Christian Kroll, CEO of the Berlin-based nonprofit search engine Ecosia, does not believe his company’s unsolicited request is absurd. He has proposed that Google grant Ecosia a 10-year “stewardship” of its Chrome browser instead of being forced to sell it to a competitor. While his idea is clever, it is also most definitely absurd.
On Thursday, Ecosia announced it had sent this proposal regarding Chrome to Google and to U.S. Judge Amit Mehta. The judge is expected to rule this month on remedies to his landmark 2024 decision that found Google has an illegal monopoly in internet search and advertising. One of the remedies the Department of Justice asked for would force Google to divest itself from Chrome.
Google has not agreed to do so and vowed to appeal the original ruling in 2024. Nevertheless, competitors have been lining up to buy Chrome ever since. Both OpenAI and Perplexity have said they would buy it. Last week, Perplexity even made an unsolicited cash offer of $34.5 billion.
Perplexity’s offer was widely criticized as being too low, especially since it is billions more than the company has raised to date. An RBC analyst, Brad Erickson, speculated that OpenAI would potentially be prepared to pay significantly more for the browser.
Ecosia believes Chrome is on track to generate one trillion dollars over the next decade, and an auction could price it in the hundreds of billions, according to Kroll. This is why, on face value, Ecosia asking to be handed Chrome for free, including control of about sixty percent of the revenue generated by its users, seems absurd.
The Ecosia proposal promises to spend those billions on climate projects, which is the nonprofit’s general mission. Founded in 2009, Ecosia donates millions per month and has relationships with local communities and NGOs in over thirty-five countries. It has specified projects in this Chrome proposal, including protecting rainforests, global tree-planting, agroforestry, prosecuting polluters, and investing in green AI technology.
The remaining forty percent, which Ecosia says would be four hundred billion dollars based on their one trillion dollar estimate, would be paid to Google. Google would maintain intellectual property ownership and could even continue to be the default search engine. When the decade is up, stewardship could be passed to another entity or otherwise reviewed.
Ecosia, which uses Google to power its search engine, already has a revenue-share partnership with the tech giant. It also already offers its own browser built on the Chromium open source engine that powers Chrome. That is why Kroll thinks the stewardship idea is not so out of line. He says they would be happy to manage Chrome for Google and is even offering to maintain employment for the Chrome staff.
Still, Kroll admits the bigger goal is to get the judge to consider alternatives to the typical divesture options of selling or spinning off. He argues those options would simply keep Chrome’s power and its billions in the pockets of big tech. Kroll says Ecosia holds a track record of making impossible things possible. Should he get the judge thinking, he wonders what might come out of it.