Google broke the law. It’s time to break up the company

3 hours ago 5

In less than a year, US courts have ruled that the world’s most powerful tech company broke the law – twice.

In August, a federal judge in Washington ruled that Google illegally maintained its search monopoly by locking up defaults on browsers and devices. In April, a federal judge in Virginia found that Google illegally monopolized the digital advertising market, manipulating auctions, restricting and stifling competitors. These two rulings, the most significant antitrust wins against a tech giant in decades, should be a turning point in the digital economy.

The rulings against Google’s illegal monopoly in digital advertising offer a once-in-a-generation chance to redesign the infrastructure of surveillance that underpins Google’s ill-gotten dominance. But if regulators settle for symbolic fines or behavioral tweaks, it will do nothing to structurally reform the business model and incentives that underpin Google’s illegal dominance. In a three-week hearing that began this week, the US justice department is urging a judge to break up the company. Whether we seize this moment to break up these concentrations of power will shape the future of markets, media and democratic governance.

Google is emblematic of the platform economy in which we now live. The Silicon Valley corporation and its platform brethren provide core infrastructure – for advertising, for information access, for the economy at large. Google’s control of the search ecosystem, from its Chrome browser and Android operating system to its dominance in digital advertising and search, gives it unrivaled power over who gets heard and who gets paid. That power has stifled competition, undermined journalism and distorted the digital economy.

The courts have now recognized what my fellow critics have argued for years and what regulators around the world have similarly determined: Google illegally leverages its dominance in one market to reinforce its control in another.

As addressed in the ad tech case, Google manipulated auctions and structured its business to advantage its own services at the expense of publishers and rivals, turning its ad exchange into what one employee called an “authoritarian intermediary”. As a result of its illegal monopoly, and by its own estimates, Google pockets on average more than 30% of the advertising dollars that flow through its digital advertising technology products; in some transactions and with certain publishers and advertisers, it takes far more.

As discussed in the search case, Google paid billions annually to be the default search engine on devices and browsers, effectively shutting out competitors and securing its control of 90% of the search market. And Google is now using the data generated throughout these products and its monopoly profits to secure its dominance in AI.

Regulators around the world have converged on similar verdicts and would like to see structural changes, though they seem to have been waiting to see what happened in the US cases. In 2023, the European Commission concluded that only divestiture could remedy Google’s ad tech conflicts of interest. Google offered to sell its AdX exchange, but European publishers and regulators rejected the move as insufficient. In the UK, Google is now facing a £5bn class-action lawsuit for abusing its search dominance along with a competition strategic market status investigation, which could result in structural or behavioral remedies.

These global actions reflect a growing consensus: Google’s power is infrastructural and self-reinforcing. It controls the tools that decide what we know, what we see and who profits. The implications are especially acute for journalism, which has been hollowed out by Google’s ad market manipulation and search favoritism. In an era of generative AI, where foundation models are trained on the open web and commodify news content without compensation, this market power becomes even more perfidious.

Meaningful remedies require structural separation supported by behavioral changes to prevent future anticompetitive behaviors, including in the market for artificial intelligence. First, Google should be required to divest parts of its ad tech stack, spin off Chrome and ensure interoperability. Vertical integration has allowed it to dominate every layer of digital advertising, from the tools publishers use to the auctions that determine ad placement. Breaking up that stack would create space for competition and innovation.

Second, regulators should enforce interoperability and transparency. Let competitors have access to or build on Google’s core infrastructure. Let users choose and switch search engines and browsers easily, enabling them to take their data and easily shift providers. Require Google to disclose how it trains its AI models and how it uses publisher content.

Third, global coordination should be built into enforcement. Antitrust remedies must be aligned across jurisdictions to prevent regulatory arbitrage and make retaliatory American actions more difficult. The US cases should embolden regulators elsewhere to act swiftly.

Finally, we must recognize that these antitrust cases are not just about prices or innovation. They are about power. Who sets the rules for how knowledge circulates? Who profits from public discourse? Who benefits from the infrastructure of the modern economy? If we allow Google to keep its hydra-headed corporation intact, the same dynamics will replicate themselves under the guise of AI innovation.

The courts have shown that Google broke the law. Now, governments must show that the law still has teeth. That means structural remedies, not settlements. Transformation, not tinkering.

If we fail to act now, we may not get another chance.