Ninety percent of U.S. internet searches run through Google. That single number explains why the antitrust cases piling up against Big Tech feel so urgent — and why the outcomes keep disappointing everyone who expected them to actually change something. As a recent analysis lays out in stark terms, courts are consistently reaching for behavioral remedies over structural ones, which is a polite way of saying they’re writing strongly worded letters to companies that print money faster than governments can regulate them.
- A federal judge dismissed the FTC’s monopoly claims against Meta in 2026, ruling that the government failed to prove Facebook held an illegal monopoly on social media.
- Adam Candeub, Trump’s pick to lead the DOJ’s Antitrust Division, testified before the Senate in August 2026 in a confirmation hearing that could determine how aggressively the government pursues cases against Google and Apple.
- The DOJ reached a settlement with RealPage in November 2025, requiring the company to stop sharing rental pricing data among landlords — a case triggered by ProPublica’s 2022 investigation into cartel-like behavior in rental markets.
- The United States has no equivalent to the EU’s Digital Markets Act, which proactively mandates fair competition among large online platforms.
- Courts in 2025 continued to favor behavioral constraints over structural breakups, even after significant rulings against Google in search.
Why Winning in Court Doesn’t Actually Mean Winning
Here’s the uncomfortable truth that antitrust lawyers and legal scholars have been circling for years: the courtroom was built for a different era. Antitrust law in the U.S. was designed to handle railroads and oil barons. It was not designed to handle a company that gives you a free search engine, a free email client, and a free map app — and then quietly charges advertisers billions to put their products in front of your eyeballs while you use all those free things.
According to reporting by news.northeastern.edu, John Kwoka, a distinguished economics professor at Northeastern University, said bluntly: “It may be that the court is not the right venue for these issues to be solved, we may need regulations or another law.” His colleague Elettra Bietti, who teaches both law and computer science, went further. “There’s something problematic about relying on antitrust litigation for trying to correct big accumulations of power in the tech space,” she said. These are not fringe opinions. They’re coming from people who study this for a living.
The Meta ruling is the clearest example of the problem. The FTC spent years building a case that Facebook bought Instagram and WhatsApp specifically to kill competition before it could mature. A judge dismissed it. Meta’s chief legal officer called the FTC’s lawsuit “weak.” She wasn’t entirely wrong about the outcome — even if the underlying behavior is exactly what antitrust law was supposed to prevent.
The Structural Breakup Question Nobody Wants to Answer
Courts have consistently chosen behavioral remedies over structural ones. Behavioral remedies mean telling a company to stop doing a specific bad thing. Structural remedies mean breaking the company apart. The second option is the one with teeth. It’s also the one judges keep refusing to use.
The Google search decision in 2025 followed this exact pattern. The court found Google guilty of maintaining an illegal monopoly. Then it declined to order a structural remedy. The result is a legal win for the government that changes almost nothing for the average person trying to find an alternative to Google Search. Courts aren’t being cowardly — they’re operating within doctrinal constraints that were written before the modern internet existed. But the practical effect is the same: companies absorb the ruling, pay whatever fines apply, make a few adjustments to their product terms, and continue operating at scale.
The EU took a different path with the Digital Markets Act, which forces large “gatekeeper” platforms to meet specific interoperability and fairness requirements before violations even occur. The U.S. has nothing like it. That gap is not an accident — it reflects decades of skepticism toward proactive regulation in American economic policy. The cost of that skepticism is now visible in every antitrust ruling that lands with a thud.
What Candeub’s Confirmation Could Actually Change
If Adam Candeub is confirmed to lead the DOJ’s Antitrust Division, he would take control of the most consequential tech cases in decades — including the government’s lawsuits targeting Google’s dominance in search and Apple’s grip on its App Store. Candeub has spent years arguing that dominant online platforms have accumulated power that regulators have consistently underestimated, and that the impact extends beyond economics into speech and public discourse.
That framing matters. It suggests Candeub might push harder for structural outcomes rather than accepting the behavioral settlements that have defined recent enforcement. Whether he can actually move the needle depends on what courts are willing to accept — and so far, courts haven’t shown much appetite for the aggressive end of the spectrum.
The broader antitrust picture in 2026 looks less like a crackdown and more like an ongoing negotiation with no clear leverage. Algorithmic pricing cases, app store disputes, ad tech dominance — each thread connects to the same core question. Monopoly power that accumulates quietly, through defaults and acquisitions and network effects, is genuinely hard to unwind through litigation alone. The same way automation is reshaping blue-collar industries faster than policy can respond, Big Tech’s market concentration is outrunning the legal tools designed to contain it.
Regulatory frameworks built for speed and anticipation — not courtroom procedures built for retrospect — are the only tools that have shown real results. Even then, enforcement is imperfect. The EU issues record fines and companies budget for them. But at least the EU is swinging. Creators, media companies, and independent publishers have been squeezed by platform dominance for years while antitrust cases crawled through federal courts. That’s not a legal failure in isolation. It’s a policy failure dressed up in legal clothing.
Somewhere in a conference room at Google’s Mountain View campus, a team of lawyers is already modeling the remedies from the next ruling. They’ve done this before. They’ll do it again. The machine doesn’t stop because a judge writes a stern opinion — and until U.S. law gives courts or regulators a tool sharp enough to actually cut, that’s exactly how this plays out.
Watch the Breakdown
Sources
- After Google and Meta antitrust cases, experts say the courtroom may be the wrong venue for challenging Big Tech — news.northeastern.edu
- Looking Ahead on US Antitrust Enforcement and Tech: Will 2026 Deliver More of the Same? — techpolicy.press
- Trump’s antitrust point man could reshape Big Tech cases against Google and Apple if confirmed — www.wfmd.com
