Break ‘Em Up
Renewed conservative antitrust aimed at Big Tech can reshape society’s fraught relationship with the internet.
By Rachel Bovard, vice president for partnerships at the Conservative Policy Institute
Life has moved fast for the Big Tech companies.
Five years ago, Google and Meta were untouchable. The millions they spent annually on direct lobbying and on their non-profit advocacy networks had purchased the good will of both party establishments. To Democrats, these firms were ideological allies in the culture wars; to Republicans, they were heroes of free enterprise, competition, and innovation. Even in Washington, the tech giants basked in what Nobel Prize-winning economist John Hicks called the greatest of all monopoly profits: “a quiet life.”
Cut to today, and both firms’ lives are anything but. Twice in the last year, federal courts have sided with the Department of Justice against Google, finding the company to be an illegal monopolist in two markets: online search and digital advertising. Meta is in court now defending itself against a Federal Trade Commission lawsuit alleging antitrust violations under the Sherman Antitrust Act.
So what’s changed? As a former British prime minister was rumored to have said, “Events, dear boy.” Specifically, the political right has largely woken up to the threat of concentrated economic power, acting at scale, because that power has been systemically wielded against them.
Big Tech’s Big Bias
Powerful tech companies have suppressed conservative political views, prohibited circulation of news stories critical of the Democratic Party, shielded progressive figures from criticism while deplatforming those on the right, brazenly kneecapped conservative market rivals, and memory-holed a president of the United States.
Individually, these actions were threats to free speech. But when activist progressive dogma is paired with unprecedented economic dominance, the result is an ideologically driven market and speech cartel: a handful of powerful tech firms able to alter the flow of information, commerce, communication, and expression, ultimately changing the nature of independent thought and public discourse in a free society. In other words, distorting the marketplace of ideas is only possible if companies first control the marketplace itself.
For years, both the Left and the Right have debated legislative fixes to the maladies Big Tech products have inflicted on our culture, communications, and commerce. None of them truly address the issue, however, because so many of the complaints against Big Tech are downstream of the concentrated economic power these firms possess. Antitrust law—the legal framework for ensuring a robust and competitive marketplace—is designed to deal with this concentration. And for the first time in half a century, the Right is re-embracing its conservative tradition of antitrust enforcement.
America’s antitrust laws arose out of Republicans’ skepticism toward centralized power (indeed, the Sherman Act, the country’s foundational antitrust law, was given its name from the pro-Lincoln, anti-slavery Republican senator, John Sherman of Ohio, who championed its passage. It was a Republican President, Benjamin Harrison, who signed it.). Just like democracies can be threatened by the tyranny of an unchecked majority, generations of conservative, classical liberal, and even libertarian thinkers have understood that centralized and scaled private economic power can tyrannize capitalism.
After years of neglect, the Right is once again relying on antitrust enforcement within its proper context—law enforcement for the marketplace—a “trust, but verify” approach to corporate power that ensures all market participants are competing fairly and legally. Fundamentally, the antitrust statutes—the Sherman Act and the Clayton Antitrust Act, enacted in 1914 to bolster the former—are designed to ensure that consumers are receiving the benefits of a marketplace that functions as freely as possible.
For example, the Sherman Act prohibits price fixing between companies, corporations colluding to manipulate bidding on contracts, and agreements between firms not to sell in certain regions in exchange for a guarantee that their competitor will stay out of others, among other activities the law categorizes as “restraints of trade.” Gaining monopoly power using predatory or exclusionary tactics is also a violation of the Sherman Act.
In other words, antitrust enforcement acts as a protective mechanism for the marketplace, one that seeks to guarantee the exercise of economic liberty, which is key to the constitutional exercise of individual liberty.
Antitrust enforcement often gets conflated with government regulation. But the two are quite distinct. Antitrust polices the market under due process—specific acts of marketplace misconduct are identified, investigated, and must be proven before a judge. Individual predatory behaviors are identified and removed, which leaves the market to regulate itself.
