Google

Google may be on the brink of a breakup

After two blistering losses in court, a new era for the internet may be coming into view

Casey Newton

Apr 21, 2025 — 12 min read

(Arkan Perdana / Unsplash)

It took a couple of decades for antitrust law to catch up with the world’s biggest companies. But over the past year, lawyers for the US government have successfully made their case that the biggest platforms have created illegal monopolies — and the solutions they are now proposing could begin to reshape the web.

Last week, we discussed the government’s effort to break up Meta, which is now in its second week at trial. Today, let’s talk about a similar effort to break up Google. While the two antitrust cases against the company in the United States are likely to play out over years, recent developments suggest that Google is going to have a difficult time avoiding at least a partial breakup of its business.

Over the past few days, we’ve seen two key developments in the government’s legal battle against Google. On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema ruled that Google maintains an illegal monopoly over segments of the online advertising technology market. And today, following a loss last year in the antitrust trial targeting its search monopoly, Google went back to trial to fight with the government over its proposed remedies.

Let’s take the search case first. I’ve previously written about the government’s plan to force the spinout of Google’s Chrome browser, Google’s response, and what I see as the likeliest outcomes from the trial.

In short: I see little evidence that transferring Chrome to another giant tech company would significantly change the search market, since most people will continue to choose Google as their search engine. But some of the government’s other proposals could have a meaningful effect.

One such proposal is to force Google to license data about its search queries, results, and what users click on to its rivals. Today, Google controls so much of the search market that other companies struggle to match its quality. Without a critical mass of clicks, their indexes of the web are inferior.

The European Union’s Digital Markets Act already requires Google to share search data on more than 1 billion historical queries. Google competitors like DuckDuckGo have called on the US government to go further, offering an API of real-time searches.

On the first day of the remedies trial, Judge Amit Mehta indicated that he is thinking along similar lines. Mehta appeared to express skepticism that Google’s ownership of Chrome is a material cause of Google’s search monopoly. This seems fair to me; after all, the government’s case targeted the exclusive agreements that Google signs with Apple and other device manufacturers to ensure default placement as the search engine for their operating systems. (It has paid Apple around $20 billion a year for this privilege.) The case did not make many arguments about Chrome, a browser that millions of people go out of their way to download on macOS, iOS, Windows, and other platforms.

On the other hand, as Erin Woo noted at The Information, Mehta emphasized that the search data Google collects from the clicks and taps on search results are the “fruits” of those device maker agreements — and thus something that the remedy must address. Given that statement, then, it seems even more likely that Mehta will require Google to share search data.

On Monday, Google made it clear that it would hate this. Here’s David Pierce at The Verge:

John Schmidtlein, one of the lead attorneys representing Google in the case, argued in his own opening remarks that what the DOJ is asking for would essentially mean white-labeling Google and making it available to competitors around the industry. In the long run, Schmidtlein argued, competitors would be able to use Google’s search index to build and train their own products, while Google is essentially forbidden (thanks to the other parts of the remedies) from making the deals and investments required to keep winning. But even in the near term, he said, “while they’re figuring all that out, you can cut and paste Google’s search results and call them your own.” Schmidtlein also argued that Google’s search data includes massive quantities of private information, which would be dangerous for other companies to have.

One counterpoint is that Google has already had to do a version of this in the European Union, to no apparent detriment to Google. Another is that you could place a time limit on these data-sharing agreements. Give DuckDuckGo, Kagi and other search engines a few years to build out their indexes and see if they can grab market share. If they can, end the data-sharing requirement and make them fend for themselves. And if they can’t, perhaps other strategies will be necessary.

"Undoing 15 years of illegal monopoly maintenance will take more than weak contract restrictions, it will require a range of remedies to create enduring competition," said Kamyl Bazbaz, senior vice president of public affairs at DuckDuckGo, in a statement.

One strategy the court seems likely to implement is to ban the default-placement deals that were the spark for the lawsuit in the first place. But there remains much uncertainty over how this would affect the market, in large part because we don’t know how device manufacturers will respond. Apple seems unlikely to make Google its default search engine for free when it was previously paid $20 billion for the privilege, even if Google remains the best search engine on the market today. But would it risk making DuckDuckGo the default? How about Bing?

