Sessions Caves to Trump on Amazon and Facebook

On Tuesday morning, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions convened a gathering of high-level officials to discuss “a growing concern” that certain companies “may be hurting competition and intentionally stifling the free exchange of ideas on their platforms,” as he put it earlier this month. According to BuzzFeed, the officials included nine state attorneys general, legal representatives from five other states, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, Acting Associate Attorney General Jesse Panuccio, and Makan Delrahim, who heads the Justice Department’s antitrust division. What companies were they discussing? As if you couldn’t guess: Facebook Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and Google parent Alphabet Inc.

I take a backseat to no one in my belief that the monopolistic tactics of Big Tech need to be curbed. Back when Microsoft Corp. was at the height of its power, entrepreneurs couldn’t get access to capital if there was a chance that their company’s features could be copied by the software giant. That practice changed only after the federal government put Microsoft on trial for violating the nation’s antitrust laws.