Lawsuits Can't Restrain Big Tech

Recent high-profile legal victories against Alphabet and Meta have ended with minimal constraints on their power. Courts found Google to be a monopolist in search and again in ad tech but refused to break the company up, imposing limited behavioral remedies instead: bans on exclusive default-search deals, requirements to share some search and real-time-bidding data, interoperability for its AdX exchange, and a court monitor - all temporary and narrower than the government sought. Google’s ad tech arm generates roughly $30 billion (about 7 percent of Alphabet’s revenue), yet judges deemed divestiture “neither realistic nor needed.” Parallel litigation has held Meta accountable for design choices that intentionally foster addictive use among minors, fueled by internal research disclosures; settlements with state attorneys general total up to $18 billion, but 30 percent of that is contingent on rival platforms matching reforms, and mandated teen protections (night mode, school mode, two-hour limits) are easily circumvented.

The concrete legal outcomes demonstrate that antitrust and private suits have so far been unable to meaningfully curb platform dominance or dismantle their profitable architectures. Financial penalties are small relative to corporate profits and behavioral fixes are limited in scope and duration. The necessary response, the piece argues, is collective power: organized tech workers leveraging internal leverage and a political movement that pursues real regulation, public control, or even nationalization of pivotal algorithms and networks - measures presented as the only reliable way to restrain firms deemed too big to break.