Google just lost a huge antitrust case. A federal judge in Virginia ruled on Thursday that the search giant illegally maintained a monopoly in the online advertising market, leveraging its position to make more money and squash competition. The Justice Department, which initiated the case along with several states, has called for Google to be broken up.

For Google — and possibly Big Tech as a whole — the timing of this news could not be worse.

We’re now years into the government’s war on Big Tech companies that spans both the Biden and Trump administrations, and major battles are finally being decided. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg just spent three days on the stand in a case that will decide if Meta’s acquisitions of apps like Instagram and WhatsApp violated antitrust laws. In August, Google lost another big antitrust case, when another judge ruled that it illegally maintained a monopoly over search and search advertising, recommending that Google spin off its Chrome browser. (The remedy phase of that case actually begins on Monday.) The Federal Trade........

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