Big Tech's Digital Robber Barons: Are these firms really harming us, or are they just successful?

• Author: Klick, Jonathan

The reputed behemoths of Big Tech are gaining enemies by the second. While millions of customers happily use Amazon, Google, Facebook, and the rest of this digital Legion of Doom every day, many in the government want to save us from the dastardly predators. These companies lure you in with their same-day shipping of Clint Eastwood posters, one-click discovery of who played the dean in Animal House, and easy ways to share the results of your "What Gilligan's Island Character Are You?" quiz with your fake internet friends (middle school classmates you haven't seen in decades, your second cousin's neighbor's ex-wife, Vin Diesel, etc.), and--before you know it--Big Tech's got you in its rapacious grasp. By the time you can google Russell Johnson's Bacon number, you find yourself submitting to the monopolies' power, with nothing left to do but say, "Thank you, sir, may I have another?"

In 2019, presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren vowed, "My administration will make big, structural changes to the tech sector to promote more competition--including breaking up Amazon, Facebook, and Google." In roughly the same period, Donald Trump hinted that his administration would take a cue from Europe's regulators in pushing back against Big Tech:

Every week you see them going after Facebook and Apple and all of these companies that are, you know, great companies, but something is going on. But I will say the European Union is suing them all the time. We are going to be looking at them differently. He continued:

But we should be doing what they're doing. They think there is a monopoly. But I am not sure if they think that. They just figure this is easy money, we'll sue Apple for $7 billion and we'll make a settlement or we'll win the case. So, I think it is a bad situation. But, obviously, there is something going on in terms of monopoly. This bipartisan antipathy didn't fade with the 2020 election. In 2021, U.S. Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Josh Hawley each published books making the case for a Big Tech smackdown Teddy Roosevelt-style. A May 2021 New York Times column by Shira Ovide marveled at how similar the two senators ostensibly from different ends of the U.S. political spectrum sounded in their assessments, comparing Klobuchar's line that "The sheer number of mergers and acquisitions, outsized monopoly power and grotesque exclusionary conduct in the Big Tech sector exemplifies what is going on with the power of BIG," with Hawley's passage that "The tech barons have risen to power on the back of an ideology that blesses bigness--and concentrated power--in the economy and government."

These rhetorical punches may end up landing in the Biden administration, which has appointed Columbia Law School professor Lina Khan to head the Federal Trade Commission. Khan rose to prominence calling for a complete re-orientation of U.S. antitrust policy in a more activist direction, with Amazon as the poster child for the failure of the standard regulatory approach. In a 2017 Yale Law Journal article entitled "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox," Khan wrote:

Given Amazon's growing share of e-commerce as a whole, and the vast number of independent sellers and producers that now depend on it, applying some form of public utility regulation could make sense. Nondiscrimination principles seem especially apt, given that conflicts of interest are a primary hazard of Amazon's vertical power. One approach would apply public utility...