Should the federal government break up Big Tech companies?

The most effective monopoly strategy of the last fifteen years was not crushing competitors, it was buying them as toddlers. Meta paid about $1 billion for Instagram in 2012 and $19 billion for WhatsApp in 2014, snuffing out two potential rivals before either could threaten the core business. The FTC's 2020 antitrust suit argued exactly that and sought to unwind the deals, because everyone understood what had happened except, apparently, the regulators who approved the mergers at the time. This is why breakups have to be on the table: once a giant has absorbed its future competition, no amount of conduct rules recreates the rival that was never allowed to grow up. You cannot regulate your way back to a competitor that was purchased in its crib. Structural separation is the only remedy that matches the structural crime. FTC

I run a small subscription app with four employees. Apple takes 30 percent of every dollar my customers pay, then sells its own competing service with no such tax. That is not a marketplace, it is a toll booth with a conflict of interest. The Justice Department's 2024 lawsuit argues Apple illegally maintains its smartphone monopoly in part by degrading rival apps and accessories, and the EU's Digital Markets Act has already forced Apple to allow alternative app stores in Europe. Developers there are shipping updates Apple would never have permitted. If a 30 percent cut enforced by a single gatekeeper is not monopoly rent, the word has no meaning. Break up the gatekeepers and the toll booths fall with them.

I worked at a local newspaper that watched its ad revenue get vacuumed up by two companies. Google sits on both sides of the ad auction, running the exchange, the buying tools, and the selling tools, and taking a cut at every step. In April 2025 a federal judge ruled Google illegally monopolized online advertising technology, agreeing with the Justice Department's ad-tech case. Studies of programmatic advertising have found publishers keep barely half of each ad dollar while intermediaries take the rest. A free press cannot survive when the company grading the auction is also bidding in it. Splitting Google's ad business from its exchange would not kill digital advertising. It would return it to something resembling a market.

Everyone frames this as a consumer issue, but ask the workers. In 2010 the Justice Department caught Apple, Google, Adobe, Intel, and others in no-poach agreements that suppressed engineers' wages across Silicon Valley, and the companies eventually paid $415 million to settle. That is what concentrated power does when nobody is watching: it does not just raise prices, it holds down paychecks. Consumers get free search while the people building the products get a rigged labor market, and no individual engineer can bargain against a cartel of the world's richest companies. Breaking up concentrated employers restores the one thing workers cannot create for themselves: competing bidders for their labor. Antitrust was written for exactly this, and the workers deserve the protection as much as the shoppers. DOJ

I lived through the AT&T breakup in 1984, and the fear campaign was identical: prices will rise, service will collapse, innovation will die. What actually happened was long-distance rates fell by roughly 40 percent over the next decade and a wave of competition produced the modern telecom market. Today Google controls about 90 percent of search and paid $26.3 billion in 2021 alone to stay the default on iPhones, a fact that came out in the Justice Department's trial. When one company can buy the front door to the internet, that is not competition. The 2020 House Judiciary report found all four giants enjoy monopoly power after a 16-month investigation. Breakups are the American remedy for exactly this situation, and they have worked before.

People forget the last big breakup took over a decade of litigation and the company it targeted, IBM, was already losing its grip by the time the case ended. The Justice Department's IBM case ran 13 years and was dropped in 1982 as without merit, after burning enormous public and private resources. Big Tech markets move far faster than courts. By the time a breakup order survives appeal, the market may have reorganized itself: search is already being disrupted by AI assistants, and TikTok came from nowhere to challenge Meta. A breakup designed for 2020's market could land in 2030 like a museum piece. Faster tools exist. Ban the specific conduct, like default-placement payments and self-preferencing, and enforce it quickly. Structural surgery on a patient that is already changing shape is a gamble with the whole digital economy. The DOJ case against IBM is a cautionary tale in how slowly these cases move: Stanford.

As a software engineer, I can tell you the integration people love is exactly what breakup proposals would destroy. Google Maps works inside search, Gmail, and Calendar because one company builds all of them. The Justice Department wants to force Google to sell Chrome, but Chrome's open-source foundation underpins most rival browsers too, including Edge and Brave. Break that apart and you do not get five healthy competitors. You get licensing fights, broken features, and a worse product for the two billion people who use it. The 2020 House report documented real harms, but structural breakup is the bluntest possible tool. Targeted rules on self-preferencing would fix the abuse without dynamiting products that work.

While Washington debates breaking up Google and Meta, Beijing is pouring state money into AI, chips, and quantum computing. America's tech giants are among the few Western companies with the scale to compete with subsidized Chinese champions. Splitting them into smaller pieces would not create competition with China; it would create five smaller companies that each lose to one giant one. Antitrust law exists to protect consumers, and consumers currently get search, maps, video hosting, and social networking for free. Prices have not risen; they are zero. The Pew Research Center has found Americans are divided on whether tech companies need more regulation, not clamoring for breakups. There are real abuses to police, but weakening our own champions during a technology race is self-sabotage dressed up as reform.