The government can’t replace big tech capacities – antitrust approach fails

Hovenkamp pointed out that Big Tech companies are “highly productive,” have growth rates that are three to four times as large as the growth rates of the overall economy, do “enormous amounts of research,” and are among the largest patent-receiving entities. The paper also cited the innovation spends of firms like Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon.

“We should avoid the effort to try to break up Big Tech, because we have a very poor track record with respect to breakups,” Hovenkamp said. For instance, a breakup is an unwise antitrust remedy if it ends up transferring a monopoly to another company. “Should the remedy in the Google search case be to force Google to transfer [its] search [capabilities] to another buyer?” he asked. “Unless we can predict some other kind of pro-competitive consequence down the road, it really doesn’t make any sense to simply transfer a dominant product like a search engine and break it up.”

That aside, “there’s no good way to come up with an engineering mechanism for breaking up Google search or Facebook,” Hovenkamp continued. “The only thing any one of those remedies does is make Facebook less valuable. It will hurt users. It will hurt investors, stockholders, and employees. But it won’t do any good in terms of making that particular set of markets more competitive.”