Google, Meta antitrust cases could set legal precedents
The courts dealt Google a blow this week, deciding it operates an illegal monopoly in digital ad tech. Meta's antitrust trial over Instagram and WhatsApp also began this week.
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As Google deals with a second antitrust loss this week and Meta began its own antitrust trial, cases against Amazon and Apple are pending. The results of these antitrust cases could significantly alter big-tech business models.
The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia ruled Thursday that Google illegally monopolized online digital advertising markets, handing the U.S. Department of Justice another win in its second antitrust case against the tech giant. Judge Amit Mehta deemed Google an illegal monopolist of online search in August 2024.
Also, the Federal Trade Commission's antitrust case against Meta went to trial this week, in which antitrust enforcers are challenging Meta's acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp as anticompetitive.
Google and Meta aren't the only tech giants facing antitrust scrutiny. The FTC has filed an antitrust case against Amazon for alleged anticompetitive dominance over online marketplaces, while the DOJ filed a case against Apple for alleged illegal monopolization of the smartphone market. Big tech companies are facing an antitrust reckoning, with business-altering breakups considered as potential fixes for anticompetitive behavior in both the Google and Meta cases.
While Google, Meta, Amazon and Apple are not homogenous, tech giants' broad influence over various aspects of the economy is what began to draw antitrust enforcers' ire, said William Kovacic, a competition law professor at the George Washington University Law School.
"There's been growing concern expressed in academic commentary, in popular literature and in enforcement agency discussions that these companies have excessive control over the economy," Kovacic said. "And not only do they have excessive control over the economy, but they also exert undue influence over the political sphere and over the very social life of the nation. That growing sense of anxiety has inspired the investigations and the cases."
Antitrust cases could reshape big tech's business models
Kovacic said there's been a concern that antitrust law has been inattentive to big tech's business models for the past 25 years, allowing companies to carry out acquisitions that reinforced their market power.
"Now there's a sense of urgency to try to make up for lost time," he said.
Should the government succeed in its antitrust cases against the tech giants, particularly against Google and Meta, it will refine and extend the precedents set by previous significant cases such as the Microsoft antitrust case from the 1990s. The DOJ accused Microsoft of illegally monopolizing the PC OS market. Microsoft settled with the government and faced business restrictions to address the anticompetitive concerns. The DOJ cited the 25-year-old Microsoft case in its online search antitrust case against Google.
Large antitrust cases don't often come around, and when they do, they "make a big impact," said Joseph Coniglio, director of antitrust and innovation at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. While Microsoft set the standard for high-tech antitrust cases and will be hard to repeat, Coniglio said the wave of new antitrust cases against big tech could leave their mark.
"I think it's certainly likely that one of these cases will rise to a level that it ends up being a very important, Microsoft-esque type of precedent," he said.
The cases could bring more attention to mergers and acquisitions by dominant firms in the tech sector, which made many key acquisitions in the 2000s, Kovacic said. If the FTC wins its case against Meta, it will be a cautionary tale for companies about how freely they can use acquisitions to "bolster a position in any one market," he said.
The DOJ similarly alleged in its ad tech case against Google that its acquisitions and "anticompetitive auction manipulation" led to an illegal monopolization of digital advertising technologies and created an anticompetitive environment for its ad tech competitors during the past 15 years.
"It will focus more attention on how the elimination of potential threats to competition could be significant for antitrust purposes," Kovacic said of the Meta and Google antitrust cases.
You could see fundamentally different sectors in the area of social networking and in the area of search if those remedies come to pass.
William KovacicCompetition law professor, George Washington University Law School
Should Meta be forced to divest Instagram and WhatsApp, it would dramatically affect the company's configuration, Kovacic said. Similarly, in the Google online search antitrust case, in which some of the proposed remedies include divesting its Chrome search browser and potentially the Android operating system, it would dramatically change the company's operating platform.
"You could see fundamentally different sectors in the area of social networking and in the area of search if those remedies come to pass," Kovacic said. "Each of these, in their own way, would be transformative."
Indeed, while remedies reached in the 1998 Microsoft antitrust case didn't "make quite a splash," remedies in antitrust cases against Google, Meta, Amazon and Apple could significantly alter tech companies' platforms, should the U.S. government win, Coniglio said.
"It's certainly very possible that if they win one or more of these cases, we could get a remedy that really does change things, both at the company level and at the industry level more generally," he said.
A long road toward breakups
The Google and Meta antitrust cases were filed during President Donald Trump's first administration. However, though Trump's appointees to the DOJ and FTC in his second term promise to continue pursuing tech giants' purported anticompetitive behavior, growing concerns about staying technologically competitive with China could potentially limit more extreme remedies such as breakups.
"We have a new administration that is very much concerned about America's global competitiveness and winning around the world," Coniglio said. "There's a real sense in which this administration is hesitant to do breakups because they're looking at it in that American global competitiveness lens."
One of the big challenges in the FTC's Meta case remains proving that it maintains a dominant position in the social media market as social networks like YouTube, TikTok and X serve as competitive players, Kovacic said. Demonstrating competitive harm from both Google and Meta's behaviors will also be a challenge, he added.
Coniglio said another hurdle in the Google online search antitrust case is that proposed measures such as divesting Chrome and Android don't deal specifically with Google's third-party contracts prioritizing its search engine, which is the behavior Judge Mehta found to be anticompetitive.
"The Microsoft case is very clear you have to meet a higher burden to show divestiture," he said. "Even if they could say there was some causal connection to the harm, you're going to have to have a better case and meet a higher burden to show divestiture."
Both Google and Meta have argued that instead of damaging their markets, they contributed to improving them and giving users a good experience. Google plans to appeal the judges' decisions in both antitrust cases.
Rather than a breakup, Coniglio said tailored remedies that specifically address anticompetitive concerns would allow competition to flourish but don't "kneecap these great American companies from being able to innovate in the next generation."
Makenzie Holland is a senior news writer covering big tech and federal regulation. Prior to joining Informa TechTarget, she was a general assignment reporter for the Wilmington StarNews and a crime and education reporter at the Wabash Plain Dealer.
