Perplexity's bid for Alphabet's Chrome appears mischievous

It could be a tactic to pierce Google's defence in its antitrust case

- DAVE LEE

If you're fighting an antitrust lawsuit that might end up breaking your company into pieces, one defence 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 the US Department of Justice (DoJ) calls for it to sell Chrome, its market-leading web browser, as part of the remedies for its monopolistic behaviours involving its search business.

As the company wrote on its blog in May, the DoJ's proposal to break off Chrome—which billions of people use for free—would break it and result in a "shadow of the current Chrome," according to Chrome leader Parisa Tabriz. She added that the browser would likely become "insecure and obsolete."

This defence was complicated somewhat on 12 August when it emerged that Perplexity, an AI company, had made an "audacious" (Bloomberg), "longshot" (Wall Street Journal) and "mischievous" (my term) bid to take Chrome off Google's hands for $34.5 billion.