The four biggest jewels in America’s tech crown took a pummeling in the markets today after various reports predicted the US government would step up its antitrust oversight. A look at Google’s long history of antitrust tussles with the European Commission suggests many more years of disquiet.
The European Union has slapped Google with antitrust charges totaling $9.5 billion over the last decade. Despite being the largest punishments it has ever handed out, the amounts are pretty small change for a monolith like Google. Twists in the long-running saga, however, resulted some days in billions in market capitalization losses for Google’s parent company, Alphabet, Inc.
The only time Alphabet’s market capitalization came away unscathed was in March this year, but that case is related to a relatively small part of the company’s business—advertising technology firm, AdSense—and Google cooperated with that probe. The company is appealing the other two fines.
The markets’ brutal response today to reports of US antitrust probes suggests that Google’s tribulations won’t end any time soon. And now the other US tech behemoths will likely face their own.