This year has seen the resolution of major suits against tech giants Alphabet and Meta, both of which were found liable for serious lawbreaking. Yet the penalties imposed on the corporations are laughably inadequate to restrain their power.

When the government first filed major antitrust lawsuits targeting Big Tech back in 2020, many people were optimistic that the long-standing practice of public legal action against monopolistic companies could rein in these economy-dominating corporations.

But as these pages have covered, this “techlash” has come to little. Antitrust law has conformed to its castrated character of recent decades, with the state unable to bring itself to seriously restrain, let alone break up, the giant companies even after they were ruled to be full monopolies just months before.

Recently, when it comes to enforcing the law against the tech giants, new lows have been reached.