Competition and the clock: how Google plans to deflect and delay a historic break-up threat

A court-ordered break-up of Google would be unprecedented in modern American corporate history, delivering a blow to the Big Tech company that even Microsoft ultimately dodged when it lost its own US antitrust case two decades ago. Yet for the legal team tasked with mounting Google’s response to the potential sanctions that the Department of Justice revealed on Tuesday night, the case could hardly have landed at a better time.

Google’s initial response to the DoJ’s proposals — that competition is “thriving” in search ads and “fierce” in artificial intelligence — would have been less convincing even two years ago, before OpenAI’s launch of the breakthrough ChatGPT chatbot. Spinning out its arguments through the appeals courts will be crucial to Google’s strategy as it looks to deflect or delay the effects of August’s landmark ruling by a federal judge that it maintained an illegal monopoly by paying billions of dollars to device makers, mobile carriers and browser developers.

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