In the process, it's helped its parent company, Alphabet, become one of the most valuable businesses on the planet.

Google has accumulated unprecedented power over communication and information online.

The worry is that because Google uses its dominance in one area to succeed in another, it's not a level playing field.

And that is really the core reason why we have seen these different lawsuits emerge over the last couple of years.

The U.S. government is approaching year five of its sprawling investigation into Google.

I think it's quite possible that what we see come out of at least one of these cases is a breakup of Google.

Many of the biggest firms in tech drew antitrust scrutiny in the late 2010s, but Google so far is the only company to end up in federal court.

Will the U.S. government break up Google?

And if so, how will that impact investors and the public?

The government's first major antitrust case against Google began in October 2020.

It focused on Google Search.

Search and advertising is Google's bread and butter.

It has its moonshot projects, but search and advertising pays for all of that.

People who use Google Search don't pay with money.

Instead, Google makes money by collecting user data and selling ads.

When we use Google as a search engine, we expose ourselves to extensive surveillance.

We enable Google to use information that Google derives from our queries for personalized advertising.

That's at least under the default settings.

The government's complaints focused on agreements Google made with companies like Apple.

What Google had done over the course of the past decade, decade and a half, is entered into these exclusive default agreements with other competitors, potential competitors like Apple.

They entered into an agreement worth about $20 billion per year now that makes Google the exclusive search engine on all Apple devices in the Apple Safari browser.

They maintained those agreements with mobile device manufacturers.

If you get a phone that's made by Samsung, it has an exclusive revenue share agreement with Google so that Google Search is the only search engine that appears on that cell phone when you start it up.

The regulators believe that Google is able to keep that dominance in part because of these sweetheart deals.

For example, some Apple executives expressed interest in using the privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo as the default option while in private browsing mode.

But the terms of their agreement with Google prevented that idea from taking root.

Google's made it very difficult to adopt DuckDuckGo.

Like on Android, it's 15 to 20 steps to make DuckDuckGo the search default there.

Search engines are built with software that can crawl and rank websites on the internet.

The process can cost billions of dollars if done at a scale to compete with Google.

Google controls about 88% of the search engine market in the United States.

Nobody can enter this market and credibly compete with Google.

The Google Search trial included depositions from high-profile witnesses like Microsoft chief executive Sadia Nadella.

The presiding federal judge, Amit Mehta, determined that Google, quote, is a monopolist and has acted as one to maintain its monopoly.

Throughout that trial, we were hearing so many people talk about how Google Search has gotten so much worse over the past decade.

Google does not, when it comes to local search, show the information it determines is the best.

It simply self-preferences its own inferior content above everyone else.

The government's second major complaint began in 2023 with a focus on online ad technology.

Back almost 20 years now, Google had acquired businesses like DoubleClick to consolidate the entire ad tech ecosystem.

If you're a website, you plug into a publisher ad server.

If you're an advertiser, you plug into an ad network on the other side, and then you meet on this exchange in the middle.

And because Google has maintained, allegedly, a monopoly across each of those properties, it is able to take 20 cents of every dollar that passes through its advertiser exchange.

And that is far higher than any other ad exchange on the market because Google really is kind of unavoidable here.

The trial on Google's monopoly power in digital ads began in September 2024 and is slated to run well into 2025.

Google is also facing antitrust complaints from other businesses.

A notable challenge came from Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite.

The problem, Epic claims, is Google was charging a 30% fee on products within apps in its app store.

They were feeling unfairly restricted from accessing consumers directly.

Google had gone through many steps to make sure that Epic and other potential app stores were not able to load their own app stores on an Android device.

And the case at its core said that if there was actually competition here, you'd see that 30% fee come down significantly.

And those savings would probably be passed through to consumers as well.

Attorneys general representing all 50 states also raised this issue with Google in 2021.

But Google settled this case with them in 2023.

Epic Games also filed a similar complaint against Apple and its app store.

I would have Apple and Google both done.

They have said, we want to make money.

We want to charge tolls for anyone who wants to cross that bridge to the consumers.

A jury delivered a verdict favoring Epic over Google in 2023.

But the company sued again in 2024, claiming that Google continues to use anti-competitive agreements to protect its monopoly power.

Some of those walled gardens, if they haven't entirely come down, have at least come down a little bit in terms of the Apple ecosystem.

They've won some concessions.

And that gives them more reason to go after Google and Apple here in the U.S.

The courts are now determining the best way to restore competition in online industries.

Lawyers refer to these solutions as remedies.

Weak remedies would include injunctions that are targeted at specific behaviors that have been identified to be anti-competitive.

For example, the judge in Epic Games v.

Google is banning Google from a range of conduct for three years.

Notably, Google has to let developers charge in-app fees without using Google's billing system, removing the company's ability to levy tolls on its partners and users.

If you move even further into the direction of stricter, more effective remedies, you could, of course, think of structural remedies.

Structural remedies include namely breakups.

The government is leaving the possibility of a Google breakup open, according to court documents filed in October.

