Ultimately, prices are not determined by costs, and that applies to the labor market, as well.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
It seems to me that if antitrust action were taken that really eats into FAANG profits, that industry pay would decline. Not overnight of course, but gradually in real terms. May still rise in nominal terms.
Startups/companies have been forced to raise wages over time to compete with FAANG.
It's this. Apple and Google control the entire mobile software market. They tax it excessively, to the point that they get a 15% to 30% cut of almost every mobile app transaction, and have for decades. If a business can't afford to give up 15% to 30% of their total revenue, forever, then they're effectively prevented from bringing their mobile apps to market. Apple and Google also effectively decide what apps are distributed to the vast majority of Americans, as their app stores are responsible for 99% of all mobile app downloads[1].
It's insane that a duopoly has been allowed to heavily tax and stifle innovation over entire markets in the mobile space for more than a decade now. The entire mobile app, operating systems and payments markets are dominated by two companies, and they're doing everything in their power to remain dominant, at the expense of consumers and healthy, efficient markets.
But a lot of comp in tech is benchmarked against FAANG. Specifically if you are a startup trying to hire top 80th-90th percentile people. If their pay fell, I'm pretty confident the top end of industry pay would as well, despite more competition/productivity. Median pay likely unaffected.
Even when you consider the low marginal cost to produce SaaS and similar, the same is true of any competitor. So you'd expect a highly competitive cloud (e.g.) landscape to be low margin despite low cost to provide.
Looking specifically at Azure, AWS, Google Cloud... They become somewhat of a local monopoly over their customers due to costs of switching. The higher barrier/cost to switching to a competitor, the greater pricing power the company has. Even considering that the first choice has a lot of competition.
Anyway, long story short, I think regulation that enables low cost of switching is inevitable in the longer run. As this provides the most competitive landscape, this highest net benefit to society. Would need to be crafted intelligently though.