Big Tech companies have grown thanks to their products

The argument

Proponents of this position argue that the size of the Big Tech companies is not an accident or a symptom of anticompetitive conduct but a consequence of what their products do. In the specific context of the tech industry, and given the specific needs Big Tech fills, a large company is not merely tolerable but the ideal form: the service improves as it grows, so growth is evidence that the product is working rather than evidence that competition has failed. Facebook is the example they offer. Its purpose is to allow people to build and maintain social networks, and that purpose, on this view, is best served by having a single platform on which all social networks are hosted and integrated. The value of such a service to any one user lies largely in who else is present on it; a platform holding only some of a person's friends, family and social contacts does a fraction of the job. Nobody wants to have to track down segregated groups of contacts across a variety of competing social network sites, and so users themselves push towards consolidation. Scale, on this account, is not something imposed on consumers but something they select. The remedy would therefore damage the thing it claims to protect. If each person's social network were dispersed across a group of competing companies, the end result for the consumer would be messy and redundant: the same connections maintained in several places, the same messages checked in several places, and no single place where a person could reliably be found. Breaking up such a company would not release a better product that competition had been suppressing; it would dismantle the integration that made the product valuable in the first place. Since the Big Tech companies have grown thanks to their products, supporters of the position conclude, they should not be broken up.

Premises

Counter-arguments

The network-effects point explains why a single, integrated platform is convenient for users, but convenience does not reach the conclusion that the company should not be broken up, because that is not what the breakup case actually turns on. Antitrust concern about Big Tech rests on abuse of market power — self-preferencing, foreclosing rivals, buying up competitors before they can grow, and degrading privacy and choice once dominance is secure — not on a denial that scale can deliver benefits. Scale that arises naturally from a genuinely superior integrated product is different from dominance maintained by acquiring nascent competitors such as Instagram and WhatsApp, and many breakup or structural-separation proposals target the latter without dismantling the core network. The 'single platform' benefit is, moreover, not uniquely tied to single ownership: interoperability and open standards let competing services connect and exchange, exactly as independent email providers and phone networks interoperate, so users could keep an integrated experience across firms that compete on privacy, features and terms. The argument shows that bigness has advantages for this kind of service; it does not show that those advantages require one company to own the whole market, which is what 'should not be broken up' asserts.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P2] That users want an integrated network does not require single ownership — interoperability and open standards let competing services connect, as email providers and phone networks do, delivering integration without one firm owning the market. [Rejecting P3] The breakup case rests on abuse of market power — self-preferencing and acquiring rivals like Instagram and WhatsApp — not on denying scale's benefits, so the convenience of a large platform does not answer it.