The Case Against the Case Against Google
Is Google too powerful? The Justice Department's Christine Varney thinks so. As Fred Vogelstein reports in Wired, the attorney who represented Netscape during the federal government's long-running Microsoft antitrust case sees the tech world's newest giant …
Context & Ripple Effects
Fred Vogelstein's Wired profile of Christine Varney laid out the setup a week before this piece: Obama's top antitrust enforcer, who represented Netscape during the long federal case against Microsoft, believes Google has become too powerful. Slate's answer pushes back on that framing, disputing the argument rather than the facts of Google's dominance.
What makes the exchange more than commentary is Varney's position — her view sits inside the Justice Department itself, and her Microsoft-case pedigree gives the government's side a credible author. Any rebuttal, like Vogelstein's, has to argue against the person who wrote the Netscape chapter of the last great tech antitrust case.
First-order effects
- Varney's stated belief puts Google under formal antitrust scrutiny at the Justice Department, moving the question from op-ed pages into an agency with enforcement power.
- Vogelstein's counterargument hands Google a ready-made public defense at exactly the moment a DOJ chief is questioning its power.
Second-order effects
- Rivals and critics of Google gain an attentive audience at the DOJ — the same channel through which Netscape's grievances once helped seed the Microsoft case.
- The Microsoft precedent cuts both ways in the debate: enforcement supporters can cite it as proof that intervening in tech markets works, while skeptics like Vogelstein can point to it as a template being applied before anyone shows Google harms consumers.
Third-order effects
- If Varney's view carries the day, the antitrust toolkit built for desktop software gets tested against a web-scale platform, forcing regulators to decide whether free distribution and instant switching make monopoly claims obsolete.
- The dispute helps define how future administrations treat dominant internet intermediaries — as self-correcting markets or as gatekeepers warranting structural intervention — a question every subsequent large platform will inherit.
The trend: Antitrust enforcement is migrating from the Microsoft era's desktop-software monopolies toward internet-scale gatekeepers, with Google as the first contested test.