The End of the Giants?

For the past two decades, the rise of tech companies has been remarkable. The acronym GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft) captures this cultural fascination. However, as the trustbusters brought the fight against the Rockefeller and Carnegie monopolies at the beginning of the 20th century, the current skeptics vow to take a firmer control of these tech giants. How this fight is going to happen inspires a wide range of tactics.

Massachusetts Senator and Democratic Presidential Candidate Elizabeth Warren has been pushing an anti-trust agenda (Image: Gage Skidmore).

Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren is campaigning for rolling back previous mergers that have empowered and consolidated a handful of tech firms. Tech giants have had a strong tradition of aggressive acquisitions. Facebook acquired social media competitor Instagram in 2012 in a billion dollar deal and then the messaging platform WhatsApp in 2014. Under Warren’s plan, companies like Google/Alphabet would lose many of its prized assets, including YouTube and Waze. 

However, undoing mergers would be a vast oversimplification. The first barrier is the astronomical amount of acquisitions that tech companies have gone through. Amazon has 101 acquisitions since 1998 and Apple has as many as 20 since November 2018. The time lag and the moving values of these subsidiary companies further complicate the justification for the process of breaking up. While high-value targets like Apple’s Beats and Amazon’s Whole Foods could be the first to be on the chopping block, moving to the medium-value sections open up a large gray area. With the recent development of Warren’s platform it remains unclear how such process would proceed. One thing is clear: the giants are wary. In a leaked audio, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg dreaded the prospect of “a major lawsuit against [the American] government” but remained adamant that “[Facebook] will win the legal challenge.” 

From September, the Federal Trade Commission has opened antitrust investigation into Facebook’s conduct. While part of the probe focused on acquisitions similar to Warren’s plan, the FTC also sought to look into Facebook’s conduct at large including more oversight over the dissemination of false information and collection of privacy data. Back in July, the FTC had already placed a $5 billion fine over privacy issues. Other issues included “quality of consumer’s choice” and “price of advertising.” Yet, the FTC would also have to rely on further legal developments with the tool to further reprimand Facebook. A potential reason for Facebook’s above confidence was the murky definition for a monopoly. It is important to note that in 2017, FTC approved the Amazon and Whole Foods $13 billion dollar merger under the difficulty to define Amazon as a grocery provider. 

Independent of the legal questions, there are several economic factors suggesting breaking up tech giants would be detrimental. Startups need capital to grow, which is often provided by tech firms in the form of acquisition. Facebook’s representative Matt Perrault affirmed in July the ability of the company to “fuel innovation and bring together firms of complementary strengths.” While a separate Department of Justice probe is underway to determine this effect, there is a compelling narrative within the startup world that their best shot of development was through the acquisition of established tech firms. 

It is difficult to imagine what a post-Microsoft breakup would look like. One classical example of the past was the monumental dissolution of Standard Oil into 34 smaller companies, based primarily on geographical differences (Standard Oil of New Jersey, Standard Oil of California) and sectors (New York Transit Company, National Transit Company). This move did disintegrate the power of Standard Oil, but only for a short time. The descendants of Standard Oil included a fair share of oil giants including ExxonMobil, British Petroleum (BP) and Chevron.  

There is no guarantee that Warren can push forward with her plan, either as potential future President or as Senator. There is also no guarantee that the FTC would not face political resistance in its investigation probe. It was 29 years between Standard Oil’s first legal loss in 1882 and the Supreme Court’s decision to dissolve the company in 1911. Yet, this is not to say that the opposition is not mounting. The Monopolization Deterrence Act proposed by Senators Richard Blumenthal and Amy Klobuchar is seeking “harsher penalties [for] anticompetitive practices.” While it is hard to imagine a future without Facebook as a social media or Amazon as a product delivery service, we might be seeing the beginning of the end for the giants.