No Trust in Antitrust: Google Wins Even While Losing

2:05 PM, Feb. 2, 2026

Google, unbreakable and unavoidable. This tech giant has pervaded everyday life, transforming from a simple search engine into a multifaceted service, ranging from a video publishing website to dominating the email service provider industry. Now, Google has stepped into the surging AI industry. To say Google is monolithic would be an understatement. But is Google too powerful? Indeed, there are signs of a monopoly. The United States Department of Justice (DOJ) agreed and brought an antitrust against the company in 2023.

First, it is important to give a quick rundown of the current state of antitrust law. Antitrust enforcement has been inconsistent, at best. In the world of technology specifically, antitrust has not prevailed recently. For example, the federal government and a collection of state attorneys general challenged Meta, Facebook’s parent company, for its acquisition of social media platforms Instagram and WhatsApp. This case was dismissed by the DC Circuit, stating that courts should “proceed cautiously when asked to deem novel products or practices anti-competitive.” Another example is the Sprint and T-Mobile merger from 2020. Despite the government’s fears about price increases post-merger, the Southern District of New York disagreed and allowed the merger to proceed. Ultimately, the average price of mobile services increased in the years following.

These examples demonstrate that courts are hesitant to rule against monopolies for a variety of reasons, like reluctance to interfere with a private company or perceived market disruption. Leading up to 2025, the last major antitrust victory against “big tech” was in 1998. But Google recently lost a major antitrust case. In U.S. v. Google, the United District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that Google held monopoly powers in general search engine services and text advertising. For perspective, Judge Mehta found that Google held “almost 90% of the market share for searches conducted on computers and nearly 95% of the share for smartphone searches.

Following this landmark decision, there was a hearing to render what remedies should be ordered following this violation. The DOJ sought an immediate divestiture of Google’s Chrome and a contingent divestiture of their Android operating system. The Court ruled against these remedies, stating it was too drastic and out of scope. It instead prohibited Google from entering or maintaining any exclusive contract concerning the distribution of Google Search, the Chrome browser, and some other products. Google must also share certain search-index and user-interaction data, search results and other content from its search engine results page, and material changes to its ad auctions.

What was expected to be a dramatic breakup for the company turned relatively tame. A company that owns over ninety percent of the market share received essentially a slap on the wrist.

This result was actually seen as a win for Google. Several members of Congress deemed these remedies insufficient. What was expected to be a dramatic breakup for the company turned relatively tame. A company that owns over ninety percent of the market share received essentially a slap on the wrist. What seemed to be underlying this decision was AI. It seems like the court, just like before with the Sprint-T-Mobile merger, is making a prediction that this new technology will create new avenues of competition. There is a question, though, if this is a fair prediction. It seems almost contradictory to expect AI to create competition to Google’s search engine, when its search engine is one of the leading AI engines. AI is already integrated into Google’s service: the first result of every search is often AI generated. While ChatGPT has seen an uptick as a search engine and is still leading the way in generative AI, it remains risky allowing Google to continue in its current capacity. Google may even surpass (or at least match) OpenAI’s dominance, especially with Google’s drastic changes over the last couple of years and its wealth of data. As expected, Google appealed the antitrust case and is requesting a pause on the remedies, despite the lenient penalty. The first major win against “Big Tech” in about thirty years seems now nothing more than a slap on the wrist with potential serious consequences for all users.

Kaleb Ton

Kaleb attended the University of Miami where he majored in Finance. In law school, Kaleb is a member of the Asian American Law Student Association and the Tax Law Association. He enjoys fishing and rock climbing in his free time.