US’s big tech breakup drive is falling apart

Washington’s push to break up America’s biggest tech companies is not going well.

Over the past year, authorities have failed to persuade judges to order companies like Google and Meta to sell off significant portions of their businesses. For example, Instagram and Chrome. For what many considered to be the most severe crackdown on tech monopolies in decades, these losses are a major issue.

Big tech breakup plans face mounting legal hurdles

The setbacks come while separate cases against Apple and Amazon are still pending. It’s raising real doubts about whether the government’s strategy for reining in these giants will work at all.

Final answers could be years away with all the appeals that are expected. But the recent defeats give tech bosses like Mark Zuckerberg new chances to push the Trump administration for lighter treatment on monopoly enforcement.

Fast changes in artificial intelligence have weighed heavily on decisions that went Big Tech’s way.

Take the Google search case. Judge Amit Mehta ruled in August that the company spent billions on exclusive deals to keep an illegal monopoly in internet search. But he handed Google a big win in September when he refused to order sales of Chrome or Android, which is what the Justice Department wanted.

Mehta said the threat to Google’s search business—worth about $200 billion a year—from AI chatbots was a major reason he went with softer penalties.

Courts are exercising caution when making extreme decisions, such as dismantling businesses valued at trillions of dollars.

Courts reject breakup orders as AI reshapes competition

Take a look at the other Google case about digital advertisements. In April, Judge Leonie Brinkema declared that Google had “wilfully” monopolized a portion of the online advertising industry. However, she publicly expressed concern about prosecutors’ desire to divide up Google’s advertising business.

Brinkema pointed out that no one had found a buyer for Google’s ad exchange yet. She said she was “concerned” that the whole divestiture idea was at a “fairly abstract level.”

The FTC and Justice Department didn’t respond when asked to comment.

After Mehta’s ruling, Gail Slater—who runs the Justice Department’s antitrust division under Donald Trump—said she was looking at her options and “thinking through whether the ordered relief goes far enough.”

After the Meta decision, the FTC said it was “deeply disappointed” and was “reviewing all our options.”

The Google search and Meta cases both started during Trump’s first term. They marked a new era of going after monopolies after decades where agencies didn’t try anything this big against tech companies. The last time something similar happened was a 1998 Justice Department complaint against Microsoft.

Biden-era officials, including Kanter and former FTC commissioner Lina Khan, ramped up monopoly lawsuits in a major way. They went after sectors beyond tech and brought the Google advertising case, plus suits claiming Amazon hurt customers, rivals, and sellers, and that Apple monopolised smartphone markets.

Amazon and Apple say the lawsuits are wrong on the facts and the law. Their trials are set for 2027.

The 2025 tech rulings demonstrate how attempts to combat market dominance may be hampered by enforcement delays.

Kanter said monopoly cases filed in the past four years “should have been brought 10 years earlier. The remedies would have been quite straightforward and achievable.”

In his opinion, Judge Boasberg seemed to agree. He stressed that things had “changed markedly” since the FTC sued Meta in 2020.

These cases have also put a spotlight on how to regulate new technologies like AI.

Slater, talking about AI in September, said creating fair competition through antitrust enforcement “is always important, but it is crucial where the technology is still developing rapidly.”

Getting courts to use their authority was “one of the reasons why it’s important to bring big, ambitious cases,” he said. “Once you establish that the rule of law applies, in time, the remedies will follow.“

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