Government regulation, by contrast, goes after entire sectors of the economy with a one-size-fits-all approach, and does so without even needing to find clear evidence of fault. Moreover, regulations are easily gamed by market incumbents to their benefit. Big business loves big government, as the saying goes, particularly the big businesses whose billion-dollar profits allow them to purchase the rules that govern them. (It’s no secret why Meta has been trying to influence regulations around Section 230, the legal immunity provided to speech platforms.)
Regulations are also a reactive solution, instead of a proactive one—they tend to follow concentration, rather than address it before it arises. Once a company becomes “too big to fail,” a single regulatory approach to the nuances of an entire industry becomes the only way to manage the problem. Shrewd antitrust enforcement on the front end, by contrast, prevents the “too big to fail” problem from arising in the first place. For conservatives in particular, who abhor the growth of the regulatory state, antitrust is a forward-looking antidote based on hard evidence.
The recent spate of Big Tech cases bears this out.
The ongoing Meta trial is not a theoretical debate about how much market power is too much. Rather, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is being asked to explain his own emails about building a “competitive moat” around the company, evidence that he may have acquired potential competitors before they could threaten Meta, and that he suffocated third-party software developers, in clear violation of federal law. The stakes for Meta couldn’t be higher. If the government is successful in proving Meta holds an illegal monopoly, the remedies could be existential for the company—a structural breakup of Meta’s empire.
Likewise, in one Google case, a judge agreed with antitrust enforcement agencies that Google’s billion dollar payments to distributors to prohibit rival search engines from competing for access to the platforms constituted illegally exclusive conduct. In the other, a separate judge found the same in Google’s distortion of the online advertising market through an illegal monopoly over ad publishing and the software system.
Both trials weighed actual company behavior and market outcomes against the letter of federal antitrust statutes—rather than models and predictions. Some on the Right might deride this as “hipster antitrust,” but to most of us, it just looks like common sense. Market incumbents seeking to use their dominance to snuff out industry upstarts and deprive consumers of competition on the merits isn’t playing fair—it’s cheating.
By taking on the tech giants, DOJ and FTC enforcers have cleared the way for the American people to rectify and reclaim our broken tech markets—to reimagine the internet and our society’s increasingly fraught relationship with it.
Reimagining the Internet
What would a re-imagined internet look like? First and foremost, perhaps “less like a casino,” as the FTC’s former Director of Consumer Protection, Samuel Levine, suggested last year—less like a place that surveils our every move while deploying sophisticated methods of covert manipulation designed to addict us or push us into risky behaviors, questionable products, and hard-to-cancel subscriptions.
But there is also the matter of ending, for good, any one company—or small clique of firms—controlling information flow, communication with family and friends, the financing of information through ads, and the nascent development of artificial intelligence. These are all distinct markets and require vibrant competition between chastened incumbents and viable upstarts on quality. To realize this future, the current incumbents’ means of monopolization must be opened up and shared with the entire tech ecosystem in a way that fosters meaningful innovation—the economic liberty required for individual liberty to flourish.
In practice, that could look a lot like what the DOJ recently proposed during the Google search remedies hearing: monopoly corporations divested of control over key distribution channels, anticompetitive behaviors like exclusionary contracts banned, and emerging technologies opened up to robust competition by eliminating monopolistic barriers to entry. In short, a re-imagined internet that’s open to all comers, where companies actively compete for consumer attention, rather than a few dominant companies manipulating and commoditizing it. That includes:
Breaking exclusive contracts
Central to the DOJ’s successful monopolization case against Google search was the multi-billion dollar exclusivity deals with device makers and browser partners that made Google their default search engine. By locking rivals out of both browsers and mobile, Google effectively barred access to a key distribution point that would have allowed their competitors to scale. The DOJ is proposing to ban Google from entering such exclusionary contracts and other self-preferencing actions, thus restoring the air supply to search rivals. This is key not only for the search market but, as a Google executive testified, in the burgeoning artificial intelligence market, where Google already has an exclusivity deal in place on Samsung devices for its Gemini AI app.
