Should Big Tech Companies Be Broken Up?

“Google paid Apple $12 billion in 2021 alone to be the default search engine on every iPhone. No startup can match that. A market where incumbents can buy defaults and lock out competition is not a functioning market; it is a toll booth. Courts have now confirmed this constitutes illegal monopoly maintenance, and the remedy should match the scale of the harm.”

“When Facebook acquired Instagram in 2012 for $1 billion, internal emails showed the acquisition was explicitly motivated by eliminating a competitive threat before it could grow. The FTC's case documents a decade of buy-rather-than-compete strategy. Allowing acquisitions of nascent competitors forecloses exactly the innovation antitrust law was designed to protect.”

“Google's scale enables it to invest billions annually in AI research, undersea cable infrastructure, and global security operations that no smaller company could fund. Search, Maps, Gmail, and YouTube are better because of that integrated scale. Breakup remedies are more likely to produce weaker, less-secure products than to produce viable new competitors.”

“Traditional antitrust measures consumer harm, typically in price and quality. Google Search is free and substantially better than any alternative. Amazon's prices are lower than brick-and-mortar competitors. Applying a framework designed for 19th-century oil monopolies to free digital services requires a fundamental rewrite of antitrust doctrine — rewriting rules mid-game to reach a predetermined outcome is policy by litigation.”