Technology is fast and the courts are slow: Why anti-trust law keeps losing to Silicon Valley

A US federal judge earlier this week ruled that Meta did not illegally suppress competition by buying Instagram and WhatsApp more than a decade ago. (Courtesy: Reuters photo)

For more than five years, American regulators have tried to rein in Meta, Google, Apple and Amazon through a series of high-profile antitrust lawsuits. But the ground beneath those cases keeps shifting. New platforms rise, markets mutate, and artificial intelligence rapidly alters how people use the internet. The result is a widening gap between the speed of technological change and the slow, procedural nature of antitrust litigation — a gap that increasingly benefits the tech giants, the New York Times reported.

A clear example came this week, when a US federal judge ruled that Meta did not illegally suppress competition by buying Instagram and WhatsApp more than a decade ago. When the US Federal Trade Commission filed the lawsuit in 2020, Instagram and WhatsApp were seen as essential rivals Meta had absorbed to cement its dominance. By 2025, however, TikTok, YouTube Shorts and other short-video platforms had transformed the social-media landscape. Judge James E. Boasberg wrote that the “market has changed markedly,” pointing to TikTok’s meteoric rise as evidence that Meta does not hold monopoly power in social networking today.

That reasoning reflects a broader theme: as long as the competitive landscape keeps evolving, courts seem reluctant to impose sweeping remedies.

Google has leaned heavily on this logic. In the long-running case about its dominance in online search, the company argued that AI-powered chatbots and assistants had fundamentally changed how people find information. Judge Amit P. Mehta agreed that AI had “changed the course of the case,” ordering only limited behavioural remedies rather than structural changes like separating the Chrome browser from Google’s search business. In another case, concerning Google’s advertising technology, the company called the chief executive of wikiHow as a witness to show how AI tools are already cutting into traffic for traditional websites. The argument was simple: the market is being disrupted anyway, so drastic intervention could cause more harm than good.

Even where courts find the tech giants guilty — as in Google’s ad tech case or earlier rulings against its search practices — the remedies increasingly reflect the uncertainty created by rapid technological innovation. Regulators may want structural breakups, but judges worry that splitting companies while markets are being reshaped by AI could create instability for smaller businesses that depend on those tools.

This complication has spilled into every major antitrust case. The government’s 2023 lawsuit against Amazon, accusing it of squeezing small merchants, won’t reach trial until 2027. A separate case against Apple has no trial date at all. By the time those cases move forward, the ecosystems in question may look radically different.

The tech industry is quick to highlight this lag. Executives and lawyers argue that forcing structural changes based on a static picture of the market is dangerous when innovation can overhaul the competitive landscape in months. Herbert Hovenkamp, a leading antitrust scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, notes that traditional monopoly indicators — stagnant innovation, fixed market shares, pricing power — don’t map cleanly onto modern digital markets. Big tech companies may be powerful, but they operate in sectors where users shift behaviour fast and new competitors emerge regularly.

History supports this pattern. The IBM antitrust case, filed in 1969, dragged on for 13 years before being dropped in 1982, just as personal computers overturned the mainframe market IBM once dominated. The Microsoft case of the late 1990s ended in 2001, by which time the internet itself had reshaped the software industry.

Yet many legal scholars warn that the difficulty of regulating tech giants doesn’t mean regulators should give up. Rebecca Haw Allensworth of Vanderbilt University argues that slow courts are a flaw to be fixed, not a reason to abandon antitrust oversight. The risk, she suggests, is that without intervention, dominant firms can use their existing power to steer emerging technologies in ways that entrench their influence for decades.

For now, though, the wins are piling up for Silicon Valley. Meta avoided major penalties in its battle with the FTC. Google has persuaded judges in multiple cases that disruptive technologies reduce the need for aggressive remedies. And the longer these cases take, the more the industry can point to shifting markets as evidence that regulators are fighting yesterday’s wars.

The message emerging from the courts is clear: when markets move as fast as technology, the law struggles to keep up — and the companies moving fastest have the advantage.