Two tech giants —
In proceedings in Washington, where a federal judge is weighing how to resolve Google’s monopoly in search, an executive made a startling admission: that Google pays Samsung an “enormous sum” to preinstall its Gemini AI app, even though courts have twice found those kinds of deals illegal. The revelation could give the government ammo for devising a penalty that hurts Google’s position in artificial intelligence.
Two floors down, the Federal Trade Commission, which wants to break up Meta Platforms Inc., was getting Instagram co-founder
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Getting to this point required something unthinkable in the current hyperpartisan political climate: continuity in building the legal cases from
“It’s striking that the advances have stuck,” said Lina Khan, Biden’s FTC chair who played an instrumental role in the tech cases, though she notes the alliance could be easily broken as Trump dismantles government agencies and resists court orders. Mike Davis, who advises Trump on antitrust, said, “to his credit, President Joe Biden continued what Trump started, and now Trump in his second term is finishing the job.”
Google is in court for a judge to sort out what it might have to change about its business, after an August ruling that it illegally dominates the online search market. The government is arguing for a mandate on Google to sell off its megapopular Chrome web browser. Also in Washington, Meta entered the second week of its FTC trial, which threatens to rip apart the social media empire with forced spinoffs of Instagram and WhatsApp.
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Federal antitrust enforcers are also suing Apple Inc. and Amazon.com Inc., and investigating Microsoft Corp. and Nvidia Corp. And that’s beside the slew of Congressional probes and White House actions affecting everything from artificial intelligence hegemonies to US engagement with China.
In a separate loss last week, a federal judge determined that Google violated antitrust law with its control over the technology used to place ads around the internet. The bipartisan celebration spoke volumes. “Big WIN in the fight to break up Big Tech,” Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren posted on X. “Huge news,” lauded Senator Josh Hawley, the Missouri Republican, suggesting a government dismantling of Google could reshape the internet.
Partisan beginnings
The techlash started along partisan lines. During the first Trump administration, the left worried about the warehouses of consumer data Google and Facebook were amassing and how opaque algorithms were amplifying misinformation on Twitter and YouTube. GOP officials began alleging massive anti-conservative biases: shadow bans on social media, content censorship, and violations of free-speech norms.
Hearings on these matters ended up mostly performative lashings from Congressional leaders and empty contrition from executive participants. Fierce questioning from lawmakers signaled they wanted to do something but were split on what exactly to do. Little was accomplished. The investigations felt so toothless that Google’s cofounder Larry Page and Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai ghosted a call to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2018.
Consensus started to build, though, on the idea that the problems all stemmed from the companies being too big and having too much control over data, speech, and consumers’ access to information. And as the government started to learn about how the companies actually amassed this power, they started to make bigger bets on how to constrain it.
In 2019, the FTC imposed a $5 billion fine on Facebook, its largest ever imposed on a company for privacy violations, and one of the largest civil penalties ever obtained by the federal government. The agency’s two Democratic commissioners even dissented, saying it wasn’t onerous enough. The punches worsened from there, with the DOJ and eleven states suing Google in 2020 for antitrust violations in the search market. That went to trial in 2023.
The arc of these cases highlights the work done across the aisle. The investigations of Apple, Amazon, Meta and Google were started under the first Trump administration and carried forward under Biden starting in 2021. Khan’s FTC, for example, saved the Trump administration’s Meta case from dismissal. For the loudest critics of Big Tech, these actions represent more than mere attempts to reset market competition.
The momentum is also a reflection of a greater understanding that to take meaningful action, policymakers and regulators would need to move beyond the congressional grillings and dig into the technical details of how these companies work.
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That could explain why its ultimately fact-bound federal judges who are doing the heavy lifting. Some Facebook employees in 2018 celebrated with champagne after Meta chief Execuitve Officer Mark Zuckerberg’s first congressional testimony revealed Senators’ cluelessness. (“Senator, we run ads,” he said, when asked how his company makes money.) Google’s latest blow in court this month was a highly technical ruling focused on complex innerworkings of its advertising exchange.
As politicians align against Big Tech, the companies are also in sync on their defense: arguing that the regulatory scrutiny works against US interests at home and abroad. “At a time when U.S. digital services are in fierce competition for global technology leadership, structural remedies that weaken US companies are not wise and risk handing an economic advantage to adversaries abroad,” said Matt Schruers, who heads the tech-funded Computer & Communications Industry Association, which counts Google as member, ahead of Monday’s trial.
Any breakup of Meta or Google could take years, if it comes at all, and wouldn’t even resolve some of the early concerns about consumer privacy, misinformation or bias. Messing with Google’s ad exchange would cause little harm to Google, said Dan Morgan, an analyst at Synovus. “No politician or judge seems to care” about that.
In some ways, the fact that Google may be seriously punished is almost more important than the seriousness of the punishment itself. Kristian Stout, the director of innovation policy at the International Center for Law and Economics, a nonprofit think tank promoting limited government that has received tech-industry funding, said Democrats and Republicans have always had different, even conflicting views for how to hold different parts of the tech world accountable. Stout said the left has been consistently skeptical of Big Tech and focused on reducing its market power, while the “the Republican view is always contingent on how they perceive Big Tech behaving,” particularly in terms of “the extent they think they’re being censored.”
In Congress, there is some overlap on certain tech issues. “You can hear pretty much the same analysis from Senator Mike Lee, a Republican from Utah, as from Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat from Minnesota,” said Barry Lynn, an early mentor to Khan and founder of the think tank the Open Markets Institute. He believes both sides of the aisle are highly critical of Meta, too, even if Democrats and Republicans view the company’s biggest problems differently.
Still, while strides are being made in the courts, lawmakers have accomplished very little because that consensus evaporates when it comes to more polarizing issues like misinformation and competition with China. A group of bipartisan bills to rein in Google, Apple, Meta and Amazon largely failed in 2022 and Congress has yet to pass a comprehensive data privacy bill. Legislative efforts to limit tech’s speech liability shield, known as “section 230,” have never been seriously entertained.
Fragile Alliance
Though bipartisanship has finally resulted in some progress, the political alignment on breaking up Big Tech is fragile and vulnerable to collapse, according to former Biden administration officials. That’s because the White House has begun to politicize agencies that were previously seen as bipartisan or at least impartial. “The biggest opportunities for that consensus are continued, sound antitrust law enforcement,” said Doha Mekki, the former principal deputy for antitrust enforcement at the Justice Department under Biden. “The biggest threat to it is disregard for basic rule of law principles.”
The “extreme polarization” will certainly test the cooperation, said Reed Showalter, a former White House staffer in the Biden administration focused on competition policy. “It’s an open question whether antimonopoly interests on both sides can survive the other currents of their own parties.”
There’s also Trump himself, who is cozier with big technology companies than he was during his first term, in part because executives see him as someone they can extract a deal from. Meta’s Zuckerberg tried, and failed, to persuade Trump to drop the FTC case. But he’s succeeding in other ways: Trump is telling his counterparts in Europe to back off tech regulation and pledging to help the US lead in the artificial intelligence race.
For now, the right and left are celebrating the government’s wins in court. “There are still progressives and conservatives who are profoundly antimonopoly,” Showalter said.
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Elizabeth Wasserman
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