Aravind Srinivas, the co-founder of Google rival Perplexity, believes that breaking up the tech giant is not the solution instead, customers should have the choice to select their default settings on their Android smartphones.
The comments are part of Perplexity’s proposal submitted on being asked to testify in the US remedies trial over Google's search monopoly that started on April 21. This follows a US federal judge's ruling in August 2024 that Google violated antitrust law to retain its online search monopoly.
The US department of justice (DoJ) is seeking to break up Google and force the tech giant to divest its popular Chrome web browser, syndicate its search and advertising data to help rivals improve their quality and end exclusive distribution agreements with companies like Apple.
Srinivas said none of the proposed remedies addresses the fundamental issue of customer choice or the freedom of original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and carriers to offer it.
"Chrome should remain within and continue to be run by Google. Google deserves a lot of credit for open-sourcing Chromium, which powers Microsoft's Edge. Chrome has become the dominant browser due to incredible execution quality at the scale of billions of users," he said.
The value others have created on platforms such as Chromium and Android far exceeds their own value, he said.
"We don't believe anyone else can run a browser at that scale without a hit on quality, nor the business model to be able to serve that many users profitably by keeping the browser free" Srinivas added.
Let consumers pick
Perplexity, which seeks to disrupt Google’s flagship search engine with its answer engine, is currently working on a web browser called Comet that will be powered by Chromium.
Srinivas said consumers should have the choice to pick default search and default voice assistant and OEMs should be able to offer this choice without the risk of the company restricting access to Play Store and other Google apps such as Maps and YouTube.
"The thing that is particularly frustrating about Google to us is how hard it is to change anything on Android. OEMs can only use a Google-approved version of Android, if they want to have core Google apps like PlayStore, Maps, etc. And "Google-approved" means keeping Google as the default search and Google/Gemini as the default voice assistants," he said.
Even when they have a choice, it is a frustrating experience for consumers since the option is "hidden in settings four-five clicks away from the home screen. Most people don’t even know it's possible", he said.
OEMs also "feel threatened" to make any changes due to the scale of revenue sharing offered to them by Google "even when better alternatives are available", he said.
Perplexity is said to be in talks with smartphone makers such as Samsung and Motorola to integrate its Android assistant on their devices.
"Consumers deserve the best products, not just the ones that pay the most for placement. This is the only remedy that ensures consumer choice can determine the winners," he said.
In an official blogpost, Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google’s vice president of regulatory affairs, argued that DoJ’s proposals were "both unnecessary and harmful" due to the emergence of new services such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and foreign competitors like China's DeepSeek.
The DOJ's proposal to split Chrome and Android "would break those platforms, hurt businesses built on them, and undermine security”, she said. It would also hamstring how Google develops AI products amid a fiercely competitive global race for the next generation of technology leadership, she said.
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