The Great Silicon Valley Breakup That Never Quite Happened
Watching antitrust regulators try to dismantle tech giants is a bit like watching a dog chase a sports car. They make a massive amount of noise, but you are never quite sure what they would do if they actually caught the thing.
For years, the US Department of Justice has been building a sprawling case against Google. The argument was delightfully simple. Google, they claimed, controls too many parts of the digital advertising pipeline. They wanted a forced breakup to level the playing field.
That grand dismantling has just hit a rather large legal brick wall.
A recent court setback for prosecutors means Alphabet gets to keep its ad-tech stack intact. To me, this reshapes the entire conversation around digital adverts for the foreseeable future. Investors who had priced in a dramatic restructuring now have to hastily recalibrate their models.