![]() Microsoft, as many people have forgotten, actually did get prosecuted for antitrust violations in the late 1990s, in a case that stretched into the mid-2000s. (If this feels like a legal tautology, it sort of is: Who’s to know what’s a fair price if there isn’t any competition? Nevertheless, here we are.) Antitrust law comes into play only if you use your monopoly to suppress competition or to charge unfairly high prices. Think power utilities, such as Duke Energy, or the TV and internet giant Comcast. Current antitrust law allows for the possibility that you might be the sole player in your industry because you’re just that well managed and your product is just that good, or it’s just cost-prohibitive for any other company to compete with you. In fact, it’s not even illegal to be a monopoly. Read: How to fight Amazon (before you turn 29) The company is reluctantly guilty of the sin of bigness, yes, but it is benevolent, don’t you see? Reformed, even! No need to cast your pen over here! ![]() Since its own brush with antitrust regulation decades ago, Microsoft has slipped past significant scrutiny. Microsoft is the company that could truly test the Biden-era commitment to anti-bigness, and, as a lawyer friend of mine put it, define the limiting principle of new Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan’s antitrust theory. One behemoth is still swimming around relatively invisibly: Microsoft. However, like technology itself, antitrust scrutiny isn’t yet evenly distributed. Facebook, Alphabet (the parent company of Google), Amazon, and Apple are in different stages of public villainy. Taken in sum, the myriad efforts under way in Washington, D.C., raise the specter that companies may soon have to answer for their sheer size, rather than what they do with it.įew industries are more at risk from this regulatory fervor than Big Tech (the problem is right there in the moniker, after all). “Capitalism without competition,” he declared, is “exploitation.” The executive order comes as lawmakers and policy makers are proposing big changes to antitrust law and the enforcement of existing competition rules. This month, President Joe Biden signed an executive order to attempt to undo some 40 years of growth-at-all-costs economic policy, targeting various kinds of monopolies, including airlines, meatpackers, hearing-aid manufacturers, and, of course, technology firms. ![]() The problem, as the Biden administration tech-policy adviser Tim Wu might say, is the bigness. ![]()
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