⚠ The Antitrust AssaultModerate threat

Google's dominance has grown so complete that it has become the primary target of antitrust enforcers around the world, and those enforcers have begun to win. This is a genuine and present danger, because the legal attacks are aimed not at the periphery but at the load-bearing pillars of the business: the default-placement deals that keep Google the pre-set search engine on the world's devices, and the advertising-technology machinery through which so much of the internet's ad money flows. When a court can order changes to those foundations, the threat is not competitive but structural.

The specifics are sobering. Courts have found that Google's arrangements to be the default search engine — the payments that keep it one tap away everywhere — constitute an unlawful maintenance of monopoly¹, and a separate court found that Google monopolized parts of the ad-tech stack that intermediates between publishers and advertisers². The remedies have since arrived, and they are rules rather than breakups: no forced sale of Chrome or Android, a ban on exclusive default deals and compelled sharing of search data under a six-year judgment³; a refusal, in September 2026, to divest the ad exchange⁴; and, since July 2026, rival app stores on Android under the Play Store injunction⁵. Each constrains the distribution and the monetization that make Google what it is, without taking any of it away.

What tempers the danger is that antitrust remedies are slow, often narrower than the headlines suggest, and difficult to craft without harming the consumers they are meant to protect. Google's products are genuinely good and genuinely free, which complicates the case for aggressive intervention, and even without paid default deals, many users might choose Google anyway out of simple habit and preference. The company has vast resources to litigate, to appeal, and to adapt its conduct to the letter of any ruling while preserving much of its substance.

A long-term owner should treat antitrust as a serious, ongoing drag rather than a mortal blow — the most likely source of a real, permanent trimming of the company's advantages, arriving by court order rather than by competition. It has already cost Google the exclusivity of its default deals and will constrain its ad-tech conduct and app-store terms for years, and the appeals could still make any of it harsher. But the underlying habit — the world's reflex to 'google' its questions — is not something a court can easily order away, and that habit is the deepest part of the moat. The prudent expectation is meaningful erosion at the regulated edges, not the dismantling of the core.