Last year, a federal judge said Google was illegally monopolizing some ad markets.
This week, we learned about the punishment Google is likely to receive for its sins: Not much at all.
While the details of Judge Leonie M. Brinkema’s order remain under seal for now, we have the broad strokes: It will likely have to play nicer with competitors — but in a way that’s unlikely to have any real impact on its business, and certainly not on its core business. Most crucially, it will not have to engage in any structural changes, like splitting itself apart.
“This is pretty close to the best case scenario for them,” ad tech veteran and author Ari Paparo tells me.
If that sounds familiar, there’s a good reason: In 2024, a different federal judge also ruled that Google ran an illegal monopoly in search. The next year, he announced the company’s punishment — which also barely affected Google’s business, and did not require “structural” changes, like selling off parts of itself.
It’s become a recurring theme for Google and its Big Tech peers: The US Government — starting with the first Trump administration, and even more so in the Biden years — has been taking them to court, in an effort to reduce the reach and clout they’ve accumulated over the last couple decades. And the feds keep losing.
In Google’s case, the government has “won” twice, but its prizes are barely consolation prizes.
In other cases, it has been a straight-up loss: Last year, Meta beat the federal suit accusing it of being a monopoly, which means it didn’t have to sell off Instagram or WhatsApp. And in 2022, the US tried to stop Microsoft from buying gaming giant Activision — and lost that case three years later.
And given that the US government has never made a serious attempt to pass legislation reining in Big Tech — except for 2024’s TikTok sell-or-ban law, which everyone basically decided to ignore — court cases were supposed to be the one tool the feds had left. They haven’t worked.
The federal effort to slow down Big Tech in the courts isn’t formally over. The government is still appealing its Meta loss. And it still has pending cases against Amazon and Apple.
More important is that there are many other anti-Big Tech court cases.
Meta, for instance, just agreed to pay $18 billion to settle a teen addiction suit brought by several US states. Mark Zuckerberg may reasonably call that settlement a bargain, as my colleague Pranav Dixit argues. But it’s a reminder that Big Tech is still dealing with state suits, civil suits filed by users, and a whole lot of regulatory scrutiny in Europe.
All of which means Big Tech is likely to write more checks in the coming years. But investors seem fine with that — Meta’s stock went up after it announced its potential $18 billion payout; Google stock rose after Wednesday’s news.
And that reaction makes sense. These fights are over Big Tech as it used to be — this week’s Google news is about a shrinking part of its ad business that may only account for 1% of revenue today — and not where it wants to go, since none of the suits are about the industry’s headlong plunge into AI.
So maybe Washington and others will be able to make Big Tech pay for the old internet. There’s no sign they will keep the companies from owning the next one.
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