Commentary: This call to break up Big Tech is rather misguided

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Silicon Valley’s value is to be celebrated, but we shouldn’t turn a blind eye to its problems, says an observer.

The chief executives of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google

And the US government has done likewise, blacklisting some Chinese outfits over perceived national security threats while discouraging others. The other suggests that regulators should look at the underlying structure of the market and potential for powerful players to exploit their positions.Those two sides seem to agree that price plays a key role. People who argue against breaking up the tech giants point out that Facebook and Google provide services that are free to the consumer, and that Amazon’s marketplace power drives its products’ costs down.

There aren’t just two ways for this debate to end, with either a breakup of one or more technology giants or simply leaving things as they are for the market to develop further. In the 1956 federal consent decree against the Bell System telephone company, for example, which settled a seven-year legal saga, the company wasn’t split up. Instead, Bell was required to license all its patents royalty-free to other businesses.

Two decades later, Microsoft was itself the target of an antitrust action. In the resulting settlement, Microsoft agreed to ensure its products were compatible with competitors’ software. That made room in the emerging internet marketplace for web browsers, the predecessors of Apple’s Safari, Mozilla’s Firefox and Google Chrome.EU Commissioner for Competition Margrethe Vestager holds a news conference at the European Commission in Brussels, Belgium July 16, 2020.

 

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