Washington is running two simultaneous antitrust campaigns against the same company, and the overlap is starting to look deliberate.
In the search case, Judge Mehta's September 2025 remedies decision banned Google's exclusive distribution contracts for Search, Chrome, and AI products — the very deals that paid Apple roughly $20 billion a year to make Google the default on Safari. A DOJ cross-appeal now before the D.C. Circuit is pushing for the structural remedies the lower court rejected: a forced sale of Chrome and a contingent Android divestiture. In the ad-tech case, a separate judge in the Eastern District of Virginia is weighing whether to order Google to sell AdX, its dominant programmatic ad exchange. A ruling there is expected imminently.
Together, these two cases put a number on something the market has priced as a monolith. Alphabet runs its search distribution machine, its browser moat, its mobile OS ecosystem, and its ad-tech stack as a single flywheel. Break the wheel and each piece gets its own price tag.