Patplexity's bid of $ 34.5 billion for Google's Chrome looks ominous

Copyright © HT Digital Streams Limit all rights reserved. Dave Lee 4 min read Aug. 17, 2025, 03:30 IST Alphabet argued that the Hiving of Chrome would ruin this browser. (Bloomberg) Summary It can be a tactic to pierce the defense of Google owner alphabet in his antitrust case. Alphabet argued that the away court of his popular browser would make it in a shade of himself. The bid of Patplexity indicates that Chrome can be used to drive AI adoption. If you fight an antitrust legal action that can divide your business into pieces, the defense to argue that these pieces would disappear if it was separated from the mother ship, and thus created a worse outcome for the consumer. This is what Google did in the face of the US Department of Justice (DoJ) that it sells Chrome, its leading web browser, as part of the remedies for his monopolistic behavior that entails his search business. As the company wrote on its blog in May, the DOJ’s proposal to break down Chrome – which uses billions of people for free – would break it and it leads to a ‘shadow of the current chrome’, according to Chrome leader Parisa Tabriz. She added that the browser would probably become ‘uncertain and outdated’. Also read: Manu Joseph: Who would have thought that Google could be replaced, this defense was somewhat complicated on August 12 when it emerged that Portplexity, an AI company, an ‘zealous’ (Bloomberg), ‘Longshot’ (Wall Street Journal) and ‘ominous’ (my term) to take Chrome from Google’s hands for $ 34.5 billion. Confusion does not have $ 34.5 billion. The company was valued at $ 18 billion at the time of its last financing round, but said it would come up with funds from a coalition of investors already on board with the plan. The agreement would be realistic only if the court forced the alphabet unit to sell Chrome, which according to most analysts I spoke to would be an extreme measure. But it is not an impossibility. It may indeed become a little more possible thanks to the bids of Portlexity and what can come next. But before I go into it, we let it humor for a second and talk about the way Chrome would make sense of confusion. The web browser has become a critical early battlefield for the formation of new habits in AI. Confused realize this and recently sets its own browser, Comet, which posts its own AI assistant -front and center: If you type in a query in the address bar, Comet, instead of searching Google, will turn to its AI. Also read: Google’s AD-Tech domination is easier to solve than the search monopoly on scale, this shift in search engine behavior to AI would be profound. The problem is that Comet has a small market share compared to Chrome’s 70% of the table browser use worldwide and 67% on cell phones. After a loose estimates of about 3.5 billion users of Chrome, confusion would pay about $ 10 per user. The goal would then be to convert as many of them as possible for users of the $ 20-month ‘Pro’ AI plan. If AI business models go, it’s not really bad. Unlike its biggest competitors, Parplexity does not have a shop window for its AI, an existing highly used product where users can discover AI’s functionality without having to look for it. The lack of movement in the share price of Alphabet on August 12 indicates that investors have blocked the possibility. For the beginning, some analysts think the valuation is far away. According to Baird, the offer is “the asset many under values and should not be taken seriously”. A better number, his analysts said, would be more like $ 100 billion – although it is difficult to say how the dynamics of an agreement would play if Google has no choice but to sell Chrome. Previous valuations have placed it somewhere between $ 30 billion and $ 50 billion, a figure that looks a little conservative if the browser does indeed play an important role for building AI market share. Also read: Google and Meta Antitrust cases show why we need a policy spinder to promote competition in digital markets, regardless of, what this bid really represents is a cunning plan to get into the ear of Judge AMIT MHTA, as he considers the appropriate antitrust drugs for Google’s previous bad behavior. With this move, confusion that skews Google’s defense is that the spinning of Chrome would be fatal to not just Chrome, but to chromium, the Open Source project that forms the spine of most top website, including Google’s direct competitors. It can now be sincerely argued that there is a bona fide offer of a company that not only can remove Chrome from Google’s hands, but further develop it – to see it to be ‘uncertain and outdated’ as the company warned. What’s more, it seems other AI businesses will throw their names into the ring. Openai’s head of Chatgpt testified during the hearing that the company would be interested in buying Chrome, “just like many other parties.” How much of this the judge takes into account is another thing. He probably should not: The rationale to force a sale of chrome would be to prevent alphabet from creating a new AI monopoly with the same tactics used to dominate the search. Well, but Judge Mehta has other instruments at his disposal to achieve it more fairly. The only reason an AI business would be interested in buying Chrome, at a double value of the existing value, would be to use the browser for the same anti-competitive purposes. © Bloomberg The author is the American Technology columnist for Bloomberg. Catch all the business news, market news, news reports and latest news updates on Live Mint. Download the Mint News app to get daily market updates. More Topics #Google Apps #Kartic Intelligence Read the following story