Big Tech stops other companies from competing

The argument

Rather than competing fairly with other firms on the basis of product quality, the Big Tech companies have used specific tactics to ensure that they remain dominant. These anticompetitive practices violate antitrust laws and have only been permitted due to weak enforcement of antitrust laws. The 2020 presidential campaign of Elizabeth Warren identified two major strategies employed by Amazon, Facebook, and Google to limit competition: mergers and the creation of proprietary marketplaces. Mergers limit competition by consolidating market power under the umbrellas of the Big Tech companies whenever disruptive competitors appear. Facebook's purchases of Instagram and WhatsApp and Google's purchases of Waze and DoubleClick are examples of the merger strategy. In each case, instead of trying to compete with the product offerings of the smaller companies, Facebook and Google simply bought them out and integrated their services into their own platforms before the smaller companies could attain sufficient scale to threaten Big Tech's dominant position. Proprietary marketplaces allow Big Tech to undermine smaller businesses by compelling those businesses to compete in a marketplace where Big Tech has unfair advantages. Amazon opened an online retail marketplace on which other companies could sell goods, positioning Amazon's marketplace service as the avenue through which many different businesses could compete, but then used the data provided by their marketplace to promote Amazon-branded or endorsed products on that same market. By acting both as the operator of the marketplace and as the favored competitor in the marketplace, Big Tech prevents true competition.

Premises

Counter-arguments

The practices described are conduct, and conduct has conduct remedies — which is what the position needs to rule out and does not. Self-preferencing in a marketplace and the use of third-party seller data can be addressed by data-separation requirements, non-discrimination rules and interoperability mandates, of the kind imposed on designated gatekeepers under the EU's Digital Markets Act without ordering any divestiture. If the harm is a behaviour, the remedy matched to it is a prohibition on the behaviour, and structural separation has to be justified by something a prohibition cannot fix. The merger examples are also contested. Instagram had a small user base and no revenue when it was bought, and WhatsApp was one messaging application in a crowded field; whether either would have grown into a genuine rival absent acquisition is a counterfactual, and the neutralisation case is stronger for some transactions than others. Acquisition is additionally the principal exit route for venture-funded startups, so restricting it changes the incentives to found companies at all — a cost the argument does not weigh. The claim that these practices "violate antitrust laws" is finally a legal conclusion rather than a premise: courts have accepted versions of it in some cases and rejected them in others, particularly where plaintiffs could not establish consumer harm under prevailing standards, and the authority cited here is a campaign platform rather than an adjudicated finding. Separation carries its own risks too, since unbundling integrated services can degrade products users value and remove the cross-subsidy that keeps some of them free.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Self-preferencing and the use of marketplace data are conduct, and conduct remedies address them directly — data separation, non-discrimination and interoperability rules imposed without divestiture — so the harm identified does not itself require structural separation. [Rejecting P2] The merger examples are contested: Instagram had a small user base and no revenue and WhatsApp operated in a crowded messaging market, so whether either would have become a rival is a counterfactual — and acquisition is the principal exit route for venture-funded startups, a cost the argument does not weigh. [Rejecting P3] That these practices violate antitrust law is a legal conclusion courts have accepted in some cases and rejected in others, and it rests here on a campaign platform rather than an adjudicated finding.