It’s easy to miss it amid the nonstop avalanche of news, but we are on the cusp of a technology revolution — one that could usher in an entirely new information landscape.
After 30 years of shockingly few regulatory restraints, America’s tech giants were beginning to operate almost like wrecking balls, slamming their weight into industry after industry and taking them out one after another. Boom. Uber crushed the taxi limousine business. Boom. Facebook toppled the news business. Boom. Amazon wiped out numerous small retailers.
Finally, our courts are beginning to push back.
In the past two months, courts have forced Apple to end its usurious tax on purchases made through apps on its phones, ruled that Google had abused its online ad monopoly and considered what consequences to impose on Google for what they concluded was an illegal dominance of the search market. A court has heard arguments about why Meta, which runs Facebook, should be forced to spin off popular rivals Instagram and WhatsApp, and allowed a case to proceed that alleges Amazon has abused its monopoly.
Reining in Big Tech appears to be one of the few bipartisan policies that has spanned the Biden and Trump administrations, despite the tech titans’ attempts to curry favor with the new president. Taken together, these developments could end years of stagnation and usher in more competition, smaller companies and better services. I personally can’t wait for competition in the search market — as Google results have been getting worse, by many estimates, including my own.
I’m tired of sifting through Google’s increasingly cluttered and irrelevant search results, searching in vain for the latest news and instead finding only Reddit posts. I want a search engine for shopping that trawls the web for the best merchandise rather than just pulling from the sites that list items with Google. I want a search engine that doesn’t allow ads to masquerade as reviews. I want a search engine that lets me control the amount of artificial intelligence summaries in my results. And there are probably even cooler search products that a new generation of search entrepreneurs will dream up.
Google argues that A.I. search engines like Perplexity are already providing competition in the market. That is a mirage. As the judge in the Google antitrust case has described, none of Google’s rivals can compete with it, given how much Google knows about what websites users click and stay on versus those they click and bounce from.
That data is the special sauce that prevents rivals from cracking open the search market. A senior OpenAI employee, Nick Turley, testified in court that if it obtains access to Google’s special sauce, it would still take at least five years for Open AI’s ChatGPT product to compete with Google search.
Consider the search engine Bing. Despite investing around $100 billion in Bing, Microsoft failed to make a dent in Google’s market share, in part because it would have taken Bing 17 years to collect the same amount of user data about website quality that Google collects in 13 months. In other words, unless the judge opens up Google’s data to competitors, true competition in search will not arrive.
Change is already coming to Apple. Since a judge ruled that Apple’s 30 percent commission on in-app purchases is illegal, iPhone owners have been able to buy books directly within the Kindle app and can download Fortnite again. Proton, a privacy app, announced it would charge its customers up to 30 percent less because of the ruling.
Even more beneficial changes are likely in store as more court rulings come down. Another antitrust case alleges that close to 50 percent of the price of many goods sold on Amazon is made up of fees sellers must pay to the company to rank higher in its search results. That’s why so many of the top results are not the cheapest or best products, but rather the products that Amazon makes the most money from.
If the case against Amazon prevails, we could live in a world where we can actually find the products we want — and for lower prices.
Or consider Facebook, which is in court on allegations that it bought Instagram and WhatsApp to crush competition. If the court forces Instagram and WhatsApp to be spun off as separate companies, we could suddenly have three distinct social media platforms with different algorithms that compete with one another to provide the best experience — rather than one monolithic experience run by a guy who says he no longer believes in fact-checking.
It’s worth remembering that antitrust rulings are necessary but not sufficient to increase competition. Think of the 1984 landmark breakup of AT&T, which prompted all sorts of great innovations, from the popularization of portable radios to lower-priced long-distance calls, but didn’t last. Twenty years later, the Baby Bells largely recombined, leaving us with the current duopoly of AT&T and Verizon. Their dominance in the market has kept American cellphone service and broadband internet both more expensive and worse than our European peers.
Lawmakers must regulate companies to ensure they aren’t abusing their power. The telecom duopoly is an abject lesson: These two companies are among the top spenders on Washington lobbying while their customer satisfaction plummets. And the official tallies don’t count all the soft dollars telecoms spend buttering up D.C. staffers and hosting galas. I remember being a reporter in D.C. when AT&T started “Operation Cupcake” — delivering 1,500 cupcakes to the Federal Communications Commission building on a single day — in a bid to get its merger with T-Mobile approved. (It didn’t work; AT&T was forced to abandon the merger under antitrust scrutiny from the Obama administration.)
Of course, attempted cupcake corruption pales in comparison with the climate of graft currently underway in our nation’s capital. President Trump has been clear that he is willing to accept gifts from those seeking political favors in ways that shatter previous norms. Mr. Trump hasn’t publicly interfered in these lawsuits, but that could change.
A technology landscape we deserve is finally within reach. But it won’t happen if we don’t demand it.
Source images by Anthony Redpath and C.J. Burton/Getty Images
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Julia Angwin, a contributing Opinion writer and the founder of Proof News, writes about tech policy. You can follow her on Bluesky, Twitter or Mastodon or her personal newsletter.
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