We simply don’t know. What we do know is that defaults are hugely consequential — and if Apple did switch the default to another search engine, Google would likely lose market share. An EU-style “choice screen” that asks users to set their own default might seem more appealing to Apple and Google — but choice screens in Europe haven’t affected Google’s market share in the slightest, and I doubt Mehta would accept them as a monopoly remedy.

II.

And while Mehta weighs his options, Google has another remedy phase to prepare for.

Here’s David McCabe at the New York Times:

Google acted illegally to maintain a monopoly in some online advertising technology, a federal judge ruled on Thursday, adding to legal troubles that could reshape the $1.86 trillion company and alter its power over the internet.

Judge Leonie Brinkema of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia said in a 115-page ruling that Google had broken the law to build its dominance over the largely invisible system of technology that places advertisements on pages across the web. The Justice Department and a group of states had sued Google, arguing that its monopoly in ad technology allowed the company to charge higher prices and take a bigger portion of each sale.

“In addition to depriving rivals of the ability to compete, this exclusionary conduct substantially harmed Google’s publisher customers, the competitive process, and, ultimately, consumers of information on the open web,” Judge Brinkema said.

I was somewhat surprised that Google had lost the search monopoly case. But I always expected it would lose the ad monopoly case: it has been clear for at least a decade that Google dominates the online advertising market, particularly the part of it that publishers depend on to host ads on their sites.

The judge’s 115-page ruling illuminates how Google built and pressed its advantage in great detail: making tiny adjustments to online advertising auctions to ensure that it won in the vast majority of cases, introducing fees and other requirements that prevented rivals from gaining a foothold, and illegally tying together two key components of the online ad market: Google Ad Exchange (aka AdX), a real-time marketplace for buying and selling ads; and Doubleclick for Publishers (DFP), the ad server platform that lets publishers manage and serve their ad inventory.

“We won half of this case and we will appeal the other half,” Lee-Anne Mulholland, the company’s vice president for regulatory affairs, said in a statement. “The Court found that our advertiser tools and our acquisitions, such as DoubleClick, don’t harm competition. We disagree with the Court’s decision regarding our publisher tools. Publishers have many options and they choose Google because our ad tech tools are simple, affordable and effective.”

I spoke with a Google representative today, and the company told me it believes the judge did not properly apply past precedents in her ruling. In particular, the company believes Verizon v. Trinko prevents companies from being forced to offer services to their competitors. (This is known as the “refusal to deal” doctrine.)

In her ruling, though, Judge Brinkema argued that Trinko means companies don’t have to offer services to competitors — but this case shows Google placing illegal constraints on its customers. For publishers to get access to AdX, and the millions of advertisers who use it, Google forces them to use its ad server.

“The tie increased Google’s scale, decreased rivals’ scale, caused some rivals to exit the publisher ad server market, and harmed competition, customers, and Internet users,” Brinkema wrote. (Ben Thompson has a nice analysis of the implications of Brinkema’s interpretation of Trinko, which goes well beyond Google.)

Google tells me it intends to fight both the search and the ads cases all the way to the end, as you would expect. And it has won victories along the way, gradually whittling away at the cases’ scope.

At the same time, the two cases collectively represent the most consequential antitrust losses in the consumer tech industry since the United States. vs. Microsoft in 2001. The company now faces the possible forced divestiture of Chrome and the breakup of the advertising engine that generates the bulk of Google’s profits. The government has also suggested that it may be necessary to force the sale of Android.

It is unlikely the government will achieve all of that. But I’m increasingly convinced it will achieve something. Changes are coming to search, and search advertising, at the precise moment that a new crop of AI-powered competitors appear poised to take advantage. Google remains too big, and too smart, for the proposed changes to disrupt its place at the center of the tech ecosystem. But for the first time in a long time, and despite its best efforts, that ecosystem is growing — and now finally, one way or another, Google is going to have to compete with them.

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