Bill Gates: if we break up Big Tech, we'll just have more bad companies

In an interview with Bloomberg, Bill Gates dismissed the idea of breakups as a remedy for Big Tech's monopolistic market concentration; Gates said that breaking up an abusive company will just produce more abusive companies. Instead, Gates believes that specific monopolistic activities should be banned.

Gates has some company in this position: For example EU competition commission Margrethe Vestager (recently blessed with a surprise reappointment) says that attempts to break up Facebook will turn into protracted litigation boondoggles, and instead, she just wants to go on extracting massive fines from tech companies that misbehave (though these fines are also the subject of high-stake litigation).

But it's not just Vestager and Gates: Mark Zuckerberg wants to see regulation for Facebook. He says that clear rules will help him steer his company without daily, ghastly scandals.

The problem with this model is that expensive, difficult-to-implement compliance rules are tantamount to permanent licenses to dominate the internet: if you have to be a giant to afford to comply with the law, then we'll only get giants.

The other problem is that giants who extract monopoly profits from their suppliers and customers have plenty of money left over to lobby governments to let them get away with progressively worse behavior (which improves their profitability, leaving more money to lobby with, lather, rinse, repeat). This is why the first trustbusters focused on breaking up the giant companies (which were run by executives who were no less wicked than Big Tech's supposedly benevolent dictators): they didn't just want to have fairer, more competitive markets, they wanted to hamstring the industries' ability to corrupt democratic governance. Read the rest