Recent years have seen a legal losing streak for Big Tech. With verdicts allowing liability for consumer harms like addiction and exposure to harmful content, commentators have talked of an industry turning point like that Big Tobacco once faced. Yet despite the legal headwinds, there have been zero firm breakups, no victories on attempts to claw back mergers like Meta’s purchase of Instagram, and so far mostly just smaller fines, with class-action lawsuits potentially delivering greater sums — but that remains to be seen.
A legal sea change for the industry came in twin verdicts earlier this year, the first on March 24 in New Mexico, finding Facebook parent company Meta liable for failing to control predators on its platforms as required by state law. The second, a day later, came with a Los Angeles jury finding Meta and YouTube negligent for designing their platforms with addictive features intended to hook young users. The plaintiff in the LA case is a girl who was six when starting use of the programs and who allegedly experienced body dysmorphia and thoughts of self-harm as a result.
The rulings are landmarks, but they appear to be just the beginning for the platforms. Thousands of suits are winding through courts nationwide, with over a dozen scheduled to start this year. Some are from individuals, some from states, and many have been amalgamated into class-action status.
The tech giants have historically relied on 1990s legislation shielding them from liability related to user content, which the US Supreme Court recently upheld in defense of telecom giant Cox Communications. But the LA case dealt with personal harm rather than the content of user posts. More verdicts finding for plaintiff injury could give Silicon Valley firms a legal profile similar to companies selling tobacco and opioids, which have been beset by endless and very costly court actions. This caliber of liability is far greater than the usual class-action ephemera that bounce off Big Tech’s hull even when victorious — like when Apple settled last month in a consolidated suit in which buyers claimed the company had oversold the artificial-intelligence abilities of its newer iPhones. The company agreed to pay a mere $250 million. (The company made a $112 billion profit in fiscal year 2025.)
The companies are appealing, and the juries have so far issued awards far lower than those sought by the plaintiffs. But as the firms themselves observed during the court proceedings, some of the platform features held by the verdicts to be addictive include instant notifications and infinite scroll, which the platforms say are “inescapably linked” to the user content that attracts people to apps. They were suggesting that these verdicts could open floodgates to massive class-action suits by large volumes of users, perhaps comparable to the great waves of litigation that engulfed Big Tobacco and the Big Pharma companies making opioids. The huge settlements of these suits tend to encompass gigantic payouts and sometimes major changes to the products or their marketing.
Such a wave appears to be building. Meta, YouTube, Snapchat, and Tiktok paid undisclosed amounts to settle a Kentucky school district’s lawsuit arguing these addictive features harmed students and therefore the district, which asked for $60 million for mental health support programs. By now, over 1,200 lawsuits have been brought by school districts against the platforms. In April, Meta faced the indignity of purging ads from its platforms for law firms that were recruiting plaintiffs to sue the tech company.
Legal relief for the platforms also looks far off. In May, the Supreme Court turned down Meta’s appeal of a decision allowing a lawsuit filed by Vermont’s attorney general, one of over forty similar suits over Meta’s harmful design launched by states and likely to ultimately be granted class action status, as in state actions against Big Tobacco.
But not all is dark on Meta’s doorstep. The attempt by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to break up Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp well after the fact failed earlier this year, with the judge ruling that the subsequent rise of other social media platforms like TikTok undercut the FTC’s monopoly claims. Of course, its claims are also undermined by the fact that the FTC itself signed off on Facebook’s original acquisition of those firms in the first place. The Barack Obama–era tech-friendly FTC waved through the mergers of Instagram and WhatsApp in 2012 and 2014, respectively, hurting the agency’s ability to claim clear harm at this late date. The FTC is now appealing the ruling.
Besmirching Search
Google is an incredible antitrust case, having lost not one but two monopolist adjudications within a year but carrying on in almost the same position of incredible power it began with. Ruled first to run a monopoly in online search and then another one in publisher ad tech, the company has avoided the worst outcomes. There have been some large fees, especially in Europe, but so far no “breakups” — forced divestitures where companies are required to sell off parts of their empire, as the Department of Justice sought when asking the court to break off YouTube and Chrome from Alphabet, Google’s parent company.
