Antitrust restructuring of major corporations is on the table in a way it has not been since the Microsoft case in the late 1990s. Indeed, the historic moment may be comparable to the breakup of Standard Oil in the 1910s and AT&T in the 1980s, when courts reorganized those companies and freed the market from their control. Today, judges face a similar opportunity to rein in today’s rapacious monopolists.
Amid rising public pressure to challenge concentrated corporate power, the federal government has, since 2020, filed antitrust lawsuits against Google, Amazon, Meta, and Apple, as well as dominant firms in the agriculture, debit payment, and rental pricing software industries. These cases aim to break monopolistic control of markets, and not merely to stop unfair practices. The outcome of this litigation wave will determine whether antitrust remains a meaningful check on concentrated private power or operates as regulatory theater.
Antitrust enforcers stand poised to secure favorable judgments in lawsuits that affect multiple sectors of the economy. These lawsuits could bolster farmers’ ability to repair their equipment, reduce the costs retailers incur on e-commerce platforms, increase the revenue software developers earn from their smartphone applications, and reduce the interchange fees businesses must pay to credit and debit card companies.
The poster child for the burgeoning possibilities of antitrust remedies involves the lawsuits against Google. In August 2024, Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google was liable for monopolizing the search market. He found that Google illegally paid Apple and other manufacturers billions of dollars every year to be the default search provider in web browsers on desktops and smartphones, resulting in the foreclosure of critical distribution channels to competitors. In April 2025, Judge Leonie Brinkema held that Google was liable for monopolizing the ad-tech market, which produces the revenue stream that underpins much of our modern media system. In her decision, she found Google used its dominant control over digital advertising to lock in news publishers, impose supra-competitive take rates on Google’s exchange, and exclude competing digital advertising providers.
Other lawsuits against Google, such as the widely publicized lawsuit by game developer Epic Games, have also found Google liable for monopolization. Given this legal onslaught against Google, odds are in favor that the corporation will undergo some form of corporate restructuring. Due to Google’s immense size and scale, the result would fundamentally alter how the public uses and accesses the internet. Breaking up Google—by divesting Chrome or its digital advertising business—would strip the corporation of its control over access to information and online revenue. The shift would mean more competition, the viability of privacy-oriented alternatives, and greater power for journalists, creators, and users concerning how information is distributed and monetized.
A few federal judges and Gail Slater, the Assistant Attorney General for the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, will control the scope of the remedies to be imposed on Google. Regardless of any obstacles the DOJ staff may face in determining which remedies they should pursue, one thing is certain: federal judges are vested with all the authority they need to impose the government’s demands, and they are obligated to impose sweeping remedies on antitrust violators like Google.
Flexing the Structural Relief Muscle
Remedies convert violations of legal rights into actionable consequences. In his leading casebook, renowned remedies scholar Douglas Laycock succinctly asserted that “remedies give meaning to obligations imposed by the rest of the substantive law.” In other words, remedies are how democratic institutions prove their legitimacy: equipping the law with real force to answer public calls for action, rather than serving as a meaningless political gesture. Without effective remedies, the law merely functions as a speed limit sign with no police or cameras to enforce it.
The antitrust laws are, in the words of Senator John Sherman, namesake of the titular Sherman Act, “remedial statute[s].” To accompany the sweeping prohibitions on “restraints of trade” and monopolization, lawmakers were diligent to buttress these proscriptions with a panoply of robust remedial provisions.
The antitrust laws include the ability for harmed private parties to obtain treble damages and attorneys’ fees (a novel feature in American law at the time of their enactment). Lawmakers authorized federal, state, and private enforcers to initiate lawsuits, eventually establishing two separate agencies to advance the cause. Further supporting these profound legal tools were the equity provisions that empowered enforcers to seek and, critically, courts to impose structural changes to a business’s operations. The purpose of this vast and deep remedial landscape was to facilitate the “high purpose of enforcing the antitrust law[s].”
At the federal level, the thinking surrounding the purpose and necessary goals of antitrust remedies has been lost for some time. With the notable exception of the antitrust litigation against Microsoft in the late 1990s, market restructuring has simply not been seriously contemplated by enforcers since the 1970s, when the DOJ was litigating its antitrust lawsuit against telecommunications giant AT&T for willfully stifling competition in, among others, long-distance services. According to historian Steve Coll’s book The Deal of the Century, the prospect of breaking up AT&T and imposing other remedies permeated the government’s legal strategy.
