Axios

Today's tech giants achieved success and scale by promoting their openness, but the industry's open doors are shutting, one by one. Today's dominant tech platforms are privately owned and governed, and their owners will readily adjust the "openness" dial to suit their needs — booting users perceived to be undesirable, blocking competitors, and locking down key data structures (like Facebook's "social graph") to prevent users from choosing alternatives.

President Trump's tweets don't pack the punch they did at the outset of his presidency. His Twitter interaction rate — a measure of the impact given how much he tweets and how many people follow him — has tumbled precipitously. It's a sign that his strongest communication tool may be losing its effectiveness and that the novelty has worn off. 

Despite a host of concessions offered by Sprint and T-Mobile that won over Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai, the fate of the deal hinges on the competition questions that reportedly continue to dog the deal at the Department of Justice. At the DOJ, deals are approved if they won't hurt competition, which is usually determined by potential impact on consumer prices. Discord between the FCC and DOJ is unusual, as the agencies usually collaborate and share information during merger reviews.

President Donald Trump has a penchant for ganging up on the "mainstream media," but lately his attacks have spread to ganging up on any information gatekeeper — from Big Tech platforms to newscasters on his favorite network. His ire lately has turned toward Sunday political shows, specifically. Last weekend he tweeted multiple times about the "Fake News Sunday Political Shows," even calling out Fox's own Chris Wallace for interviewing Mayor Pete Buttigieg.

As calls mount to break up big tech companies or limit their power, their legal fate will hang on how judges and regulators define their markets. "The social networking category" is a way to define this market that most readily casts Facebook as a monopoly. But if you call it "messaging," then Apple, Snapchat, and the cellphone providers all look like hearty competitors. Similarly, in many countries, Google looks to have a monopoly in the search market.