It’s try or die for trustbusting – failure to block consolidation makes it irreversible

Richard, The Week UK, Is Big Tech getting too big?: The EU is pursuing anti-competition claims against both Microsoft and Apple,” June 26, 2024 https://theweek.com/tech/is-big-tech-getting-too-big

Microsoft has also come under scrutiny from the Federal Trade Commission in the US for its "dealings" with startup Inflection AI, which may also contravene antitrust laws, said Mark Lemley and Matt Wansley in The New York Times. Microsoft has "defended" its deal, but it has raised questions about whether the Big Tech firms are now too big to allow new companies to flourish, forgetting that "it is competition – not consolidation – that delivers technological progress". Indeed, the Big Tech firms were "once small start-ups themselves", added Lemley and Wansley, but they are now "old", and instead of "innovating", they have "learned to stop the cycle of disruption". They do this by investing in start-ups, giving them "intelligence about competitive threats and the ability to influence the start-ups’ direction". While there have been "competition issues in the Big Tech sector", agreed Andrew Lilico in The Telegraph, the Big Tech firms have been an "important driver of recent US economic growth" and overreaching with regulation could "kill the golden goose". Specific cases of anti-competitive behaviour should be investigated, he argued, but it is wrong to assume Big Tech firms are "automatically monopolists by their nature". What next? The focus for all the Big Tech firms is generative AI, which will undoubtedly be the "big technological upheaval" of the near future, said The Economist. But regulators need to strike a delicate balance when monitoring the firms' interests in AI, and a "light touch" may be necessary. However, Big Tech would surely "use their imperial might to try to bend it to their advantage" if they were left "to their own devices", so regulators must "move fast" and act on their "duty" to "prevent them quashing competition".