It’s a reaaaalllly convoluted topic. It sounds simple in the article and the US attorney makes it sound simple. But it’s really not. To be transparent, I work with Google ads for a living, operating it on behalf of advertisers’ interests. I have for about 15 years now. I think there’s bullshit being spewed from both sides of the conflict. My biggest beef with google on the ad side has nothing to do with their so-called “monopoly in the ad space.” I don’t even know how one would solve that alleged issue. I mean, if more people used other search engines, then they wouldn’t be a monopoly in search. But people choose, overwhelmingly, not to. The only real competitor in search is Microsoft Bing. But for whatever reasons, people chose google over bing a vast majority of the time. That said, my main beef with them is that their ad platform is constantly being rigged to favor their bottom line at the expense of advertisers. It’s complete bullshit the way it’s operated, and there is absolutely no regulations to deal with it. I have to believe that this is partly because google has bought off so many elected officials, but the other half of it is that to create meaningful regulations of their practices would require a very nuanced understanding of the platform, and congress simply doesn’t have that, nor would they be interested in acquiring it. Anyone can set up a Google ads account and run ads. However, not everyone can run an ad account without getting their ass handed to them financially. My job is doing that on behalf of businesses because I have experience with the platform and also know enough to be an effective advocate for the business so that the fucks at google don’t take financial advantage of them. Which, they absolutely will every time unless there’s someone like me standing in the way. TLDR: monopoly isn’t the issue with their ad platform, it’s deceptive and abusive business practices that squeeze advertisers and take advantage of their naivety, all for an ill-gotten increase to google’s bottom line. I could make a similar argument against other ad platforms to varying degrees, but google is the worst offender by far. Facebook is pretty bad, too. But google is on another fucking level. Basically, the government knows it should be doing something, but the government really has no idea what exactly needs to be regulated or why it needs to be regulated. They really should talk to people like me and my peers if they truly want to make any positive difference on this particular issue. All I can really say without getting too much in the weeds is that a set of very specifically written laws needs to be passed.