Google declined to comment. The company has said it intends to appeal the judge’s ruling that it has illegally monopolized the search market, which could delay a remedy for months or years. It also plans to challenge any ruling that calls for Chrome to be divested and has proposed a narrower set of remedies that would modify its default search agreements with Apple, Mozilla and Android, to open up the search market to competition.
AI startup Perplexity made a formal offer to acquire Google’s Chrome browser for US$34.5 billion, an audacious bid to get ahead of a potential requirement for the search giant to sell the web browser in US antitrust proceedings.
The unsolicited bid, which Perplexity intends to fund with the help of outside investors, was sent to Alphabet Inc’s Google on Tuesday morning, a Perplexity spokesperson said. It comes not long after rival artificial intelligence startup OpenAI also expressed interest in acquiring Chrome, which together with the open-source Chromium software is the main way people access the web on PCs.
