Competition can fix Big Tech, but only if we don't make "bigness" a legal requirement

I'm all for making Big Tech small again and fixing the internet so that it's not just five giant websites filled with screenshots from the other four, not to mention doing something about market dominance, corporate bullying, rampant privacy invasions and so on.

But a persistent thread in the past year's efforts to "fix the internet" has been to pass out badly constructed regulations that only the very biggest companies can afford to comply with, making it that much harder to enact policies that might shrink those companies down to size, and ensuring that small companies will be forced out of business by compliance costs long before they grow big enough to challenge the big guys.

In a column I just published in The Economist, I try to show how rules about harassment, sex trafficking, copyright infringement, terrorist recruiting and stopping kids from seeing porn have backfired, making the big platforms much stronger. Unless we do something about this -- like clarifying patent, copyright and other rules to allow little companies to plug their tools into the big companies' silos to help users escape them -- the big platforms will only get bigger, stronger, and harder to topple.

As has been the case so often in the internet's brief life, humanity has entered uncharted territory. People (sort of) know how to break up a railway or an oil company and America once barely managed to break up a phone company. No one is sure how to break up a tech monopolist.