Google has finally been judged to be a monopoly by a federal court — while this was strikingly obvious already, what does this judgement mean? Is this too little too late?

This week Alix and Prathm were joined by Michelle Meagher, an antitrust lawyer who shared a brief history of how antitrust started as a tool for governments to stop the consolidation of corporate power, and over time has morphed to focus on issues of competition and consumer protection — which has allowed monopolies to thrive.

Michelle discusses the details and her thinking on the ongoing cases against Google, and more generally on how monopolies are basically like a big octopus arm-wrestling itself.

Further reading:

• US Said to Consider a Breakup of Google to Address Search Monopoly — NY Times
• Google’s second antitrust suit brought by US begins, over online ads — Guardian
• Big Tech on Trial — Matt Stoller
• How the EU’s DMA is changing Big Tech — The Verge
• UK set to clear Microsoft’s deal to buy Call of Duty maker Activision Blizzard — Guardian

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Michelle is a competition lawyer and co-founder of the Balanced Economy Project, Europe’s first anti-monopoly organisation. She is author of Competition is Killing Us: How Big Business is Harming Our Society and Planet - and What to Do About It (Penguin, 2020), a Financial Times Best Economics Book of the Year. She is a Senior Policy Fellow at the University College London Centre for Law, Economics and Society. She is a Senior Fellow working on Monopoly and Corporate Governance at the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations (SOMO).