Trending on Billboard Back in May 2024, when then-Attorney General Merrick Garland announced that the U.S. Department of Justice had filed a sweeping antitrust lawsuit against Live Nation, he didn’t exactly mince words: “It is time to break it up.”  And now two years later, after a coalition of states decisively won that case , they’re asking the judge for exactly what Garland promised: A court order forcing Live Nation to sell Ticketmaster. They say it’s the only way to end the company’s harmful monopoly over live music.  Related But such a ruling would be extraordinary, in the truest sense of the word. Breakup orders (known as “structural remedies” in antitrust law parlance) on the scale of Live Nation and Ticketmaster have been granted only a few times over the last century. Experts tell Billboard they can be effective, but that judges view them as a drastic, last-ditch option.  “There’s often been anxiety on the part of judges about restructuring industries,” says William E.…