In a recent RealClearMarkets column, Market Institute Senior Fellow Norm Singleton draws a sharp historical parallel between the government’s decades-long antitrust crusade against IBM and today’s efforts to “break up” Google.
In 1969, the U.S. government sued International Business Machines (IBM), then the world’s largest corporation, for antitrust violations. The case dragged on for over a decade until it was dismissed in 1982 as “without merit.” By then, IBM was already losing ground to garage startups named Apple and Microsoft.
Singleton argues that the same dynamic is playing out again. Both the Biden and Trump Administrations have targeted Google, accusing it of maintaining an illegal monopoly in online search and advertising. Yet as Judge Amit Mehta’s recent decision shows, technology markets tend to evolve far faster than government regulators.
A Lesson in Judicial Humility
As Singleton explains, Judge Mehta rejected the government’s demand that Google sell its Chrome browser and Android operating system. Such a breakup, Mehta wrote, was not “tailored to fit the wrong.” He also refused to end Google’s revenue-sharing arrangements or prevent it from paying Apple and others for default search placement—moves that, in Mehta’s view, would “impose substantial—in some cases, crippling—downstream harms” to consumers and competitors alike.
Instead, the judge credited Google’s success to “best-in-class search quality, consistent innovations, investment in human capital, strategic foresight, and brand recognition.” In an especially striking passage, Mehta cautioned that judges must approach efforts to “reshape a major market with humility,” adding that predicting the future of technology is “not exactly a judge’s forte.”
Markets, Not Mandates, Drive Innovation
The decision also reflects the rapid rise of AI tools like ChatGPT, which are already disrupting Google’s traditional search dominance. As Singleton notes, Mehta recognized that “the money flowing into this space, and how quickly it has arrived, is astonishing.”
In other words, the same competitive forces that dethroned IBM are already reshaping the search market—without government intervention.
Let the Markets Work
Judge Mehta did impose some conditions on Google, requiring limited data sharing with competitors and preventing the company from conditioning access to key apps like the Play Store on the use of Google Search. But overall, Singleton concludes that Mehta’s decision reflects an important truth:
“The Google case, like the IBM case before it, does not demonstrate the need for government to forcibly ‘break up’ monopolies, but the need for government to, in the words of Judge Mehta, ‘let the markets work.’”
Read more in RealClearMarkets by clicking here.
