Don't carve out Chrome, you'll break it, moans Google

#317: As a line of wannabe owners stretches round the block, the browser's chief argues cutting it out of the Alphabet family is impossible...

There’s been an unprecedented rush of new sign-ups to this newsletter over the past fortnight, and as you’ll see, unprecedented is the word of the day today.

So, let’s dive in by saying hi and thanks to some of the new faces joining our 15,000-strong community, that’s now growing at a faster pace than ever before.

Welcome then to Canva, Deutsche Telekom, The Associated Press, Dotdash Meredith in New York, broadcaster SBS in Sydney, Semrush in New Jersey, British Airways, the Haskayne School of Business in Alberta, brand agency The Twenty One in New York, Publift in Dublin, The Information in Los Angeles, The Future of Privacy Forum in New York, NASA, TikTok, The Guardian, Amazon-owned Audible, Warner Bros, Bauer Media, Clemenger BBDO, OMD, Taboola, The US AI Safety Institute, broadcasters CTV in Canada and Channel 4 in London, and too many more to mention.

I’ve been throwing back industrial amounts of coffee and working from 4am all this week to cover the trials of Google and Meta.

I’m reminded of a British joke that you wait ages for a bus, then two always arrive together.

After decades warning Big Tech’s too powerful, the two who led the charge are both facing break-up, in two courts, at the same courthouse, at the same time.

And just hours ago, we learned the date for the trial to break up Google’s ad monopoly. It kicks off next week.

We’ve had the biff, and the bash... this will be the wallop.

It’s unprecedented. There’s that word again. Unprecedented.

Someone else was throwing that word around yesterday, so let’s see who, and why, and then throw her under one of those buses…