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For the second time in a year, a federal court has found that Google (GOOG, GOOGL) broke the law by abusing its market power.
The loss could have major ramifications for a company already facing the threat of a breakup and arrives at a moment when the search giant’s vulnerabilities to a shifting online environment and political crosscurrents are especially visible.
But a forced restructuring and legal troubles are only part of Google’s challenges.
While all members of the Magnificent Seven are suffering through a lousy 2025, Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has been a laggard in the group over the past several years, failing to claim a breakout moment or turnaround in the way Nvidia (NVDA) and Meta (META) have. Microsoft’s (MSFT) early association with ChatGPT also placed Google in AI catchup mode, a posture that may still exist in public perception.
The company is also coming off a rough quarter when it fell short on cloud computing revenue, fanning lingering worries about its AI business. Its stock is down 20% in 2025 and has lost about 2% over the last year.
CEO Sundar Pichai is aiming for his company’s Gemini chatbot to be used by 500 million people by the end of the year. As of Thursday, ChatGPT was the most downloaded free app on iPhones and on Google Play, while Gemini was No. 26 and 14 on those platforms, respectively.
Like many of its Big Tech peers, Alphabet has for months been contending with the fallout from China-based DeepSeek’s AI models, whose early success caught the world by surprise and prompted concerns about Silicon Valley’s spending spree. Alphabet has dramatically expanded its capital expenditures for the year ahead, upping a previous estimate of roughly $58 billion to a planned $75 billion.
Google is also caught in the middle of the brewing trade battle between the US and China. Earlier this year, China launched an antitrust investigation into the company. And that’s before Trump’s latest escalation of his trade spat with Beijing.
More broadly, if the Trump administration’s trade policies slow US growth, as Fed officials, business leaders, and economists predict, Google’s advertising revenue stands to take a hit. Businesses often pare back ad spending during lean times to protect core operations.
While Google at its heart is an online advertising company, it isn’t just that. In YouTube, it claims an entire media ecosystem that occupies a singular space in tech and popular culture.
