The court found Google has a monopoly in search and related advertising, but stopped short of dismantling its core platforms like Chrome and Android. Instead, it handed down remedies aimed at curbing power without expropriating the firm’s entire business, requiring data sharing with rivals, blocking certain exclusive agreements, and imposing disclosure requirements around artificial intelligence and internal data. Sundar Pichai’s claim that the data-sharing mandate confiscates Google’s intellectual property highlights the libertarian fear: when the state treats private property as a fungible reservoir to be redistributed, it wounds the very incentive structure that makes innovation possible.

From a Hayekian lens, knowledge is dispersed, localized, and cannot be centrally orchestrated by politicians or bureaucrats. The court’s attempt to impose data-sharing obligations and to micromanage pre-installation deals substitutes bureaucratic coordination for the on-the-ground realities of competitive discovery. Prices, signals, and entrepreneurial experimentation arise from voluntary exchanges and the feedback of consumers; to tilt those signals with blanket mandates is to distort the information that guides innovation. The remedy should be to shrink the state’s reach, not to extend it through compelled sharing or regulatory tinkering with contracts.

Nozick’s framework of individual rights and minimal state legitimacy would condemn forced divestitures and compulsory data disclosures as violations of property rights. If a firm owns its search algorithms, its data, and its contractual arrangements, the state’s prerogative is to enforce justly formed contracts and protect victims of actual fraud or coercion, not to retroactively redistribute intangible assets to “level the playing field.” The idea that the government can reallocate ownership to correct market power is precisely the kind of pattern Nozick warned against: rights violation under the banner of public welfare. The market’s corrective is voluntary exchange and robust property protections, not bureaucratic expropriation or forced sharing.

Rand would insist that a free society must respect the sovereign rights of individuals to act in their rational self-interest, pursue profit, and own the fruits of their labor. The push to bar exclusive deals, to extract data, or to mandate pre-installations is an intrusion into private property and contract. It treats people as instruments in a policy experiment rather than ends in themselves. If consumers prefer non-Google options, they will choose them; if rivals can create superior value, competition will take its course without the state’s regulatory elbow. The moral imperative is to protect voluntary cooperative arrangements, not to corral private enterprise into obedience to centralized controllers.

In practice, this is a warning about the state’s growing appetite to micro-manage platforms that operate in a dynamic, dispersed economy. The interim, reform-by-regulation approach invites future interventions: more data coercion, more disclosure mandates, more rules about how platforms should structure their partnerships. The libertarian reply is stark: roll back antitrust enforcement that treats market outcomes as a misallocation to be corrected by decree; strengthen property rights and contract enforcement; and curb the state’s power to intervene in the minutiae of corporate strategy. Let rival firms compete, let consumers decide, and let the price signals, not judges, guide the evolution of platform markets. If monopoly power harms actual customers, address the harms directly through lawful, narrowly targeted remedies that respect property rights and the limits of what a centralized authority can know and do.