Big Tech antitrust fights face a new uncertainty: Trump

Nearly every major US tech giant is defending against government-led antitrust claims, and they are all hoping for a reprieve from their new opponent: the Trump administration.

One recent plea came from Alphabet’s Google (GOOG, GOOGL). Last week it asked Trump’s newly staffed Justice Department to rescind a Biden-era request that a judge force Google to divest its Chrome web browser and essentially break itself up.

Google’s new request to the DOJ, reported earlier by Bloomberg, is based on national security concerns. Google’s cybersecurity protections for sensitive data like passwords and digital wallets are integrated across its widely used consumer and business technology products, including Chrome.

“We routinely meet with regulators, including with the DOJ to discuss this case,” a Google spokesperson said. “As we’ve publicly said, we’re concerned the current proposals would harm the American economy and national security.”

It is not the only Silicon Valley titan caught in the government’s crosshairs. Apple (AAPL), Amazon (AMZN), and Meta (META) are all defending against their own antitrust lawsuits, some of which involve similar claims as the Google case.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta is up next for trial, starting April 14, versus the Federal Trade Commission.

The final decision on what happens to Google’s $2 trillion empire will be in the hands of federal judge Amit Mehta, who ruled last August that Google illegally monopolized online markets for “general search” and “general search text.”

Hearings to decide on remedies in this case are slated for April and May. Final recommendations from the government and Google are due to the judge today, giving a Trump-led DOJ one last chance to alter the prior Biden-era suggestion to the judge that Google be broken up.

“The Biden Justice Department proposed what I would call remedy spaghetti against the wall,” Chamber of Progress CEO Adam Kovacevich, who previously led Google’s US policy strategy and external affairs team, told Yahoo Finance.

“The problem is if the Justice Department pursues these pretty wide-ranging remedies, the odds of losing increase.”

And the tension for the Trump administration, he added, is that it is engaged in an existential fight with China for the future of key technologies, including artificial intelligence, and Google’s parent company is still can be an important weapon for the US.

“What are we going to do, hobble one of our main US runners in that race by breaking up that company? It seems ill-timed to do that.”

Google’s search case is not the only matter it may need to negotiate with the new DOJ.

It is also a defendant in a US antitrust case that went to trial in a Virginia district court last year on the government’s claim that it illegally blocked rivals from the online ad technology market. That case is pending a judge’s decision.

Antitrust experts have expressed mixed views over whether Trump’s antitrust enforcers will go lighter than their predecessors on tech.

And those questions may be even more difficult to answer while Gail Slater, Trump’s pick to lead the Justice Department, has yet to be confirmed.

That leaves this week’s decision on what to recommend in the Google case to the acting assistant attorney general for antitrust, Omeed Assefi, who is in charge until the Senate signs off on Slater.

“Big Tech has run wild for years,” Trump said in a December statement announcing Slater’s appointment on his Truth Social platform, “stifling competition in our most innovative sector and, as we all know, using its market power to crack down on the rights of so many Americans, as well as those of Little Tech!”

“I was proud to fight these abuses in my First Term, and our Department of Justice’s antitrust team will continue that work under Gail’s leadership,” Trump added.

It was Trump’s first administration that initially sued Google over antitrust concerns. It was also during Trump’s first administration that the FTC sought to unwind Meta’s (META) acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, leading to the case that is now set for trial in April.

Trump’s first administration also launched an antitrust investigation into Apple (APPL), leading the Biden administration to sue the iPhone maker last year. That case has not been set for trial.

Trump has sent some mixed messages about how far he wants to go to hold tech firms accountable.

While campaigning, he was asked whether he supported a breakup of Google as an antidote to unhealthy competition in the search engine market. Trump suggested that Google’s punishment could be accomplished without forcing it to sell off parts of its empire.

“What you can do without breaking it up is make sure it’s more fair,” Trump said in an Oct. 15 interview. The former president described Google’s search engine as “rigged” and expressed concern that consequences for Google in the case could favor China.

Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai in December said of Trump that “in my conversations with him, he’s definitely very focused on American competitiveness, particularly in technology, including AI.”

When asked at a New York Times DealBook summit if Trump’s election changes the dynamic for Google’s antitrust case, he said, “This is a DOJ case, and the case is already in court,” noting that it started under Trump’s first term.

“So I don’t have any particular insights into that.” The company, he added, will “defend ourselves there.”

What remedies it eventually faces could have giant implications for other big names in the tech world.

Apple tried and failed to intervene in Google’s case to protect its multi-billion contracts with Google. Those contracts, which a judge could also undo, ensure iPhones and other Apple devices default to Google Search.

Even Google-backed artificial intelligence company Anthropic wants to lighten the consequences for the tech giant.

In a recent court filing, the startup asked the judge overseeing the case to allow it to file a friend of the court brief detailing how limits on Google could impact the race to develop AI.

So far, Trump’s DOJ has pushed back on that request, asking the judge to disallow Anthropic from injecting its own views into the dispute.

Some of the tech giants are facing a different government foe: the Federal Trade Commission.

That’s the case with Meta, where the FTC alleges the social media giant used its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp to stifle competition in the market for “personal networking services” like platforms such as its own companies, Facebook and Instagram, and third parties like Snapchat.

The FTC has asked California federal district court judge James Boasberg to unwind the two acquisitions based on claims that, under Meta’s control, they harm consumers.

That trial starts next month.

Amazon also is tangling with the FTC in one of three government-led antitrust lawsuits against it. Two cases are set for trial in 2026. One led by the FTC and 17 state attorneys general is scheduled to kick off in the US District Court for the Western District of Washington in October of that year.

The suit alleges Amazon illegally inflated prices on Amazon.com by punishing sellers who dropped their prices, and blocking sellers who declined Amazon’s fulfillment service from Amazon Prime sales.

Northwestern University law professor Andrew Stoltmann told Yahoo Finance in November that he expected Trump to “neuter” the FTC and strip it of its power to enforce the nation’s competition laws so that companies with litigation already underway would benefit from lighter consequences.

“I think tech companies will be major winners,” Stoltmann said.

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