This update focuses on the digital technology sectors and the firms that have come to be collectively known as “Big Tech.” Our AI Industry Preview discusses the outlook for firms, including digital technology incumbents, working to innovate and compete in AI technologies, infrastructure, and applications.
U.S.
Large digital technology firms have been in the crosshairs of antitrust enforcers and private plaintiffs for several years.[1] The Trump administration has aggressively carried forward litigation and investigations that had been launched or developed under the Biden administration but has obtained mixed results, highlighting the difficulty of proving forward-looking innovation theories of harm in court for industries undergoing rapid development and disruption. Enforcers have continued to closely scrutinize technology mergers, often focusing on innovation concerns or access to innovation-critical inputs. Digital technology industries have also been the target of broader Trump administration policies and political pressure, at times creating conflict both within the federal government and between state and federal authorities.
Following an August 2024 liability decision in the search distribution case against Google, the Trump administration’s Department of Justice (DOJ) sought aggressive structural, prohibitional, and data-sharing remedies. In September 2025, the court largely rejected the DOJ’s more consequential remedies requests, and in so doing underscored the difficulty of disentangling the effects of rapid and responsive innovation often seen in high technology sectors from exclusionary conduct.
For instance, the court found divestiture of Chrome and contingent divestiture of Android inappropriate because it could not conclude that Google’s “market dominance is sufficiently attributable to its illegal conduct” as opposed to Google’s lawful innovation, investment, and strategic foresight.[2] The court also rejected the DOJ’s request to outright bar Google from paying for placement or distribution, finding that such a remedy would place other ecosystem players in the position of accepting either lower revenues or lower quality, to the detriment of those players, consumers, or both. The court further noted immense investments in generative AI that had emerged since the liability phase of the case that might bolster competition for placement. Accordingly, the court instead imposed more limited restrictions on Google contracts, such as prohibiting exclusivity and setting term limits.
The court also required Google to share certain data with rivals. The Trump administration’s DOJ argued that this remedy should include generative AI firms because, while the technology was “a glimmer of an idea” during the liability trial in 2023, it had come to offer “the possibility of the next digital frontier” by 2025. Indeed the court did not address AI as a competitor to search engines in its liability opinion at all, focusing instead on the incorporation of AI techniques into search technology. The court’s remedies opinion, by contrast, contains an extended discussion of generative AI, walking a fine line to assert that the technology did not presently fully substitute for general search but nonetheless posed a potential threat in the future. Accordingly, the court accepted the DOJ’s extension of the remedy to qualified AI firms. The evident tensions between the court’s opinions issued at different times, resulting from evolving competitive conditions, reflect the difficulty courts face in evaluating innovative industries where rapid technological developments disrupt markets even as a court examines them.
Fast-moving technological and user preference changes led to a Federal Trade Commission loss in its long-running challenge to Meta’s acquisitions of WhatsApp and Instagram as unlawful monopoly maintenance. The trial court found that the FTC had failed to prove its proposed “personal social networking” relevant market, and that Meta lacked monopoly power in any properly defined market, due to changing industry conditions during the pendency of the case (which was initially filed in 2020).
As in the Google case, the Meta court found that each time it issued a decision, the technological and market landscape had changed considerably. Over the course of the case, the court found that Meta had come to compete closely with TikTok and YouTube as users sought out less “connected” social content from friends and more “unconnected” content algorithmically recommended by a platform operator. Relying on the FTC Act’s limitation to prospective (rather than remedial) relief, the court found that the FTC had to show that Meta had monopoly power at the time of trial, and it had failed to do so. Although the legal basis of the court’s holding is limited to the FTC Act, the reasoning may be extended where other plaintiffs seek prospective relief. The factual records developed in both Google and Meta show how rapidly serious threats and disruptors to even the most stable-seeming market positions can develop.
