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Too Big to Care: Tech Monopolies and the Antitrust Reckoning
Five companies control the infrastructure of the digital economy. Regulators on both sides of the Atlantic are finally doing something about it. Whether what they're doing is the right thing is the question worth asking.
Standard Oil controlled oil refining. US Steel controlled steel. AT&T controlled telephony. Each was eventually broken up or constrained. The difference with Big Tech is that the infrastructure they control is not a pipe or a factory. It is the marketplace itself — and dismantling the marketplace is considerably more complicated than breaking up a refinery.
Yesterday we covered algorithmic accountability — AI systems making consequential decisions about hiring, lending, and criminal justice, the documented bias in those systems, the COMPAS affair, predictive policing's self-reinforcing feedback loop, and the gap between stated regulatory principle and actual enforcement. Today we are pulling back to the level above individual algorithms and looking at the companies that build and operate them. Tech monopolies and antitrust: how Google, Apple, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft acquired the kind of market power that makes every previous conversation in this series — about data privacy, about AI, about algorithmic control — partially a conversation about them. What regulators are doing about it. And whether the tools available are adequate to the problem they are being asked to solve.
Start with the scale, because the numbers are extraordinary even by the standards of previous monopoly eras.
01 — How They Got Here
The dominance of the major tech platforms is not accidental and it is not simply the result of building better products, though they did in many cases build better products. It is the result of structural features of digital markets that make winner-take-all or winner-take-most outcomes almost inevitable in the absence of regulatory intervention.
Network effects are the primary mechanism. A platform becomes more valuable to each user as more users join it. Facebook is more useful when your friends are on it. Google Search is more accurate when more people use it, because more search data trains better results. An app store is more valuable to developers when more consumers are on the platform, and more valuable to consumers when more developers build for it. These effects create natural barriers to competition that have nothing to do with the quality of the product and everything to do with the installed base. Competing with a platform that has two billion users requires not just a better product but a reason for two billion people to switch simultaneously, which is a coordination problem of extraordinary difficulty.
The acquisition strategy compounded this. Between 2000 and 2020, the five major tech platforms made hundreds of acquisitions. Many of these were unambiguously beneficial — talent, technology, product improvements. Some were what economists call "killer acquisitions" — buying potential competitors before they could develop into threats. Facebook's acquisition of Instagram in 2012 for one billion dollars, at a time when Instagram had thirteen employees, has become the canonical example. Mark Zuckerberg's internal emails, later produced in litigation, are unusually candid about the competitive rationale. The FTC approved the acquisition. It has been regretting that decision in public for several years.
The tech giants did not become dominant by being evil. They became dominant by being good at exploiting structural features of digital markets that regulators took two decades to recognise as the competitive threats they were.
02 — The Google Verdict
In August 2024, a federal judge ruled that Google had illegally maintained a monopoly in general search and search advertising. The decision, by Judge Amit Mehta in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, found that Google's practice of paying billions of dollars annually to be the default search engine on Apple devices, Android phones, and major browsers — approximately $26 billion in 2021 alone — constituted illegal monopoly maintenance under the Sherman Antitrust Act. The ruling was the most significant antitrust decision against a technology company in the United States since the Microsoft case in 2000.
The remedies phase — determining what Google must actually do differently — has proven contentious and slow. The Department of Justice proposed remedies including forcing Google to divest Chrome and potentially Android, and to share search data with competitors. Google argued these remedies were disproportionate and would harm consumers. The outcome of the remedies process will shape the practical impact of the ruling more than the ruling itself. A finding of illegal monopoly with weak remedies leaves the market structure largely unchanged. This is the pattern in tech antitrust: years of litigation producing findings that companies can absorb without structural change.
03 — The App Store Wars
Apple's App Store control — the requirement that iOS apps be distributed exclusively through the App Store, with Apple taking a commission of fifteen to thirty percent of all transactions — has been challenged on antitrust grounds in multiple jurisdictions simultaneously, producing a patchwork of outcomes that illustrates both the complexity of platform antitrust and the limits of jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction enforcement against global platforms.
