A MONOPOLY’S END

Who can slay the Google dragon?

The world turns, as it always does. Men build great empires, and they crumble sooner or later. Some fall because of their size, because they’ve grown too large, too unwieldy to sustain themselves. Others, well, they’re destroyed from the outside. Antitrust, they call it. A word for people wielding the law like a cudgel, cracking the skulls of monopolies that have strangled competition, innovation, and freedom. This is where we are now, staring at the swollen belly of a beast called Google and those who stand before it with their legal cudgels raised.

The beast didn’t start out like this. No, in the beginning, it was just a high-quality search engine born out of the optimism of men who wanted to organize the world’s information. They believed in their mission, and for a while, so did we. But as is often the case with empires, power corrupts, or maybe it just distorts things. The search engine became a monopoly, its advertising arm swelling, and before anyone noticed, it had swallowed the whole damn world of digital ads. This is the story Judge Brinkema is telling us in her court, the one that’s unraveling now.

With her sharp words and cunning mind, Judge Brinkema has seen the rot at the heart of this empire. She recognizes that Google, in its vastness, has started to crush innovation, strangling the life out of anyone who dared challenge it. Antitrust law, she says, is there to keep the system running, to stop companies from imploding under their own weight or snuffing out every flicker of progress and competition. That’s what’s at stake here: the future of competition, the lifeblood of any thriving society. We’ve seen it before, back in the days of FDR, when Thurman Arnold broke the backs of monopolists, and Wall Street trembled.

But it’s not just about the law. No, it’s about men, their ambitions, and the price they’re willing to pay for power. Much like those of Standard Oil and AT&T before, Google's rise was a slow, calculated march to domination. At first, they bought ads; then, they bought the companies that sold them. They built walls around the entire digital advertising ecosystem, locking everyone else out, and growing fat off the spoils. For a time, the world turned, and no one seemed to mind.

But the thing about empires is that they all have weak points. Google’s weak point, it turns out, is its greed. They didn’t just want a piece of the pie; they wanted the whole damn bakery. And now, they’re staring down the barrel of a third major antitrust trial, with the lawmen gathering at their gates.

What happens next? It’s hard to say. Breaking up a giant like Google isn’t easy. It’s like tearing apart a concrete block with your bare hands. But if history tells us anything, sometimes it takes a hammer to smash things apart and rebuild them. FDR did it with big business, and maybe, just maybe, we’ll see it happen again.

The remedy isn’t complicated. Google needs to be cut down to size, its ad empire broken into pieces, and the data it hoards kept under lock and key. No more harvesting user information to manipulate the market. Split up their businesses, from YouTube to search to Android. Give the market back its competition, and innovation will rise from the ashes. That’s the theory, anyway.

If this is done right, it’ll mean the end of Google as we know it. But that doesn’t mean the end of Google. Like AT&T before it, the pieces might be worth more than the whole. And maybe, just maybe, in a few years, we’ll look back on this and realize that the best thing that ever happened to Google was being broken apart.

That’s the way of things, after all. You build something too big, and eventually, the world will come for you. It’s not cruelty. It’s just the law of nature. Even the strongest fall and something new will grow from their bones.

So, what’s left for Google? It’s simple, really. They need to give up on the idea that they can organize the world’s information. No one should have that power, no one company, no one man. It’s too much, and it’s time they let go.

If we reach that point, when Google’s stranglehold is finally broken, we’ll see innovation again. We’ll see a market where entrepreneurs don’t fear being crushed, competition thrives, and the rule of law is not just a threat but a promise. That’s what antitrust is for: to remind the giants that they’re not untouchable, that in the end, even they must bend to the law.

That’s the fight Google finds itself in now, and it’s a fight Google can lose.

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CEO INTERVIEW

Julia Gudish-Krieger

Julia is an experienced venture capital investor and technology start-up founder. As an investor at Insight Partners, Julia invested over $100M in marketplace and SaaS companies globally.

Julia previously founded and ran VillageLuxe, a venture-backed peer-to-peer luxury rental marketplace, for which she was awarded the Forbes 30 Under 30 accolade. She is a strategic advisor and investor in the technology and retail industries, and is active in the YPO and Harvard alumni communities.

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