Before reading the article, I assumed it was about LLMs. It looks like the regulators have perfectly timed their focus on Google’s business. Is Microsoft laughing at this point?
Only in the narrow sense that Microsoft managed to avoid structural remedies due to Bush Jr. shenanigans that were forgotten because the case was settled three days before 9/11. In the broader sense they've got loads of consent decrees on them, first from the US, then from the EU. They can't even kick CrowdStrike out of the NT kernel!
Even among big tech, Google is an unusually meaty target because:
1. Literally all but two of their consumer product lines are acquisitions. A significant part of their ads network is also acquisitions. Most of those product lines and ad network divisions were preceded by internally-developed business units that were marketplace failures. Google does not build, it buys.
2. Android is FOSS, which neatly tidies away a lot of the "we have a right to monetize our IP" arguments that Apple loves to trot out.
3. They paid Facebook bucket-loads of money to keep them from launching a competing ad network under the "Jedi Blue" program. This is textbook illegal behavior and doesn't require any new theories of antitrust like, say, the Epic lawsuit did.
4. Google doesn't comply with litigation holds. Civil litigation is a Constitution-free zone, you can't take the 5th in this kind of trial, meaning that you can be forced to self-incriminate, and if you do not do so, the judge is free to make adverse inferences.
5. Google doesn't have a single charismatic(?) leader. Apple had Steve Jobs, who could invent the monopolistic business model and then conveniently die[0] before anyone with power started to question it. Google has a bunch of executives that all have to e-mail one another, which means that even with their cavalier attitude towards recordkeeping, something winds up getting recorded, making the missing information even more incriminating.
The one thing I can't answer with this set of answers is why Facebook isn't getting as much scrutiny as Google is, especially since Facebook has proven to be such a good conduit for scammers and disinformation. Facebook has even less ability to leverage "copyright disclaims antitrust" than Google does.
[0] Constitution or no, a judge can't compel a corpse to testify.
Regarding point 1, and in comparison to Microsoft, the company has historically acquired other businesses to fuel its growth (DOS, cough cough...). This is a normal playbook.
