Watchdogs run into a judge-shaped brick wall.
Washington’s push to split up Big Tech is faltering after a string of setbacks in monopoly cases that are starting to look like a strategy problem.
Over the past year, federal enforcers have struggled to persuade judges to order tech giants such as Google and Meta to spin off significant assets like the Chrome browser and Instagram.
The campaign began during the first Trump administration and expanded under Joe Biden, becoming the biggest challenge in decades to anti-competitive behaviour in tech.
Prosecutors have secured landmark rulings that some companies maintained illegal monopolies. Judges have still flinched at the toughest fixes, preferring softer remedies over carving up businesses or unwinding old acquisitions.
With cases against the Fruity Cargo Cult Apple and Amazon still pending, the recent decisions are forcing awkward questions about whether the government’s approach can actually land a punch.
Department of Justice, former antitrust division head Jonathan Kanter said, “I wish courts had been more decisive.”
Kanter said the rulings showed the US had moved too slowly while tech firms hoovered up rivals and cemented dominance.
“There’s an important lesson here, which is not to let the monopolies form or maintain themselves illegally in the first place,” Kanter said.
The outcomes may still be years away, with lengthy appeals likely to grind on. Antitrust officials appointed by Trump have kept backing these legal fights, but last year’s setbacks have given tech bosses like Mark Zuckerberg fresh room to lobby for a retreat.
Rutgers Law School professor Michael Carrier said the speed of technological change has become the get-out clause, especially with AI.
“The fast-changing nature of these markets, which is especially the case given recent improvements in artificial intelligence, raises hurdles for watchdogs, and he said the government faced an uphill climb,” he said.
In the Google search case, a US district court judge, Amit Mehta, ruled in August 2025 that the company spent billions of dollars on exclusive deals to maintain an illegal monopoly in internet search. The government then took a hit in September 2025 when Mehta declined to order the divestiture of Chrome or Android, as the Department of Justice had requested.
Mehta pointed to the threat AI chatbots pose to Google’s roughly $200bn-a-year search business, arguing that this justifies lighter-touch remedies. “The emergence of [generative AI] changed the course of this case,” he wrote.
The Federal Trade Commission’s case against Meta ran into the same problem, plus the passage of time. US district court judge James Boasberg noted that a “massive leap in AI” had transformed social media since Meta bought Instagram and WhatsApp in 2012 and 2014, acquisitions the regulator wanted to unwind.
Boasberg accepted Meta’s argument that it faces sharp competition from TikTok, which he said had “spread furiously” since arriving in the US in 2018. In November 2025, he ruled that Meta does not hold an illegal monopoly.
Mehta wrote that judges “must approach the task of crafting remedies with a healthy dose of humility”.
He also quoted a Supreme Court warning about judicial overreach in complex markets. “Courts reviewing complex business arrangements should . . . be wary about invitations to ‘set sail on a sea of doubt’.”
