One of the defining market trends of the 2020s has been the strict anti-monopoly and antitrust stance taken by US, UK, and European regulators.
Since Lina Khan was sworn in as the Chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in 2021, she hasn’t shied away from challenging big tech companies on antitrust and anti-competitive grounds. Under Khan’s leadership, the FTC has sued or filed complaints to block:
- NVIDIA from acquiring Arm in 2021
- Lockheed Martin from acquiring Aerojet Rocketdyne in 2022
- Microsoft from acquiring Activision Blizzard in 2022
- Meta from acquiring VR company Within in 2022
Besides specific M&A complaints, the FTC also has ongoing antitrust suits against Amazon and Meta. The agency accused Amazon of fighting sellers’ efforts to offer products more cheaply on other marketplaces, while it alleges that Meta has engaged in an “illegal buy-or-bury scheme to maintain its dominance.”
The FTC hasn’t been alone in its stance against big tech monopolies. The UK’s Competition and Market Authority blocked Adobe’s acquisition of Figma in 2023, and it forced Meta to divest Giphy in 2022. Meanwhile, the US Department of Justice (DoJ) filed an antitrust complaint against Apple in March 2024, accusing it of locking down its iPhone ecosystem to build a monopoly.
Now, Google is in the hot seat. In August 2024, the DoJ won a lawsuit against Google in which it had accused the search giant of monopolizing the online search and advertising markets. The DoJ’s complaint centered around Google’s revenue sharing agreements in which it paid tens of billions of dollars (including $26 billion in 2021 alone) annually to Apple, Mozilla, Samsung, and other companies to remain the default search engine on their devices. These preinstallation agreements effectively blocked competing search browsers from reaching device users, further entrenching Google’s dominant market position.
The DoJ is focused on evaluating remedies for Google’s monopoly charges, which it outlined in a filing on October 8. Some of these proposed remedies, such as making Google share its search data with competitors through an API or banning default and preinstallation agreements with device makers, seek to even the competitive landscape without altering Google’s business. However, the DoJ is also considering asking a federal judge to force Google to divest part of its business including “behavioral and structural remedies that would prevent Google from using products such as Chrome, Play, and Android to advantage Google search and Google search-related products and features.”
Ultimately, it will come down to a judge, not the DoJ, to determine which remedies are appropriate, and Cornell University law professor Erik Hovencamp noted that judges view breakups as extreme remedies that could have unintended consequences. However, even if Google survives this lawsuit unscathed, the search giant is still facing four other antitrust lawsuits, including a case in which the DoJ is accusing Google of monopolizing the ad-tech market, and the government is seeking to force Google to divest its Ad Manager product.
With Meta, Apple, and Amazon all facing their own antitrust suits right now, the outcomes of Google’s cases could set a precedent for how regulators will structure big tech antitrust remedies going forward.
