The Boston Globe on breaking up Big Tech falls into the trap of tech exceptionalism

The Boston Globe has published a giant weekend package of responses to Elizabeth Warren's proposal to break up the Big Tech monopolies.

I'm absolutely in favor of this proposal, but I'm concerned that the proponents for it have fallen into the trap of tech exceptionalism, the idea that tech is either intrinsically monopolistic (something you hear from Big Tech itself, as they insist that "network effects" and similar excuses mean that they are helpless to avoid monopolies), or more dangerous (see the rhetoric about how "algorithms" can produce influence campaigns that turn decent people into anti-vaxxers, Trump supporters or murderous jihadis), or both.

I think both of these are vastly overstated and that you don't need to believe in them to support the case for breaking up Big Tech. Big Tech is monopolistic because it grew up without any meaningful antitrust enforcement -- because the Apple ][+ and Reaganomics were born in the same 12-month period, because a generation of tech lawyers learned from the FTC's tame response to Microsoft that it was fair game, and because the investors who choose the boards of these companies are great fans of monopolies in every industry they back, not just tech.

And as to tech's ability to distort our thinking, the idea that this is due to some kind of machine-learning secret sauce is something that Big Tech itself promotes ("Buy our ad-tech and we'll sell your stuff to people who wouldn't buy it otherwise"), but I don't know why we'd conclude that these companies lie about everything except their sales literature. Read the rest