Audio of this conversation is available via your favorite podcast service.Google is an illegal monopolist. That is the finding of two federal judges in landmark antitrust cases over the company’s dominance of online search and advertising technology. But when it came time to order remedies, neither judge broke up the company. To discuss what the remedies mean for competition and what they portend for the broader effort to hold big tech firms accountable to democracy, particularly in the AI era, I spoke with Barry Lynn, executive director of the Open Markets Institute, and Mihir Kshirsagar, who leads the Tech Policy Clinic at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP).What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the discussion.President Donald Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson of La., listen as Google CEO Sundar Pichai speaks to reporters at the White House in Washington, Tuesday Sept. 29, 2026, after meeting with top executives of AI firms. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)Barry Lynn:Barry Lynn, executive director of the Open Markets Institute.Mihir Kshirsagar:Mihir Kshirsagar. I'm the director of the Tech Policy Clinic at Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP).Justin Hendrix:I'm pleased to speak to the two of you today, and we're going to talk about a range of things to do with competition and antitrust and the nature of the tectonic plates of the tech environment that we live in. I was kind of thinking about what is the right metaphor for…

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