiary to share its search index – the massive database that essentially serves as a “catalog of the web.”
But the most exciting part came when Judge Amit Mehta raised the possibility of a resale of the browser. Turley was quick to express interest on behalf of his company, indicating that OpenAI – like many other competitors – could be interested in acquiring Chrome.
4 billion users and a mountain of data
This would indeed be a major opportunity for Sam Altman's company, for two reasons. To begin with, according to Ars Technica, the firm has already considered creating its own browser based on Chromium, entirely designed around ChatGPT. You don't need to be a seasoned analyst to understand the benefits of acquiring such a product: by purchasing the original rather than developing a copy, OpenAI would above all gain a base of four billion users, all likely to become potential customers of its artificial intelligence chatbot.
But from OpenAI's perspective, Chrome would above all represent an almost inexhaustible source of data – a resource even more precious than the users themselves. The company is constantly seeking to accumulate more to train its models, because its entire business model is based on this practice. However, a phenomenal amount of information circulates every day through the browser, and OpenAI would have every interest in seizing it.
It will therefore be interesting to follow the next episodes of this saga. It is worth remembering that the possible sale of Chrome is still far from being finalized; everything will depend on the decision of the Department of Justice. But if it does, we can safely bet that OpenAI will quickly position itself on the issue.
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