A crackdown in the US to weaken the power of American internet titans appeared imminent only a few years ago.
President Joe Biden was installing a slew of officials renowned for their tough-on-tech stances while Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook executives were hauled before Congress.
However, attempts by Congress to establish new regulations addressing concerns like privacy and misinformation are all but dead, and in court, tech companies have won a number of high-profile victories in lawsuits contesting their accountability for the material on their platforms and their right to acquire other companies.
The next court case, a high-stakes trial that pits the government against Google, will start on Tuesday.
The business is charged with unfairly securing its position as the default search engine by spending billions of dollars to have web browsers like Mozilla and phone manufacturers like Apple set their products as the default.
The arrangements, according to the prosecution, provided Google, which manages about 90% of all global search inquiries, such a data edge that it prevented competitors from establishing themselves and broke US competition rules.
The lawsuit, which was brought against the tech industry in the final months of the Trump administration in 2020, is regarded as a landmark case because it is the most significant test of whether the US government can succeed in its efforts to regulate the sector.
Over the course of the 10-week trial, executives from Apple and Alphabet, the parent company of Google, Sundar Pichai, are both anticipated to testify.
According to Bill Baer, a visiting scholar at the Brookings Institution and a former government lawyer who focuses on competition law, or anti-trust in the US, "it's the anti-trust monopolization trial of a generation."
The 1998 lawsuit against Microsoft, which the courts eventually found maintained its monopoly over operating systems by illegal, anti-competitive techniques, including pre-installing Internet Explorer, was cited by some experts as evidence that the government has a solid case.
If the government prevails in this legal battle, Google may no longer be set as the default search engine; there may also be other, more important changes.