Imagine this: You’ve planned your entire weekend around watching your team play. You’ve paid for YouTube TV, cleared your schedule, maybe even invited friends over.
Then, hours before kickoff, YouTube TV drops the channel — not because of technical issues but because Google is in a contract standoff with the network.
Millions of Americans now face this reality as YouTube TV threatens to pull Fox programming, potentially blocking NFL and college football games during the season’s most exciting weekends.
This isn’t just a corporate spat. It’s part of a larger problem: Google’s relentless drive to dominate every corner of the media landscape and use its power to dictate what we see, hear and even think.
Google treats contract negotiations like a weapon. In 2021, YouTube TV subscribers lost ESPN and ABC during the college bowl season. In 2023, MLB Network vanished without warning before spring training.
Now Fox is on the chopping block just as college football heats up and NFL fans gear up for marquee matchups.
While Google is playing games with your TV, its prices keep climbing. YouTube TV subscriptions are up nearly 30% since 2021 and 14% this year. Google is asking Americans to pay more for less and betting on our love of sports to make it stick.
These blackouts are just the tip of the iceberg. Google controls roughly 90% of internet search, dominates digital advertising, owns the world’s largest video platform, runs the Android operating system on billions of devices and controls the Chrome browser used by most Americans.
No company in American history has had this kind of control over information. Google doesn’t just compete; it owns, manipulates and exploits its dominance across multiple markets.
Courts are finally catching up. In August 2024, Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google maintained an illegal monopoly in search and advertising. Eight months later, Judge Leonie Brinkema found Google used anticompetitive tactics to dominate digital advertising. Both rulings called out Google’s “deliberate and illegal behavior.”
These weren’t close calls. The evidence of systematic abuse is overwhelming. Google’s dominance becomes especially dangerous when paired with its content moderation. The company has repeatedly targeted conservative voices. It banned President Trump from YouTube for more than two years during critical election periods, suspended Sens. Rand Paul and Ron Johnson for COVID-19 policy discussions, and permanently silenced prominent conservatives such as Dan Bongino.
This isn’t just corporate overreach; it’s also a threat to free speech. When one company controls the marketplace of ideas and the algorithms that decide which ideas are heard, America is at risk.
Now Google is moving this control into live sports. As it does, it negotiates with the same networks it seeks to replace. This is like letting Amazon control all package delivery while forcing every competitor to ship through Amazon warehouses. Google leverages its search monopoly to promote its own content, preinstalls YouTube TV on Android devices to crush competition and uses massive ad profits to outbid smaller companies for sports rights. Competitors must play on Google’s field, by Google’s rules and with Google as the referee.
The result? Higher prices, more blackouts, fewer choices and the slow disappearance of independent voices.
This standoff isn’t about fees. It’s about one corporation controlling what Americans watch, read and discuss. Google has quietly become our news curator, speech moderator and telecom provider, without our consent.
We never voted to make Google the gatekeeper of American information. Yet that’s exactly what has happened. Fines haven’t worked; Google treats them as the cost of doing business. With more than $350 billion in revenue last year, a few billion dollars in penalties doesn’t change anything.
Structural reform is the only solution. Google’s search, advertising, video platform and mobile OS should be separated. Competition, not regulation, is what protects consumers and preserves free speech. Sports fans shouldn’t have to choose between their favorite teams and fair pricing. Americans deserve real choice, not the illusion of choice in a Google-controlled marketplace.
Google could end this standoff by negotiating in good faith. Even if this crisis passes, the underlying problem remains: too much power concentrated in too few hands.
It’s time to break up Google before it breaks American freedom, competition and, yes, even football.
Mike Davis is the founder and president of the Article III Project.
