Alphabet may have hoped that Donald Trump winning the White House would quell talk of a Google breakup, but that doesn’t seem likely. In a filing late last week, the Justice Department reiterated its suggestion that Google be forced to sell the Chrome web browser following a verdict last August that determined the company to be an illegal monopoly.
That’s a setback for Google, and it could signal trouble ahead for other companies, as the government continues to take an aggressive stance on Big Tech.
In some cases, that could be financial trouble. Google pays handsomely to be the default search engine for Safari, Apple’s Web browser. In 2022, Google’s revenue share payment to Apple was estimated at $20 billion. That worked out to 17.5% of the company’s operating profit that year.
With that sort of money at risk, Apple asked to intervene as a defendant in the government’s case against Google last year, saying it didn’t want to lose “the ability to defend its right to reach other arrangements with Google that could benefit millions of users and Apple’s entitlement to compensation for distributing Google search to its users.” (Last month a judge denied that request.)
Last week, however, the DOJ did agree to let Google pay Apple for services that were unrelated to search.
The ripple effect could go well beyond finances. While Google was the only Big Tech company with a judgment against it, the Federal Trade Commission had expressed grievances against several other companies during the Biden administration. And the fact that the DOJ is not standing down on Google has executives worrying they might be next.
Meta, for instance, is set to go on trial next month in a case that could see it forced to sell Instagram and WhatsApp. That case, originally filed by the FTC in 2020, alleges Meta overpaid for the two apps in an attempt to maintain a monopoly on personal social networks. Another judge set October 2026 as the start date for the FTC’s antitrust suit against Amazon.
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Chris Morris is a contributing writer at Fast Company, covering business, technology, and entertainment, helping readers make sense of complex moves in the world of tech and finance and offering behind the scenes looks at everything from theme parks to the video game industry. Chris is a veteran journalist with more than 35 years of experience, more than half of which were spent with some of the Internet’s biggest sites, including CNNMoney.com, where he was director of content development, and Yahoo! Finance, where he was managing editor More
