Google Antitrust Ruling Gets It Right

National Review Online

Thursday, September 04, 2025

 

A federal judge has declined to force Google to sell its Chrome browser. Last year, Judge Amit Mehta ruled that the company was guilty of operating an illegal monopoly, but did not immediately spell out which remedies would be required for its infractions. In its brief, the Department of Justice requested that Google ought to be forced to sell Chrome, as well as banned from entering the browser market for five years. Ultimately, Mehta disagreed, describing this demand as “overreach” and “a poor fit.” Instead, he determined that Google must refrain from entering into, or maintaining, exclusive distribution agreements, and he ordered the company to share certain search data with its competitors.

 

Reporting on the judgment, the New York Times’ news team concluded that the judge’s “message for big tech” had been “play nice, but play on.” We disagree. The judge’s message for the tech industry was that, now as 30 years ago, it is simply too chaotic and fast-moving to permit aggressive antitrust action. In his opinion, Judge Mehta noted that the recent rise of artificial intelligence had substantively “changed the course of this case,” before complaining that, because such innovations are so systemically disruptive, his court was being “asked to gaze into a crystal ball and look to the future.” In this, he was right. It is impossible to review the past three decades of American tech development and see anything other than repeated episodes of creative destruction. There is no Standard Oil in this equation — and there never will be.

 

If, 30 years ago, one had told a computer-savvy American that, in 30 years, seven tech stocks would dominate the market, he would have been hard-pressed to correctly guess more than one of their names. Back then, Amazon and Nvidia were tiny start-ups, Apple was still a basket case, and Alphabet, Meta, and Tesla did not exist. Only Microsoft was prevalent, and, in 1995, the biggest question facing the company was whether its new Internet Explorer browser would be able to unseat Netscape. By 2003, it had — and, indeed, it had achieved such a considerable share of the market that the Department of Justice had brought a landmark antitrust case against its owner. By 2010, however, Internet Explorer was as much an afterthought as Friendster and OS/2 Warp. By 2022, it no longer existed.

 

It is impossible to tell what effect AI will have on Google or its competitors, because it’s impossible to know how the internet is going to evolve from one moment to the next. In this respect, the term “Big Tech” is a misnomer. Certainly, it seems likely that tech will remain a big part of our lives. But in what exact configuration? Nobody has a clue. Somewhere, right now, an American is walking around with an idea that will change the world, slay some dragons, and dramatically reorganize the market — and, in all likelihood, do all of those things faster than the law can keep up.