AI-driven search startup Perplexity is prepared to buy Chrome from Google if the search giant is forced to sell it by a US federal court.
The Amazon-backed startup’s chief business officer, Dmitry Shevelenko, testified in court that Perplexity could take on the project of running Chrome without diminishing its quality or charging for it.
The testimony was made in the remedy hearing related to Google Search’s illegal monopoly, where Judge Amit Mehta of the US District Court for the District of Columbia is considering whether the tech giant’s search business should be broken up.
Perplexity’s Shevelenko was reportedly subpoenaed by the US Department of Justice (DOJ) to testify in court so that the DOJ could demonstrate the impact of Google’s illegal search monopoly on AI companies.
Laying out his grievances against Google, Shevelenko spoke about how Android users had to navigate a “jungle gym” of settings to make Perplexity the default AI assistant on their devices. Even after making it the default, Perplexity’s assistant still cannot be activated by using a wake word like ‘Hey, Google’ and instead, requires users to press a button to activate it.
He also testified that making deals with phone makers to have its AI assistant pre-installed was incredibly difficult because those companies were under contract with Google and essentially had a “gun to [their] head”, according to a report by The Verge.
He said Perplexity had failed to ink a deal with any smartphone brand because they feared Google could turn off their significant revenue share if they did something the tech giant disliked.
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On Monday, April 21, Peter Fitzgerald, Google’s vice president of platforms and device partnerships, testified that the Alphabet-owned company is paying “enormous sums of money” to Samsung in order for its Gemini AI app to be pre-installed on devices manufactured by the South Korean electronics giant.
Recently, Bloomberg reported that Perplexity had reached an agreement with Motorola to make its AI assistant default over Google’s Gemini. Without naming Motorola, Shevelenko said the smartphone maker would not make it the default assistant “despite both parties wanting it to be” as they couldn’t find a way to “get out of their Google obligations”.
He also questioned whether other AI companies such as OpenAI are capable of buying Chrome and ensure that it stays an open source model while continuing to adequately support the browser.
“There’s all the self-serving incentive to be here today and shout about how evil Google is, and I think we want to be reasonable. Google builds good products that others are able to iterate on. “We wouldn’t want a remedy that cripples Google’s ability to keep doing that,” Shevelenko said.
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In a landmark antitrust ruling last year, Judge Amit Mehta held that Google had an illegal monopoly of the search engine market and abused its monopoly position by using exclusionary agreements with phone and browser companies to lock up distribution channels.
If Judge Mehta rules in favour of the DOJ in the ongoing remedy hearing, it could mean that Google is forced to sell off its popular Chrome web browser as well as the free open-source Chromium browser that many other web browsers are built on.