One of the remedies that we're talking about is what it would mean for Google to divest Android.

It maintains that separate brand and potential to be independently monetized that could justify separating it from Google and making it a standalone business.

So the most likely scenario is that they break out their ad network.

It's their ugly piece of business.

It's about 11 percent of revenue.

This has been long rumored by regulators to get broken out.

But a breakup could be far-fetched.

So I don't think that a breakup is likely, and the market seems to think that way as well.

In practice, that would be really, really hard to do because Google is an ecosystem.

All of these things are so closely integrated.

Even if you broke it up, the different business units would make deals to keep some of that integration.

So I think that's really difficult in practice.

It's also the most extreme remedy.

Google is expected to appeal the cases, but the company did not respond to CNBC's request for comment.

The Google team wrote in a blog post that its ad tech fees are lower than the reported industry averages.

The company also wrote that the government's ad tech case could create challenges for small businesses. 69 percent of them use digital ads to find customers.

Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin invented the Google search engine in the late 1990s.

Their project rose to prominence as Microsoft battled its own antitrust lawsuits in federal court.

So you go back to the Microsoft example of the late 90s, the early 2000s.

Microsoft ultimately won that legal battle.

If it didn't, it would have been appealed for years and years.

But it missed sort of this huge innovation wave.

A lot of that had to do with all of its antitrust and legal battles.

But there wasn't a breakup of Microsoft.

There was enough of a conduct remedy and a separation of the operating system and the browser to allow for inroads to be made by companies that we now are calling the new illegal monopolies.

I mean, this is how Google was able to innovate in its infancy.

This is why all of this antitrust stuff matters.

Because if Google is so distracted by these lawsuits, the fear is that it falls behind in this very important race going on right now, where the winners are still being decided.

Regulating tech is a bipartisan priority.

But some members of Congress disagree with the government's approach.

There's no proof that Google is charging outrageous sums and charging above and controlling the market.

They just say they have a lot of the market share.

This has been the problem with antitrust policy going back to standard oil.

You know, our foundational antitrust laws were designed at the end of the 19th century, where the monopolies that we were trying to confront back then were railroad barons and steel manufacturers.

It is incredible to me that these foundational tools, these antitrust laws are equally applied to new markets and new and emerging markets.

What we're starting to see here is a breadth of enforcement, not just against Google.

We now have major antitrust cases pending against Apple, against Amazon, against Meta, against Live Nation Ticketmaster.

Some analysts believe that a breakup, though far-fetched, could possibly be good for the stock.

I think the sum of the parts do unlock value here.

Google has acquired over 200 firms in its nearly three-decade-long existence.

Prominent examples include Android, YouTube, Waze, machine learning pioneer DeepMind, and startup firms that produced services like Google Maps and Docs.

That said, Google is in a fierce competition to stay relevant as new technologies like cloud computing and artificial intelligence take hold.

Google is the number three player in cloud, and cloud is really important in that it's the infrastructure, the backend for generative AI.

But there's sort of a new race going on, too.

Google is very smart in that it's developing its own chips called TPUs that can handle some of the compute power.

They still need NVIDIA, they still need GPUs, but they're creating their own technology to enable them to perhaps rely less on an NVIDIA.

Amazon's doing a similar thing, so is Microsoft.

Very few companies have the resources to compete for key inputs that drive the production of artificial intelligence tools.

We might run into a situation where the current gatekeepers, the current monopolies, manage to capture that emerging sector simply by extending their power.

They have enormous access to data obtained through their monopoly over the general search engine market.

But the worry is that Google moves a little more slowly than, say, an open AI, which adopts more that old Silicon Valley philosophy of move fast and break things.

Since ChatGBT arrived and sort of stole that generative AI mainstream moment, you are seeing Google move faster.

At the same time, Google has the most to lose.

Can Google shift its whole business of search into chatbots with the same success and the same dominance that it's enjoyed over the last few decades?

The coming years could be important for regulators.

The fact of the matter is competition often matters most when there are new inflection points that emerge in the market.

Right now is perhaps the most critical inflection point we've seen in the search market in 15 years.

The digital economy in the U.S. has, by and large, remained just unregulated.

Antitrust law is kind of the only thing that's happening at all.

The government's battle with big tech companies started while former President Trump was in office.

If he were to take office again, the cases are likely to move forward.

Democrats are looking for sharper antitrust enforcement, too.

Vice President Kamala Harris reportedly has a close personal relationship with Google's lead counsel in the case.

But she is expected to let the antitrust process run its course.

This could take years because even when we get a decision, Google has already said that they're going to appeal.

There's so many resources that they have to pour into fighting this avalanche of legal battles.

And I go back to the Microsoft example from the late 90s, early 2000s.

That can sort of erode innovation at the edges for many, many years.

We really need to kind of put our faith in the fact that breaking up monopolies is critical to making sure that that innovation benefits consumers.

American people, working families can benefit from that innovation.

That's really what this antitrust project holds.