Monopolies are good for monopolists only

America’s first Gilded Age began in the late nineteenth century with a raft of innovations—railroads, steel production, oil extraction—but culminated in mammoth trusts run by “robber barons” like JP Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and William H.Vanderbilt. The answer then was to bust up the railroad, oil, and steel monopolies. We’re now in a second Gilded Age—ushered in by semiconductors, software and the internet—which has spawned a handful of hi-tech behemoths and a new set of barons like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and Google’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page. The answer now is the same as it was before: Bust up the monopolies. 

• Nearly 90% of all internet searches now go through Google. Facebook and Google together account for 58% of all digital ads. They’re also the first stops for many Americans seeking news (93% of Americans receive news online). Amazon is now the first stop for a third of all American consumers seeking to buy anything.
• With such size comes the power to stifle innovation. Amazon won’t let any business that sells through it to sell any item at a lower price anywhere else. 
• Google uses the world’s most widely used search engine to promote its own services and Google-generated content over those of competitors. Facebook’s purchases of WhatsApp and Instagram killed off two potential competitors.  
• Contrary to the conventional view of America as a hotbed of entrepreneurship, the rate new job-creating businesses have formed in the United States has been halved since 2004.
• Such size also confers political power to get whatever these companies and their top executives want. Amazon—the richest corporation in America—paid nothing in federal taxes last year. Meanwhile, it’s holding an auction to extort billions from states and cities eager to have its second headquarters. It also forced Seattle, it’s home headquarters, to back down on a plan to tax big corporations like itself to pay for homeless shelters for a growing population that can’t afford the sky-high rents caused in part by Amazon. 
• Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who holds the world’s speed record for falling from one of the most admired to the most reviled people on the planet, just unveiled a plan to “encrypt” personal information from all his platforms. The new plan is likely to give Facebook even more comprehensive data about everyone. If you believe it will better guard privacy, you don’t remember Zuckerberg’s last seven promises to protect privacy.
• Google forced the New America Foundation, an influential think tank it had helped fund, to fire researchers who were urging antitrust officials to take on Google. And it’s been quietly financed hundreds of university professors to write research papers justifying Google’s market dominance.
• Regulating the tech mammoths like utilities or common carriers would put government into the impossible position of policing content and overseeing new products and services. A better alternative is to break them up. That way, information would be distributed through a large number of independent channels without a centralized platform giving all content apparent legitimacy and extraordinary reach. And more startups could flourish. 
• The combined wealth of Zuckerberg ($62.3 billion,) Bezos ($131 billion,) Brin ($49.8 billion,) and Page ($50.8 billion) is larger than the combined wealth of the bottom half of the American population. 

Some of the robber barons of the first Gilded Age were generous philanthropists, as are today’s. That didn’t excuse the damage they did to America. Monopolies aren’t good for anyone except for the monopolists. In this new Gilded Age, we need to respond to them as forcefully as we did the first time around. 

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In a democracy, no one should be allowed to grow beyond the reach of competitors.