Should big technology companies break up or break open?

There can be little doubt that the major digital companies have gained a level of economic control akin to the industrial barons of the Gilded Age. It is important to take steps to introduce much needed competition into the digital marketplace. Clearly, a more active review of mergers is necessary, even when the acquired company is comparatively small. However, the other prong of antitrust policy, the physical breakup of dominant companies, may not be the only path to competition in a world where the tools of dominance are virtual rather than physical. Breaking up the digital companies into smaller clones may reduce their size, but each new company will still possess the virtual assets that enabled their parents’ anticompetitive activities in the first place: the databases full of information about you and I. Break open that hoard of digital information, make it available to innovators and competitors, and the marketplace can function. Requiring competitive interconnection to databases would have the effect of an “internal break up” by going after the source of its market control.

[Tom Wheeler served as the 31st Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission from 2013-2017]