For almost a decade, the Silicon Valley behemoth known for charming us with colorful doodles and once-innocuous search engines has been under the microscope, and yet, up until recently, it seemed completely untouchable. Google, the eternal golden child of tech, acted as if Congressional hearings were mere distractions—a great way to exercise the legal team and brush up on public-speaking skills. Sure, the occasional Senator would fumble around, barely able to operate the very devices they were accused of being tools of evil monopolistic practices, but serious consequences? Google was untouchable. The very idea of the giant having to answer for antitrust violations was laughable—until it wasn’t.
Somewhere in the mid-2010s, the winds started to shift. What began as the usual governmental grumbling turned into full-scale investigations. By 2020, Google, once the darling of tech revolutionaries, faced formal antitrust charges. It seemed the jig was up, or at least it was getting awkwardly close to being up. But for all the noise, the company’s leadership probably thought it was business as usual. They’ve been through it before, right? It’s not like anybody was breaking up monopolies these days—after all, this wasn’t the Microsoft trial from the ’90s.
