The Scoop
When Perplexity made a $34.5 billion unsolicited bid for Google Chrome last August, it was largely seen as a publicity stunt. Google had just lost its antitrust lawsuit with the Justice Department, and a US federal judge was considering whether it should be required to sell off Chrome.
It turns out, Perplexity never thought the deal would go through if a judge didn’t force it, the company told me. And there was more to the multibillion-dollar bid than a publicity play. Perplexity, which pitches itself as a hybrid between a traditional search engine and AI chatbot, used the bid as a defensive measure to protect its own business and, it says, the state of the internet.
Let me explain. Perplexity has built its own AI-powered browser, called Comet, on top of the free and open-source software that underpins Chrome and several other browsers. If Google were ever to sell Chrome, it’s unclear what would happen to Chromium, which hosts the browsers. And any buyer that mucked with the platform would mess with one of Perplexity’s most important products.
In this sense, Perplexity figured that if it bid for Chrome, it could use the deal terms to send a signal to the greater market about how important it was to maintain the sanctity of the open-source software. Under its proposed terms, Perplexity also committed to keep users’ default search engines — oftentimes Google — unchanged on the browser. In the potential war for Chrome, Perplexity wanted to set a floor for offers to ensure the winning bid would have to exceed what it put on the table.
“We needed those terms to be public before the decision of the judge,” head of communications Jesse Dwyer said. “We didn’t expect them to sell Chrome.”
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Christopher Suarez, a lawyer at Washington-based firm Steptoe, said Perplexity’s bid wouldn’t automatically set a floor for other companies’ offers by legal standards — other firms could certainly forgo the commitment to keep Chromium open source and instead pony up a lot more money.
But the bid did broadcast to investors, regulators, judges, and consumers that there are certain norms of the internet that if broken, could “piss a bunch of people off,” Suarez said.
The court didn’t force Google to sell Chrome so these practices remain by default with Google. But Perplexity is facing several lawsuits that threaten to change the structure of the internet, limiting how its business can function.
Amazon is suing Perplexity for allowing users to create agents that shop on Amazon on their behalf, in a lawsuit that could determine if agents are merely extensions of their human users and should be policed as such. A ruling in Amazon’s favor would require agents to obtain permission to interact with websites, which risks breaking the internet into walled gardens that limits the efficiency of AI assistants — and could puncture Perplexity’s business model.
Rachyl’s view
Perplexity is one of several companies banking on the status quo of the internet changing, from users clicking through links ranked by relevance to having an AI model aggregate and summarize all of the information at once. That routine is already changing, with even Google arguing its search monopoly is being disrupted by AI. But there are aspects of the last 20 years of internet norms that are beneficial to Perplexity’s business, and its ongoing attempts to keep those norms amid an industry in flux reveals the delicate balance disruptors face between replacing the old world order and depending on it.