Why is there so much antitrust energy for Big Tech but not for Big Telco?

I'm 100% down for the trend toward trustbusting, and I'm very glad to see it applied to Big Tech, because, like Tom Eastman, I'm old enough to remember when the Internet wasn't a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four. I'd like to have that Internet again.

What's more, I think many of the Big Tech trustbusters are there because they understand the companies, the economic context, the promise and the peril of industrial concentration: people like Tim Wu, Elizabeth Warren, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

I think that the right wing case for busting up Big Tech is much less principled and much more parochial, driven by a desire to force the platforms to let their Nazis stay, and give far-right harassers extra leeway, while pwning the libs.

But that all said, Karl Bode raises an excellent point when he asks why there isn't the same kind of energy to break up the telcos, whose routinely deplorable behavior make them the most loathed industry in America, and whose monopolism has cost America its competitiveness.

Bode points out that Big Telco is the enemy of Big Tech, and has -- since the days of the Bell System -- sought to monopolize 100% of the profits from the use of its wires (the latest version of this being the Net Neutrality fight).

Bode sees Big Cable's hands working behind the scenes to manipulate and mainstream the debate over monopoly and Big Tech, using conservatives' distress at seeing the "free market" turn into a monopolized communications world that is increasingly hostile to them to get them to overcome their 40-year commitment to permitting monopolies (which are a godsend to the investor class, which is also the political donor class). Read the rest