Catching up on Big Tech Antitrust Cases

Lawsuits against Google and Meta portend the end of an era

Posted on April 30, 2025 in Blog Posts

For our non-US readers, one thing you should know about the US legal system is that it can take a long time for a case to go through the system. Two or three years might elapse between the start of a lawsuit and the start of a trial. Even once an initial verdict is announced, it can take several more weeks—or months—until the judge issues a sentence. Sometimes, lawyers will seek to appeal the verdict, which can delay the case’s resolution by a couple more years (and lawyers can appeal that verdict, etc.). In short, legal reporting is slow, often provisional, and vulnerable to total reversals. 

Not quite two years after our first post on the antitrust cases against Google, the courts have finally issued judgment in the second major antitrust lawsuit against the company. This post will recap both of these lawsuits and also get into the ongoing Meta antitrust trial. As I wrote in our initial coverage, what is most significant about these trials isn’t the outcome necessarily, but that Big Tech is beginning to face high-level legal scrutiny. Indeed, other Big Tech companies, such as Amazon and Apple, will face their own antitrust lawsuits soon. An antitrust campaign could radically affect the structure of the internet economy and its information landscape, so we wanted to make sure they have stayed on your radar. 

United States v. Google LLC (2020) 

Decided back in December 2024, United States v. Google LLC (2020) was the first of the major antitrust lawsuits against Google. This one focused on Google’s search engine monopoly. The lawsuit alleged that Google used its power to secure its monopoly by entering into exclusive deals with Apple and mobile phone companies to make Google the default search engine on phones, enriching Google through increased use and, therefore, ad revenue. 

Google’s lawyers argued that these default settings did not “determine” users’ decisions about which search engine to use. Though the judge granted some points, he was not persuaded and ruled against Google. The verdict put it starkly: “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly.” It featured a few other biting moments, such as calling out Google for directing its employees not to use specific language that could possibly implicate them in antitrust suits. 

This case is on our radar again because its remedies trial, in which the court decides how Google should address its monopoly, concludes next week. This trial might be huge. According to The Verge, the Department of Justice (DOJ) is considering breaking up Google into multiple products. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has already expressed interest in buying the Chrome web browser. It is also reportedly developing a social network, which—forgive me for editorializing—is maybe not the lesson to take from these antitrust trials. 

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United States v. Google LLC (2023) 

Alongside an antitrust lawsuit over its search engine monopoly, Google faced a second antitrust lawsuit over its advertising services. Typically, users think of Google primarily as a search engine, but it provides a massive ad infrastructure for the web. Google has bought several ad tech companies over the years, DoubleClick being the most prominent among them. The DOJ charged Google with maintaining a monopoly in three areas—its publisher ad server, its ad exchange markets, and its advertiser ad networks—though the judge only found Google guilty of the first two charges. (If you would like a nice diagram of a punishingly technical lawsuit, please refer to page 20 of the judge’s opinion.) 

Google has already announced that it will appeal the ruling. If the appeal fails, it will likely face a further breakup of its services, though no specifics are known at this time. Given that ads underwrite just about every part of the internet, allowing users to access most websites for free, this case may have far-reaching implications for the open web.

Federal Trade Commission (FTC) v. Meta Platforms 

The final Big Tech lawsuit to keep an eye on is against Meta, which owns a wide range of incredibly popular apps, including Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp. Its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp specifically are the reasons behind the lawsuit. The FTC alleges that Meta engaged in anticompetitive behavior by buying up its competition: Instagram once rivaled Facebook as a photo-sharing social media platform until Meta bought it, and WhatsApp once rivaled Facebook Messenger as an instant-messaging service until Meta bought it. The FTC alleges that, in effect, Meta has monopolized the markets around its products. 

The trial is currently ongoing, but should Meta lose it, it will likely have to sell off Instagram and WhatsApp. As The New York Times opines, the broader implications of this lawsuit may well disrupt the pattern of Big Tech companies purchasing small, start-up companies, many of which operate on the financial assumption of a Big Tech buy-out.

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Hopefully, if you have lost the thread on these various lawsuits, this post will help you pick them back up. It promises to be an interesting couple of years for Big Tech in the legal arena, especially with the Amazon and Apple antitrust trials beginning in 2026. Between the antitrust suits against Big Tech and the rise of AI, we might well come to see this moment as the end of an era of internet history, for better or worse. 

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