Is the tech backlash going askew?

We sympathize with the increased anxiety over the poor data hygiene practices of leading tech platforms. And we agree that legislation clarifying the duties of those who collect and use personal information is important, as is delineating enforcement responsibilities among agencies and jurisdictions. We’re concerned, however, by the passionate but incomplete argument that it’s time to jettison decades of antitrust policy that limits the government to intervening only when market concentration has, or could, cause higher prices for consumers. The vague alternative, proposed by critics on the left and right, is a return to a failed framework that boils down to, at best, a general belief that “big is bad” and, at worst, to politically-based payback for companies on the wrong side of an election. Do antitrust jihads really help consumers more than it hurts them? Probably not. The more effective regulator of digital markets has always been the happy confluence of engineering and business innovations in hardware, software and communications driving exponential improvements in speed, quality, size, energy usage and, of course, cost.

[Blair Levin is a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Larry Downes is project director at the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy.]