100-Year-Old Antitrust Laws Are No Match for Big Tech
After CEOs at Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google survived their day in Washington as dominant as ever, it’s clear current antitrust rules aren’t sufficient.
Regulators need a better set of rules to more effectively chaperone the tech giants and their treasure trove of data.
Photographer: Krisztian Bocsi/BloombergWhen U.S. antitrust laws were first written more than a hundred years ago, the word “data” had a slightly different meaning, referring mainly to facts and manually-compiled information. You didn’t hear it much in everyday language, and it certainly wasn’t associated with trust-busting. In the digital world of today, it’s come to mean the measurable tidbits and inputs that add up to make every program and app — and thus much of the world’s economy — function. And the fact that it isn’t anywhere to be found in antitrust rules is a big problem.
To have data is to have power, and collecting it is the lifeblood of four of the most valuable companies in America: Facebook Inc., Google, Amazon.com Inc. and Apple Inc. Together, they are worth more than $5 trillion by market cap. That’s like adding up the market values of Walmart Inc., Johnson & Johnson, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Procter & Gamble Co., Pfizer Inc., Coca-Cola Co., Exxon Mobil Corp., Nike Inc., McDonald’s Corp. and Walt Disney Co. — and then multiplying that sum by two. Calling it “Big Tech” doesn’t even do it justice.