Google's 'Anti-What' Case Lacks a Teddy Roosevelt
On the surface, the antitrust debate over Big Tech sounds like America 120 years ago — but this time, no one seems to care.
Theodore Roosevelt makes his point to journalists.
Source: PhotoQuest/Getty Images
It’s as though the American debate has gone back 120 years. Not only are we discussing tariffs, beloved of President William McKinley, but now antitrust, associated with his successor Theodore Roosevelt, is at the top of the agenda. When Roosevelt set about dismantling the huge conglomerates that had been pieced together by J.P. Morgan, he described them as “creatures of the State,” which had not only the right but was “duty bound to control them wherever the need of such control is shown.” No politician is talking in such fiery terms now, but these ideas are back on the table.
The proposal is to break up Alphabet Inc., which controls Google. There’s an argument to be made for this, as well as the other dominant internet platforms — notably Amazon.com Inc., Apple Inc., Meta Platforms Inc. and Microsoft Corp., all of which could fairly be claimed to be monopolies in one way or another.
One of the strongest arguments against the Magnificent Seven has long been that they’re so dominant that they invite the inevitable state intervention to split them up. So it’s interesting to see how this week’s news has played out in markets. Alphabet shares have suffered, but not so severely, and they haven’t stopped the S&P 500 from hitting a new all-time high. This is how trading in Alphabet and the S&P has moved this week so far:
The Magnificent Seven as a whole have been trimmed back since their peak earlier in the summer, but the pandemic-era trend of extreme outperformance of the rest of the market remains firmly intact. This shows how the ratio of Bloomberg’s Mag 7 index to the other 493 largest-cap US stocks has moved since the beginning of 2000: