Settlements and consent decrees are not the worst thing in the world. IBM was never prosecuted but the fear induced by the 1970s antitrust investigation likely

Settlements and consent decrees are not the worst thing in the world. IBM was never prosecuted but the fear induced by the 1970s antitrust investigation likely caused the series of missteps IBM made in the 1980s that allowed the personal computer industry to bloom (if there was no antitrust investigation, IBM would likely have written an operating system for PCs in–house, not call on Gary Kildall or Bill Gates). Big question mark in my mind is if there’s hard evidence that Google employees required customers of one service (say, Cloud) to utilize another Google service (ads, G Suite/Workplace, etc.) in order to get a discount or some other preference. That's a slam dunk. My suspicion is that there'll be a lot of activities that hew extremely closely to that line without crossing it.