Google’s big problems, briefly explained

Google just lost a huge antitrust case. A federal judge in Virginia ruled on Thursday that the search giant illegally maintained a monopoly in the online advertising market, leveraging its position to make more money and squash competition. The Justice Department, which initiated the case along with several states, has called for Google to be broken up.

For Google — and possibly Big Tech as a whole — the timing of this news could not be worse.

We’re now years into the government’s war on Big Tech companies that spans both the Biden and Trump administrations, and major battles are finally being decided. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg just spent three days on the stand in a case that will decide if Meta’s acquisitions of apps like Instagram and WhatsApp violated antitrust laws. In August, Google lost another big antitrust case, when another judge ruled that it illegally maintained a monopoly over search and search advertising, recommending that Google spin off its Chrome browser. (The remedy phase of that case actually begins on Monday.) The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and 17 states sued Amazon over its online marketplace monopoly and will go to trial next year. And then there’s Apple, which is embroiled in an antitrust case of its own, its third in the past 15 years.

“The court confirmed that Google used its monopoly power … to lock in publishers and foreclose competition in ad exchanges, violating antitrust law and putting our digital markets and information environment under Google’s control,” Barry Lynn, executive director of the Open Markets Institute, said in a statement. “That’s illegal monopolization, plain and simple.”

Holding Big Tech to account is a bipartisan issue. The case that Google lost last year was initially filed by the first Trump administration in 2020, and after the Biden administration doubled down on antitrust enforcement, the second Trump administration shows no signs of backing off. Vice President JD Vance has been a vocal opponent of Big Tech’s unchecked power and expressed support of Lina Khan, who grew to prominence for calling out Amazon’s antitrust violations and served as FTC chair in the Biden administration. Trump signaled that he intends to take on Big Tech by replacing Khan with another antitrust hawk, Andrew Ferguson.

Reining in Big Tech is also a popular idea. Some 59 percent of Americans were in favor of breaking up Big Tech companies, according to a 2021 poll by Vox and Data for Progress. And that poll was conducted before revelations by whistleblower Frances Haugen that Facebook knew its products were harming children, and before Google was accused of using AI bots to steal data from millions of users without their consent. A 2024 Pew Research Center survey found that most Americans think social media companies have too much power over politics and society, and about half think the government should do more to regulate them.

Google suffering back-to-back losses in court feels like it could be a tipping point.

“We’re reaching an integrity crisis moment,” said Davi Ottenheimer, vice president of trust and digital ethics at the data privacy company Inrupt. “And that’s what we have to get to get movement in the United States.

Then again, if we’ve learned anything from decades of antitrust enforcement in the United States, it’s that breaking up big companies — especially big technology companies — is hard. Microsoft avoided a breakup after losing a landmark antitrust case in 1998 over its bundling of Internet Explorer in Windows. The remedies from that ruling nevertheless increased competition in the browser space and eventually helped pave the way for Google Chrome, which is now a main character in Google’s antitrust drama.

The result of other major antitrust cases in the past have been the tech companies settling or paying big fines, which they can afford. For example, a decade ago, Apple lost an antitrust case over colluding with publishers to fix e-book prices and ultimately paid $450 million as part of a settlement. Google lost three major antitrust cases in the European Union at the end of the 2010s and paid about $9.5 billion in fines. And yet, Google remains intact.

We don’t yet know how Google, Meta, Amazon, and Apple will fare. We do know that some of the tech CEOs who flew to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring, who gave millions to Trump’s campaign and inauguration, and who praised the president on the Joe Rogan’s show are probably getting nervous.

We also don’t know if Trump will stop these lawsuits if he decides that’s what he wants. Zuckerberg, who has spent millions courting Trump in recent months, would probably love this option. Ferguson, the FTC chair, recently told The Verge that he’d “obey lawful orders” if Trump asks but would “be very surprised if anything like that ever happened.”