The American antitrust cases against Google and Meta will reshape how the internet works, assuming the remedies phase actually sticks. Google has already lost twice—once on search, once on adtech—which means the company is now facing a remedies phase where courts will force structural changes. For Meta, the fight is just beginning, and it's far messier.
Google's adtech monopoly is straightforward to prove. The company controls three critical layers of digital advertising on the open web: the technology publishers use to sell ad space, the tools advertisers use to buy it, and the exchange in the middle. Because Google built all three, it knows exactly what both sides are willing to pay, creating a closed loop no competitor can penetrate. Add in the fact that Google's search engine drives most traffic to these websites in the first place, and you have a nearly perfect monopoly. The court agreed. The real question now is what forced divestiture looks like—whether Google has to sell off parts of its advertising empire, open its systems to competitors, or simply stop blocking interoperability.
Meta's case is harder because it hinges on something more abstract: network effects. Zuckerberg's defense is clever: yes, we bought Instagram and WhatsApp to kill potential competitors, but that didn't make us a monopoly because TikTok and Twitter still exist. The government defined the market narrowly—personal social networking—which makes Meta look dominant. Zuckerberg's counter is that the real competition is much broader. He's also betting that improvements to users' experience (adding Stories, Reels, messaging features) prove he didn't degrade the market; he improved it. That's a defensible argument, which is why Meta's team sounds far more confident than Google's. If they lose anyway, forced divestiture of Instagram is the likely remedy—and that's the bitter irony. Instagram would probably be worth more as a standalone company than it is as Meta's cash cow funding Reality Labs ambitions. Zuckerberg himself flagged this in 2018 emails. Sometimes the market works best when broken apart.