The Real Problem with Big Tech: Lack of Competition

This was the year when Big Tech companies were humbled, their reputations tarnished, and their share prices clobbered by a tidal wave of political outrage over misinformation, censorship, and data abuse. This public flogging may go too far. The risk grows of interventions that sound satisfying but don’t fix, and in fact may worsen, the underlying problem in this arena: an absence of competition. If there is a case for government intervention, then, this is it: more muscular antitrust oversight. Antitrust has risks of its own: denying companies synergies they might achieve if free to acquire or exclude competitors. Nor are trust busters free of their own political agendas. Yet these risks seem much less consequential than those that come from regulating content or privacy, and worth taking for the sake of more competition, the most effective antidote to monopolists’ abuses.