Those broadly worded statutes still hold up more than a century later, says antitrust expert Michael Salinger, Jacqueline and Arthur Bahr Professor of Markets, Public Policy, and Law. Standard Oil became 34 separate companies.

The American Tobacco Company was broken up into four different firms. As a result, Congress passed the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890, and the Clayton Antitrust Act in 1914, outlawing monopolies, cartels, and trusts-and they started picking the biggest offenders apart. But look, at the end of the day, if someone’s going to try to threaten something that existential, you go to the mat and you fight.”īut is it a good idea, or even possible, to split up these companies? We asked five Questrom School of Business professors about the questions-economic, political, and customer-related-we need to consider before rethinking our regulation of Big Tech.īack in the 1880s, many companies in the United States were growing into monopolies, using anticompetitive, oppressive business practices. “It’s like, we care about our country and want to work with our government and do good things.

“I don’t want to have a major lawsuit against our own government,” Zuckerberg says in a speech to Facebook employees. New laws could be coming too: Senators Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) introduced a bill dubbed the Monopolization Deterrence Act, which would impose harsher penalties on Big Tech companies that engage in anticompetitive practices.Īnd perhaps feeling this pressure, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in an audio clip that was leaked in early October, can be heard blasting Warren’s plan to break up Big Tech companies if she’s elected president. The government is upping its scrutiny of Big Tech, which is facing sweeping antitrust investigations by the US Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission, and Congress. Apple became the first company to cross the $1 trillion mark in market capitalization-a market cap larger than the GDP of Saudi Arabia. Google gets more than 92 percent of global search engine inquiries. Amazon accounts for nearly 40 percent of all e-commerce spending in America. Facebook has 2.4 billion active monthly users. They worry about the volume of personal data the tech giants possess and the sway these companies have over their lives.

President Trump has said that “something is going on in terms of monopoly,” and it’s “a bad situation.” Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), a presidential contender, says companies like Amazon, Facebook, and Google have too much power over our economy, society, and democracy. The calls to break up Big Tech are getting louder-and they’re coming from both sides of the political aisle.

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