Breaking Up Big Tech Is Hard to Do
Innovation depends on large companies’ teams and shared technologies.
‘I would like Google to be broken up into eight or 10 different monopolies,” declared tech investor Roger McNamee earlier this year. Machine-learning pioneer Yoshua Bengio called Big Tech’s size and power “dangerous for democracy.” Jonathan Taplin, former director of USC’s Annenberg Innovation Lab, has called for government antitrust action. These are not dissident voices, but members of a growing chorus.
They are united in the belief that the large market shares of a few tech companies stifle competition, harming consumers...