Antitrust's Hindsight Problem

The most interesting aspect of the recent ruling against Google is that they've now lost an antitrust case twice. Yes, yes, they're saying they "half won", but if you have to say that, well, it's like the idiom around being "half pregnant", you lost.

And this puts the company in an unprecedented place in the history of corporations. They're the Donald Trump of antitrust cases. Of course, even though the President has the inglorious distinction of having been impeached twice... well, he's President again! And I suspect there will be a similar effect on Google as a result of these losses. That is, I doubt it will dent them much. They'll be okay.

If anything, I suspect these cases – as well as the myriad other antitrust cases against Big Tech™ – will ultimately point to how ineffectual current antitrust law is for our modern age (apologies, Lina Khan). But that will likely only be obvious in hindsight, which is interesting because that itself is a big part of the problem with these cases: that they're being litigated with hindsight...