Divesting key distribution channels
The DOJ has come in guns blazing at the Google search case remedies hearing, suggesting that Google be forced to sell off its Chrome browser. Spinning off the world’s most popular search engine—one that has “fortified” Google’s monopoly—would jump start competition in the search and advertising marketplaces. The DOJ also wants to reserve the right to force Google to spin off Android, its mobile device, if the Chrome-divestment alone fails to bring new players into the market—again, to ensure that the currently sclerotic competition in search and advertising is running at full throttle.
Syndicating search results with an eye toward innovation in generative AI
Antitrust remedies are most successful when they are applied with a vision toward the future. The DOJ and FTC today should focus not on regulating what technology market might emerge, but on clearing key bottlenecks that, if released, could spark transformative innovation in the coming decades. In 1982, breaking up AT&T spawned the mobile phone market. In 2001, prohibiting Microsoft’s monopoly control of the browser market meant Microsoft could not block a new and innovative search engine called Google from reaching its users through the web.
The DOJ wants Google to license its search results to anyone who wants them, and to share data with rivals—to prevent Google from dominating the still-emerging market for generative AI. DOJ lawyers see a future where search is integrated with AI chatbots—large language models that only work if given access to a real time, constantly updated data. Licensing and sharing Google’s massive horde of search results, the government argues, would level the market’s playing field so the best chatbot can win. This would reverse the enshittifying incentives now plaguing the industry and pave the way for a new era of user-friendly innovations.
These correctives would all be prudent steps toward a market that has, for years, been suffering under the weight of a monopolized incumbent. They aren’t about punishing Google or the tech companies, per se, but rather about vigilantly enforcing competition laws and fashioning a durable remedy that fixes the harms consumers have experienced over decades.
Breaking up companies isn’t a new or novel approach. Courts adopted this remedy in the original AT&T case. Additionally, companies at times voluntarily break themselves up to reduce corporate bloat and inefficiencies. In April 2024, General Electric, once considered America’s biggest and most recognizable company, voluntarily broke itself into three companies. The result was increased shareholder value and better products and services for consumers, a win-win.
It also makes the future path toward taming the tech companies clear: divestment—breaking up the companies—and structural reforms that limit their ability to exercise scale in ways that throttle competition, such as through exclusionary contracts, snuffing out competitors, and throttling speech through sheer information dominance.
Some in Congress have already cracked this code. Sen. Mike Lee has introduced the AMERICA Act to require companies with $20 billion or more in revenue from digital advertising to divest of third-party advertising lines. Sen. Marsha Blackburn and Sen. Richard Blumenthal have previously introduced the Open App Markets Act to force competitive changes onto the two dominant app stores, owned by Apple and Google. Both these efforts are a recognition that strategic divestments and competitive re-alignments are far better solutions than either prescriptive regulations, aesthetic changes at the tech companies, or tech CEOs’ wink-and-nod promise to do better.
Even for those conservatives and civil libertarians chiefly concerned about Big Tech’s ideological censorship, divestment is the cleanest, clearest solution. It was scale, after all, that enabled Google, Meta, and others tech giants to create and run their censorship cartel. Speech concerns—like consumer protection—can be solved through competition. But only if a free market exists in the first place—a market where small companies have the ability to themselves build competitive scale and aren’t locked out of key points of competition. By ensuring a pluralistic, consumer-driven, competitive baseline, antitrust enforcement protects Americans from corporate and political mischief.
Today, there is only one way to accomplish this. Only one way to ensure the speech distortions, censorship, and hand-in-glove cooperation of the tech platforms with the government can never happen again. It’s the same way to usher in competitive dynamism and technological innovation, and put Big Tech back to work for the American people and not the other way around: break ‘em up.