After the breakup of AT&T, however, in concert with the purposeful decline in federal antitrust enforcement, the intellectual and institutional muscles supporting ambitious remedies quickly atrophied. Decades of underenforcement drained both the doctrinal imagination and the human talent needed to design and implement structural relief.
For the federal government, a new opportunity to implement robust structural remedies almost presented itself in its lawsuit against Microsoft in the late 1990s. A structural breakup was interrupted, however, due to improper judicial conduct and changes in political administrations. Enforcers ultimately abandoned a breakup in favor of paltry restrictions on Microsoft’s business practices. Subsequent academic literature criticized the handling of the lawsuit for the lack of critical thinking regarding the remedies that enforcers wanted. Not since the antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft has another opportunity of similar magnitude presented itself to federal enforcers.
A New Opportunity Arises
Now, more than a quarter century later, the public has another chance to witness the full thrust and potential of the antitrust laws. What is critical is that enforcers and judges need to be reminded that restructuring businesses to restore competitive conditions and prohibiting dominant corporations, like Google, from engaging in unlawful behavior has always been at the heart of what the antitrust laws can and must do.
In one sense, the ability to restructure the economy provides the clearest visible indicator to the public that justice has been served. For too long, the public has witnessed instance after instance of corporations engaging in often blatant lawbreaking and walking away with no more than token penalties, accompanied by the boilerplate legal phrase “this is not an admission of guilt” on the settlement form.
It’s no secret that the public’s confidence in our political system was shattered after the 2008 financial crisis, when only one low-level bank manager was jailed, and the biggest financial institutions only got bigger. Meanwhile, President Obama refused to use his executive authority to prevent millions of Americans from losing their homes and livelihoods. The precipitous collapse of white-collar crime prosecution after 2012 only intensified this perception of corporate impunity, a trend that continues today. It should go without saying that a well-functioning democracy of the kind the antitrust laws were meant to buttress requires punishing wrongdoers.
Structural remedies also bring clarity to the purpose of the antitrust laws. They ensure that corporations are adequately incentivized to and remain subservient to the public, and must adhere to established norms concerning what constitutes lawful means of operating in the marketplace. Remedies, in this sense, serve dual purposes: they deter future violations and, when applied to offenders, reinforce institutional legitimacy by ensuring meaningful consequences rather than merely symbolic fixes.
None of this was accidental. Congress wrote the antitrust laws with ambition. In both the statute’s text and its legislative history, Congress codified deeply held moral and ethical norms, grounded in principles of fair competition, non-domination, and democratic control of the economy. To facilitate these principles, Congress gave the public the tools for broad economic reordering in the event of a violation. It was the Supreme Court’s ideological shift, which began in the late 1970s and was subsequently adopted by the Reagan administration in 1981, that neutered the institutional will to enforce and interpret the laws as Congress intended. Nevertheless, once liability is established, structural change is not merely justified by law—it is mandated by it. Indeed, the Supreme Court has been uncharacteristically clear that liability obligates, not just authorizes, the courts to impose structural change.
In a decision from 1944, the Supreme Court stated, “The Court has quite consistently recognized…[d]issolution[s]…will be ordered where the creation of the combination is itself the violation.” In another decision, the Court opined about the absurdity that would arise if weak remedies were imposed on antitrust lawbreakers. “Such a course,” the Court stated, “would make enforcement of the Act a futile thing[.]” In another decision, the Supreme Court stated that “[c]ourts are authorized, indeed required, to decree relief effective to redress the violations, whatever the adverse effect of such a decree on private interests.” The jurisprudence is replete with many more judicial directives commanding the lower courts to impose sweeping remedies to effectuate Congress’s legislative command.
Not only is there a duty to impose structural remedies, but the Supreme Court has been straightforward that in all but the most wholly unwarranted situations, a district court judge—like Judge Mehta or Judge Brinkema presiding over their respective lawsuits against Google—is afforded broad discretion on what remedy to impose both to “avoid a recurrence of the violation and to eliminate its consequences.” As long as the remedy is a “reasonable method of eliminating the consequences of the illegal conduct,” judges operate with expansive discretion and face virtually no doctrinal constraints on what can be ordered.
