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> Google isn't a particularly old company it hasn't had a strangle hold for long and it doesn't look like it's business is unassailable. So why go after it at all. On the other hand, the anti-monopoly moves have been slow and ineffective. When Microsoft finally got hit...

Google was incorporated 26 years ago, in 1998. Microsoft was founded in 1975, 26 years before US v. Microsoft was decided. Google is exactly as old as Microsoft was at the time, and while it's harder to measure my sense is that their stranglehold on search is at least as long and at least as unassailable as Microsoft's was in OSes.

You can't have it be both too early to go after Google and yet too late to have gone after Microsoft.

Well to push the point a little - Imagine that Microsofts anti-trust case was in 2008, not 1997 and the iPhone was out and clearly gaining traction. Suddenly Microsoft doesn't look like some perpetual juggernaut. That's where we are with Google today - we can see the product that's likely to displace it. Windows is still big today, but it's not anywhere near the strategic force it was in the early 2000s. In the same way, I don't think Google is likely to be in the same place in a few years time.

I kind of am asking to have it both ways - they should be able to move against these companies earlier by levying smaller sanctions. That way they don't need 1 big killer case to get a judge to order the entire company broken up or spun off.

Microsoft still owns 70% of the PC market 15 years after your hypothetical and is still a "perpetual juggernaut" in that market. Because you don't care about that market and think smartphones are more important doesn't mean the rest of us stop caring about PCs and the harm Microsoft's ongoing monopoly in that market creates.

Sure, but the "PC Market" isn't anything like what it was. In the data centre their market share probably looks more like 20% and they have almost no presence on mobile. So yes, they continue to dominate 1 sector (and even that they aren't as dominant as they were) but that sector is now just 1 part of a market that has several significant sectors they are not dominant in.

It'll likely be the same for Google -they'll continue to be the dominant search engine, but search engines will be significantly less structurally important going forward.

We ruined antitrust enforcement in the 70s and 80s by switching from “we know companies having too much of a market is bad, so that’s enough” to “we must show specific harm of specific kinds before we can do anything”.

This is like requiring overwhelming evidence that a radiation source caused a particular case of cancer—not other problems, like birth defects, just cancer, and we’re gonna assume the cancer wasn’t caused by the radiation source until you can convince us otherwise—before being able to move against an actor exposing the public to radiation.

I think you meant "berth" rather than "birth".

> If you could point at one bad thing Google did...

Agree. But then there are the more nebulous ones — like Google's ad/search entanglement.

The Apple deal had two sides engaged in monopolistic behavior. One was Google buying out that default provider option. The other was Apple, having that default option.

> The other was Apple, having that default option.

What UI are you imagining? Perhaps no search engine at all in the browser but the first time a user goes to "search" you present them with a list of random-sorted search engines?

Maybe the problem was that Apple has "that default option for sale."

Search without a setting configured should open the Settings dialog to the page which configures search.

On that page should be a list of the current well known / trusted providers (this can be a cached copy for offline config), maybe a refresh button (check for an updated version of that list), and a method of providing an end user installed search option.

In short: Empower the End User.

Here's my take:

The lawsuit started under Trump DOJ as a political stunt because Google resembled wokeness and the party of freedom and family values (Republicans) wanted to show how tough they are to their constituents.

A few republican states also filed similar lawsuits in tandem which all got lumped together into this lawsuit.

Then the Biden came to power and kept at it because, well, he did keep a lot of Trump initiatives and now the DOJ people think they're some kind of a hero for working on this case.

Should suing Google really the highest priority for the administration? I don't think so but here we are.