A number of government litigations and investigations concerning digital technology remain in progress. In April 2025, a district court allowed a suit by the FTC and several states and territories against Amazon, which alleged that it favored paid results or its own products. The plaintiffs also claim that Amazon for years operated an algorithm codenamed “Nessie” designed to raise prices when it predicted that Amazon’s rivals would match the price increase, allegedly reducing gross sales while raising Amazon’s profits by hundreds of millions of dollars annually. The Trump administration’s FTC has also reportedly advanced a broad antitrust probe into Microsoft initiated under the Biden administration related to its cloud, AI, and software businesses. The DOJ, for its part, survived a motion to dismiss a suit brought along with several states and the District of Columbia alleging that Apple unlawfully restricted cross-platform technologies within its smart device ecosystem.
Merger enforcement in the Biden administration reflected strong concern that acquisitions of start-ups by large tech companies could harm innovation by eliminating a nascent competitive threat.[3] Trump administration agency leadership, while still closely focused on innovation theories of competitive harm, has pared back skepticism of start-up acquisitions. For instance, then-Commissioner Andrew Ferguson highlighted the potential for overenforcement to deter investment by impairing acquisition as an exit strategy for innovative entrants in his statement accompanying resolution of the Synopsys/Ansys merger (though that deal was not itself a start-up acquisition).
State and federal enforcers continue to cooperate and coordinate on enforcement in digital technology sectors, including through the litigations described above. However, conflicting industrial and enforcement policies have created unusual tension among the Trump administration, federal antitrust enforcers, and state attorneys general in the last year. Conflict is likely to build going forward, presenting both opportunities and risks for technology firms. State and federal authorities are particularly primed for conflict over regulation and antitrust enforcement in AI-related sectors, discussed in greater detail in our AI Industry Preview.
A highly unusual state challenge to the DOJ settlement in the HPE/Juniper merger is an important developing example of state and federal conflict. The DOJ filed suit in the early days of the Trump administration to block the merger, joined by several state attorneys general. The DOJ announced a settlement in June 2025 that did not include the state plaintiffs. Following public reports questioning how the settlement was reached and the firing of high-level DOJ attorneys involved in the case, the states sought and received permission to challenge whether the settlement was in the public interest.[4] That proceeding remains ongoing.
Federal enforcers under the Trump administration have strongly signaled interest in using the antitrust laws to address perceived ideological biases allegedly created or encouraged by digital technology platforms, consistent with a broader campaign reaching back to the first Trump Presidency. In February 2025, the FTC sought public comment on “Tech Censorship,” and in April 2025, the DOJ held a “Big-Tech Censorship Forum.” The Trump administration’s AI Action Plan and certain Executive Orders have expressed similar concern over what it deems “woke” AI. And the administration’s December 2025 Executive Order titled, “Ensuring a National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence” directs the FTC to challenge state regulations affecting AI output as incompatible with the FTC Act’s bar on unfair or deceptive practices. Neither agency has tested the legal basis for treating viewpoint discrimination allegations as an antitrust concern in court, but technology firms can expect the agencies to probe this issue during investigations and seek guarantees in connection with settlements.[5]
We expect agencies to continue to aggressively investigate conduct and mergers in traditional digital technology markets, notwithstanding the difficulties of proving forward-looking competitive harm theories and crafting judicially palatable remedies, the disruptive potential of AI, the Trump administration’s broader agenda concerning AI and digital technology incumbents, and potential divergence with state authorities. These competing forces have created a compliance minefield for digital technology firms likely to get even more challenging in the coming year. Further, we expect this governmental interest to continue to spur parallel private competitor and class action litigation.
Europe and the UK
In Europe, competition authorities have not engaged in significant merger control enforcement against transactions involving large digital technology firms. However, on the behavioral side, European competition authorities have maintained their active scrutiny of conduct involving digital technology firms.
In July 2025, Italy’s competition authority, Autorità Garante della Concorrenza
e del Mercato (AGCM), initiated an investigation into Meta for pre-installing its Meta AI chatbot on WhatsApp. In November 2025, the AGCM broadened this investigation to also cover Meta changing its terms to allegedly exclude competing AI chatbots from using WhatsApp and in December adopted interim measures prohibiting those terms in Italy. The European Commission (EC) announced in December 2025 that it had opened its own formal investigation into Meta restricting access to WhatsApp for third-party AI providers, excluding Italy from its investigation in light of the AGCM’s own probe.