In the US, Epic Games' lawsuit against Apple produced a ruling that was a partial victory for each side. Apple was required to allow developers to include links to alternative payment methods in their apps — a narrow obligation that Apple implemented in a way that Epic and others characterised as deliberately unhelpful, charging fees that made the alternative payment option economically unattractive. The litigation continued. The European Union's Digital Markets Act, which came into force in 2024, imposed broader obligations on Apple as a "gatekeeper" platform — requiring genuine interoperability with third-party app stores and payment systems in the EU market. Apple's compliance was, by the assessment of most independent observers, technically minimal and commercially structured to preserve as much of the economic model as possible while technically satisfying the letter of the law.
This pattern — compliance that satisfies the form of regulatory requirements while preserving the economic substance they were designed to disrupt — is the dominant strategy of the major platforms in the current regulatory environment, and it is working. The Digital Markets Act is the most ambitious platform regulation in the world. Its practical impact on market structure, two years in, is modest.
04 — The EU's Approach vs the US Approach
The contrast between European and American approaches to tech regulation is one of the defining features of the current regulatory landscape, and it has significant implications for what outcomes are achievable.
The European Union has taken a structural approach — identifying specific obligations that large platforms must meet regardless of whether any specific harm can be proven. The Digital Markets Act designates companies above certain size thresholds as "gatekeepers" and imposes ex ante rules: you must allow third-party app stores, you must allow users to uninstall pre-installed apps, you must not preference your own products over competitors in search results. These obligations apply without the need to prove anticompetitive behaviour in each case. The approach is faster than litigation and more predictable for industry planning.
The United States has relied primarily on case-by-case antitrust enforcement through litigation under laws written in 1890 and 1914. This approach is slow, expensive, and constrained by legal standards that evolved in the context of industrial-era monopolies focused on price effects rather than the data accumulation and attention monopolies of platform markets. The consumer welfare standard — the dominant framework in US antitrust for several decades — asks whether a practice harms consumers, typically measured by price. Platforms that offer services free to consumers while monetising their data and attention through advertising are structurally difficult to challenge under this framework, because the consumer-facing price is zero.
The consumer welfare standard was designed for a world where monopoly power expressed itself as higher prices. Platform monopoly power expresses itself as data extraction, attention capture, and competitor exclusion. The tools designed for the first problem are awkward instruments for the second.
05 — What Breaking Them Up Actually Means
The most dramatic proposed remedy for tech monopoly power is structural separation — breaking the companies up. Separating Google Search from Google Advertising from YouTube. Separating Facebook from Instagram from WhatsApp. Separating Amazon Marketplace from Amazon Web Services from Amazon's own retail business. These are the remedies that generate the most coverage and the most industry opposition, and they deserve more rigorous analysis than they typically receive.
The case for structural separation rests on the argument that vertical integration across multiple layers of the digital economy creates conflicts of interest that cannot be adequately managed through behavioural remedies. Amazon competing with the merchants who use its marketplace while also operating the marketplace is the clearest example. The incentive to preference Amazon's own products over third-party sellers is structural, and behavioural rules prohibiting it require the kind of continuous enforcement that regulators have not demonstrated the capacity to provide.
The case against forced breakup is partly practical and partly principled. The practical argument is that the integrations that create competitive concerns also create genuine consumer benefits — the ability to move between Google products seamlessly, the investment in infrastructure that AWS enables across Amazon's businesses, the cross-platform features that Facebook's family of apps shares. Unwinding these integrations would be technically complex, potentially harmful to product quality, and contested at every stage in courts that have historically been reluctant to impose structural remedies in technology markets. The principled argument is that market dominance achieved through legitimate competition — building products people wanted to use — should not be dismantled simply because the company grew large.
Neither argument is entirely satisfying. The first understates the competitive harm from the current structure. The second overstates the legitimacy of a dominance built partly on killer acquisitions, exclusionary defaults, and self-preferencing that regulators failed to challenge in time. What is clear is that the antitrust tools currently available — litigation under century-old statutes, behavioural remedies that platforms implement minimally, fines that represent fractions of quarterly revenue — are not producing structural change at the pace the concentration of digital market power arguably requires.
Tomorrow we are turning to a topic that has been running underneath every episode of this series, because it underlies every platform, every algorithm, and every data-driven decision we have discussed: online privacy and the surveillance economy. What data is being collected about you, by whom, how it is used, what the law says about it, and whether anything you can actually do makes a meaningful difference. See you then.
Switched On is a daily technology series covering AI, social media, data privacy, and the digital forces reshaping modern life — with no corporate spin, no false comfort, and absolutely no mercy for buzzwords.