The judge in the search case argued that the company’s payments to Apple and Samsung for exclusive default status were abusive but declined to agree to the government’s request for a “choice screen” where users of a new phone or browser choose from a ballot of options, claiming that interfered too far in product design. So there will still be default search engines and web browsers on new smartphones, and Google can still pay gigantic amounts for that coveted position. The company’s large payments to hardware makers are expected to continue, including to Apple which receives over $20 billion a year from the search company, almost pure profit.
The punch-pulling of the remedy decision was guided by the judge’s feeling that the competitive AI market would limit Google’s future monopoly power, even though its ocean of search and web data are part of the reason the company’s Gemini AI engine has taken a leading position in parts of the market.
The remedies for the ad tech case are still under deliberation, but based on the presiding district court judge’s questioning, the ad industry is decreasingly expecting serious action. Again the most serious potential sanction is a divestiture of AdX, the company’s main ad-auction platform. But conduct-based or “behavioral” rules are more likely, such as requiring Google to permit publishers (websites showing ads served by Google’s software) to set different floors for bids from different buyers, which the search giant has so far forbidden. But web display ads are usually seen as the lowest end of the ad inventory, so this again would not come to a major shift but a small compromise to ward off the big changes. And as Microsoft’s and other cases have shown, behavioral remedies can be ignored once people stop paying attention.
YouTube’s inclusion in the California lawsuit means it too will have to confront a future of massive litigation unless later spared by the Supreme Court. The company will be more than able to make a case in its own defense, as this arm of Alphabet alone makes more money than Disney’s entire massive media segment and is now considered the world’s largest media company. With the cases on appeal and the scope of future lawsuits vulnerable to future restrictions, the video platform is unlikely to be forced to make major changes.
Captive Markets
The other major front in the techlash has developed among companies running entire controlled, captive markets.
Last year, Apple was once again ordered by a federal judge to suspend its fees on developers, in violation of a September 2021 antitrust settlement. Software developers who sell games or apps on the iPhone App Store were required for years to pay a 30 percent cut to Apple, but the company was forced to give them up after a ruling in a case filed by Fortnite maker Epic. The company then added new, almost identical fees and maintained them despite an injunction to stop. Having continued the practice after previous injunctions, the judge hauled the company back into court and took the rare step of referring the company to prosecutors for contempt. Apple was chewed out by a European court over the same issue days earlier.
While Amazon’s main antitrust case continues, in which it is accused of running its enormous independent-seller market tyrannically and abusing it as a lab for strategic product categories to take over, other cases have concluded. The company settled in September 2025 with the FTC over its use of “dark patterns,” a term for manipulative online techniques to steer people into purchases, such as online commerce sites claiming a small number of items left at the posted price, or claims of reduced prices. Amazon used these to maneuver consumers into joining Prime unwittingly and had made it difficult for years for subscribers of the Prime service to cancel once signed up.
The settlement was $2.5 billion. The FTC proudly boasted it was one of the largest settlements in the agency’s history. Yet the amount was 3.2 percent of Amazon’s profit for 2025 alone, and the company likely felt that getting the legal claims of abusing customers out of the headlines before the holiday shopping season was worth the relatively modest sum.
Meanwhile, Amazon is enjoying its victory on appeal against Luxembourg’s consumer privacy agency. The Luxembourg National Commission for Data Protection (CNPD) fined the company $854 million in 2021 over allegations that its behavioral advertising system violated the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the European Union’s main privacy law. Luxembourg’s courts accepted Amazon’s claim that the regulator didn’t consider in its ruling whether the company violated the GDPR purposefully or negligently, so the CNPD must now reassess the full case.
The European Commission separately ruled earlier this spring that Meta has inadequate age-verification processes, in particular for identifying and suspending the accounts of underage users who get around the initial verification check. The EU’s Digital Services Act requires companies to have effective processes to check a user’s declared age of birth, but the platform’s controls allowed users to sidestep the process. Further, the company’s process for reporting age-violating users was cumbersome, requiring seven steps to even reach the form. The company is permitted to argue against the ruling, with penalties expected to be over a year away.
But for a set of companies that are losing major battles in court, Big Tech’s legal troubles aren’t yet standing in the way of continued financial bonanzas and economic dominance.