Google Controls 90% of Search. A Judge Ordered Behavioral Fixes.

May 21, 2026

In August 2024, a federal judge ruled that Google had illegally maintained a monopoly over general search. The company controlled roughly 90% of all U.S. search queries, a position it defended through exclusive payment arrangements with device manufacturers and browser developers. In September 2025, after a separate remedies trial, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta declined to break up Google and instead ordered behavioral restrictions: prohibitions on certain exclusive distribution contracts. Google's market share was not addressed.

The Mechanics of Capture

Market concentration did not arrive all at once. It accumulated over two decades, aided by weak enforcement, regulatory lag, and a consumer welfare standard that prioritized short-term price effects over structural market health. Corporate profits reached $3.41 trillion in the third quarter of 2025, up from $3.26 trillion in the second quarter and more than five times the historical average of $672 billion that held from 1947 through the early 2000s.

The wage data runs in the opposite direction. According to the Economic Policy Institute, wages for the top 1% of earners grew 182% from 1979 to 2023. Wages for median workers grew roughly 26% over the same period. EPI research published in 2025 found that low-wage workers faced worsening affordability conditions as wage growth stalled, even as overall corporate earnings continued to rise.

The connection between concentration and compensation is direct. When a single company dominates a market, it can extract higher prices from consumers and lower wages from workers who have fewer employers to choose from. Federal Reserve research found that in industries with higher concentration, price increases run about 25 percentage points higher than in competitive markets. The labor market equivalent, called monopsony, operates on the same logic: fewer competing employers produce lower wages for workers in that sector.

"U.S. corporate profits averaged $672 billion from 1947 through the early 2000s. The Q3 2025 figure is $3.41 trillion — more than five times that average." — U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis

The Enforcement Gap

The Google case demonstrates what late-arriving antitrust enforcement looks like in practice. The government's original investigation began years before the 2024 ruling. The monopoly finding took years to litigate. The remedies trial ran through spring 2025. The final order came down in September 2025. The DOJ has cross-appealed, seeking the Chrome divestiture the court rejected. The appeals court is not expected to hear arguments until late 2026 or 2027. During all of that time, Google continued operating with a 90% search share that a federal judge had already determined it should not have acquired.

The FTC's suit against Amazon, alleging that it favors paid results and its own products over competitors, survived a motion to dismiss in April 2025 and remains unresolved. Meta avoided forced divestiture of Instagram or WhatsApp after a court ruled in late 2025 that it does not hold a monopoly in social networking, citing TikTok's rise as evidence of competition. These cases move through a legal system built for a slower economy, applying standards developed before the internet concentrated distribution into a handful of platforms.

What Regulated Markets Produced

From 1945 to 1980, corporate profit shares of U.S. GDP held in the 5-7% range. Wages rose. The middle class expanded. Inequality fell. That period coincided with active antitrust enforcement, collective bargaining rights, and a regulatory posture that treated concentrated market power as a structural problem rather than a sign of efficiency. The Sherman Antitrust Act is 135 years old. The regulatory framework around it is older in some respects. Neither was designed for markets where a single company can acquire dominant position through algorithmic network effects and exclusive mobile agreements rather than through explicit price-fixing.

Germany's Mittelstand model, built on thousands of mid-size firms competing across manufacturing sectors, consistently produces export-competitive industries alongside wage levels and working conditions that outperform U.S. equivalents in comparable sectors. That outcome reflects deliberate policy choices about how much market concentration to permit and what enforcement looks like when those limits are reached. The tools that produced broad-based growth in the postwar U.S. were not dismantled because they failed. They were dismantled starting in the 1980s, following policy arguments that equated concentration with efficiency and treated antitrust as an obstacle to scale.

The September 2025 Google remedies order imposed behavioral restrictions that the DOJ argued were insufficient. The department is correct. A company with a 90% market share, confirmed by a federal court as an illegal monopoly, operating under behavioral constraints while its structural position remains intact, is not a market that enforcement has restored to competition. The appeals process will take years to resolve. Consumers and rival search providers are operating inside the monopoly structure that the court found illegal, with no structural remedy ordered or in sight.

Sources

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