Lawsuits Can’t Restrain Big Tech

When the government first filed major antitrust lawsuits targeting Big Tech back in 2020, many people were optimistic that the long-standing practice of public legal action against monopolistic companies could rein in these economy-dominating corporations. But as these pages have covered , this "techlash" has come to little.

Antitrust law has conformed to its castrated character of recent decades, with the state unable to bring itself to seriously restrain, let alone break up, the giant companies even after they were ruled to be full monopolies just months before. Recently, when it comes to enforcing the law against the tech giants, new lows have been reached.

"Neither Realistic nor Needed" Google's first antitrust suit concerned its control of web search, and it was ruled to have operated a monopoly yet was given only a slap on the wrist. Rather than being broken up or forced to sell off any of its major corporate units like Chrome, the court imposed rather toothless "behavioral" remedies, barring exclusive default-search deals and requiring the company to share some search data with rivals.

A second case was brought by the Department of Justice in 2023 over Google's "ad tech" business, an industry term referring to the segment of the company's ad business that helps independent websites (such as news publishers) sell ads on their own pages. Google owns what are by far the dominant tools for this market, including the exchange itself (known as AdX) where advertisers find publishers as well as the servers that deliver the ad content.

The company charges a 20 percent fee to run ad auctions for websites, which occur in fractions of a second as your browser opens the webpage in question. It should be said at the outset that ad tech is a small part of Google — the $30 billion in revenue it brought in for 2025 comes to just 7 percent of Alphabet's total revenue, and that share has been in decline for years.

The Justice Department wanted the court to force Google to sell off AdX. The judge's full opinion remained under seal for weeks while both sides were given the chance to redact confidential information from it. The now-revealed remedies include a requirement for Google to make its ad exchange interoperable with competitors, meaning that using Google's marketplace for finding bidders wouldn't lock publishers into using its other tools.

It also forces the company to share some real-time bidding data with publishers. But unsurprisingly, in Google's second monopolist verdict in two years, the company was still not subjected to any form of breakup. Judge Leonie M.

Brinkema found such a measure to be "neither realistic nor needed." Instead she settled for narrower measures such as those mentioned above as well as obliging Google to retain a court-appointed monitor with limited power over the firm. The "remedies" will stay in place for only six years , rather than the fifteen years that the government sought.

And Google of course plans to appeal the finding of monopolization, which will take some years. The company is now an adjudicated monopolist twice over, but the liberal state has failed to even partially rewrite Alphabet. Hang Together Meanwhile, the private arm of the techlash appears to be producing more serious consequences.

Years of attempts by litigants to sue the platforms for their harmful content have failed, due to strong legal protections shielding the companies for material posted by users. But more recently, users have hit on the legal argument that the designs of the platforms themselves are harmful, and intentionally so.

Reporting and disclosures about such design choices have bolstered these cases, from the Wall Street Journal in its damning "Facebook Files" series that drew on leaked internal Meta research to company documents unsealed in court. (An illustrative quote : "Targeting 11 year olds feels like tobacco companies a couple decades ago [and today].

Like we're seriously saying 'we have to hook them young' here.") These revelations showed that company engineers and executives were quite aware of the addictive properties of now-common social media and online video platforms, including the infinite scroll of social media feeds, the autoplay algorithm of online video sites, and the regular barrage of push notifications that attempt to pull users back to the platforms.

Juries are finding for the plaintiffs in these cases, most famously for litigants in Los Angeles and New Mexico, where Meta is supposed to pay out hundreds of millions of dollars in total penalties. In August, Meta reached a major settlement with most of the US state attorneys general, which have sued the company on similar grounds of user harm.

That settlement involved both a cash payout and promised changes to Meta's app designs. The settlement awards up to $18 billion to the forty-eight states, Washington, DC, and three territories taking part in the suit, to be apportioned based on the states' populations. However, Meta will only pay out 70 percent of this amount unless YouTube and TikTok adopt similar changes and together pay an amount equal to the remaining 30 percent, about $5.3 billion.

Even if Meta ends up paying the higher amount, the figure is quite small — according to the corporation's most recent 10-Q filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, its last quarterly profit was $15.8 billion. So the settlement represents the company's net income for just three months, but paid out over a decade, and at a time when Meta is firehosing money into a dubious data center build-out.

For a payout that settles so much liability, and over two decades of operation, this sum is a wretched pittance. The "behavioral" penalties, rules that the company is now obliged to follow, are also less than inspiring. Facebook and Instagram nominally require users under eighteen to use teen accounts, which are now mandated to include "night mode," which blocks most app features between midnight and 6 a.m., and "school mode," which prevents push notifications during school hours; minors will also be limited to two hours of use per day.

Unless, of course, teen users can figure out how to circumvent the changes — for example by using their parents' often-on phones to change the settings and disable these modes. But what teen is more tech savvy than their parents? Nine-Tenths of the Law The public and private legal processes continue to grind along, with a Justice Department case against Apple and a Federal Trade Commission case against Amazon still pending, and Meta continues to deal with thousands of civil lawsuits from individual users and school districts.

But so far, neither of these legal routes looks very promising in terms of reining in the power of the Big Tech platforms. What will it take to impose real penalties or constraints on the tech giants? Tech workers are seeking to organize and use their leverage to demand change at the companies from within; meanwhile, politicians like Bernie Sanders have called for taking a 50 percent stake in the major artificial intelligence companies.

Seeing the continued failures of the legal strategy to rein in Big Tech, it increasingly looks like we need organized tech workers and a political movement for real regulation and public control — up to and including the socialist solution of nationalization of their pivotal algorithms and networks.

For companies that are apparently too big to break up, socialism may succeed where liberal regulatory efforts have failed. This article originally appeared in Jacobin , a democratic socialist magazine publishing long-form essays and analysis on politics, economics, and culture. Subscribe to the print edition for $20 a year.