(DCNF)—Google’s search engine empire could face a serious reckoning as the Justice Department’s landmark antitrust case entered its remedies phase Monday, handing a federal judge the power to dismantle the tech behemoth’s illegal monopoly over how users discover information online.
The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia already ruled in August that Google illegally maintained a “monopoly” in general search markets, mainly through billion-dollar deals to secure exclusive default status on mobile devices and browsers. Now, Judge Amit Mehta will decide how far the government can go to unwind said monopoly — with potential remedies ranging from prohibiting exclusivity agreements to forcing divestiture of Chrome or Android, interventions that could deliver a serious blow to the company’s entire business model.
“You’re ultimately trying to resolve the particular harm that you’ve seen,” Luke Hogg, director of technology policy at the Foundation for American Innovation, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “And whether or not Google’s control of Chrome or Google’s control of Android is contributory to their general size and market position is secondary to questions of how that actually helped in their monopolization of search.”
Mehta’s forthcoming remedy could bar Google from continuing exclusivity deals with Apple, Samsung and Android device manufacturers — a core part of the company’s current business model. Though the DOJ doubled down in March on pursuing more drastic measures, like forcing Google to spin off Chrome or Android entirely, Hogg said that’s unlikely to happen.
“There’s middle ground points where you can get to greater competition in those markets without totally spinning it off,” Hogg said, pointing to historical precedent. “If you go back and look at the Microsoft case and the consent decree there, they get to this middle ground point where there’s a lot of openness requirements, interoperability requirements, banning of exclusivity deals and things like that.”
Hogg was referencing the DOJ’s 1998 lawsuit against Microsoft, which charged the company with using its dominance in PC operating systems to crush rival Netscape by bundling Internet Explorer with Windows. Though the court initially ordered a breakup, the case ultimately ended in a consent decree that imposed interoperability rules and banned certain exclusivity deals — a potential blueprint for reining in Google without tearing it apart.
Such a ruling — that is, enforcing interoperability requirements and exclusivity bans rather than forcing breakups or divestiture — could rattle Google’s financial relationships with key partners, particularly Apple, Samsung and Mozilla — companies that have long enjoyed billion-dollar benefits from default placement deals. Apple previously indicated it would likely keep Google as the default search engine on Safari even without those payments, but the end of such arrangements would still cut off a highly lucrative revenue stream. Google paid Apple $20 billion to remain the default search engine on Safari in 2022, according to Apple’s December motion to intervene in the case.
“If this court prohibits Google from sharing revenue for search distribution, Apple would have two unacceptable choices,” Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of services, wrote in his declaration of support for the motion. “It could still let users in the United States choose Google as a search engine for Safari, but Apple could not receive any share of the resulting revenue, so Google would obtain valuable access to Apple’s users at no cost. Or Apple could remove Google Search as a choice on Safari. But because customers prefer Google, removing it as an option would harm both Apple and its customers.”
Mozilla may face far greater disruption. The company derives a significant portion of its annual revenue — some 85% in 2023, according to Fortune — from its exclusivity deal with Google, a dependency that could become an existential liability if the court bans such agreements outright.
Samsung, meanwhile, could have more freedom to strike its own deals if Google is forced to separate Android from its other services. But untangling those tightly linked agreements could create new headaches for phone makers used to getting everything — the operating system, the browser and the search engine — in one package.
But while the courtroom battle focuses on Google’s grip over traditional search, the future of the industry may already be slipping beyond the company’s control. The rise of artificial intelligence-powered tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity is beginning to shift how users interact with information online — away from keyword-driven search results and toward conversational, context-aware answers.
“The search market is not what it was when this case started,” Hogg said. “But that also doesn’t mean that Google’s monopolistic practices aren’t problematic.”
Google, long viewed as a leader in AI research, has released a competitive model in Gemini, but is facing strong headwinds from faster-moving rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic, who continue to beat Google across several key benchmarks, according to Stanford University’s 2025 AI Index Report.
Hogg argued the company’s dominance in traditional search may have discouraged it from more aggressively pursuing its own breakthrough tools.
“They were developing what eventually became Gemini four, five, six years ago,” Hogg continued. “But instead of launching it, they kind of held off until OpenAI jumped onto the scene. The reason they weren’t investing as heavily and not willing to go to the levels outside companies were going to go is because of the clear competition to their search monopoly.”
Under the Biden administration, the DOJ initially proposed in November that Google divest its AI investments, including stakes in companies like Anthropic, to prevent further entrenchment of its search monopoly. As of March, however, the Trump administration’s DOJ is now only requiring Google to give advance notice of future AI investments — a shift toward a more hands-off approach under President Donald Trump, though concerns still remain.
“We believe that Google can and will attempt to circumvent the court’s remedies if [AI provisions are] not included,” DOJ prosecutor David Dahlquist told Mehta in court Monday, according to Fortune. “Gen AI is Google’s next evolution to keep their vicious cycle spinning.” A written transcript of proceedings has not yet been publicly released.
Assistant Attorney General Gail Slater Delivers Remarks Before Opening Arguments in Google Search Remedies Trialhttps://t.co/4RA7Gpso2m
— Antitrust Division (@JusticeATR) April 21, 2025
Still, the central question is whether any remedy — no matter how well-crafted — can land quickly or forcefully enough to matter in a search market already being reshaped, or replaced, by AI. Hogg such remedies can, but only if paired with real competitive pressure.
“It’s going to end up being this confluence of remedies against Google plus innovation in the market,” Hogg said. “Maybe we’ll see in five, six, seven years that Google Search will kind of be like Yahoo — everybody remembers it was that huge thing, but now everybody’s using Perplexity or whatever.”
The case also comes at a politically volatile moment for Big Tech. Originally filed under Trump, the lawsuit moved forward under former President Joe Biden and has now re-escalated under Trump’s second term. Key regulatory appointees — including Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chairman Andrew Ferguson, a longtime skeptic of Silicon Valley consolidation — have signaled a more aggressive stance toward digital monopolies, even as the administration’s DOJ softens some of its earlier demands.
Just last week, Google was dealt another blow when a federal judge ruled it had illegally used its dominance in digital advertising to edge out competitors — a separate case with implications that could lead to further structural remedies. Meta, too, remains locked in an antitrust battle with the FTC over its acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp, underscoring that Google’s trial is just one front in a much larger war.
However Mehta rules in the coming months, the outcome will demonstrate how far the government is willing, and able, to go in challenging the foundations of Silicon Valley’s power.
(Featured Image Media Credit: Joe Gratz/Flickr)
All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact [email protected].
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
