Sources: amid budget woes, the US DOJ has delayed deciding whether to sue Apple or file a new suit against Google over antitrust concerns until at least March
Context & Ripple Effects
The DOJ's big-tech docket has been moving on political and budgetary clocks, not legal ones. The [[a:957528|Google search suit was filed in 2020 after AG Barr overruled career lawyers who wanted more time]], and the judge has since signaled that case won't reach trial until late 2023. Now, with the Apple decision pending, budget constraints push the next move to at least March.
The delay matters because the arc that follows shows it was triage, not abandonment: by August 2022 the DOJ was drafting a potential antitrust complaint against Apple, and by early 2024 Apple was making a final pitch to Assistant AG Jonathan Kanter to head off a suit — a case that later entered settlement discussions. This March deadline is the hinge between the Google case already in court and the Apple case to come.
First-order effects
- Apple gets at least a quarter more without a filed complaint against it, while DOJ antitrust staff must sequence resources between the pending Google trial track and a possible second front.
- Google's existing 2020 case proceeds on the judge's late-2023 trial schedule regardless of the delay, so the budget squeeze hits the not-yet-filed matters hardest.
Second-order effects
- Apple's App Store economics — the platform drawing more than 800 million weekly visitors per Apple's own figures — stay under the status quo during the reprieve, preserving the exclusivity arrangements any future suit would target.
- The delay signals to other enforcers and state AGs watching both companies that federal bandwidth, not the strength of the theories, is the near-term constraint on parallel big-tech actions.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, antitrust outcomes against the largest platforms are set by enforcement capacity and litigation timelines rather than filing dates — the Google matter ran from a 2020 filing toward years of pretrial process, and the Apple arc from delay to complaint to settlement talks spans multiple years.
- Career-staff assessments versus political timelines — visible when Barr overruled lawyers in 2020 — become a recurring structural feature of how these cases start, with budget cycles acting as a de facto gatekeeper.
The trend: Federal antitrust action against big tech is increasingly paced by DOJ budgets and multi-year litigation timelines, stretching each case from filing to resolution across half a decade.