At President Donald Trump’s second inauguration, the ceremony saw the president-elect wreathed by billionaire tech CEOs including Apple’s Tim Cook, Google’s Sundar Pichai, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Tesla’s Elon Musk, and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. The effect was similar to that of Big Tech’s 2016 pilgrimage to Trump Tower after the president’s first victory, when platform CEOs performed the usual ingratiating rituals expected of an incoming president.
But since January, the tech giants have found themselves under mounting pressure, partially due to the president’s notoriously mercurial nature but also because of litigation begun in his first term. While Musk’s dramatic fallout with Trump has gotten the most media attention, major tech players including Google, Apple, and Meta are facing serious antitrust challenges from the administration.
Here’s a rundown of the major legal battles that Big Tech is currently embroiled in and what might come of them.
Under the most pressure is Google parent company, Alphabet, which has been in the teeth of antitrust lawsuits for years now and is presently zero for two. As I’ve previously discussed in Jacobin, the company lost its search monopoly trial last year and was then found guilty of monopolization last April over the dominance of its online advertising technology monopoly.
The legal process is now in the “remedy” stage of determining corrective measures. Federal judges are weighing how much to regulate or break up Google’s search monopoly in the first case, and its ad tech monopoly in the…
Auteur: Rob Larson
