How much power and influence can Google buy (absolute best attorneys, call in favors...) vs the power of the US government? If the US government can't do anything, what does that mean?
It means the US people would need to - if they wanted to - pass new laws specifically to target tech company's anti-competitive behaviors because they aren't exactly the same thing as what was being done by the companies the laws originally targeted.
I'm not convinced there is broad >60% popular support for expanded antitrust laws, so you'd really have to start with that in terms of what it means.
I'm optimistic but quite jaded.
Did I miss something?
> On June 7, 2000, the District Court ordered a breakup of Microsoft as its remedy.
Then
> Ultimately, the Circuit Court overturned Jackson's holding that Microsoft should be broken up as an illegal monopoly. However, the Circuit Court did not overturn Jackson's findings of fact, and held that traditional antitrust analysis was not equipped to consider software-related practices like browser tie-ins.
Maybe its chance or maybe it really did work, but MS is not the evil monopoly it once was. Still very succesful but not a monopoly.
It appears that this is the beginning of the end of the big tech party.
I think about it differently. First, the government going after a company for being a monopoly is the goal for every company in a capitalist system. It means they won the game by cornering markets and crushing every possible competitor.
Second, breakups will grow the big tech pie and increase shareholder and employee value. How many small, but growing endeavors has a company like Google killed? How many internal projects never see the light of day because they aren't Google scale day 1? Breaking up some of the current big tech behemoths will unlock and trigger a new big tech party, it will just be spread across more different companies.