Google having been found to have have a monopoly on search and to have used it illegally to influence other businesses, the Department of Justice is considering breaking up the company.
A bid to break up Alphabet Inc.'s Google is one of the options being considered by the Justice Department after a landmark court ruling found that the company monopolized the online search market, according to people with knowledge of the deliberations. … Less severe options include forcing Google to share more data with competitors and measures to prevent it from gaining an unfair advantage in AI products, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private conversations.
The last time this was attempted was with Microsoft in the 1990s—and the breakup failed on appeal, making antitrust law appear to be something of a dead letter. At the time, though, the media were sympathetic to big companies, drunk on techno-optimism, and eager to cast themselves as cheerleaders for an industry itself recovering from the dot com crash. Now … not so much.
