Analysts weigh in on enterprise impact if Google forced to sell Chrome

The Google antitrust trial is “a nonsensical move by the US government that is ridiculously short-sighted, because if compromising privacy for ad revenue is bad, compromising privacy to train AI models is dangerous,” an industry analyst said Thursday.

Paddy Harrington, senior analyst at Forrester, who specializes in security and risk, added that efforts by the US Department of Justice (DOJ) to derail the company is a “move that may have been done in the name of anti-trust and competition, but it does not appear as if anyone thought through the implications of something else.”

That ‘something else’ raised its head this week during the remedies portion of the trial that began in August 2024, in which Judge Amit Mehta ruled against Google. Nick Turley, the product lead of ChatGPT at OpenAI, said his company would be interested in acquiring Google’s Chrome browser if the company is forced to sell it.

Could disrupt the browser market

Harrington countered, “this is not as simple as selling off a product; it’s a complete platform. And it’s moving from Google, where data collection is about selling ads, to OpenAI, where data collection is about training AI to then sell to a ridiculously wide variety of purposes. A ‘devil you know versus the devil you don’t know’ sort of deal.”

Such a move, said Harrington, has the potential to completely disrupt the browser market as a whole, not just for Google. “It’s understandable why OpenAI would want it for training the AI models, but if they purchase Chrome, what happens to Chromium? While it’s the open-source project of Chrome and ChromeOS, does Google keep the project under their development arm, or does it go with the browser?”

He pointed out that the majority of non-Chrome browsers use Chromium as their engine, so “if it stays under Google, by and large the browser market should probably remain the same. If it goes along with the sale to OpenAI, that could cause a serious disruption, as the privacy focused developers may want to distance themselves from a company that’s making money feeding their AI models.”

It’s all about the data

OpenAI’s interest in Chrome, said Brian Jackson, principal research director at Info-Tech Research Group, “is all about the data. OpenAI acquiring Chrome would be like Exxon acquiring an untapped oil field with the drilling already done. Just turn on the taps, and the good stuff starts flowing. Beyond that, OpenAI also has about 3.5 billion users, which it could reach instantly with its AI services.”

It is, he said, possible to imagine an OpenAI version of Chrome that would start with ChatGPT search by default instead of Google.com, and that would offer agentic integration to complete tasks such as shopping, booking appointments, or unsubscribing from unwanted emails.

“Such a coup would instantly transform OpenAI’s outlook from a provider of LLMs that sit behind the scenes of major tech brands to one of most prominent direct owners of customer relationships in the world,” said Jackson. “ChatGPT is already propelling it into that territory, but Chrome is still many magnitudes more well used.”

As for the impact all of this might have on enterprise users, Harrington said that “it would make sense for Chrome Enterprise (CEB) to go along with the ‘consumer’ Chrome business, and while there are two editions — one free, one paid — the paid version really just opens up the number of functions you can manage inside the browser. The functions are there already, it’s just a matter of how they’re turned on and off.”

All of this, he said, “is tied to Chrome itself, and Chrome Enterprise is just a rebundled version of it into an MSI (for enterprise distribution and an enterprise approach to configuration) with ADMX templates.”

Anshel Sag, principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, agreed, saying he could not imagine Chrome Enterprise being sold separately from the consumer version, “since they are fundamentally the same browser with different features and security.”

A question of trust

Asked about the level of trust CIOs and CISOs have in Google compared to OpenAI, he said, “there is more trust in Google, simply because the company has shown that it’s serious about security and privacy. That said, OpenAI doesn’t really have that kind of a track record, and while it does work with enterprises, it is still unclear how it might handle something like a browser, and all of the responsibilities that come with maintaining that level of security.”

One of the biggest costs that would further impact OpenAI’s profitability is R&D for Chrome, and ensuring it remains secure, Sag added.

Jackson said there is no doubt Chrome Enterprise would be impacted. The service, he said, is “the browser with some other enterprise management capabilities wrapped around it. It’s possible OpenAI would reach an agreement to still allow Google to own and sell its enterprise contracts there, but the product at the core of it would still be controlled by OpenAI.”

Then, he said, “there’s the question of what OpenAI does with the data, and how the change in ownership would impact enterprise trust. When it comes to cybersecurity in the enterprise, the modern best practice approach is a zero-trust approach. Zero-trust principles say to treat all connections as potentially hostile, limiting access to systems and data based on only what is absolutely needed by an authenticated user.”

The ’devil we know’

For browsers, he said, “ there are a couple of ways that enterprises try to make that work. Some large enterprise clients will use Chrome Enterprise, which offers browser policy management. This is where they can limit what data the browser can access and what it can do with that data.”

Other enterprises, said Jackson, would let users download pre-approved consumer browsers, likely including Chrome, and have IT manage them with other centralized administration tools such as Windows Active Directory or a Unified Endpoint Management solution.

He said, “unless OpenAI tries anything too aggressive with data collection, we’ll see enterprises take the same approach to web browsers in the future. Ultimately, Google is also a large data-hungry tech giant that is trying to train its own AI models, and we’d have every reason to be as concerned about its motivations to harvest user data as OpenAI. But it’s the devil that we know.”