Regulators tighten grip on Big Tech with technical and conduct reforms amid legal battles

While forced break-ups remain elusive, recent legal actions signal a shift towards detailed conduct rules and technical oversight aimed at curbing monopolistic practices by Google, Meta, Apple, and Amazon across the US and Europe.

The latest regulatory blows against Big Tech have not produced the break-ups once demanded by prosecutors, but they are tightening legal supervision of how the biggest platforms run search, advertising, app distribution and services for children. In the past fortnight alone, a federal judge in Virginia ordered Google to change the machinery behind its advertising business while sparing it from a forced sell-off, and Meta agreed to a sweeping US settlement over claims that Facebook and Instagram were built to hook young users. In Europe, Apple and Meta are already living under formal penalties issued under the Digital Markets Act, the EU rulebook designed to curb the power of digital gatekeepers. (apnews.com)

Google’s most recent setback came on 2 September, when US District Judge Leonie Brinkema ordered the company to rework the system behind its digital advertising monopoly. The full remedies remain sealed for 14 days while the parties propose redactions, but the headline result is already clear: the court rejected the Justice Department’s bid to force a disposal of parts of Google’s ad-tech stack. That spared a business underpinning a significant share of Alphabet’s nearly $400 billion in annual advertising sales, even though the judge had already found monopoly violations. Critics were scathing. Sacha Haworth of the Tech Oversight Project called the outcome “the wrong message at the wrong time”, while Google’s regulatory affairs vice-president, Lee-Anne Mulholland, said the company was “very pleased” the court had refused a break-up. (apnews.com)

That ruling sits alongside Google’s separate search case, which is already deeper into court supervision than many casual observers realise. The Justice Department says it won remedies in September 2025 that barred Google from maintaining exclusive distribution deals tied to Google Search, Chrome, Google Assistant and the Gemini app, while also requiring the company to share some search index and user-interaction data with rivals and offer syndication services to certain competitors. The public case page shows that the matter moved on to a final judgment dated 5 December 2025, followed in 2026 by compliance reporting and the appointment of additional technical committee members. In other words, the search case is no longer only about whether Google broke the law; it is about how the court will police the remedy. (justice.gov)

Meta’s settlement shows a similar preference for conduct rules over corporate surgery. Reuters reported that the company will pay up to about $18 billion over a decade to settle claims from nearly all US states that its platforms harmed children and misled the public about safety. The package includes roughly $12.7 billion in guaranteed payments, a further $5 billion contingent on whether Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube adopt similar safeguards, and $459 million tied to privacy claims linked to Cambridge Analytica. More important for users, Meta agreed to restrict teenagers to two hours a day on Facebook and Instagram, block use from midnight to 6 a.m. without parental consent, and largely disable push notifications during school hours. Colorado attorney general Phil Weiser said: “The focus of this case was to protect our kids.” Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who approved the main settlement after the trial had begun on 18 August, called it “a good step forward”. The deal does not, however, force Meta to abandon personalised recommendations or targeted advertising. (investing.com)

The settlement also stops short of closing the wider political and legal assault on social media. Reuters said thousands of cases by individuals, school districts, municipalities and other public bodies are still pending, and two states, Florida and New Mexico, remained outside this settlement. Europe is pressing Meta on a different front. On 23 April 2025, the European Commission fined the company €200 million after finding that it had failed to give consumers a choice of a version of its service that used less personal data. Brussels said that decision followed extensive dialogue with the company, underscoring a distinct European method: codified obligations, formal findings and administrative fines rather than blockbuster jury-style damages claims. (investing.com)

Apple’s European position is equally instructive. The same Commission decision fined Apple €500 million for breaching the DMA’s anti-steering rules, which are meant to stop platform operators from preventing developers directing customers to offers outside the platform’s own payment rails. Apple then suffered a second defeat on 8 July 2026, when the General Court in Luxembourg dismissed its challenge to being designated a gatekeeper for the App Store and iOS, and ruled that its actions concerning iMessage were inadmissible. The court also backed the Commission’s view that Apple’s various app stores should be treated as a single core platform service. Under the court’s own note, any further appeal would be limited to points of law. (digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu)

Amazon is now facing a more technical but potentially far-reaching case in the US advertising market. The Federal Trade Commission and 22 states allege that, for more than seven years, Amazon secretly inflated the prices paid by advertisers in auctions for Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands and Display Ads on Amazon.com and its mobile app. According to the FTC, the company added an undisclosed “soft reserve price”, used what the complaint describes as an “invented auction participant”, and extracted tens of billions of dollars from customers that included more than 500,000 small and medium-sized businesses. The agency says more than one million brands and sellers were affected. Among the most damaging details are internal 2024 notes quoted by the FTC, in which senior executives allegedly described a “clever non-transparent way to charge first price” that had been “incredibly effective” at driving revenue. (ftc.gov)

Taken together, the cases suggest that Washington and Brussels are converging on a narrower but more practical ambition than the dramatic trust-busting language often used around Big Tech. They are trying to prise open defaults in search, force interoperability and steering rights in mobile software, limit addictive design for minors, and shine light on the black-box mechanics of digital advertising. The companies remain enormous, profitable and, in most cases, intact. But the legal perimeter around how they may use their scale is becoming more detailed, more technical and harder to dismiss as political theatre. (apnews.com)