If the desired outcomes are realized, a breakup of Google could fundamentally reorganize the structure of the internet and our experience with it. Requiring Google to spin off its digital advertising platform could enable journalists and content creators to diversify their revenue sources through new competitors, giving them greater autonomy over their income. Divestiture could also enable them to have more control over the distribution of their work products and reduce the constant risk of censorship and algorithmic manipulation that Google has deployed to maintain its monopoly over search and advertising. Moreover, a spinoff could also erode the surveillance advertising model, making privacy-friendly alternatives more viable competitors. For the public, more competition in search could expand options for finding and presenting information on the internet. Likewise, a divestiture of Google’s Chrome browser could open new pathways to access the internet and lessen dependence on a single dominant provider.
Corporate Allies Spring into Action
In an attempt to get ahead of the litigation game, executives and ideological friends in the legal academy have churned out scholarship and opinion pieces designed to deter enforcers and courts from imposing remedies deemed “too harsh” to Google’s operations. In a recent paper on structural remedies, Professor Herbert Hovenkamp, a leading establishment antitrust scholar (and a Big Tech sympathizer), provided a hierarchical schematic outlining how remedies should be considered and administered. One of his points stated that “Even with market dominance established, alternatives to structural relief are often superior, and simple injunctions are often best; for any problem, they should be the first place to look.” The International Center for Law and Economics, a member of Google’s “army of paid allies,” submitted an amicus brief to the district court overseeing Google’s antitrust lawsuit, erroneously stating that “structural remedies are disfavored in Section 2 cases[.]”
Naturally, too, Google’s business executives have ardently defended the company’s business practices. In April 2025, Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai testified that any breakup of Google would be “so far-reaching” that it would be a “de facto divestiture” of its search engine. Pichai also decried the forced sharing of the data that underpins Google’s search engine as a remedy that would leave the company with no value. It is revealing to hear the highest-ranking corporate executive at the company admit that Google’s success is dependent on a select few unlawful practices, rather than its business acumen, and that Google is apparently incapable of deploying lawful methods of competition to succeed in the marketplace. Since the filing of both federal lawsuits, Pichai has also embarked on a marketing tour to tout the company’s operations, defend the benefits of its business practices, and detail the potential unintended consequences of the government’s lawsuits. Such alarmism is a standard defensive tactic, deployed to influence judges and sap public support for real solutions.
But from the earliest days of antitrust law, the Supreme Court has consistently affirmed that breakups, divestitures, and other corporate restructuring remedies—though often described as “harsh,” “severe,” or inconvenient by violators—are time-tested, necessary, and appropriate for restoring competitive market conditions. In a forthright statement, the Court stated that antitrust litigation would be “a futile exercise if the [plaintiff] proves a violation but fails to secure a remedy adequate to redress it.” In fact, the Court has lamented that prohibitions on specific conduct—rather than breakups or other corporate reorganizations—are “cumbersome,” delay relief, and position the court to operate in a manner for which it is “ill suited.”
Rising to Meet the Moment
The vigorous enforcement of the antitrust laws in the post-World War II era compared with the drastic decline that began in the late 1970s is clear evidence of the changing “political judgment” (as Professors Andrew Gavil and Harry First call it) concerning what remedies should be imposed. Judges today are far different from their historical counterparts, who viewed antitrust as a facilitator of economic liberty, a bulwark against oligarchy, and fundamental to protecting our democracy. Punishing antitrust violators was not just a legal formality but also a moral imperative.
Even though many judges have not considered these issues in decades—or, in some cases, ever in their careers—during this profoundly important moment in American history, judges should be cognizant of what the jurisprudence plainly mandates them to do. If the rule of law retains any meaning, it demands that courts decisively address the harms the government has been litigating for a half-decade.
The question now is not whether courts can impose structural remedies; it is clear they can. It is whether they will rise to meet the moment. The remedies that judges will impose on Google and the other alleged monopolists in the government’s lawsuits will be a defining test of judicial integrity and democratic accountability to the rule of law. A failure to act calls into question the very legitimacy of our legal system to hold the powerful accountable. As the jurisprudence makes clear, anything less than structural relief results in the public “[winning] a lawsuit and [losing] a cause.”
Daniel A. Hanley is Senior Legal Analyst at the Open Markets Institute.