The Tech Giants’ Anti-regulation Fantasy
Today’s Big Five digital platforms aren’t the first tech giants to bristle at government scrutiny. Long before Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft began spending millions of dollars to fight antitrust rules and other measures that would challenge their business models, 20th-century behemoths such as AT&T and IBM were insisting that government interventions in their business would stifle innovation. In reality, one of the most important things the United States government has ever done to advance technology is regulate it. Microsoft was the beneficiary of antitrust litigation aimed at IBM, once the country’s dominant computer maker; Amazon, Google, and Facebook have flourished because a 1996 law granted them extraordinary protection from legal liability for the content they circulate; Apple is a beneficiary of a strong patent regime.
The advent of smartphones, one-click shopping, and an avalanche of digital stimuli doesn’t change the
