Appearing in court on April 23 as a witness in a lawsuit between the US Department of Justice and Google, Weiberg said Chrome would be worth about $50 billion if Google were forced to sell the browser.

US Justice Department asks court to force Google to sell Chrome browser

The court is considering remedies after determining that Google has a monopoly in the search market. One remedy being proposed by the Justice Department is to sell Chrome.

When calculating Chrome’s value, DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weiberg said he focused on the browser’s user base. The price is higher than the roughly $20 billion figure Bloomberg reported in November 2024. In addition, with the “sky-high” valuation, the number of people who can afford to buy Chrome will shrink.

Earlier, at a court hearing on April 22, OpenAI product manager Nick Turley said that his company and “many others” would like to buy Chrome if they could. ChatGPT currently has an extension for the browser, but if Chrome were to integrate more deeply with OpenAI, the chatbot would be much better.

He also revealed that last summer he approached Google about a deal to improve the accuracy and up-to-dateness of ChatGPT responses but was turned down.

The antitrust trial will last three weeks, starting on April 21, and will be presided over by Judge Amit Mehta, the same judge who ruled that Google illegally monopolized the search market through practices such as paying Apple to be the default search engine on iPhones.