After a five-year legal showdown pitting the U.S. Department of Justice against Google, a federal judge concluded that the disruptive forces of artificial intelligence technology will have a better chance of hobbling an illegal monopoly than any restraints imposed by a court order.

That was one of the underlying themes of a highly-anticipated ruling issued late Tuesday by U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta. After ruling that Google's dominant search engine had turned into an illegal monopoly back in August 2024, the judge spent the next 13 months mulling the best way to rein in the technology powerhouse's bad behavior.

At the same time, the technology landscape had been thrust into the throes of a tectonic shift that couldn't have been anticipated in October 2020 when the Justice Departmen

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