Judge says DOJ's antitrust lawsuit against Google likely won't go to trial until late 2023
Lauren Feiner / CNBC :
Context & Ripple Effects
The DOJ's case against Google was born rushed: reporting at the time said Attorney General Barr overruled career lawyers who wanted more preparation before filing antitrust charges in September 2020. By December, the judge was signaling a trial no earlier than late 2023 — already a three-year runway from filing to courtroom.
That estimate proved optimistic rather than pessimistic. The trial for the DOJ and state plaintiffs was ultimately set for September 9, 2024, and after the monopoly finding the same judge gave himself until August 2025 to rule on remedies — a cadence that makes this 2020 scheduling note the first data point in a much longer enforcement timeline.
First-order effects
- Google carries a multi-year litigation overhang: with trial unlikely before late 2023, the search and ad businesses under scrutiny operate for roughly three more years without a courtroom verdict forcing changes.
- The DOJ and state attorneys general must sustain a complex case through years of discovery and motion practice, testing whether political appetite for the suit outlasts the delay.
Second-order effects
- Court-calendar congestion compounds: the FTC's parallel Amazon antitrust case was later scheduled for October 2026, suggesting federal dockets are serializing big-tech monopolization trials rather than running them concurrently.
- Competitors and ad-market participants price around the uncertainty — any contractual or partnership decisions touching Google's search defaults get made against a moving trial date rather than a fixed one.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, US antitrust enforcement against major platforms runs on a find-then-fix cycle measured in half-decades: liability is established years before remedies land, as the gap between the 2024 trial and the August 2025 remedies deadline illustrates.
- That lag shifts practical power to the incumbent being sued — behavior that would be enjoined quickly in a faster system persists through the entire pendency of the case.
The trend: Federal antitrust action against Big Tech is settling into a multi-year rhythm in which trials and remedies trail filings by years, letting incumbents operate under challenge rather than under correction.