The tech giants don’t just have economies of scale: they have their network effects, their size, and their huge troves of data. These factors combine to build almost unassailable companies. Programmatic advertising has come to dominate the internet and the huge volumes of both data and eyeballs needed to make that work. Venture capital requires technology startups to go big or go home. This dynamic has conspired with other forces to accelerate the internet’s centralising effects. Take one down, and before too long something all too similar will take its place. Tackling tech giants one at a time is simply a global game of whack-a-cyber-mole. This is where we hit the issue of thinking too small: Facebook is the result – a symptom – of the fundamental nature of the internet, not its cause. Even breaking up the site on ostensibly more sensible grounds like, for example, requiring it to divest its Event-organising functions could lead users to migrate to the better services.
In such a position, most of us would likely look for a new social network that would allow us to have all of our connections in one place – rapidly rebuilding the very monopoly control Warren and Vestager seek to challenge. Splitting that core product would quickly turn out to be untenable: would you divide users by country, severing international friendships and family ties? Or at random, leaving people with odd subsets of their friendship groups? The core Facebook network, however, would remain as a multi-billion dollar company with more users than the population of any country on the planet, and billions in revenues. That’s when the question becomes: what would breaking up Facebook actually accomplish? The simplest way to break up the company would be to require it to reverse its purchases of Instagram and WhatsApp, which would at least mean several huge companies competing in both the social media and messaging spaces. In that sense, using competition as grounds to reform big tech would first require us to fundamentally rewrite competition law and then get the new definitions passed by Congress and the EU, and accepted by the courts as constitutional or compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights.
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