The pandemic could make the economic power of Facebook, Google, and Amazon more visible, making them an even bigger target for antitrust hawks in Washington, DC
and their risks of an antitrust collision with Washington https://www.politico.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Politico's warning lands midway through an arc that has been building for years: Google, Facebook, and Amazon were flagged as being on a collision course with political power back in 2017, and House lawmakers formalized the threat with a sweeping antitrust investigation in June 2019. What changed by May 2020 is the pandemic itself — as the Washington Post reported a week earlier, COVID-19 is decimating the broader economy while giving the tech giants a rare opening to expand power and political fortunes.
First-order effects
- Facebook, Google, and Amazon gain users, ad dollars, and dependence as locked-down consumers and businesses shift online, making their dominance more visible to the House investigators already probing their conduct.
- The downturn weakens the startups and rivals that would ordinarily contest that dominance, so consolidation accelerates precisely while the antitrust investigation is gathering evidence.
Second-order effects
- The hypothetical case structures sketched in 2018 coverage of potential suits against Google, Amazon, Uber, and Facebook become the working templates for enforcers, since the pandemic hands them fresh market-share evidence.
- The giants' improved political fortunes cut both ways: expanded pandemic-era power gives Washington hawks a stronger public-interest narrative, forcing the companies to spend more on lobbying and defensive positioning.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — crisis-driven concentration followed by political backlash — the US moves toward a durable, bipartisan antitrust posture against Big Tech, as later legal analyses of the cases against Google, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook suggest the eventual suits are real but not slam dunks.
The trend: Economic crises are accelerating platform concentration faster than regulators can respond, turning each downturn into a catalyst for the next round of antitrust confrontation.