President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice suffered a massive defeat in court recently after a judge tossed out its multi-year attempt to crack down on Big Tech firms.
On Wednesday, Judge Leonie Brinkema in Alexandria, Virginia, tossed out the Trump DOJ’s attempt to force Alphabet, the parent company of Google, to sell its digital advertising business, The Guardian reported. This is the third time that the Trump DOJ has lost a bid to break up Big Tech, which started during the first Trump administration, the report noted.
“The ruling is the third time in a row that a judge has rejected a bid by U.S. antitrust enforcers to break up big tech in a crackdown that started during Donald Trump’s first term,” the report reads in part. “It is likely to fuel questions about whether courts are up to the task of checking the industry’s unprecedented power over the U.S. economy.”
The case against Alphabet was initially filed in 2023 during the Biden administration, but it is one of several antitrust cases that the Trump administration continued prosecuting after the Biden DOJ left office.
“A federal judge in Washington last year rejected the Federal Trade Commission’s attempt to make Meta Platforms sell off Instagram and WhatsApp, saying the agency failed to prove that Meta holds a monopoly in a social media landscape that has shifted drastically since the case was brought in 2020,” the report added.
“Likewise, another judge in Washington, who previously ruled that Google holds an illegal monopoly in online search, rejected the Justice Department’s bid to make the company sell its Chrome browser, citing rising competition from generative artificial intelligence companies such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT,” it continued.
The Trump administration’s luck doesn’t seem likely to change as an antitrust suit it brought against Apple won’t make it to a courtroom before 2027, the report noted.
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