James Surowiecki

The Big Four—Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Alphabet—are unquestionably in the government’s crosshairs. Yet their stocks are more valuable than ever, which suggests that investors, at least, are betting that the antitrust hullaballoo won’t add up to much. Why?  One reason is that in going after Big Tech, trustbusters are going after some of the most popular companies in America. Surveys routinely find that Amazon is the most trusted company in the US, with Google and Apple not far behind in the “most admired” rankings.

Over the past four or five years, scholars, politicians, and public advocates have begun to push a new idea of what antitrust policy should be, arguing that we need to move away from a narrow focus on consumer welfare—which in practice has usually meant a focus on prices—toward consideration of a much wider range of possible harms from companies’ exercise of market power: damage to suppliers, workers, competitors, customer choice, and even the political system as a whole.