The White House has declared artificial intelligence “non-negotiable” for America’s future. Winning the AI race, the administration argues, is essential to the nation’s prosperity and security. But if the United States is serious about that goal, it needs to rethink how it approaches antitrust, letting fast-moving markets generally solve market power problems on their own.
Today’s antitrust enforcers treat markets as if they are frozen in time. Take the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) recent case against Google’s search product. The court acknowledged that Google built its success through technical excellence and business savvy. Yet the company was found in violation largely because its contracts to be a default search engine lasted more than a year. Rather than warn the company and partners and let them adjust, the DOJ launched a five-year legal battle aimed at breaking up Google.
Fortunately, the court understands competition better than does the DOJ, stating in its remedies decision that “much has changed since the end of the liability trial.” More specifically, AI is search’s creative destruction. What was once a service providing lists of links is now dominated by AI-generated content. Surveys find that 80 percent of consumers rely on AI overviews for at least 40 percent of their searches. Sixty percent of searches now end without a single click. People are looking for information—answers—not just websites.
And AI platforms are taking over search. Roughly two-thirds of large language model users rely on these platforms for researching, gathering, and summarizing information. Using AI for search has nearly doubled in the past six months and Google’s share of general information searches has dropped 8 percent this year. When AI is involved, Google and Microsoft together serve less than half the usage.
Unfortunately, the court’s remedy will slow the AI revolution. The court decided that Google should share its search data with rivals. This will make it more economical for rivals to imitate Google and less economical to leapfrog: Subsidizing companies to hold onto a product whose time has passed simply delays the future.
The Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) case against Meta also suffers from static thinking. To justify its case, the FTC invented a market it called “personal social networking services,” defined narrowly enough to include Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat, but exclude TikTok, YouTube, and X. The reality is that companies compete for attention and ad dollars across a broad landscape. An average TikTok user now spends over an hour per day on the platform, compared to the average Facebook user’s less than 40 minutes. Meta’s share of digital advertising has dropped about 10 percent since 2021, while Amazon’s and TikTok’s shares are growing. Competition here is intense and shifting.
Speaking of online advertising, in April Google was found guilty of monopolizing parts of the open-web ad-tech stack—the infrastructure that matches advertisers with public websites. But digital advertising is in constant flux. As consumers spend less time browsing the open web and more time in apps like TikTok, businesses increasingly see those platforms as their most effective marketplaces. TikTok, which runs its own ad system, is often seen as the most effective system for reaching younger audiences, perhaps making TikTok essential for small businesses and content creators. AI is accelerating these shifts by creating a zero-click world.
The common flaw in these antitrust cases is an “end-of-history” mindset. Regulators assume that today’s conditions will last indefinitely, and that any large company must be a threat to competition or a symptom of failed competition. But tech markets don’t work that way. They evolve quickly, disrupting the status quo before regulators even finish their lawsuits.
The DOJ and FTC should resist the neo-Brandeisian view that business size itself is a sin. Market leadership is always temporary in a digital world. Instead, antitrust enforcement should focus on conditions that genuinely protect businesses from competition—without ignoring the speed and impacts of technological change.
If the United States wants to remain at the forefront of AI and the digital economy, it needs to stop regulating while looking in its rearview mirror. Dynamic competition, not litigation, is what creates innovation and economic leadership.
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