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Live debate for the event "Should Big Tech Companies Be Broken Up?" on superdebate.org.
Network effects create winner-take-all dynamics that do not self-correct. The network that everyone is on is more valuable to each user than a better-quality network with fewer members. Antitrust intervention is the only known mechanism that can break a network-effect monopoly, and the US has used it successfully before with AT&T and Standard Oil.
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.
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.
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.
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.
US tech companies are in direct competition with Chinese firms that are state-subsidized, face no antitrust constraint, and are building global digital infrastructure across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Breaking up American technology companies in this geopolitical environment is unilateral disarmament. The strategic cost of fragmentation is real and measurable.
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