What the breakup of Google could mean for Apple and other tech companies

Alphabet may have hoped that Donald Trump winning the White House would quell talk of a Google breakup, but that doesn’t seem likely. In a filing late last week, the Justice Department reiterated its suggestion that Google be forced to sell the Chrome web browser following a verdict last August that determined the company to be an illegal monopoly.

That’s a setback for Google, and it could signal trouble ahead for other companies, as the government continues to take an aggressive stance on Big Tech.

In some cases, that could be financial trouble. Google pays handsomely to be the default search engine for Safari, Apple’s Web browser. In 2022, Google’s revenue share payment to Apple was estimated at $20 billion. That worked out to 17.5% of the company’s operating profit that year.  

With that sort of money at risk, Apple asked to intervene as a defendant in the government’s case against Google last year, saying it didn’t want to lose “the ability to defend its right to reach other arrangements with Google that could benefit millions of users and Apple’s entitlement to compensation for distributing Google search to its users.” (Last month a judge denied that request.)

Last week, however, the DOJ did agree to let Google pay Apple for services that were unrelated to search. 

The ripple effect could go well beyond finances. While Google was the only Big Tech company with a judgment against it, the Federal Trade Commission had expressed grievances against several other companies during the Biden administration. And the fact that the DOJ is not standing down on Google has executives worrying they might be next.

Meta, for instance, is set to go on trial next month in a case that could see it forced to sell Instagram and WhatsApp. That case, originally filed by the FTC in 2020, alleges Meta overpaid for the two apps in an attempt to maintain a monopoly on personal social networks. Another judge set October 2026 as the start date for the FTC’s antitrust suit against Amazon.

Apple is not immune from legal action either. The DOJ, along with 16 state and district attorneys general, sued the company last March for monopolizing the smartphone market.

“This is . . . the first signal of the Trump Justice Department’s approach to antitrust litigation,” said Damian Rollison, director of market insights at AI-powered marketing solutions company SOCi. “The willingness of the Trump Justice Department to reinforce and continue prior actions against Big Tech has dangerous implications for Meta and Apple as well, given the cases they face in the next several months.”

Federal officials are targeting each of these companies for something different, but there are some similar threads in the prosecutions. While Google, Apple, Amazon, and Meta all operate in different parts of the technology world today, they share a common focus: artificial intelligence.

“These are not firms anymore; they’re platforms,” says Ram Chellappa, professor of information systems and operations management at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School. “As these platforms become bigger and their knowledge of the user increases and ownership of user data increases, they all . . . want to be the platform from which you do things. . . . Meta didn’t buy Instagram for the tech. They bought it [in 2012] for the user base, [and] their data. The future will boil down to who has the best training data for AI.”

With the looming threat from the DOJ (as well as other threats made during the presidential campaign), the CEOs of major tech firms have been cozying up to Trump since he was elected. Google and Microsoft both donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund. Meta did as well, and agreed to pay the president $25 million to settle a lawsuit for suspending his social accounts in 2021. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos also contributed to the inauguration fund and has radically overhauled the opinion page of The Washington Post to reflect libertarian viewpoints and exclude opposing points of view (as well as killing a planned endorsement of Kamala Harris during the campaign).

It’s unclear so far how effective those actions have been in shielding their companies from further scrutiny from the DOJ or FTC.

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