In September 2025, the EC fined Google €2.95 billion (approximately US$3.19 billion) after finding that Google abused its dominant position in the online advertising technology sector by favoring its own adtech services. The EC concluded that Google had provided AdX, its ad exchange service, unfair advantages in Google-owned services used by both publishers and advertisers to mediate ad placements. Google responded to the EC’s order to cease the offending conduct and offered a compliance plan in November 2025. EC review of these proposed commitments is ongoing.
The EC also ended in September 2025, its long-running Microsoft Teams investigation by accepting commitments offered by Microsoft to address antitrust concerns over the tying of its Teams platform to the Office 365 and Microsoft 365 business suites, following complaints by Slack and alfaview. Microsoft will now offer the suites without Teams at a reduced price, ensure better interoperability for rival products, and allow data portability.
Finally, in December 2025, the EC stated that it had opened a formal antitrust investigation into Google over two types of potentially anticompetitive conduct. First, the EC is investigating whether Google may have used the content of web publishers to provide generative AI-powered services (“AI Overviews”' and “AI Mode”) on its search results pages without appropriate compensation to publishers and without offering them the possibility to refuse such use of their content. Second, the EC is reviewing whether Google trained its generative AI models on video and other content uploaded to YouTube without offering appropriate compensation to creators or allowing them to refuse such use of their content.
In addition to enforcement under traditional antitrust laws, the EC has initiated significant enforcement actions under the EU’s digital regime, the Digital Markets Act (DMA). In a first, the EC revoked the designation of Meta’s Facebook Marketplace service under the DMA, concluding that it no longer met the relevant thresholds. In another first, the EC initiated two market investigations for cloud computing services, for which no gatekeeper has yet been designated. The EC is assessing whether Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure should be designated under the DMA despite not meeting the relevant thresholds for size, user numbers, and market position. In addition, the EC is investigating whether the obligations are effective in addressing anticompetitive practices in the cloud computing sector, which may result in an update to the DMA.
In April, the EC imposed its first fines for noncompliance with DMA obligations. The EC found that Apple had breached its anti-steering obligation under the DMA and that Meta had breached its obligation to give consumers the choice of a service that uses less of their personal data. For these infractions, the EC fined Apple €500 million (approximately US$568 million) and Meta €200 million (approximately US$227 million).
The Digital Markets, Competition, and Consumers (DMCC) Act came into force in the UK at the beginning of 2025. Under the DMCC, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) may designate large tech platforms as having Strategic Market Status (SMS) and impose tailored conduct requirements upon them. In October 2025, the CMA confirmed Google’s designation with SMS in general search and search advertising services. Shortly afterward, the CMA confirmed the designation of Apple and Google with SMS for their mobile platforms, covering operating systems, app distribution, browsers, and browser engines on smartphones and (as to Apple) tablets. Following the designation, the CMA is now considering the nature and extent of conduct requirements to impose on Apple and Google under the DMCC. The CMA is expected to announce these requirements and to initiate a third SMS investigation in early 2026.
European antitrust authorities have displayed continued willingness in 2025 to engage in active enforcement against large digital technology firms, both using traditional antitrust laws and new digital competition regimes. We expect this trend to continue, as European antitrust authorities continue to deploy the full range of antitrust tools available to them.
[1] So much so that, in response to the tweet announcing his appointment, Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chair Andrew Ferguson promised that the FTC would “end Big Tech’s vendetta against competition and free speech.”
[2] Similarly, the court in the Google ad tech case has not yet ruled on remedies following a November 2025 remedies trial, but appeared to express some skepticism of the DOJ’s request for extensive structural remedies with a nod to rapid development in the industry and uncertainties in trying to predict its future.
[3] For instance, the Biden administration issued an early (and extensive) Executive Order on competition enforcement that called for greater enforcement of acquisitions of nascent competitors by dominant internet platforms, and the 2023 Merger Guidelines (retained by the Trump administration agencies) contain an extended discussion of the elimination of nascent competitive threats.
[4] In another example of conflict among federal authorities, the Trump administration pardoned an executive charged with bid rigging during his own term, reportedly without consulting the DOJ first.
[5] See, for instance, the FTC’s consent order for the Omnicom/Interpublic merger, which includes provisions intended to prevent the combined company from discriminating against advertisers based on political or ideological views.
