What a Tech Antitrust Ruling Actually Decides, and Why the Remedy Phase Matters More

Antitrust rulings against technology companies are piling up. The pattern is consistent: a court or regulator finds a violation, and then a second, slower fight begins over what to do about it. The two stages are legally separate, and the second one is where the money and the market structure actually change.

Take Google. Judge Leonie Brinkema of the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia ruled on 17 April 2025 that Google acted illegally to maintain a monopoly in some online advertising technology, according to The New York Times. The ruling runs to 115 pages.

That single decision contained both a loss and a partial win for the government. Brinkema found Google had a monopoly over two of the three parts of the online advertising market the Justice Department and a group of states had identified: the tools publishers use to host open ad space, and the software that facilitates transactions. She dismissed the third, the tools advertisers use to buy that space, saying the government had failed to prove it was a real and defined market.

"In addition to depriving rivals of the ability to compete, this exclusionary conduct substantially harmed Google's publisher customers, the competitive process, and, ultimately, consumers of information on the open web," Brinkema said.

The court found Google violated the Sherman Antitrust Act "by willfully acquiring and maintaining monopoly power" in the online technology ad industry. The Times reported that the case could reshape a $1.86 trillion company and alter its power over the internet.

Two cases, two different questions

The search case against Google is further along, and it is the cleanest illustration of how the process splits. Ars Technica reported on 22 April 2025 that the remedy phase was getting underway before Judge Amit Mehta, with the Justice Department seeking to force Google to divest Chrome, unbundle Android and make other foundational changes.

The government's position is helped by the fact that liability is already settled. As Ars Technica put it, the Department of Justice has a major advantage here: Google is guilty. The court had found Google violated the Sherman Antitrust Act by "willfully acquiring and maintaining monopoly power," and the purpose of the remedy trial is only to determine what to do about it.

What the DOJ wants is specific. It argues that Google's handling of Chrome creates a barrier to competition by preferencing Google's own services. It also wants the search placement deals banned, the contracts in which Google pays Apple and Mozilla billions of dollars per year to be the default search engine. In the government's view, those deals forced rivals to compete around the edges after being locked out.

Google's counterargument is equally specific. The company has announced its preferred remedies: less exclusivity in search contracts and more freedom for Android handset makers to choose preloaded apps. It says it would accept additional government oversight to ensure compliance. It will also argue, according to Ars Technica's account of the expected proceedings, that the DOJ proposal is heavy-handed and emblematic of an "interventionist agenda," and it will lean on witnesses from Mozilla and Apple to say Google's services are the best available.

The DOJ is expected to point out that both companies receive enormous sums from those deals, which makes their testimony less reliable. Ars Technica noted that almost all of the Mozilla Foundation's revenue comes from Google, and Google does not dispute that.

Microsoft's case is still at the beginning

Microsoft's situation is at the opposite end of the timeline. The Verge reported on 1 June 2026 that the Federal Trade Commission sent civil investigative demands, which function like subpoenas, to at least half a dozen companies that compete with Microsoft.

The investigation began under the Biden administration in 2024 and continued under President Donald Trump. New details obtained by The Verge suggest the FTC is particularly concerned with potentially exclusionary behavior around Microsoft's Azure cloud services and with the company's role in the AI industry.

The CIDs say the goal is to determine whether Microsoft used unfair methods of competition in its cloud, software products and related services in violation of the FTC Act, according to a source who reviewed the letters and was granted anonymity to discuss nonpublic information. The documents generally run more than 15 pages and more than 15 questions, often with extensive sub-parts. The FTC did not respond to a request for comment.

Microsoft spokesperson Alex Haurek said the company is "cooperating fully with the FTC and believe our practices promote competition while delivering the innovative products our customers expect." Customers have complained, often anonymously for fear of retaliation, that Microsoft's 2019 changes to its licensing terms made it significantly more costly to run Windows software outside Azure.

In 2023, Google told the FTC in response to a broad cloud inquiry that Microsoft used dominance in other areas to "give their own cloud products an unearned advantage." Haurek pointed to Google as "a clear example of that dynamic, growing 63% year over year and competing head-to-head with other major providers including AWS, the largest cloud provider."

There is no guarantee any of this ends in a complaint. After further investigative steps, FTC staff decide whether to recommend filing one, and the agency's two commissioners vote. Both are Republicans. As George Washington University law professor and former FTC chair William Kovacic told The Verge, this kind of information gathering tends to happen early, and the commission could end the matter quietly with no minority-party commissioners to object or publicize the choice.

Nvidia shows the geopolitical layer

Rulings do not only come from US courts. Ars Technica reported on 15 September 2025 that China's State Administration for Market Regulation found Nvidia violated the country's antitrust law, a preliminary finding against the world's most valuable chipmaker.

The finding concerned Nvidia's failure to fully comply with provisions attached to its $6.9 billion acquisition of Mellanox Technologies, an Israeli-US networking supplier, which Beijing conditionally approved in 2020. Potential penalties range from 1 percent to 10 percent of the company's previous year's sales, and regulators can also force changes to business practices.

Timing matters here. Two people with knowledge of the matter said SAMR reached its conclusion weeks before the announcement and released it to give China greater leverage in trade talks with the US. The regulator opened the investigation in December, a week after Washington imposed tougher export controls on advanced high-bandwidth memory chips and chipmaking equipment.

Nvidia sits at the centre of that dispute. Successive US administrations have forced it to sell watered-down versions of its AI processors in China, and the Trump administration blocked sales of the H20 chip before Nvidia cut a deal to resume them in exchange for giving the US government 15 percent of the revenues. Chinese regulators have meanwhile warned domestic companies not to buy the H20.

Why the remedy phase decides the outcome

In each of these cases the finding of liability is only the setup. The remedy determines whether a market opens up, whether a company sheds a product, or whether a settlement quietly closes the file. That is why the Google search remedy trial drew comparisons from Ars Technica to the Microsoft case of the 1990s and to the breakups of AT&T and Standard Oil.

The politics around enforcement have also become harder to read. At Y Combinator's Little Tech Summit in May 2025, The Verge reported, FTC chair Andrew Ferguson appeared while deliberately shunning the American Bar Association's spring antitrust meeting across the street, the first time any administration had done so. Ferguson had recently declared his opposition to maintaining the FTC as an independent agency. Lina Khan, his progressive predecessor, criticised Trump for firing two Democratic FTC commissioners, then posed for a photo with Steve Bannon.

A DOJ attorney at the same event declared that this was the era of MAGA antitrust. Senator Josh Hawley said of Mark Zuckerberg: "I welcome the fact that Zuckerberg says that he's not going to engage in obvious, outrageous censorship anymore. Congratulations, but that doesn't mean that you get to violate antitrust laws."

For anyone trying to read the runes, the practical lesson is to follow the remedy filings, not the verdict headlines. A violation finding sets the boundaries of the argument. What a company actually gives up is decided later, by a judge weighing proposals, or by commissioners deciding whether to file at all.