The Department of Justice’s antitrust case against Google Search should set off alarms in every boardroom across the country. The case, now entering its remedies phase, signals a troubling shift in American antitrust enforcement away from protecting consumers and toward punishing business models that succeed too well.

Here’s the message the DOJ is sending: If your company out-innovates rivals, secures valuable partnerships, and achieves scale by building products that users and business partners choose freely, federal regulators may accuse you of stifling competition — and demand that your company be restructured, your business partnerships canceled, and your proprietary systems provided to competitors.

That’s not a warning from a dystopian future. It’s what the DOJ is seeking now against Google.

Let’s start with the facts. The court found that Google built its market position in search through technical excellence, business savvy, and achieving scale. It hired top engineers and relentlessly innovated. Its breakthrough in ranking websites — pioneered by Stanford graduate students in the late 1990s — quickly made it the leading player in search, supplanting the once-dominant Yahoo.

This is the textbook definition of innovation-driven growth. Google built a superior product and found effective ways to get it into users’ hands. By 2009, it handled 80 percent of U.S. internet searches. Today, it’s closer to 90 percent. Yet that rise — gradual, incremental, and continuing to deliver value — has drawn the ire of regulators.

The DOJ persuaded the court that Google’s ascendency, plus its default contracts with Apple, Mozilla, and others, amounted to illegal “maintenance” of monopoly power. Crucially, the court acknowledged that Google’s position was lawfully earned. 

Yet the length and scope of its contracts — many spanning two to five years and covering about half the internet searches in the U.S. — crossed a line. One-year contracts would have been acceptable. Two years? That’s too long.

No statute draws this line. The standard is stitched together from past cases, which is standard practice. Yet the key legal threshold wasn’t whether the contracts blocked competitors, but whether they “appeared capable” of doing so. That’s not a standard — it’s a guess.

This should be deeply unsettling for any business that relies on long-term partnerships or builds its own customer-facing platforms. If success in execution — strong branding, effective distribution, and long-term planning — can be recast as foreclosure of rivals, then every industry leader is vulnerable.

The DOJ’s proposed remedies underscore the threat. They want to unwind Google’s distribution contracts, force the company to provide rivals with access to its proprietary infrastructure, and remake the business. 

Imagine if these principles were applied across sectors: Airlines forced to share infrastructure, retail chains required to subsidize competitors, cloud providers compelled to open their platforms to rivals.

These are not theoretical risks. Any firm that creates a product of exceptional quality, gains market share, and negotiates default placements with third parties could find itself in Google’s position. The DOJ is effectively saying that you don’t need to harm consumers, raise prices, or exclude rivals through coercion. Mere success and savvy are grounds for enforcement.

A more reasonable remedy — if any is warranted — would be to restrict exclusive defaults for a time, with exceptions for companies like Mozilla that rely on Google revenue. Yet the DOJ’s sweeping proposals go well beyond that. They aim to punish a business model that aligns incentives across platforms, advertisers, and consumers.

This is the opposite of what good policy should do. It doesn’t foster competition — it disincentivizes it. It doesn’t promote innovation — it penalizes it. It creates uncertainty for any company trying to build strategic partnerships, leverage economies of scale, or invest in long-term relationships.

The business community should not ignore this case. Its outcome will shape the legal and regulatory landscape for years to come. If the DOJ prevails, success itself may become a liability. Any firm that scales too well, distributes too widely, or delivers too much value might be the next target.

The United States built its global economic leadership by encouraging risk-taking, rewarding excellence, and letting markets — not regulators — determine winners. That legacy is now at risk. Business leaders should take note — and speak up.