The unprecedented power of technology companies is prompting calls for the rethinking of decades-old US antitrust laws focusing on consumer protection
TECHNOLOGY COMPANIES WITH unprecedented power to sway consumers and move markets have done the unthinkable: They've made trust-busting sound like a good idea again. Tweets: @gerrymcgovern , @jaberman , and @dk_munro Tweets: Gerry McGovern / @gerrymcgovern : 90 percent of new online-ad dollars went to either Google or Facebook in 2016 http://www.wired.com/... Jonathan Aberman / @jaberman : The discovery that tech is dominated by monopolies is not news. But the issue is 30 years of legal precedent and conservative judges. You can't just change some regulations or enforce what rules exist. http://www.wired.com/... Daniel Munro / @dk_munro : “Tech companies with unprecedented power to sway consumers and move markets have done the unthinkable: They've made trust-busting sound like a good idea again.” http://www.wired.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This January 2018 piece captures the moment trust-busting stopped being a dirty word in tech commentary. The arithmetic behind the mood shift was stark — Gerry McGovern's cited stat that 90 percent of new online-ad dollars went to Google or Facebook in 2016 gave the concentration argument a number, and Jonathan Aberman framed the real obstacle: not awareness of monopoly power, but three decades of legal precedent and conservative judges that no regulatory tweak can override.
The arc since then validates the premise while testing Aberman's thesis. Weeks after this piece ran, the Foundem case against Google attacked the self-correcting-market assumption underlying consumer-welfare antitrust. By 2020 the four giants faced formal legal risk analyses suggesting the cases would be hard-fought, and in mid-2021 the FTC's Facebook suit was dismissed — precisely the precedent-and-judges problem Aberman predicted — which commentators read as fuel for legislative strengthening instead.
First-order effects
- Google and Facebook sit at the center of the renewed scrutiny, with their 2016 capture of 90% of new online-ad dollars serving as the anchor evidence for monopoly claims.
- Aberman's diagnosis puts enforcement agencies in a bind: existing rules interpreted under 30 years of precedent cannot simply be enforced harder, shifting the burden toward lawmakers.
Second-order effects
- Court setbacks like the FTC's dismissed Facebook suit push reformers toward Congress and legislation rather than litigation, changing where the fight over platform power is fought.
- Global regulators moved faster than Washington — by 2021 governments worldwide were limiting big tech's power with an urgency and breadth described as unmatched for any single industry, raising pressure on US lawmakers to act.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, US antitrust law gets rewritten away from pure consumer-protection framing toward structural and exclusionary-conduct standards — the shift Foundem's case and the 2021 dismissals both argue for.
- The alternative lever is already visible: even under old laws, existing statutes plus the threat of regulation forced Apple and Microsoft into right-to-repair concessions, hinting at an era where platforms open up through pressure rather than formal antitrust victories.
The trend: Big tech concentration is driving antitrust from a consumer-welfare framework judged by courts toward legislative and global regulatory action, because decades-old law and its interpreters are the bottleneck.