Instead, Google will have to provide search index data and amalgamated user metrics to at least some of its competitors. Judge Amit Mehta ruled that the government prosecutors couldn't prove that Google's dominance in the browser space—just under 70 percent of market share, at the time of writing—was essential to its illegal monopoly in search, as Ars Technica reports. Ditto for Google's operation of the Android mobile operating system, which it will also get to keep.
And so the biggest shakeup in online power in decades won't happen, at least not now. Things were starting to look interesting, too. OpenAI, the current juggernaut of the "AI" space thanks to ChatGPT, stated an interest in buying Google's browser. Perplexity, makers of a competing "AI" search engine, made a public declaration of intent to buy Chrome if it became available, offering about $35 billion (which, incidentally, is about double the evaluation of the company, which had only 52 employees in 20
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